Writing
- JCProbaby's Postroll- Mostly posts written by folks from the IndyWeb
- Murmel.social - a daily email that lets you know about the most popular stories of the day based on what the people you follow on Mastodon are sharing
- Morning Brew - a must-read daily newsletter with a links section
- Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends - a Substack newsletter currently on its 772nd edition
- The Weekly Thing by Jamie Thingelstad - a regular newsletter of interesting links, photos and commentary from a smart and friendly guy
- Links at Werd/IO - a collection maintained by Ben Werdmuller who works at ProPublica and is a massively experienced writer and startup founder
- The Installer by David Pierce - a weekly column at The Verge (also available as a newsletter) designed to tell you everything you need to download, watch, read, listen to, and explore that fits in The Verge’s universe.
- Labnotes by Assaf - A weekly collection of tools and products you should know about, tips about UX, management, infosec; random and funny stuff. Tilted towards devs, but enjoyable by everyone
- hiro.report - straight from Austin, TX, - sweet dopamine hits of fresh tech, gear, and apps every week
Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇 - A scratchpad for temporary text snippets
- Published blog posts
- Bookmarks via Raindrop.io
- People you work with (co-workers)
- Customers/Clients
- A record of your daily appointments
- Weather reports
- Restaurants where you've eaten
- Recipes
- Watched YouTube videos
- Watched movies
- Watched TV shows
- Music you've listened to
- Games you've played/bought
- Apps you want to buy
- Receipts via email
- Apps you own
- Analytics reports from your web site or blog
- Registration info for software you've purchased
- A record of interactions with your family members who live separately
- Random photos
- Saved blog posts from writers you like
- Phone numbers and contact information
- An outline of your online security plan (DNS, VPN, Firewall, Ad Blocker, Password Manager), just don't include passwords in plain text%
- Copies of your insurance cards
- Lyrics to your favorite songs
- Profile pictures to use on web sites
- A list of numbers to call if you lose your wallet/purse
- Podcasts you want to subscribe to
- Books you've read/want to read
- Vacation plans
- Your favorite memes
- Copies of vital documents like birth certificates, marriage licenses etc.
- A copy of your resume
- Your current and past goals
- A copy of your will
- A copy of your healthcare power of attorney
- The random poem you've written
- Cue sheets for long bicycle rides
- Jokes you want to remember
- A list of things you love
- A record of completed tasks from your task manager
- Your favorite quotes
- Transcripts of your Q&As with ChatGPT or Google Gemini
- Saved emails
- Notes from training you've attended
- The encryption key for Bitlocker or File Vault
- A brag document for your job
- Technical "How to" documents for computer related tasks
- Genealogy info
- Wifi passwords
- Imported web pages from your read it later service
- RSS feeds from your favorite blogs
- Software manuals
- Appliance manuals
- Default settings for your computer
- A record of your Amazon purchases
- End of the year "Best of" articles to check out on books, TV, podcasts, movies, articles
- Screenshots of social media posts you like
- Purchasing wish list
- Templates for various dataview queries
- Terminal or Powershell commands too complicated to remember
- How to write in Markdown
- Search tips, syntax and operators for your favorite search engine or AI
- API Keys for various web services
- Templates for your Obsidian plugins
- Templater snippets
- All the topics in your quotes collection
- Drafts blog posts
- A history of your social media posts
- A "To Watch" list for YouTube and television
- A daily gratitude list
- A record of new things you've learned
- Alarm codes for your relative's houses
- A dataview query for notes created today
- A dataview query for notes modified today
- Waypoint Folder Notes for your important folders of notes
- The only copy of a wedding video
- A master's thesis
- Twelve years of lesson plans by a middle school teacher
- Multiple instances of people's photo libraries
I have updated my /now page - What I’m reading and watching, plus links to this week’s blog posts, the week’s best purchase, and the links I added to my personal bookmarks.
Inevitable Things
I'm turning 60 in a few months and though I wouldn't say it's messing with my head in any kind of negative way, it has prompted me to think about aging and mortality more than I have in the past. It's so weird to be getting ready to start my seventh decade on earth while simultaneously being able to recall events from the past as if they happened yesterday. In some ways, it is almost inconceivable that high school happened 40+ years ago. I had dinner with my brother (58) and sister (56) the other night along with my mother (77) and we were recalling events from growing up as if they just happened last week.
I've been going gray for years. Not only that, but I wear a full beard and it is 100% white. Wonder Woman told me today that one of our grandkids said to her recently, "Nana you might be old, but at least you're not as old as Papa." For the record, we are less than two years apart. Still, there has been more than one occasion when we've eaten together, and they've extended a senior discount to me (I'm not old enough) and not to her. Sometimes I feel like I'm in a Sci-fi novel, married to an immortal who doesn't age. She was furious when Kamala Harris first named Tim Walz as her running mate because she thought he was just another old white man. Once she found out that Kamala and Tim are are the same age that he is cool AF, she calmed down.
I charged full steam ahead through my 40s and early 50s, hiking the Appalachian Trail and completing 83 century rides on my bicycle. I thought I'd be going like that for decades until arthritis brought me to a screeching halt and I had to have both knees replaced. Plenty of people go on to have very active lives after that surgery, so there is still hope that I'll get some of that mojo back. My mom walked across England and hiked the Camino de Santiago in Spain in her 70s.
Our oldest grandchildren have graduated from high school now. It won't be long before we are great-grandparents. It's funny because all of my siblings, none of whom got married or had kids early like me, all have children the same ages as my grandchildren. I grumbled for years that I didn't like kids, but it was all a facade. I worked in primary and elementary schools for two decades, and being a grandparent has been one of the best experiences of my life.
I'm trying to be OK with the fact that I don't feel like my time on earth is unlimited like I have for most of my life. Not being a religious person, there are no thoughts of an afterlife. Every time I do something unhealthy, I immediately have the thought that I'm robbing myself of time. I wish I could say that I am them immediately motivated to then eat some spinach and power walk around the block, but so far that has not been the effect.
I have got to say that I enjoy having been around enough to be retired from my career job. It's cool going to work these days because I want to, not because I have to. I could stop at any time. That's pretty empowering. It makes the crappy days that inevitably happen at work more bearable. I'm not even the oldest person in my office. Our database manager is three years my senior, and she takes no shit from anyone. She's my role model.
I can accept my eyes getting weaker and my gait getting slower. As far as I can tell, my mind isn't slipping yet. Both my parents are still alive, so family history indicates that I probably have quite a few years left. I hope so. There is so much more to write about.
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For Linkblog Fans
If you check out this blog regularly or better yet, if you subscribe by RSS, I'm going to imagine that you are a fan of discovering cool new websites, stories, blogs and galleries on the regular. Not only do I post here every day, I also have a weekly post on Micro.blog that I aggregate at Amerpie's Cool Links (there's an original name for you) There are a few really good places where I find links and I though I'd share them with you.
When You Find Something that Sparks Joy
(Note: this is a repost from my tech blog from a few months back. I was a wee bit busy this weekend being a supportive husband and was away from my computer)
I often make the comment on Reddit or Mastodon that Obsidian, a cross-platform note-taking application, is my favorite piece of software since Netscape Navigator 2, the browser that practically everyone used when we transitioned from AOL and CompuServe to the real Internet back in the 90s. Back then, we discovered new and interesting web pages daily. The Internet was full of hastily constructed and esoteric material, and it all seemed so magical. For our whole lives, we'd had to wait until 10 past the hour for the radio to give us a weather forecast, and now we could use this marvelous piece of software to go to weather.com whenever we were curious. It was revolutionary and amazing, and it took a while to get used to.
Eventually we did get used to it, along with all the other marvels over the past nearly 30 years. I find myself quite jaded sometimes. The computer I carry in my pocket can do almost anything, and I'm still referring to it as a phone, the same name I used for the hard-wired wall mounted rotary dialed device at my grandmother's house. I no longer marvel at being able to do my Christmas shopping from my couch or following a baseball game pitch by pitch, knowing the speed of every thrown ball and the batting average of every hitter right up to that at bat.
I experienced an Internet revival late last year. After an aborted attempt to retire early, I'd lost interest in keeping up with technology. I quit following the news, stopped downloading software and spent hours scrolling trash subreddits like "Am I the Asshole". Out of desperation, I went back to work to have something to do. Even though I went back into the IT field, I was still ambivalent. Instead of being on a Mac like I was used to, I was assigned a slow old Dell full of Microsoft software. It did not spark joy. Then one day I picked up my old iPad and for some reason launched my RSS reader. Many of the blog feeds were years old and dead, but some were still active. I started reading them, first from boredom and then with interest. People were talking about apps I'd never heard of. I cracked open my MacBook and started downloading updates for the OS and the hundreds of apps I'd collected over the years. It took a while.
A British blogger, Robb Knight, had created a page where people were listing their default apps in all kinds of categories. I wanted to get on the fun. I'd been working in the Apple/Mac/iOS space since the late 90s and except for the short break after retirement, I'd always been fascinated by software. In order to get added to Robb's site, I had to start a blog. I signed up at Micro.blog, registered a domain and started writing. One app I saw mentioned over and over that I'd never used was Obsidian. It's free to download, and you can use it all you want without paying a dime unless you want to take advantage of their sync service, something I did a little later.
I documented my learning process in Obsidian as it progressed. I'd download a plugin, watch a YouTube video, configure my setup, use it for a few days and then write a post for my blog. I'd cross post it on Reddit and use a hashtag on Mastodon. I went for months living and breathing Obsidian. I started doing all my writing in it. I pimped out the template for my daily note, incorporating more and more of my life into it. I integrated key email messages via IFTTT, Dropbox and Hazel. I synced my bookmarks from Raindrop.io. I started using Omnivore as my read it later service simply because it automatically imports into Obsidian. I started my first GitHub repository to share 500 Markdown notes containing my quotes collection. I managed to get Obsidian to do every single thing I'd once used Evernote for.
Because of Obsidian, I've been able to learn to blog in the 21st century. I have four different blogs on three different platforms. I've got good notes and records and tens of thousands of words of web posts in my vault. Although I still write about the app occasionally, I've moved on to writing reviews of other software and even into non-technical writing. It's amazing that something as simple as a plain text editor at its core has been at the center of my tech and real-life revival. It is so powerful and so extensible that it almost defies belief. The community around the app is generally helpful, supportive, curious and open. I've even interacted with the CEO of the company on social media.
So, to the folks in whatever Bat Cave Obsidian is developed in, thank you for making such a wonderful tool. I owe you one.
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Obsdian’s Many Uses
In all my time using a Mac, I’ve never found more uses for a
single app as I have for the note taking app, Obsidian. With a robust selection of
over 1900 plugins, Obsidian can be configured to import and manipulate
data from a great many sources. It can even be used for publishing.
Using the Dataview plugin makes it function like a database. It stays
open at all times on both my Macs. There are a great many resources to
help you master it, including on Reddit, Discord, the developer’s
website, YouTube and numerous blogs.
Here are 77 use cases
The Wilmington 10 - American Political Prisoners
I have been a dedicated newspaper reader since I was in the first grade in 1971. I did not limit myself to just the comics. I thought Dear Abby was fascinating and I always read the headlines on the front page. In North Carolina in the 1970s an infamous civil rights case was often featured. The Wilmington 10 was the name given to eight high school students, a minister from the United Church of Christ and an anti-poverty worker who had been caught up when the men were arrested for arson, following a bombing during racial unrest in the coastal town of Wilmington. The case was considered by many to be a travesty of justice from the very beginning. The convictions were based on eyewitness testimony from a mentally ill man who recanted during cross-examination and was banished from the courtroom. The other witness was given a motorcycle for his testimony. He too, later recanted.
when the Soviet Union was accused by the United States of human rights violations, the Soviets used the Wilmington 10 as an example of American hypocrisy. After serving nearly a decade in prison, all of the convictions were overturned, and the state declined to re-prosecute. In 2013, over 40 years after their initial convictions, the Wilmington 10 were granted pardons by the governor of North Carolina, although four of them had already passed away. The oldest of them, the Reverend Benjamin Chavis, went on after his incarceration to become the national president of the NAACP.
Being Wonder Woman's Husband
At 8:00 AM Saturday morning, Wonder Woman and about 70 others will begin running a 2.2-mile course over and over for 24 straight hours. Whoever covers the most distance in that time period will be declared the winner. Those completing 50k, 50 miles, 100k, 75 miles, and 100 miles will receive special awards. Some races are entrepreneurial money-making events for the organizers. Ironman, the titular sponsor of triathlons, is a for-profit company. The race Wonder Woman is in is a fundraiser. The money raised goes to an organization in the greater Williamsburg, VA area called The Arc. This is a wonderful inclusive organization offering programs to adults with developmental and intellectual disabilities.
The name of the race is The Greensprings 24. The start/finish line and crew area (I'm crew) is at Jamestown High School. If you want to follow her, you can do it here. Her race number is 204, and her actual name is Carol Plummer.
I'll be set up in a pop-up off to the side with her supplies. I'll be in charge of filling bottles with both water and a liquid nutrition product called Tailwind. She has prepared packets of sports nutrition products that she will pick up every five laps or so. I have a small backpacking stove to heat up some real food for her to wolf down later in the day and through the night. It consists of things like plain white potatoes and soup. I'll be making coffee for us both.
Today has been kind of ritualistic. We live about four hours away, so we had to travel and check into a hotel. She's stayed off her feet for the most part, although I did have to talk her out of going out and doing tourist things today. She has a more restless nature than I do! It's important that she stays extra hydrated today and that she eats some extra carbs. Her favorite pre-ultramarathon meal is pho, the Vietnamese rice noodle soup made with a salty and savory beef broth. She got into bed at 5:30 to read and hopefully doze off early. We will sleep as late as we can tomorrow before driving the 15 minutes to the racecourse in time to get the crew area set up.
My duties will be pretty minimal. I'm mostly there as a cheerleader and motivator. If she gets blisters, I'll play medic, and as she gets progressively more tired, I'll help her with socks and shoe changes. I'll probably get yelled at a time or two. Ultramarathon runners are known for being grouchy crybabies sometimes because it's a terribly stressful sport. I'm experienced enough to let the abuse roll off. If blowing up at me makes her feel better, she's welcome to call me names any time. I admire her not just for competing in these events but also for all the training and disciplined training, eating, and sleeping she does on top of working an important job full-time, being a wife, a mom, and a grandmother. I don't call her Wonder Woman for nothing!
When the race is over, we will have to pack the car and drive back to the hotel. We've arranged a late checkout so we can both get some sleep before driving home and going back to work on Monday.
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Generation X Isn't Mad, It's Tired
The dividing line between Generation X and Boomers is New Years Day, 1965, fifty-two days before I was born. Over the next 15 years my cohort, smaller than the one that preceded it and the one that followed it (Millenials), began to reap the meager rewards our parents bequeathed us, single-parent families, careers as latch-key kids, run away inflation and coming of age with Reagan in the White House making it easy on rich folks and kicking off the decline of the middle class by breaking unions and kicking income inequality into high gear.
The oldest Gen X-ers are only five years from retirement. Everything seems to have changed for us. We bought records we traded in for tapes that we traded in for CDs before we downloaded MP3s that we stopped listening to when we had to start paying a subscription fee to listen to music. After graduating from high school, I supported a wife and a baby by cooking at a Shoney's and serving in the National Guard one weekend a month. By the time my youngest reached maturity, two adults working full time at entry level jobs could barely make ends meet.
We experienced a few cool things, like getting to watch MTV when they played music video. We've had some great music. We got to transition out of a world that worried about nuclear holocausts. Unfortunately we got to see AIDS put in an end to the free love we thought we were going to get. I've lost count of the financial crises we've endured.
Generation X | Origin, Years, Characteristics, & Facts | Britannica
Gen X is next up for retirement. Are they in denial?
Gen X Research | Environics Research
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Living Lowbrow in a Highbrow World
Back in the days when people still bought encyclopedias, my parents were confronted by an especially good salesman who sold them not only a full set of the Book of Knowledge but also a collection of classic literature. When I was in elementary school, I tackled many of those books because I thought they sounded interesting. I mean, Gulliver's Travels was about little people, and Pilgrim's Progress was about (I thought) American pioneers. I plowed through the books with as much understanding as I could muster at that age, and can today truly state that I've read them. The problem is that it's been years since I felt any urge to approach that kind of book. When I see people reading The Scarlet Letter or Dante, I'm in awe. I would feel like I was back in high school senior English if I picked up one of those books. I'm even inherently suspicious when an enthusiastic reviewer claims that a novel in one of the genres I like these days—English detective novels, science fiction, military fiction—rises to the level of literature.
I'm generally OK with my lack of formal education. I managed to learn enough on my own to support myself through retirement. I can talk to anybody and don't suffer from low self-esteem (quite the opposite if you ask Wonder Woman). I just regret not being exposed to classes like music appreciation and art appreciation. I enjoy some classical music. I've listened to Vivaldi enough that I can generally recognize his compositions, but I don't have any background in theory. Opera is a mystery, and I've only got a rudimentary knowledge of the development of jazz, although I do have a good collection of Miles Davis and John Coltrane.
When it comes to art, well, I've been to one exhibition—Norman Rockwell. I thoroughly enjoyed it, but I know that hardly qualifies me as a connoisseur. I can name famous artists and tell a Rothko from a Jackson Pollock, but I still feel under-qualified. My son takes trips to Boston and New York just to visit art museums. Considerable space in his tiny Austin bungalow is given over to his collection of art books, and the walls are covered in originals he's purchased at galleries. My walls are covered in pictures of my grandkids and Wonder Woman's photography, which is admittedly pretty arty.
I rarely like any film that wins the Best Picture award from the Academy. In fact, I am still mad at myself for sitting through The English Patient all those years ago. It's not that I'm a fan of superhero movies—not that there is anything wrong with them—I just seem to lack the gene that lets people discern symbolism in films. I'm very much an on-the-surface kind of guy. My most common reaction to reviews of arty movies is WTF?
At this point in my life, I'm not likely to summon the energy to improve on any of this. I've learned to live with my shortcomings in appreciating things the way the more cultured folks do. I feel proud of myself for reading the occasional book of poetry (full disclosure: my son buys them for me) and for reading The New Yorker, Harper's, and The Atlantic. That will have to do, I suppose.
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The Gyro is Awesome
Zorba's Gyro is the name of the diner at the end of the street where I've been a regular customer for over 30 years. It's Greek owned, of course , and serves a variety of dishes from American and Italian cuisine as well. The signature dish though, the humble gyro, is a masterpiece. When you walk in, you can see the tower of mixed beef and lamb roasting on a vertical skewer. When I order it, I always get the "all the way" edition complete with red onions, lettuce, crumbled feta and of course authentic Tzatziki sauce.
The history of the gyro is a little mysterious, but some form of shaved meat served on bread has been served in the Mediterranean region since the time of Alexander. The Turks call it doner kebab. Arabs call it shawarma. I call it delicious. Estimates of when it first came to America, or indeed, when it became popular as a Greek street food vary, depending on who is doing the talking.
Ode to Zorba's | Living Out Loud
History of Gyro, an Ancient Greek Street Food
The History of the Gyro, With a Dollop of Serendipity - The New York Times
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The Best Pharmacist in the World
For one reason or another, I've taken some kind of medication on a daily basis for almost forty years. I am an expert at swallowing pills. I'd hate to estimate how many I've taken over the years. Despite the attempts by my insurance company to strong-arm me into using a mail-order pharmacy, I stubbornly cling to a locally owned one that I lucked into by being hard to get along with.
I used to use various big box pharmacies. One thing I quickly learned by doing that was that the people there do not care about you. You might occasionally run into someone with a heart for people, but by and large, the pharmacists and techs there don't form relationships, and they stop seeing their customers as human beings after a while. That's been my experience. They will tell you to come back tomorrow in a minute. They will tell you that counting your own meds after they short you is your responsibility. Furthermore, they won't make the extra effort to deal with frustrating insurance companies. I pretty much would rather die a thousand deaths than deal with one.
Luckily, a local pharmacist with good business sense saw an opportunity to draw business away from them by starting his own pharmacy in a good location. He hired nice, competent people, and most of the time, you could go in there with a prescription in hand and walk out within 15 minutes with your medicine. It was glorious. Unfortunately, he had two giant TVs right behind the cash register tuned in at all times to Fox News. I was in there when they were covering a story about poor people trapped in a flood after a hurricane. The owner of the pharmacy was ranting that it was all their own fault for not leaving. I disgustedly asked him if he thought maybe they should have just driven their Maserati out of town or something.
I went home, went to the pharmacy's Facebook page, and left a scathing review, where I said they had good service but bad politics, and they weren't getting any more of my money as a result. I resigned myself to living in Big Box Hell. Some period after that, I got a message through Facebook from a name I didn't recognize. The writer, first name LeRoy, told me that he'd been a partner in the pharmacy but that he was leaving to go out on his own. He let me know that there would be no giant TVs playing Fox News in his new business and asked me to give him a chance, so I did.
These days, when I go to a doctor's visit for med refills, LeRoy has them filled before I can get out of the parking lot. If I have a question or an issue about one of my prescriptions, I can message him via Facebook or text him to get an answer or a refill. He's fought every insurance battle that's faced me for a decade. When big pharma jacked up the price of one of my meds by 400%, LeRoy figured out how to get me a better price. If I'm late picking up a refill, he doesn't put my meds back on the shelf and yell at me on my next visit; he just holds on to them for me, secure in the knowledge that I will get there eventually.
We are social media friends, and both of us are big baseball fans. I've followed his son's career from club ball through our local high school and summer ball. He now plays for the university where I work, which has one of the nation's best NCAA D3 baseball programs and a legendary coach. LeRoy's wife is a nurse practitioner with her own clinic, and she's treated me for everything from multi-day hiccups to a sliced finger.
In a day and age where so many businesses seem as though they exist only to extract money from you, LeRoy and his pharmacy are a total exception. He gives unfailingly polite service and always makes me feel welcome and cared for. He inquires about my wife, asks about my job, and tells me about his last baseball trip. Everyone should be so lucky.
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Should You Eat at Chick-fil-A?
LGBT Activist # 1
If a restaurant was taking the money they make and giving it to organizations trying to dissolve your marriage and take your kids away from you, you wouldn't give a shit if they"have really good lemonade."You wouldn't eat there. - FAITH NAFF
LGBT Activist # 2
"If gay rights advocates permanently withhold our business from Chick-fil-A, we'll send the message that stepping away from hateful causes was a mistake, and companies will be less likely to listen to our demands in the future."Nate Morris (CAS '27)
I don't eat at Chick-fil-A. I like chicken sandwiches OK, but I prefer the ones from Bojangles. Hell, I eat the ones they sell in gas stations. Every Chick-fil-A I come across is always super crowded. They have a reputation for dealing well with crowds, but you have to go be part of a crowd to find out if that's true. No thanks.
The biggest reason I don't eat there though is their reputation for being homophobic. Someone in my area had a Chik-fil-A Support Day a couple of years ago and lots of ostentatious Christians that I know made a big deal out of going their and posting it on social media just in case they hadn't done enough in their lives to be shitty to LGBT people.
In doing some basic research for this post, I found that the hate-chicken people quit giving money to homophobic organizations a few years ago. The owner doesn't even use his personal fortune that way any more. Most people think the motivation behind that is to stave off boycotts and bad press and they are probably right. Right-wing organizations accused Chik-fil-A of caving the the Gay Agenda, if you can believe that.
I know some principled leftists who patronize them now, partially because out of all the fast food chains, they offer more for people with celiacs. Since I don't personally have celiacs, I'll keep on eating at Bojangles though.
VIEWPOINT: Stop Asking Us to Boycott Chick-fil-A – The Hoya
Chick-fil-A and LGBT people - Wikipedia
Chick-fil-A “woke” controversy: Why conservatives are calling for boycotts | Vox
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Online Communities of the Past and Present
Although I used a local BBS and AOL chat rooms back in the day, the first online community I ever found a home in was at Epinions, a dotcom company that paid you to write reviews of commercial goods, including books and albums. You could use HTML to dress up what you wrote, so there was a small but satisfying thrill in learning how to be good at that. As usual, they had an off-topic category too, where you could write about whatever you wanted, and I contributed there all the time. People could follow you and send you private messages. I eventually outgrew it, but I tried to find a guy from there recently, after 27 years, and I succeeded because he's still using the same unique username.
When I had a Geocities website, part of it was dedicated to Vietnam veterans and their kids. I corresponded with quite a few men and women who were eager to have someone to talk with about their experiences. I live near a giant army base, so all the vets I know have comrades-in-arms everywhere they go, but the 18-year-old who got drafted from Iowa in 1967 and did his year in hell didn't always have that, and I was glad to hear them out, publish their stories, and generally just be as supportive as I could.
I was in some great bicycling forums around the turn of the century, one of which still sends me birthday greetings every year. I went as far as Georgia to meet folks from there for an organized ride.
For a few years, believe it or not, I took part in the local newspaper's community forum, which was mostly a cesspool of name-calling and ad hominem attacks on liberals. I'd write outrageously provocative stuff about W. Bush and his wars just to stir up the flag wavers. They doxed me regularly, and the woman I was married to absolutely hated me going on there. After a while, it wasn't fun anymore, so I stopped.
When I hiked the Appalachian Trail, I kept an online journal every single day and posted to a website called Trail Journals. As a result, I had people up and down the East Coast who wrote to us and visited us on the trail. It wasn't unusual to meet trail groupies who knew all kinds of our fellow hikers from reading their journals. More than a decade later, I am still in touch with people I first met through that journal.
Then we enter the long dark winter of the soul—Facebook was all there was. I never really used Twitter for anything other than news, so I didn't find much social about it. My Facebook experience is much the same as many folks. In 2008, it was a place to keep up with friends and family and to reconnect with people from the past. Today, it's the same toxic hellscape for me as it is for everyone else. I mostly stay there to see pictures of my grandkids. In 2017, I had a viral post that caused me to get literally thousands of friend requests, many of which I accepted for the hell of it. I met plenty of cool people, including a friend I eventually met in Derry, Northern Ireland.
My experience on the IndieWeb since I joined micro.blog in January has been my favorite experience out of all of them. In 10 months, I've posted more on Mastodon than I did on Twitter in 15 years. I have three accounts on different servers. I closed my Twitter account too, not wanting to send any traffic to what is essentially the Nazi Bar of the Internet. I am a happy customer of OMG.LOL, 500.social, and Onephoto.club. Aside from Micro.blog, I also use Scribbles and BearBlog.
I have accounts on Instagram, Threads, BlueSky, Pinterest, Nostr, Pixelfed, Farcaster, and Tumblr, but I use them mostly to syndicate what I write on my blogs.
I do love Reddit, where I've had an account for nearly 19 years, despite its checkered past. Syndicating AppAddict there has driven lots of traffic to my website. Earlier this year, I volunteered to become a moderator of r/macOS, a subreddit with over 300K members. That's been interesting. I get a chance to help out newbies and to stamp out some toxicity, so what it lacks in actual fun, it makes up in satisfaction.
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Visiting Colonial Virginia
Virginia, just north of my home state of North Carolina, is a wonderful place to visit. Although I am partial to the mountains, there is something to be said for visiting the colonial historical sites closer to the coast. Whether it's Jamestown, one of the first settlements in the new world, Yorktown, site of the American victory in the Revolutionary War or the extensive and richly restored town of Colonial Williamsburg, you won't be disappointed. Thankfully, the exhibits in Williamsburg include ones dedicated to Native American and African American history. It's quite an experience to walk the streets and see people in colonial dress, gardening with period tools and making the same type of crafts that were common in the 1700s. It's a fun and affordable way to spend a day. If you are a cyclist, bring your bike. The 23-mile Colonial Parkway between Yorktown and Jamestown is a road you'll want to add to the miles you've traveled while pedaling.
History of Colonial Williamsburg
Colonial Parkway - Colonial National Historical Park (U.S. National Park Service)
Plan Your Visit | Historic Jamestowne
Plan Your Visit - Yorktown Battlefield Part of Colonial National Historical Park (U.S. National Park Service)
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The Culinary Misadventures of the Long Distance Hiker
The year Wonder Woman and I hiked the Appalachian Trail, we were away from home for 156 days, from early May to mid-October. At the beginning of our journey, I weighed around 230 pounds. By the end, I had dropped to 180 pounds and was wearing medium-sized clothes for the first time since high school. For most long-distance hikers, the two overriding feelings are ravenous hunger and fatigue. The trail involves over 400,000 feet of climbing, stretching from Maine to Georgia and covering just shy of 2,200 miles. It’s almost impossible for hikers to carry enough food to sustain their weight, though some manage better than others for physiological reasons I can’t quite grasp.
In preparation for our hike, we spent a lot of time packing boxes of food for my daughter and son-in-law to mail to us at various hostels, outfitters, and general delivery post offices along the way. We bought cases of oatmeal, Pop-Tarts, energy bars, corn chips, and other pre-made food. We also dehydrated large quantities of sweet potatoes, black beans, and several London broils to make beef jerky. Since Wonder Woman has celiac disease and can’t eat wheat, we were concerned about finding adequate food for her along the trail. In hindsight, we shouldn’t have worried—or prepared so much food. We ended up giving away large portions of it when it became monotonous. To our surprise, finding gluten-free food wasn’t as challenging as we had anticipated.
A guy my size, carrying a 25-pound backpack and climbing mountains all day in hot weather, can burn upwards of 5,000 calories a day if he hikes long enough. We typically woke up around 5:00 AM to eat and pack our gear. My breakfast usually consisted of two large honeybuns thickly covered with peanut butter or Nutella. Occasionally, I’d indulge in a bagel. I drank instant coffee boiled over the beer can alcohol stove I packed. While hiking, I’d consume a Snickers bar or a couple of Nature Valley granola bars every hour. I also ate quite a few Clif bars, but I found they tasted progressively worse the more I had.
For lunch and dinner, I often wrapped my meals in a big flour tortilla. My fillings included tuna, cheese from a block I carried, dried beef or Slim Jims, hot sauce, and maybe some crumbled Fritos. I always had a second tortilla with peanut butter. For dessert, I enjoyed candy, usually Whoppers or dark chocolate. I also devoured countless bags of pork rinds—they weigh almost nothing and pack a whopping 900 calories per bag. Sometimes I’d eat a couple of family packs of instant mashed potatoes or instant rice or pasta dishes from Lipton. I’m proud to say that, unlike most of my fellow hikers, I didn’t eat any ramen noodles. I like them just fine, but they simply didn’t appeal to me at the time. After returning home, I discovered that I had royally messed up my electrolyte balance by not getting enough sodium, so maybe some ramen would have been a good idea after all.
Hiker hunger is truly on display at restaurants in the towns along the trail. Every few days, hikers need to find a place to buy supplies, wash their clothes, and grab a shower. However, they don’t do any of that until they’ve filled their bellies at whatever establishment they can find. There were times when I’d order a meal, quickly finish it, and then order a second meal before feeling even slightly full. Alongside the food, I’d drink entire pitchers of Coke, or, when we were in the South, sweet iced tea. We were always on the lookout for any AYCE (all you can eat) places, although I was asked to leave a Chinese buffet in Pittsfield, MA, after my sixth plate. In New Jersey, there’s a stretch of trail that allows you to hit quite a few delis in a short span, and I certainly took advantage of that. In New England, I savored a delicacy we don’t have in North Carolina: gigantic full-belly clams. Of course, in Maine, I enjoyed fresh lobster during a memorable meal in Millinocket, the town near the northern terminus of Mount Katahdin.
Most of the weight I lost came back within a year. To this day, I haven’t had another Snickers bar, and I went a decade without eating a honeybun. I’m not a Nutella fan anymore, although I still enjoy a fair amount of peanut butter. Whenever we travel to trail towns during hiking season, I always nudge Wonder Woman if I see a hiker come in, so we can watch them order the prodigious amount of food they typically get. It brings back such fond memories.
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Make Your Internet Better Today
Make Your Internet Better Today - A free service can block ads and malware before it ever gets to your computer. Start using it today. I did. - linkage.lol/make-your…
Make Your Internet Better Today
I'm going to be that guy who finds something cool and then wants everyone to join in. The ad blocker that I use, Ublock Origin, is in danger of being neutered by Microsoft, the company that makes my browser, Edge, which I use for some very specific reasons. If you use Google Chrome (and most of you do), your ad-blocking capabilities have been seriously dampened by Google's decision to implement new standards for browser extensions. Don't panic though. There is a solution that is free and will make your computer more private and your browsing faster. That solution is NextDNS, a free service that blocks ads and malware from ever loading on your computer in the first place. If you set this up, you can even stop whole domains from ever loading. Imagine having Twitter never polluting your presence ever again. Not only that, but you can be protected from all kids of Internet bad guys, like those who use domain name typos to trick you, or from known bad actors, over 100,000 known domains are blocked by default.
You con't have to be super technical to get this set up. There is plenty of documentation and help available. Go sign up today!
NextDNS - The new firewall for the modern Internet
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Civic Duties
In North Carolina, where I live, early voted started this week. On the first day, we set a record for voter turnout. Even in the western portions of the state where a recent hurricane destroyed roads and where many people still don't have power, the number of people who turned out exceeded the numbers from four years ago when conditions were not impeded. Wonder Woman and I always try to vote early, partly to get it out of the way and partly out of excitement.
This year we went to a recreation center located about three miles from our house. My kids went to dances there when they were in school, and I have taken my grandchildren there many times to play on the playground. Today I went to defend democracy from the fascists trying to take over my country. Donald Trump recently called people like me "radical left lunatics" and said we are "the enemy within."
We were met by campaign volunteers from various candidates, who are allowed to approach voters as long as they stay 50 feet or more from the front doors. I gratefully accepted a voter guide from a guy who had a list of all the Democratic candidates and offered polite "no, thank yous" to everyone else who wanted to hand me literature. I usually try to research all the obscure races ahead of time, but I was glad to have the guide nonetheless. We used to be able to do straight party voting here, but the Republicans eliminated it because they thought it would help them.
Most of the people in line were younger and there were lots of POC. One dumb ass showed up in full Trump rally regalia and people were staring daggers at him. I wanted to catch his eye and mouth "I'm canceling your vote" but he kept staring at the floor, too embarrassed, I hope to feel like he could hold his head up amongst his perceived enemies. In my mind, whenever I am in line to vote, the happy people are always Democrats and the sour pusses are Republicans. Unfortunately, 60% of white men are probably going to vote for Trump, citing many different reasons but the primary one, I am convinced is to perpetuate white supremacy. Yeah, screw that. Not this white guy.
We had one extremely stupid constitutional amendment to vote on, one that would make excluding everyone under the age of 18 who isn't a US citizen from voting. If you thought there was already a law in place that did that, you would be right, but you underestimate the idiocy of the Republican Party who wants to plant the idea in their pitiful voter's heads that the Democrats are getting ready to allow children and illegal immigrants to cancel Bubba's vote. These people are pitiful.
I will be glad when the election is settled. I expect there to be all kinds of controversy and dirty tricks from the other side. Another insurrection is certainly a possibility. They are losers but they don't lose gracefully.
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For the Sake of All that is Holy - Back Up Your Computer
In my 30 years in the IT business, I have been approached by people with tears in their eyes many times, always because of lost data. The things I have been asked to restore include:
I have been successful in a few cases and I've struck out in others. I preach backing up your stuff to everyone I care about. In this day and age, doing so is relatively easy and straight forward.
If you have a Mac, you should be using Time Machine, even if you have a laptop. All you need is a cheap external drive. Everything else is built in to you computer.
Back up your Mac with Time Machine - Apple Support
If you have a PC, you can back up your data and settings to the cloud (but not your whole hard drive) with built in tools.
Back up your Windows PC - Microsoft Support
To back up your entire hard drive, you need a third party tool. Here are some options.
Best Windows backup software 2024: Free and paid options reviewed | PCWorld
Everyone should use some sort of cloud solution like One Drive, iCloud, Google Drive or Dropbox to back up anything that wouldn't want to lose if their house burnt down. If you don't know how to sign up for these solutions, all of which have a free tier, get some help or pay some one. It's that important. I have been able to keep track oof some of my files since the 1990s, through multiple computers, jobs and houses. Don't lose your important information or memories because you didn't back them up properly.
(Note - if you aren't 100% sure that your photos on your phone are backed up, get someone you trust to verify it for you.)
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Shooting Down Stereotypes
I'm not going to pretend that I don't make assumptions about people from time to time because, as much as I try not to, I fall into the trap occasionally. I'm glad that, for the most part, plenty of other people and I seem to be less inclined to do it these days. We are learning not to assume that when someone is married, it's necessarily to someone of the opposite sex. We aren't as surprised when we find out that our friend's new love interest is from a different race. I love meeting someone who is into technology as much as I am who doesn't play video games, so I don't feel like such an outsider.
At the university where I work, the Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities & Sciences, who is a Professor of Religion & Philosophy, is covered in tattoos. The university chief of staff, a diminutive ex-banker, swears like a sailor. The football coach, who looks for all the world like a defensive tackle, turns out to have been a record-setting quarterback in college. The best network engineer I ever worked with talks with an accent that would fit right in "The Dukes of Hazzard" or "Hee-Haw."
People from other regions of the country (or the world) can easily have stereotypes of those of us from the South here in the US. That stereotype is that we are conservative, a little (or a lot) racist, old-fashioned, and uneducated. I always feel that I need to establish my progressive bona fides quickly, especially if someone knows I'm also a veteran or that I worked in manufacturing. I have to do that for my fellow Southerners too, just to keep the ones who actually are conservative racists from trying to include me in their conversations. I am not the type to ever hide a single facet of my personality or beliefs from anyone. I want people to know exactly who and what they are dealing with.
It seems to be a driving force within conservatism to work towards putting people back into stereotypical roles. Organizations that have used DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) are routinely attacked by Republicans, who paint the whole idea as a disturbance to the natural order of the world. They want women and people of color to stay in their traditional places. They make no secret of their disdain for same-sex marriage. When they try to practice inclusion, they use unqualified bootlickers like Herschel Walker or Mark Robinson or someone with the flawed party loyalty of Nikki Haley.
Learning how to escape thinking in stereotypes can be a lifelong process. Some people seem to naturally escape those kinds of attitudes, while others, like me, have had to be deprogrammed throughout our lives. I'm sure I have a long way to go, but I'm happy with how far I have come. Being open-minded is the goal.
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