site


17
Jan 25

I finally left Meta behind

My god-sister-in-law (just go with it) has a friend who is in a two-man band and they played a restaurant nearby this evening. So we braved the chill night air and drove to see them play. Gen X covers. They do a nice job. They can fade into the background or grab the room’s attention. Whatever is required at the moment. Good music! Very average cheeseburger!

Before that, I did this. It felt good.

I also changed up the buttons on the front page and the top of this page. No reason to have links to things I don’t use anymore.

I don’t want to say it was cathartic, or even a big decision. I ignored Threads almost immediately because it was terrible from the start. I never got a lot of traction on Instagram, because I’m not especially popular, I guess. Facebook never appealed to me all that much. So these things were easy for me. They’ll be less easy for some, I realize that. And I know that some people will be fine with the direction Zuckerberg is going.

I could thunder away at that for a few thousand words. The content moderation, dismissing the very notion of fact checking, the filters, the misinformation, the changes to their standards which will have continued negative effect on users. People you know are going to be brought further into risk by Zuckerberg’s decisions to cozy up, or read the moment, or try to be relevant — whatever the true motivation is. And whatever that motivation is, users barely figure into it. That’s not a new thing at 1 Hacker Way. Cambridge Analytica should have been the wooden stake in the heart. What they did to news media, their legendary pivot to video nonsense, how they’ve data mined you and gleefully put their thumb on the scale of distribution, the surveillance, any one of these should have all had them tossed with the bathwater. But here we are. They think they’ve got you, because you allowed for all of that. And now, at this moment, we are at a place where none of what’s going to occur is worth whatever you think you get in return.

That’s a personal decision for everyone, but even before they make it, people have got to know about it. The chronically online are the first to see what’s happening. The rest will figure it out for themselves later. (Maybe. Depending on what media environment they’ve cultivated for themselves.) If it does bubble into their consciousness, people will make their own decisions based on toleration and habits and needs.

Thing is, we don’t really need any of these things for much. We certainly don’t have to tolerate the coarseness and continued enshittification. There are better alternatives when it comes to how one spends their time, keeps in touch, or what have you. Some of them are much better.

So I didn’t have great habits in Meta’s walled garden. I don’t need them. This was an easy choice. Moreover, it’s the right one.

Wish I’d done it much, much, sooner.

I said yesterday’s bike ride was perfectly uninspired. Today’s was even more ho-hum, if that’s possible. Just 20 miles. Nothing of interest to report. Some days you’re just keeping the legs turning, and that was today.

But I did go by the best fake storefront in the fake Zwift world.

I blame the weather. We’re due some snow this weekend and then a week of bitter, bitter cold. That’s no way to begin a new semester, which starts on Tuesday.


10
Jan 25

Getting things done

I think I spent all day in either a productive and good committee meeting, or working on a syllabus and an outline for my new class. The latter is a bit of a slog. The good news is that, after however long I’ve been working on it, and for the last four months or so that I’ve been thinking about it, I finally got it into a shape I like, this new class.

There’s still work to do. a lot of it, but six weeks of layout are now in the can. I can do the next two with my eyes closed, if I have to. There will be some great guests after that, and then a series of group presentations after that. And, by then, we’ll be in the home stretch for the term.

Tonight I even figured out the midterm paper and two options for the final.

It was a productive day, then. It should all be mapped out on paper this weekend. Hopefully the rest of the details will click into place in a satisfying way.

Then I have to build the Canvas site for it.

And then I have to prepare lectures and presentations and deliver them, of course. But, here, in January, I found the path to May.

If I can sell the students on following along this could be an interesting journey.

That’s pretty exciting for me, even if a day spent pecking away at keyboards and looking for good resources to use in the class isn’t the most exciting thing to talk about.

Perhaps, then, the most exciting thing today was this. I set my cup on the countertop in the kitchen and went into another room to do … whatever it was, I forget now … and I heard the sound of something falling. Because we have two cats, you have to put things in just the right spot, or chaos gets created, and almost right away. You come, too, to know all the sounds. So I knew what it was, from two rooms away.

One of the cats was playing flip cup.

And someone won.

I wonder who it was.

There’s new art on the front page of the site. It’s a nice eight-image presentation, this is the general premise.

So go to the front page and check it out. I’ll wait for you.

It’ll probably stay up until the end of February, unless something really blows me away between now and then. By then we’ll be past due for something that makes us feel warm.

Also, I started making new buttons for the front page. There are plenty of updates coming. But I’m just doing a bit here and there, because there’s a lot of regular work to be done. And, as ever, the Want To Do list, is crammed full of items. Maybe I’ll have some of those done by May, too!


1
Jan 25

Happy New Year

We brought in the new year in the same way we have the last two years, counting down the seconds, riding our bikes on the trainers. Doing something three times makes it a tradition, right?

They were just a few symbolic miles, almost soft-pedaled. I was cooked. But, after consecutive days of 54, 58, 64 and, finally, 56 total miles last night, my year on the bike ended like this.

That’s a new PR, in terms of miles, be it ever so humble. December also became my second largest month ever (second only to February) despite no rides in the first two week. For the year, February, September, October and December are the most prolific of each of those months in the last 14 years. In 2024, I rode around the circumference of the planet — at this latitude, anyway.

I’ll complete my first trip around the equator, distance wise, in the next month or two.

None of these numbers mean anything, beyond the context of my spreadsheet.

Speaking of spreadsheets, I did the regular file deleting and updating of things today. One of those things that gets updated each month is a spreadsheet on site traffic. Last year we had almost three-quarters of a million site visits. Who knows why. It was the best year ever, and a 12 percent increase over 2023. Some of those were even people, and not bots. Whatever brought you by, I’m glad you’ve visited. Please come back around again.

Also today, in the process of doing the monthly computer chores, I added one banner here on the blog. (You know those rotate, right? The one on the top and the one on the bottom change each time you load or refresh the page. You knew that, right? You also knew there was a banner on the bottom too, right? Because you read the entire page every time you come by. There’s only five posts per page, and that’s not too much to ask.)

Anyway, now included in the rotation at the bottom page, something I saw at the Museum of the American Revolution two weeks ago.

Let us hope that’s a perpetual sentiment.

Happy New Year!


2
Dec 24

And so we start December, and the mad dash

Took mom to the airport for the sad and tearful goodbyes today. Drove home in the late afternoon’s dying sunlight. I was back inside before she was on the plane, but she has safely returned home and I have turned back to work, and the grading of things.

Before I began that, however, I did the monthly computer rituals. Cleaning old files from the desktop, adding the site’s page visits into a useless spreadsheet, updated a few other running files, and so on. I also updated the November cycling chart, which always amuses me and bores you.

The blue line is this year, and you can see that, compared to 2023’s red line, I’ve had a successful increase in my mileage, be it ever so humble. For some reason, in 2021 or so, I added a 10 mile per day projection line to the spreadsheet, and it seems to have outlived its usefulness.

It appears I’ll handily accomplish those two goals, of besting last year and the 10 miles per average, so I’ll turn myself to other, slightly more impressive goals. Goals which I most likely won’t achieve, because of the holidays. But they are out there, nevertheless, and we shall approach them with vigor, and alternating days of tired and enthusiastic legs, I’m sure.

This is funny to me because these are small numbers, really, but they seem YUGE.

Also today, I have updated the banners here on the blog. (You know those rotate, right? The one on the top and the one on the bottom change each time you load or refresh the page. You knew that, right? You also knew there was a banner on the bottom too, right? Because you read the entire page every time you come by. There’s only five posts per page, and that’s not too much to ask of you. I mean, come on.)

So now there are 116 banners randomly loaded across the top of the page, and 118 randomly loaded banners populating the bottom of the page. I should probably cull those two lists. That sounds like a great winter project. So click reload a lot between now and sometime in February to see them all. And don’t forget to scroll down to the see the ones at the bottom, either.

Poseidon always checks out the bottoms of the page. He’s very diligent and curious about the goings on around here.

(When it’s typed well, he caught the errors. When there are typos, he was off the clock.)

Phoebe, on the other hand, is much smarter, and she doesn’t care about any of this. Just so long as her picture makes the site, so that the week’s most popular feature is here every week.

We’re going to finish the year with something like three-quarters of a million visitors, according to the site statistics I looked up today. Why, I have no idea. The cats have it figured out, and they thank you.

As for me, I am now in the home stretch of two classes, so things will be light in the next few weeks. And after those two classes wrap up I’ll be finishing with two other classes. So there are liable to be some thin days in here this December. But there will be something more often than not, and we’ll of course always have the weekly check in on the cats. It is the most popular weekly feature on the site. (They know it, and they make me type it, too. Marketing geniuses, these kittehs.)


5
Nov 24

New month stuff to distract you, also a new front page look

It occurred to me yesterday that this is the first presidential election cycle since 1996 when I haven’t spent all day and all night in a newsroom or at a campaign watch party.

So all day I’ve just been doing … normal stuff. Is that what everyone does?

My first election as a cub was a midterm election, where I interviewed a man immediately after he found out he was elected to Congress. You could hear the excitement and hope in his voice. He would become a two-term governor. I also interviewed a man who became a senator, who told me I asked too many questions and hung up on me. I spent some time at a watch party where a mayor spent part of her evening hitting on me. (She’d had a few beverages.)

My first presidential election I spent in the studio, and at two watch parties. A woman who was running for local office, who’d spent the entire campaign deliberately not speaking to me, lost that night. It was fun to catch her eye at the end. But I was also trying to localize the Bush-Gore race. That night I took a brief nap in my car before going back inside the studio to go back on the air the next morning.

I was in the studio for the 2004 election, but I don’t really have any strong memories about the night. By 2008 I was back on campus, and I had to convince the students I was working with that it might be a good idea to talk to people on campus about their votes and hopes, and report on their reactions to a historic night. I’d been on that campus for a little over two months at that point, and it was eye-opening.

In 2012, the initiative in that same campus newsroom was better. They were also putting to bed their paper on that Tuesday night, so they were excited, and it was another long night. All of these were long nights.

In 2016, on a different campus, in brand new facilities, someone got the bright idea that we should try the new equipment, all of it, at the same time, and turn that into a showcase. And, fortunately, most of it worked.

By the time of the 2020 election, we were used to all of that new production equipment, but we were working in a Covid environment, which didn’t make the day any shorter, just still-surreal.

And now I’m filling my day in other ways, which is satisfying.

Anyway, the normal stuff was very normal. I have a lot of grading to do this week. It’s all piped into a CMS and that interface helpful tells you how many documents I have to work your way through. Seeing those numbers pile up, it feels like having a headache in a dream. It’s a disembodied feeling, and you know it is supposed to hurt, but you can’t feel it, which somehow makes it more daunting.

So I have 148 things to read and assess. Most of those 148 things require feedback. You want that to be useful. And since I’m forever saying the word “substantive” it should be feedback that has some significant use to it. In truth, the feedback is a lot of fun. You can make all sorts of connections, try to help students make the next leap, introduce a new concept or two if a student is interested in it. And if a student is interested in it, I find that the feedback might be the most fun part of running a class. It just takes time and care. This batch take three or four more days to get it all in. And then the next round will roll in Monday night.

I’ve also done the monthly cleaning of the computer, deleting a bunch of files I no longer need, updating some templates and updating some statistics.

Oh, and I also updated the images on the front page. They look a lot like this.

Go check them out. We’ll wait here for you.

Those are from Monterey Bay, California. I took those on a March afternoon, while we were waiting for our lunch order to be called. It was quiet, but busy, and the waves were also busily doing their job, and also quiet. At least in my memory, now. It was a beautiful afternoon. We’d driven up the Pacific Coast Highway a bit to be there, in that old cannery-turned-tourist town, and we were about to go visit the aquarium.

That is the third or fourth set of photos I’ve put on the front page from that trip. And, it turns out, I took more photos from that beach than I realized. I could run another set easily enough. In fact I might! I saved those photos of sand and rocks and water until now, to get us through a bit of the colder weather that will be here, eventually, though it felt like a warm summer day here today.

I also need to add some new buttons to the front page. I’ll get to it at some point, when the grading gets done.

Since we’re in a new month, I updated my chart for the year’s bike mileage. This means nothing, but I think about it a lot. After each ride I update the spreadsheets — plural, because why just look at a little data when you can consider it in more than one way. This chart is the main way I consider my progress.

And as you can see from the lines, what I’ve actually done, in that blue line, is well above where I was at the same point last year, which is the red line. That green line is just an arbitrary number I use as a linear measure.

I wonder at the end of each month how legitimate this is. On those last few days I compare the miles again, and compare it to earlier iterations of that same month in previous years. And there’s a list where I have ranked the months I’ve ridden the most. And so near the end of October I saw that the month was my most productive October ever — humble though my productivity be — and it had a real shot to become the second most productive month of all time. There was no way I was going to catch February 2024. At the same time, September 2024, January 2023 and November, 2023 were all ready to be knocked down a peg. And so I started riding with that in mind. It seems disingenuous, somehow. To my brain, that is. The parts of me doing the work would argue it’s quite real.

Like I said, this means nothing.

Anyway, I went out this afternoon for an easy 20-mile ride. And because of the time change I was racing daylight to get home.

That photo is timestamped 4:43 p.m. Bring on the solstice, so the days get longer again.

Though this day and night have been plenty long. So much grading still to do …