Just paid the rent on three more years of hosting the marmot and Notes From the Underground. I plan to start posting to NFTU soon, where I'll confine most of my "darker" thoughts.

While there is some cost to having your own URL and web server, it also affords you the privilege of having control over nearly the whole stack. I don't maintain the server, nor do I want to. I suppose it's possible my host might put something nefarious on it without my knowledge, but that seems unlikely at least at present.

I got a nice note from a reader, Alex Johnstone from Scotland(!). He's old-school and visits the page versus subscribing to the RSS feed. That's nice to hear, even though it should be apparent that I don't put a lot of effort into the design of this blog! He's a ham radio operator, which is also interesting to learn. I'm going to have some more time on my hands at the end of March, so I've been thinking about taking my exam and spending some more of my children's inheritance. There are antenna issues here, so it may be more of a mobile rig. We'll see, but I'm leaning that way pretty hard.

In other news, I started a post about the Tinderbox meetup and then got distracted. Figure I'll close that loop here.

First, I didn't embarrass myself. At least, I didn't embarrass myself to myself. I thought I was fine.

I thought Jack was outstanding! I'm probably biased, but I don't think you had any cause for concern, Jack.

Second, Zoom from a laptop while seated in a recliner is very comfortable, but unflattering.

Third, James Fallows was present for a significant portion of the talk about blogging with Tinderbox! I'm fan, what can I say.

While we did talk a lot about Tinderbox, because that was our audience, I think the message about getting people to just start blogging again (for the first time) was pretty clear.

I think it's easier to hear one another when we're not herded into silos and goaded into becoming performing monkeys for the benefit of billionaires seeking to monetize and profit from our social tendencies. We should be in social networks, not concentration camps.

Spread out, people! There's plenty of room in cyberspace.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 09:49 Thursday, 29 February 2024