So this is fifty-one.
Year 50 Day 366
Day 366: Oh, you thought this ended with day 365? It’s a leap year, so there’s an extra day!
However, this does bring an end to my project of a photo a day for my 50th year. While as with any year, there have been both ups and downs, overall, it’s been a pretty decent one. Semi-randomly selected highlights of the year included:
- Celebrating my 50th birthday with a trip to the Woodland Park Zoo.
- Getting stuck in a stairwell.
- Hanging out with some goats.
- Visting MoPOP and the Laika animation studio exhibit.
- Relaxing in the backyard on a warm day.
- Heading out to a movie theater to see Barbie.
- The one and only day I forgot to take a photo and had to come up with a suitable “penance” choice.
- Hanging out with con friends at the Norwescon summer volunteer appreciation picnic.
- Our summer vacation:
- Taking Amtrak from Seattle to New York,
- spending a couple days in New York, wandering through Central Park and the Museum of Natural History and seeing Six on Broadway the night before boarding a really big boat,
- spending a week on the Queen Mary II on a transatlantic voyage,
- spending four days in London, staying in a hotel with a gorgeous view of Tower Bridge, seeing Macbeth at The Globe, visiting the Tower of London and Westminster Abbey,
- and finally flying back home to Seattle.
- Starting to plan for Norwescon 46.
- Decorating for Halloween.
- Giving presentations on accessible technology at work.
- Practicing my DJing to prepare for Norwescon.
- Decorating for Christmas.
- Visiting my mom and getting her her holiday lobster.
- Realizing I had a complete collection of Star Trek TOS novels.
- Reading all six of this year’s Philip K. Dick award nominated books.
- Celebrating Leap Day.
- Finally getting a high-quality copy of The Abyss after years of waiting.
- Norwescon 46, including arriving on Wednesday, DJing on Thursday night, hosting the Philip K. Dick award ceremony on Friday night, enjoying the day on Saturday, and wrapping things up on Sunday.
- Exploring the Green River College campus during a week of conferencing.
- And a whole lot of photos of me in my office at work or sitting on the couch at home, because most days are actually pretty routine.
So that’s it for year fifty! Now on to fifty-one!
(Though without the photo-a-day project…I’ll still post photos, of course, but not daily. The real trick will be seeing if I can keep up blogging regularly without having this photo project to keep me going.)
Reclaiming the Web
Excellent article by Molly White looking back at what the web used to be and forward to how we could bring that back: We can have a different web.
As a lifelong lover of the web, it’s hard not to feel a little hopeless right now. […] It is tempting, amid all of this decay, to yearn for the good old days.
[…] Nothing about the web has changed that prevents us from going back. If anything, it’s become a lot easier. We can return. Better, yet: we can restore the things we loved about the old web while incorporating the wonderful things that have emerged since, developing even better things as we go forward, and leaving behind some things from the early web days we all too often forget when we put on our rose-colored glasses.
I’m just one (very small) corner of the ‘net, but I do what little I can to keep my site as clean as possible. No ads, no minimal trackers (EDIT: Huh…Ghostery is telling me I have two trackers on my site. I’ll look into that. I try not to have any, and I’m not sure where these are coming from.), not even any metrics (I have no idea how many — if any — visitors I get here). Like Molly and the people she mentions in the article (I voted in the Mastodon version of the poll that she screenshots), I miss the “good old days”. I hope there are enough other people who also do that we can reclaim some of that outside of the walls of Meta (Facebook, Instagram, etc.) and others.
This excellent article by @molly0xfff reminded me of the sci-fi trope where everyone in the future lives in a domed bunker & gets told not to go outside because it’s a wasteland filled with Bad People.
Of course the protagonists leave the dome & find that the reality is a bit different: outside can be scary, but it’s not the hellscape they were told.
Big Tech walled gardens are the dome; outside them is a risky wonderland that’s ours for the taking.
Leave the dome.
Year 50 Day 365
Day 365: Had a good afternoon supporting our students with intellectual disabilities, as they tabled and gathered signatures in support of Highline proclaiming today IPSE (Inclusive Postsecondary Education) Day. The proclamation was officially approved later at the Associated Students of Highline College meeting, along with official approval of the college’s new SPICE (Students Promoting Inclusive Culture and Education) club, a student advocacy club for students with disabilities. Great job, everyone!
📚 Brothers in Arms by Lois McMaster Bujold
32/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
On a stopover at Earth, Miles’ double life as Lord Vorkosigan and Admiral Naismith finally comes to a head. More of the clever mix of military SF, politics, and quirky characters that continue to make this series such fun.
Year 50 Day 364
Day 364: I got a surprise piece of cake from a coworker today!
Year 50 Day 363
Day 363: A little drizzly this morning, but still got my morning mile in, and got another mile in during the afternoon as well.
New Page: Link Recommendations
I’ve just added a new Link Recommendations page, inspired by @lori@hackers.town’s post:
…search is irreparably broken. Finding solid information about a topic is harder and harder. I think the only way we can fix this is to go back to relying on human curation.
The Yahoo model (not unique to Yahoo, but it’s a relatable example for people my age) was having a directory of websites based on topics. You go to the anime section, you get links to various anime websites. There wasn’t an infinite slop of fake blog results.
…my proposal was, and still is, simple. Do you have a personal website? Or just anywhere you can share some links? Make a page full of links to resources for things you care about. […] Then link to other people’s lists of links. […] Make a giant interconnected web of resources and get the word out in spaces you’re in for those topics that you’ve got a wealth of information gathered, and encourage others to do the same.
I’ve just started, so it’s far from finished (and as is often the case with these things, “finished” isn’t exactly a state ever likely to be reached), but it’s a start!
Year 50 Day 362
Day 362: A nice slow day of shopping, laundry, reading, and spending some time working with my music library. In the hopes of being invited back to DJ for Norwescon again next year, over the coming year I’m going to slowly go through my music library, removing the stuff I know I won’t play when DJing elsewhere and making sure that the tracks that stay on my laptop are processed and prepped. A recent update to djay Pro added variable beat grids (so that tracks where the BPM shifts during the song can still have accurate beat matching), and while most tracks are spot-on in the automatic analysis, a little time spent fine-tuning the outliers will make things much easier down the road.