Rob Fahrni

As youngsters my brothers and our friends would play football here. It’s Exeter’s Memorial Building.

It’s a fairly good sized flat field of green grass. It was perfect for tackle football with a Nerf.

The only downside was the caretaker. He hated for kids to use it for football and would run us off.

At the time the thought never crossed my mind but I’d bet some kids liked to destroy stuff. We didn’t. We just wanted a nice field to play football on.

I’m sitting there, now, writing this post. It’s a great place to relax on a bench and listen to the birds.

Your best bet is to pick a distribution medium that gives you portability of your content and some measure of your audience. Today that would be SMTP (email), RSS (podcasting), SMS, Usenet, Tor, Telegram... When we open source @tumblr it could be one of these.

— Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt) April 17, 2022

Now isn’t that something? I hope Mr. Mullenweg finds a way to federate WordPress and Tumblr with other systems, like Twitter.

But this, this is a neat way to start something like that.

We’re entering an interesting time. I feel like we’re on the crux of Twitter, WordPress, insert your favorite system here, becoming peer systems. Data flowing freely between them. Rolling up into whatever UI you prefer. Feed Reader, Twitter, Mastodon, Micro.blog. The list of potential rendering tools is as long the the list of publishing tools.

Jet trail

There’s always time to smell the roses.

The Daily Beast: “The Senate voted to confirm Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as the newest member of the United States Supreme Court on Thursday, delivering on President Joe Biden’s vow to successfully nominate the first Black female justice in the court’s history.”

We got a good one. It’s nice to see such a qualified person sit on the Supreme Court.

Congratulations Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson!

MacRumors: “In time, the Deliveries app will likely stop showing direct tracking information in the app for additional services.”

This is a real drag. I’ve been a Deliveries user for quite some time now. I have no idea why delivery companies would lock this down, unless it had to do with privacy? If that’s the case sign these third parties up, make sure they’re trustworthy, and give them an API to use. One that requires the user to give permission to the app before using it.

Platformer: “On Monday, it was revealed that over the past month he has become its largest individual shareholder. On Tuesday, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal that Musk now has a seat on the board.”

Money can’t make you happy, but it can buy you a seat on Twitter’s Board.

It would be really great if some of these companies could have some sort of Peon Board. A board of normals, the unwealthy, the unpowerful, to help offset the power held by a few. A super wealthy few.

Fingers crossed he doesn’t bring back the orange menace. 🤡

Microsoft Edge Blog: “Beginning in Microsoft Edge 100, we’ve updated sleeping tabs to enable pages that are sharing a browsing instance with another page to now go to sleep.”

I had to put this in here because it reminded me of something we did for media streams at Pelco. If the user went from a 2x2 display of video — a grid of four videos — to focus on a single stream of video, we’d freeze the other three streams. That meant we’d keep the structure of the pipeline and the attributes to restart it, but we’d release as many system resources as possible back to the OS.

When the user went back to a 2x2, or other layout, we’d thaw the streams and they start displaying video with their corresponding audio stream.

Performance work can be extremely frustrating and add a lot of complexity to software, but, when you get it right it can be very rewarding.

Maddow Blog: “But I was also struck by Trump’s focus on what he still considers one of the key details of Jan. 6: the pre-riot crowd size. In fact, the Republican wants more credit for having brought together anti-election conspiracy theorists, some of whom attacked the U.S. Capitol after having been riled up by Trump’s lies.”

The Former Guy is so egotistical. I’m shocked he hasn’t talked himself into prison.

I never expect him to spend a day in prison. Us normal folk would’ve been thrown in such a deep hole we’d never be mentioned again.

Los Angeles Times: “The walkout came in response to the company announcing Thursday that it would no longer require employees to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 to work in the office, according to an email from Chief Administrative Officer Brian Bulatao that was shared by employees and subsequently posted on Twitter.”

COVID is still a thing and I don’t know about you but I don’t care to have it.

Apparently others are thinking that way.

Bloomberg: “To some, including the 7,500 of Apple’s 165,000 employees who belong to a Slack room dedicated to advocating for remote work, it was bruising. ‘They are trolling us, right?’ one wrote.”

Apple is a fairly backwards company. It’s just in their DNA. They don’t do a lot of things other Silicon Valley companies do. E.G. last I heard, they didn’t have free food, snacks, or even free beverages for their employees. That seems standard fare in most tech companies, but not Apple.

Yeah, it must be amazing working 80 hours a week on an operating system used by millions. But there is way more to life than work.

If you’re at home you can at least somewhat control which 80 hours you work in the week.

Working from home gives me back an hour of commute time a day. I like that. I also love having an afternoon coffee with my wife or having lunch together. It’s just much easier to do random stuff from home.

Grandma’s Roses

We’re really cooking here in the great San Joaquin Valley today. 🥵

[Marc Edwards - Bjango](https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays2/): _“Spec wise, it’s incredibly similar to LG’s 5K UltraFine, and the display of the now discontinued 27-inch iMac.”_

This is a really great piece by Marc if you’d like to know a bit more about good displays options for your Mac.

Pod News: “YouTube is looking at ingesting podcast RSS feeds directly, the slides suggest, with a new podcasts homepage to be at youtube.com/podcasts (a URL that doesn’t work, yet).”

I’m not sure what to make of this. Is it a directory, a paid service, or something else altogether?

Apple’s podcast directory started out as just that, a directory. Now they have a paid service as well as the directory.

Hopefully Google will create a completely open directory as an alternative to Apple’s.

I hope they’re respecting the source of the original podcast file. Apple does this, at least for the time being.

John Siracusa: “Podcasts are now literally how I make my living.”

I’m super happy for John and I’m a fan of the man’s mini-rants, because he’s clever and funny.

Here’s hoping his podcast empire continues to flourish and he can bring us a few more Mac utilities.

Puck News: “Then the F-bombs flew. One of the most heavily managed, media-savvy movie stars of all time, was suddenly rage-screaming, off-mic but 100 percent clear, even up in my cheap seat: ‘Keep my wife’s name out of your f***ing mouth.’ Twice, with even more fury the second time.”

I thought I was watching part of the show when Will Smith walked up on stage. When the audio was shut off I knew it wasn’t part of the show. I was able to read Will Smith’s lips when he dropped his second F💣.

I’m not for violence, but I’m pertective of my wife and children. I don’t think I’d have handled it this poorly. He could walked up and told Chris Rock what he did wasn’t cool and ask him to apologize to Jada.

As it was, Chris Rock handled it pretty well. He looked like the adult in the room, even if his joke went too far.

I’m convinced that between the examples set by Ted Cruz and Will Smith we can find an appropriate and honorable way to handle some guy making a stupid comment about your wife’s appearance.

— Ken Olin (@kenolin1) March 28, 2022

Michael J. Tsai: “A consistent subscriptions experience is supposedly one of the advantages of the App Store. But Apple privileges its own services, too.”

I’m certain most developers believe Apple can do whatever it wants with its own platform.

The real problem is they say one thing and do another. To say the App Store treats all developers the same is a complete lie.

I’m not a fan of people lying to me. Never have been.

Associated Press: “It didn’t go well: Trump wanted Pence to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory, and he was very unhappy the Vice President wouldn’t do it.”

Back to TFG. If we cannot kill off Trumpism we will be the next authoritarian government in the world with an autocrat at the top. He, and his family, will not leave until The People get them out by violent means. Yes, another Civil War.

It does make me wonder how many states would band together and secede from the union if that happens. I could see the west coast states; California, Oregon, and Washington, banding together to form a new country.

The world has so many problems. We just don’t need this.

Obstruction of justice, anyone? Violation of presidential records act? https://t.co/BTSGPMqhU3

— David Corn (@DavidCornDC) March 29, 2022

The old lady and the young man.

The Bulwark - Morning Shots: “Right now, the pro-Putin (or anti-anti-Putin) faction is clearly in the minority, but they continue to have out-sized influence, especially on Russian state TV, where they provide aid and comfort to the Kremlin.”

For some strange reason one of the two political parties in the United States loves autocrats, dictators, and megalomaniacs.

I don’t understand it and they don’t understand my desire to have a better America, a people focused America. One with a few social services that make us better, stronger, and equitable.

A couple I can think of right off the bat; Universal, single payer, healthcare and a university education for anyone who wants it, for nothing out of pocket.

SFFWorld: “On the other hand, John Scalzi all but admits he’s going for pure entertainment with this novel and he most definitely hits the target.”

I really enjoy following John Scalzi on Twitter and his weblog, not to mention loving Old Man’s War.

I don’t read very often. That’s not something to be proud of, it’s just who I am, but I do have Kaiju Preservation Society and hope to dig into it.

The Atlantic: “Russian President Vladimir Putin is in trouble. Despite his limited gains on the ground in Ukraine, he is facing strategic defeat in a war that no one (including me) would have expected him to lose.”

Here’s hoping the people of Ukraine continue to lay the wood on Russian invaders and are eventually joined by the people of Russia to oust Putin.

The Verge: “The real issue is that $1,599 is a lot of money, and here, it’s buying you panel tech that is woefully behind the curve. Compared to Apple’s other displays across the Mac, iPhone, and iPad lineup, the Studio Display is actually most notable for the things it doesn’t have.”

So, I was kind of excited by this announcement, but a friend brought me back to reality.

It’s the same panel in the current Intel Mac, for like the past 10 years.

The \*exact\* same panel. For $1600.

Totally half-assed.

— Oluseyi Sonaiya (@OluseyiSonaiya) March 17, 2022

It’s a good display and you can get something just as nice from Samsung for less. It just doesn’t have the nice case around the display and, by all reports, has a really crummy stand. I’d personally use a VESA mount, so it wouldn’t bug me.

Hey, I’m still using some $300 Dell 24in display I bought years ago and I’m happy with it.

I also believe 27in is about as large as I’d like to go. I’m a single monitor guy and 27in should do nicely.

Mental Floss: “But Uslan wouldn’t be talked out of his dream. He convinced the father of a co-worker, former MGM executive Benjamin Melniker, of the project’s commercial potential, and in October 1979, after six months of negotiation, against all advice or logic, the production partners acquired Batman’s film rights for a reported $50,000. Uslan immediately quit his day job.”

This is a wonderful read about a kid who never gave up on Batman!

I also love me some Dark Knight action and I’m hoping the new, grittier, Batman is able to give us A Death in the Family on the big screen. Affleck’s Batman gave us a brief glimpse of Jason Todd’s Robin suit in Batman vs. Superman.

Cult of Mac: ”During the fighting, Petryk is hunkering down with her teenage daughter and husband. The family has been sheltering for days from Russian bombardment, sleeping in an underground parking garage at night and venturing upstairs to their apartment to work during the day.”

Great piece. I can’t imagine trying to work while my city is being bombed.

If I take a couple minutes to clean this stump up it might make a decent seat or place to put a flower pot.

CNN: ”Police in St. Petersburg arrested at least 350 anti-war protesters on Wednesday, taking the total number of protesters detained or arrested to 7,624 since the invasion began, according to an independent organization that tracks human rights violations in Russia.”

Al Corbett: ”Now, the idea is to throw low-level optimization questions at you that you will never need to deal with in your professional life — it’s not like we’re writing operating systems anymore…”

The interview process can be quite hellish. We have a live coding session with candidates at WillowTree, but to be fair I would call them different than the “Hey, write this complicated algorithm thing for me” interviews.

We work in teams. On those teams we need to make sure we can actually work with our co-workers. The coding exercise tests the grasp of your chose platform as well as how you interact with others.

If that type of exercise doesn’t work for you, you can choose to walk folks through some code you’ve written and explain it, as well as answer questions about it. Think of it as an interactive pull request.

Vanity Fair: ”Then, the day before Ratliff was supposed to shoot his scenes, Hanks fired him. The stated reason: Hanks felt Ratliff had ‘dead eyes.’”

I haven’t listened to this episode but I’m looking forward to it.

Hollywood Life: ”Barry makes a brief appearance in The Batman, and his scene teases his hopeful return as Gotham’s Clown Prince of Crime.”

Our youngest daughter and I caught The Batman yesterday afternoon (it was empty.) We both enjoyed it.

That scene with Joker, however brief, was a great scene. Only the smallest glimpse and I knew who it was.

I liked Pattinson as Batman, well done. He’s definitely a brooding version of Batman, but I like it. Gordon, played by Jeffrey Wright, was also a nice imagining of his character.

Fingers crossed they make another one.

This is not exactly encouraging.

Dave Rogers: ”But people are weird. Many, perhaps most, don’t leave. Maybe they don’t feel they have anywhere to go, maybe they feel defiantly that it’s their city, their home. I don’t know. But even with the Russians just kilometers outside the city, people went to the movies.”

We’re so fortunate we’ve never had to live in a country with war raging all around us.

Слава Україні 🇺🇦

The Loop: “Over the past couple of years, I have taken time to address issues in my personal life. In that time, I realized that there is so much more to life than work—I’ll be honest, that revelation came as a massive shock to me, but I couldn’t be happier."

All he best, Jim.

LONG LIVE THE BEARD!

Steve Beschloss: ”It’s hard to quantify the impact of Zelensky’s decision thus far to stay in Kyiv and fight with his countrymen against the invading Russians. But his rejection of the US offer to evacuate—‘The fight is here,’ he reportedly told the Americans. ‘I need ammunition, not a ride.’—is already the stuff of legend. I wouldn’t underestimate how meaningful his courage is in sustaining morale and motivating Ukrainians, be they trained soldiers operating sophisticated weapons or even college students and grandmothers producing home-made Molotov cocktails to fend off their attackers.”

It has been very inspiring to see Zelensky stay and prepare to fight. The fight is coming and I hope he and his fellow citizens can continue to repel Russian forces.

Robert Reich: ”The biggest difference between the old cold war and the new one is that authoritarian neo-fascism is not just an external threat. A version of it has also taken over one of the major political parties in the United States.”

I hope we don’t see World War III or a new Civil War. Here’s hoping Putin and Trump end up in the despots waste bin of time and Democracy survives.

Who knows, maybe Russia can finally become a true Democracy once Putin and his Oligarchs are out of the picture.

Where were you when world war 3 started?

— Derek Powazek (@fraying) February 24, 2022

The snow is pretty much gone from the storm on January 3.

Today I’m going to cleanup some of the damage caused by it. Dragging busted branches and parts of trees into the backyard for cutting up later.

I also need to shovel off a big pile of snow at the top of our driveway and haul wood up from the lower part of our backyard, stack it under the deck stairs, and put some on our front porch for easy access.

The forecast was fairly grim earlier in the week. They were calling for over a foot of snow. Recent forecasts are showing between six and nine inches.

The thing that concerns me is the call for a mix of sleet and freezing rain that is supposed to follow the snow.

When all is said and done I hope we still have power, then the cleanup begins. 🤞🏼

I enjoy snow, I really do. It’s peaceful, fun to watch while is falling, and the ground covered in white fluff is really beautiful.

On Monday, January 3, we got somewhere between ten inches and a foot of snow. It caught everyone off guard to get that much, about half that was forecast. The amount of snow was fine. The wetness of the snow was a problem.

When we expect snow you’ll find Dominion Energy trucks staged at various places throughout the region. Power goes down and they bust their butts to get it back up. They really do, no sarcasm in that statement at all.

Monday morning I got out of bed and the snow was really coming down and had been for a few hours by that point. No sooner had Kim started making a mocha and I making a pot of coffee the power went out and was out until early afternoon, Friday, January 7.

By around 10AM we started hearing trees break and fall. Our own beautiful magnolia lost a couple fairly big branches and the top broke off. That’s a real heartbreaker. I have no idea what it means for the future of it? Fingers crossed it doesn’t have to come down.

Around 11AM I could hear chainsaws firing up all around us. Our neighbor across the street and one house down lost half of a tree. It fell into the road and had to be cut into chunks to clear the road. Not long after our neighbor directly across from us lost a fairly large tree, I’d say 30-foot. It fell across the roadway and was blocking our driveway. We fired up the chainsaw and got to work on it.

Our neighborhood is amazing. Folks from all sides descended on this monster and we were able to chop it up and clear the roadway in no time. I’m grateful for our neighbors.

It was pretty frigid that day with temperatures in the high 20’s during the day and teens overnight. Of course that meant that wet snow iced up.

Tuesday we started working on the driveway. My gut told me Monday afternoon I should go out and start clearing the driveway. I was cold and decided I didn’t want to do it. That was a huge mistake. Wet snow and low temps cause ice. Duh. It took forever to clear it up. Our daughter, Taylor, slipped on the ice and landed hard on her hand and hip. She was done for the day. Kim helped her in and took care of her. They’d done amazing work clearing the snow and ice. I was able to work on a particularly stubborn bit of ice with help from the sun and cleared off a bunch of it. Kim joined me after a while and we got it cleaned up. Kim was able to back the car up the hill at that point. I’m thankful for my family.

By late Tuesday roads started to improve from Palmyra down the hill into Charlottesville. Kim took me for a ride so I could check Slack and let work know I was ok. Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention our cell service stopped working Monday afternoon. No communication in or out.

We decided to take a trip to check out the roads. They were mostly in good shape. Trees down all over the place. There are some steep S curves not far from home that looked like a war zone. That mess was cleared up by regular folk. They spent hours down there clearing the way. I’m thankful for kind, thoughtful, caring people that think of others.

We decided we really wanted a hot meal Tuesday night, our house was a freezer with the exception of the room around the fireplace. We found that our favorite Japanese place was open. We had great hibachi chicken and steak that night. So delicious! I’m grateful for folks that brave the elements so we could have a hot meal.

I’m thankful we have a fireplace and wood to burn. We had bread, cheese, and some frozen ham leftover from Christmas dinner. We pulled that out and thawed it and we’re able to get along with sandwiches, mostly. I’m thankful for leftovers.

This week has been great. The snow is still hanging around, but it is melting. Our driveway is clear and the roads are dry. There is danger around the corner. We’re expected to get up to a foot of snow between Sunday night and Monday morning.

Here’s hoping the power doesn’t go out.

I decided I’d go to my favorite coffee shop to work on Stream.

I’m sipping my cofffee, coding away, distanced from folks, of course.

A lady walks in and starts loudly discussing how, on Christmas Day, while the family was together her sister finds out she was exposed to someone with COVID. Swell.

Turns out she’s an employee coming in for her shift.

I just packed up and left. Will this mess ever end?

There is a part of me that would love to put together an alternate podcast directory to Apple’s.

Apple has given so much to the podcasting community, but you never know how long they’ll continue to make it freely available. Remember, they’re a services company now.

The service I’m thinking of would provide a shared web crawler, Administrative UI, and a nice Dashboard for supporters and advertisers. It would also have its own API and provide one compatible with Apple’s offering.

I don’t think it should be run by an individual, or a small company. It should be a cooperative, supported by the podcasting applications and podcasters using it.

Another thing that could fall out of it is an ads business that small podcasters and podcast app creators could take advantage of.

Maybe that’s just too much to expect from a small collective of podcasters and podcast app makers?

Just a thought I needed to get out of my brain.

I had to capture this for future reference. This is astoundingly sad.

At its peak (1952), polio killed 3,145 Americans. After a vaccine became available in 1955, all 50 states passed laws requiring polio vaccination before kids can enter public schools.

COVID killed 345,000 Americans in 2020, and has killed 416,000 more so far in 2021.

— Montana FTW! (@dmahugh) November 14, 2021

Ten months ago today, the sitting President incited domestic terrorists who then breached the Capitol during which time he told them he loved them in front of everybody.

— rands (@rands) November 6, 2021

Of course we the people have zero power to do anything about it. Fortunately he left the White House but he’s still free to do whatever he wants and has wacko backers in the Halls of Congress pushing his fascist agenda.

We will have a king dictator in office if we cannot stop him and his ilk.