Quick Thoughts
A designer on Threads asked what tool he should use to build a simple portfolio site, and the answers were anything but simple… get-a-good-text-editor-and-build-it-yourself, Wordpress, Squarespace, Adobe Portfolio, a bunch of services I’ve never heard of…
Finally got around to finishing X-Men 97 on Disney+. I read X-Men in the 1990s and watched the cartoon. What a wonderful reboot and a delightful nostalgia trip. Looking forward to the next season.
A former coworker was arrested two years ago on a collection of shocking sexual assault charges, but at the time, there were few details. Now that court filings are beginning, our local paper has details and it’s somehow worse than I thought. Nauseating. It’s a strange feeling to have worked with someone 15 years ago and see them in the papers accused of truly horrific behavior. Were they that monstrous when we worked together? Probably. I’m not going to link to the article because I read it and wished I hadn’t. You don’t want to read it either.
Web pages are disappearing. Links are broken. This Pew study tries to assess how bad link rot is…
But even as users across the world rely on the web to access books, images, news articles and other resources, this content sometimes disappears from view.
When I was in high school in 1992, an alternative radio station popped up in Augusta, GA. Channel Z 95.1 was amazing, but by 1996, it was gone. I just discovered that someone launched a website for the now defunct station, complete with a “reproduction” of the live broadcast and Spotify playlists.
So I ended up in the Threads test group with TweetDeck-like columns. And you know what? It’s really good.
Jay Kuo dissects the NY Times Battleground Poll:
The New York Times is out with its Battleground States Poll, so time for everyone to panic. But not me! I’m here to make sure everyone takes a deep breath and puts out any fires they may have set to their hair.
I’ve got an old Squarespace site with over a decade of posts. I’m hesitant to scrap it all and start over, but I feel like I need to scrap it all and start over.
Does social media content become popular because people like it? Or does it become popular because the algorithm likes it and that is the only content that users see?
CNN has an article about how Victorinox might create new Swiss Army Knives without knives. I stopped carrying mine after 9/11 when security tightened and kept forgetting to leave it at home. Personally, I’d love a knife-less multitool that I could attach to my keys.
My wife is about to start a PhD program. She has a Dell PC for work, but her home computer is an iPad with a keyboard case. It works for what she needs now, but looking ahead to grad school, some of the apps she’ll need won’t run on the iPad. We’ll get her a Mac, but if Apple wants people to use iPads as primary devices, they need to lift some of these restrictions to allow for more complicated computing needs.
Just had a fun conversation with my girls about how Gen X and Gen Z use social media differently. They are baffled about what I post to Instagram. I didn’t even try to explain how I use Micro.Blog. 😂
I’ve always picked up wiper blades from my local auto parts store, but I have two really short blades on this Buick that are hard to find. So I went to Amazon and found a company that will assemble a set of all three blades specifically for my car. Massive timesaver and significantly cheaper.
Now that the semester is over and I’m not teaching classes or taking classes, I’m really looking forward to working on some personal projects. I want to do a little more customization to my Micro.Blog theme, I’ve got some fonts to finalize, and some merch to design.
Connections Puzzle #329
🟪🟪🟪🟪
🟦🟦🟦🟦
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟨🟨🟨🟨
I haven’t been playing Connections lately, but today, I got them all, but from the hardest answers to the easiest. Never done that before.
Strands #61
“A shade envious?”
🟡🔵🔵🔵
🔵🔵🔵
I’ve been playing the NY Times’ Strands for a couple of months. Still in beta, but a lot of fun. Didn’t need any hints today…
Bad Batch finale was wonderful. Loved every moment.
Glad to see Instagram is trying to shut down the accounts that simply rip off original content. I’m interested to see how well the algorithm changes work.
Every time I’m reading online and a “subscribe today” box pops up over the top of what I’m reading, I just leave the page.
Explaining to my teenage daughter what microfiche is, and how we used it for research before the internet.
Today was rough. Not sure why, exactly. Nothing particularly significant happened. It just sucked the life out of me.
My inlaws were getting “Breaking News Alerts” from Messenger. Someone was sending them “news” through Facebook, and because they have notifications on, they looked like legitimate news updates.. But they were a bunch of MAGA nonsense that was probably actually Russian disinformation.
NASA’s Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth. It’s amazing how NASA has kept Voyager 1 and 2 operating. The probes were launched in 1977. 🪐
The last few weeks have been a blur… busy at work, wrapping up the semester as teacher and student, dealing with the aftermath of my wife’s car accident (she’s fine), buying a new car, my son’s lacrosse season… but I think I’m starting to round that corner back to some semblance of normalcy. 🤞
Turned in my final paper for the class I’m taking this semester. Not completely happy with it, but finished with it for now.