2025-04-20 12:00:00
Happy 420 day to all who celebrate! Also, Happy Easter if that is more your jam.
This was a very busy weekend. I don't normally plan 4 outings in a single weekend, but this weekend we did.
I started Saturday morning by getting up early and meeting the Audubon folks at York River State Park. We identified 51 species, which is a nice number for a couple of hours of birding. The 35 minute trip home took 2 hours due to an accident that shut down the highway. In the evening we attended out first Richmond Flying Squirrels game of the year. It was a beautiful night for baseball and they won, which does not happen often when I attend games.
On Sunday, we got up early to go to Bryan Park birding, and specifically to look for the Great Horned Owl that lives there. I've been out birding a couple of hundred times, and somehow I have never seen an owl. That changed this morning. We would have missed out again, but a friendly birder who had seen it earlier told me where to look, and then 15 minutes later when she can down that trail she stopped and showed me exactly which tree to look in. I paid it forward a few minutes when another birder came through looking for the owl. The photo is very bad because I took it at extreme zoom distance, staring back into the sun. The original photo is unrecognizable as an owl, it's just a dark blob, but after playing with the photo sliders in gThumb I at least got it to a point where it is proof that I did see the owl.
An Easter tradition here in RVA is Easter on Parade. The city closes down about six blocks of Monument Ave, which is paved with old brick pavers and features 2 lanes each direction and a very wide, shady and grassy median that serves as sort of a park for the locals. People show up dressed for Easter (some nicely, some outrageously) and the parade is the people watching. People picnic in the median, the people that live on the street have friends over for Easter parties, and there are street vendors and food trucks and it's just a generally fun way to spend the afternoon.
For Easter dinner we had ham, mashed potatoes, honey-balsamic glazed carrots, cranberry sauce, and rosemary and olive oil bread. The carrots were something I had never made before, and they have changed how I think about vegetables. They were that good.
It was a crazy week at work, so the links are a little sparse this week.
Elect Disk - A manifesto, or maybe just a rant, about what late stage capitalism is doing to us, along with three things you can do to reclaim some peace.
AI Rant - A fabulous rant about the AI-ization of everything.
Homestar Runner posted a new video. If you are the type that will care, you probably already knew this.
Some thoughts on what the dramatic decline in longform reading may be doing to us.
That's all for this week. In a world where you can choose to be anything, choose to be kind.
2025-04-14 12:00:00
We were out on a date night a couple of weekends ago and the club had the Best Day Kolsch, so I got one. It's very drinkable, living at the low end of the acceptable IBU range for a Kolsch. It's a good starter NA beer for someone who typically drinks mass market lagers. Personally, I'd prefer just a bit more of a hop forward character, but there absolutely nothing wrong with the beer. I will order it again.
2025-04-13 12:00:00
We listened to the Decoder Ring podcast while driving yesterday morning. The subject was the history of Spring Break. I did not realize a 1960 movie featuring George Hamilton is the origin story for the college migration South every Spring.
So of course we had to watch it last night.
It's not a bad flick for its time. It handles issues like college drinking, sex, and even rape more frankly than I would have expected for a movie of its time. Being very early in the 60s, the girls aren't looking for just a good time on the beach, the are looking for husbands. But with wall to wall kids on the beach, lots of drinking, and for some reason a jazz band playing on the beach, I can see how it sells the idea of a week of fun in the sun.
I never did the crazy week at Daytona in the 80s. We went to FL. my senior year, but we stayed in sleepy Longboat Key at a friend's parents condo, and we brought our girlfriends. It was record cold that week in FL. and our beach time was limited to walks on the beach while wearing hoodies.
2025-04-13 12:00:00
I woke up early this morning and wrote three blog posts on my phone while laying in bed.
8 Days without Facebook
The title should be self-explanatory.
Careless People
Review of the insiders look at Facebook that Zuck tried to suppress.
Where the Boys Are
Did you know the whole college students on Spring Break trope comes from a 1960 movie with George Hamilton?
Earlier in the week I wrote about Facebook Killing my Marriage and I posted about our walk through a famous local cemetery last weekend.
That's a damn productive week of blogging. I don't think I need send more of my words your way this week. We can move onto the links.
This article about a US college student in London accidentally ending up on a private charter boat filled with fans of a lower level soccer club heading to a match is charming. They made the team a new fan for life.
Bill Hunt talks about the need to build more smaller online services as an antidote to the mega sites.
It's a slick static site generator, written in bash. I do not need to replatform my website. I do not need to replatform my website. I do not need to replatform my website.
That's all for this week. In a world where you can choose to be anything, choose to be kind.
2025-04-13 12:00:00
I had never heard of this book before Facebook's attempts to stop its publication put it on my radar. Zuck, may I introduce you to Barbra Streisand?
Sarah was hired very early to lead, really start, Facebook's attempts to develop relationships with world leaders. She spent a year convincing Facebook that it needed a public policy program, and she joined as an idealistic young woman that saw Facebook's potential to change the world for the better.
The book covers her nine years at Facebook and her descent into disillusionment as she comes to realize Zuck and the rest of Facebook don't give a shit about anything beyond maximizing revenue and their personal wealth, and if they have to burn the world to the ground in the process, that's fine.
We also learn that Sheryl Sandberg is full of shit in her bestseller Lean In, and that women were routinely sexually harassed at Facebook. Sarah was literally answering emails while giving birth because that was the expectation at Facebook. Women can have it all at Facebook, which means the nanny raises your kids while you work insane hours destroying the world.
Not surprisingly, Facebook was willing to give China a back door to track every Chinese user to get access to the country; they knew they were enabling genocide in Myanmar, and Facebook employees were embedded in the Trump 2016 campaign. They knew what Trump was doing, and they were actively helping. They thought (and still think) it was a great model for the future due to the amount that the Trump campaign spent on ads. Getting politicians to base their campaigns on Facebook meant that those same politicians were less likely to regulate Facebook. It wasn't a happy accident. Facebook had a sales team of 60 selling the idea to elected officials worldwide. Facebook executives barely use the site themselves, and they don't let their children use the site or any social media.
In other words, Facebook is evil. But you already knew that.
I will say that the undercurrent of "If Facebook would have just listened to me..." running throughout the book gets a little annoying towards the end. Sarah may have been fighting internally against Facebook's worst impulses, but ultimately, she never quit. She was fired.
2025-04-13 12:00:00
Today marks 8 days since I disabled my account. I thought muscle memory would bring me to the login page regularly for a few days at least, but that has not been an issue.
I had 258 "Facebook Friends." Exactly zero have noticed I left the platform and checked in via other channels. That is what I expected. Out of sight, out of mind rules social media connections. They are all very shallow.
I'm not going to advocate that everyone quit FB, because for many people there are groups in FB providing support that is no longer available anywhere else. All the web forums moving to FB was a huge mistake that we will probably never recover from.
But at a minimum I would suggest that everyone dial back usage as much as possible. The world will thank you, if it survives.
