2025-02-10 21:17:00
I missed last week’s update, so this is a double issue covering weeks 5 and 6. My works days have been pretty busy, and sadly there have been several deaths in my family and in the families of people close to me. I’ve been in the car a lot and rediscovering some old music. In fact, the last two weeks seem to have been punctuated more than usual by music, so I’ll start there.
The highlight of the last two weeks was getting to see Hans Zimmer Live at Nationwide Arena here in Columbus. I wasn’t sure quite what to expect but he put on an incredible show consisting of some of the best musical performance I’ve ever seen in person. I didn’t know who Guthrie Govan was before but I do now! And he’s just one of what must have been 30 or 40 talented musicians and singers who brought the house down. Oh and we had pretty good seats too.
I’ve also been rediscovering some old music that I’m really enjoying, starting with The Cure. I wasn’t a fan back when they were at the height of their popularity, but I keep wondering why?
I’ve been enjoying the new Hulu series, Paradise, which has been surprisingly compelling and includes some very interesting musical cues, including a dark 2016 cover of ”I think we’re alone now” by Hidden Citizens.
My mother stayed with us for a few days on her way back from her three-week Caribbean cruise. I hadn’t revealed to her that I had repainted her room at home while she was away. She was surprised and seems to like the new look.
I work in the world of cloud computing, mostly in Amazon Web Services. But I had an opportunity to participate in a Google Cloud Hero lab session, which included four introductory labs in the Google Cloud Services platform. It was fun an instructive, and I earned a badge.
I completed by Apple Fitness January Challenge. One down, eleven to go. I've never gotten all 12 in a year. Maybe this year?
I Launched my One Thousand Likes page, in which I recognize things I find online that have given me particular enjoyment or that I think are especially important.
I’ve been experiencing more and more difficulty with my /now page lately. The automation has always been a bit brittle anyway, and now that OMG.lol has to block AWS addresses launching cyber attacks and Trakt is making my life difficult, I’m going to take a different tack. Inspired by something Robb said...
... I’ve begun manually updating my /now page again. I’ll continue to pull content into these weekly updates for posterity, and I’ll continue to adapt and adjust as needed.
One of the things I’ve been struggling with since I launched my photography blog is how and where to host the image files. One of the things I don’t like about how I have been doing it up to now is that the EXIF metadata is not visible on the site. Rather than reinvent the wheel, I went in search of an alternate hosting strategy. I looked at SmugMug, Format, Photler, PhotoShelter, Pixpa, Zenfolio, and 500px—some of which have very interesting and tempting features. But at the end of the day, I came back to good ol’ Flickr. I started with a clean slate but creating all my albums from scratch. And now the /albums page on my site redirects over there. I feel a little silly for having spent so much effort just to come full circle.
And while we’re on the topic of photography, I posted my “Best of 2024” album, which contains what I think are my best photos of the year. That isn’t saying much, but I invite you to check ‘em out anyway.
As much as it pains me, there’s not a good way for me to get to my office via public transportation. With a back-to-office mandate looming in my near future, we decided it was time to add another car to the stable. After a lot of research and some shopping around, we ended up with a black Mazda3 hatchback. And even though I fantasize about never having to drive a car again, I have to admit... it’s a lot of fun to drive!
Here are the highlights of my recent /now page activity.
Great lead actors, a solid supporting case, and a not-too-terrible plot aren’t enough to carry You’re Cordially Invited. Everything about this movie seems to have been half-assed, starting with the unreadable titles. Did they film the first draft of the script? This could have been a good movie, but was ultimately a disappointment.
Forever, Darling is not a great film, but has a few good jokes. Coming during the later I Love Lucy years, it seems to have been made to play on its popularity as a kind of extended episode.
Paradise S1E3 “The Architect of Social Well-Being”
The War for Your Attention (Radio Atlantic)
“MAGA's revenge of the mediocre: Trump's war on federal workers targets the meritorious” by Amanda Marcotte (Salon)
The hatred of federal workers is part of the larger MAGA antagonism towards scientists, academics, artists, journalists, or anyone who has developed expertise in any field but con artistry. Many federal jobs, especially the bureaucratic offices most heavily targeted by the would-be purge, are filled by people who have spent years becoming experts at what they do. In contrast, Trump's political appointments are a celebration of the slacker and the intellectually incurious.
“Why McKinley makes an alarming Trump presidential role model” by Max Boot (The Washington Post)
In 1900, at the height of protectionism, U.S. GDP per capita was, in inflation adjusted terms, $11,519 — less than Kazakhstan’s today. By contrast, after decades of free trade policies, U.S. per capita GDP in 2023 was $82,769. The McKinley Tariff Act of 1890 — sponsored by McKinley when he was a House member — proved so unpopular that it led to the Democratic landslide of 1892, and it certainly did not set America on the path to limitless prosperity: The economic downturn from 1893 to 1898 was one of the worst in the nation’s history. Unemployment in 1894 spiked to 18.4 percent, the highest level until the Great Depression.
Fujifilm’s JPEGs Are Revolutionizing Photography by Ritchie Roesch (Fuji X Weekly)
Camera-made JPEGs are more than just a convenience; they represent a shift in how to think about photography. Fujifilm has created a system that celebrates the art of getting it right in-camera by leveraging their film heritage with creative customization, which allows users to focus on intentionality.
Hope y’all have a great week!
2025-02-08 00:17:00
(February 2025 Update) Added Nasdaq to the list.
(Originally posted in June 2024) I few days ago I wished Southwest Airlines a happy 53rd birthday. It just so happens that I too recently celebrated my 53rd birthday.
Here are a few companies and organizations that also got their start in 1971.
Founding | Company | Notes | |
---|---|---|---|
Feb 8 | Nasdaq | America’s most active stock trading venue by volume | |
Mar 30 | Starbucks | Not my favorite coffee in the world, but a reliable source when in unfamiliar surroundings | |
Apr 20 | National Public Radio | Consider all the things! | |
May 1 | Amtrak | Too bad they only stop in Ohio in the middle of the night | |
June 14 | Hard Rock Cafe | I’m a big Hard Rock fan, having visited many cafés and amassed a considerable collection of pins | |
Jun 18 | Southwest Airlines | Far and away my favorite airline ever | |
Oct 1 | Walt Disney World | I’m old enough to remember when Walt Disney World had only one theme park and two hotels. | |
Dec 10 | Lucasfilm | George made some cool movies. |
2025-01-28 10:00:00
The week started with a holiday (Martin Luther King, Jr. Day) here and it’s always nice to have a short work week. I “celebrated” by taking it easy and watching the inauguration on television.
🥶 It's REALLY cold here this week! Holy crap! Several days in a row of sub-zero (Fahrenheit!) temps. That's in the neighborhood of 30 degrees below freezing!
🚽 I had a toilet blocked and despite trying everything I could, I finally relented and called a plumber. Ten minutes and $150 later, it was fixed.
My now page automation has been broken for at least a week, as calls to api.omg.lol from AWS are being blocked. Adam fixed it briefly, but it’s broken again. The Trakt integration has always been brittle anyway and as Robb pointed out, an automated page is more about data than about me sharing anything meaningful. So I think maybe I’ll go back to manually journaling my now page for a while.
I learned how to make the SSL certificate for my CDN auto-renew, so I don't have to manually update it every 3 months. What a relief!
I learned how to host a static website using S3 and CloudFront. This is an important first step toward being able to host a static site generated using Eleventy, which I'm in the process of learning how to use. My intention is to publish my dad's QSL card collection this way. (But more about that later.)
I created a new Mastodon account on Social.lol using my @w8mhb username, for my ham radio related content.
{me-pe:emoji=🌞} We made it through the 10 darkest weeks of the year! The days are getting longer and spring is on the way! (source)
“The Race to Lead the Quantum Future: How the Next Computing Revolution Will Transform the Global Economy and Upend National Security” by Charina Chou, James Manyika, and Hartmut Neven (Foreign Affairs)
“Stress Test: Can a Troubled Order Survive a Disruptive Leader?” by Margaret MacMillan (Foreign Affairs)
“Inside Meta’s dehumanizing new speech policies for trans people” by Casey Newton (Platformer)
“Trump’s Real Goal for His Second Term? Chaos.” by Howard W French (Foreign Policy)
“What to Expect When You're Expecting Fascism” by Dave Troy (America 2.0)
“Is the U.S. a patsy? The premise of ‘America First’ is bizarre.” by Fareed Zakaria (The Washington Post)
Finished watching True Detective: Night Country (season 4). This was a show that’s all about the journey. But I suppose most good mysteries are that way.
See you in another week.
2025-01-21 11:24:00
5️⃣ This was my first five-day work week of the year. I’m feeling recharged though, so it was a good, busy (good busy) week.
🚙 On Wednesday I loaded up the car with some tools and painting supplies and headed north to my mother’s house. She’s out of town so I’m doing some painting while she’s away.
🤫 Don’t tell her. It’s a surprise!
❄️ I shoveled the driveway three times while I was up there!
I survived the TikTok blackout of 2025.
“What to Expect When You’re Expecting Fascism” by Dave Troy (America 2.0)
“Trump’s Real Goal for His Second Term? Chaos.” by Howard W French (Foreign Policy) outlines some of the ominous parallels between Donald Trump and Mao Zedong in the days leading up to the Cultural Revolution.
“Inside Meta’s dehumanizing new speech policies for trans people” by Casey Newton (Platformer)
I know this update is a little light, but it was a busy week and I didn’t do much but work and work. Maybe next week will be more interesting. Cheers!
2025-01-18 19:07:00
I’ve been tagged by Alexandra to take part in this challenge. Thanks for asking, Alex!
I first established my presence on the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s. Back then it was just called ”having a web page” but at some point the concept of putting one’s thoughts online became known as “blogging.” I’ve been sporadically posting content in some form or another since those early days.[^lost]
In 2022 I wrote three LinkedIn posts about Amazon SageMaker and that sort of rebooted my blogging activity.
I joined OMG.lol in November 2022 and started using weblog.lol shortly after that. I love its simplicity, although it’s fun to push the limits.
I’ve used Wordpress and Blogger in the past. I tried Micro.blog last year. It’s another nice, simple platform, but it didn’t fill a need for me.
I don’t have a sophisticated workflow. I draft almost everything in Day One. I like it because it’s always with me—on my desktop, my laptop, my phone, and my iPad. I copy and paste content into weblog.lol and do the final polish there.
When I have an idea, and I feel like I have something to say that two or three people might actually be interested in reading. This usually occurs first thing in the morning.
I have a lot of half-baked ideas sitting in my Day One journal. Sometimes it’s because I haven’t had time to fully flesh those ideas out, and sometimes it’s because the idea itself isn’t fully formed and I need time to figure out where I’m going. Occasionally, I sit down and the thoughts just pour out. But that’s not the norm.
I suppose it’d be the series of posts detailing how I make limoncello.
I’ve been using weblog.lol for the past two years and it’s a great platform but it has its limitations and there are some more things I’d like to do that it just wasn’t built for. I’m looking forward to seeing what Adam has in store for Neato. I’m also looking at Eleventy and Netlify as a possible alternative.
Not sure. A lot of folks I follow already have done this. I’m (as usual) a Johnny-come-lately on this. If/when I tag someone else, I’ll update this post.
[^lost]: Most of that content has been lost, but I’ve managed to hang on to a few things. In 2006 I spent two weeks at Wuhan University and wrote a series of posts about the experience. Around the turn of the century I wrote some parody pieces that I called The Monkey Journals and I’ve been occasionally re-posting those here too.
2025-01-18 18:00:00
I’ve been a member of the Omglolverse for about two years. In that time I’ve used all the available services and in some cases been frustrated by their limitations. But working through—and sometimes around—those limitations (the “hacking” bit) is the fun part.
The weblog service is where I do almost everything. I even use it for my profile and now pages, as I’ll explain below. But first, the basics: there are basically two kinds of content on weblog.lol, posts and pages.
Posts are dated entries (articles) that exist at a given point in time. They generally don’t change once posted. I always write at least one post per week, sometimes more.
Pages are static entries that may change over time.
Now I know a lot of people maintain multiple blogs based on different subjects. I prefer a single unified web experience for mihobu.lol that includes my profile, my web sitelets (defaults, uses, subscriptions, etc.) all under one roof and sharing common navigation. So that’s what I’ve tried to build. Here’s how:
Weblog provides a built-in navigation mechanism, which you set up in the weblog configuration file. I don’t use it though because I wanted a “tabbed” style to separate the different sections, each having its own set of subnavigation links. To do this, I had to create a separate template for each section. This complicates maintenance because there’s a lot of duplication across templates. I use custom metadata fields to add inline CSS styles to highlight the current page link in the subnavigation bar.
My now page is powered by an Amazon Web Services Lambda Function, which fetches activity from Goodreads (about the books I’m reading), Trakt (about the TV shows and movies I’m watching), and a paste (about everything else) to generate a markdown summary of what I’ve been up to for the last seven days. I use the now page service to store the content, but I don’t use the service to display it. Instead, I pull the now page content into a static weblog page using the now
property.
My profile page exists as a static weblog page. (I don’t use the omg.lol Web Page service for this. My system-wide profile pic and favicon live there though.)
I really like FontAwesome icons, but I don’t use their icon fonts any more. Instead, I download the ones I like and use, and encode them into a CSS file of my own. I use the mask-image
CSS property to display them either as list markers or as inline glyphs (as seen here). I don’t know if I really save much in terms of performance by doing things this way. I really just did it to see if I could.
Weblog allows you to create custom properties that expand in markdown and can include arguments. I use this feature to generate nicely formatted image captions. The markdown looks like this (but must be placed in braces):
caption:text=This is a caption.
I set up my post template (in the configuration) to include a default image (another custom property), although I try to create unique post images for all my new posts. These are included in the web page headers as part of the Open Graph meta data. This also has the side effect of rendering nice image cards on Mastodon.
At this time, I’m not using weblog’s landing page and pagination features.
profile.lol As mentioned above, I don’t use this except that the avatar is shown on the directory
now.garden Because I use it to store my now content, my updates do appear in the garden. So that’s nice.
status.lol I occasionally post statuses, which are cross-posted to Mastodon. But I stopped showing these on my now page, because they hang out there forever if I don’t update. (I wish they would just age off and disappear.)
Pastebin Used primarily as a key component in my now page updates as described above, but I keep a few other things out there too.
Charms I haven’t started using these yet. 😄
some.pics I don’t use it as a photo sharing service per se (I use Flickr for that) but I do use it extensively as a content store for my blog.
PURLs I use it mostly to track downloads of things I’ve written.
Email I don’t use mihobu.lol for email. All my email/calendar stuff is on Fastmail, which I recommend highly.
DNS I don’t use omg.lol for DNS. Everything is at porkbun, which I also recommend.
Switchboard Yes I have a lot of stuff in there, which I think might be a whole other post.
Keys I keep my GPG and iMessage keys in there.
Proofs I’ve got a few in there, including this one. FWIW, I also can be found on Keyoxide.