Living Out Loud
"We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us."
E.M Forster
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Follow Friday - With Reasons

10 Recommended Follows for Mastodon I opened my Mastodon account in January of 2024, initially on Mastodon.social but quickly moved to the dazzling community on OMG.LOL, incorporating my Micro.blog follows along the way. In a short five months I've posted over 2000 times, about half the total my Twitter account accumulated in 15 years. A great many of these posts have been actual interactions with people and not just shouting into the void of the Fediverse. I've been lucky to meet some funny, smart, profane and irreverent Netizens, as we used to call each other in the olden times. I'd...
May 17th, 2024 WeblogPoMo2024

The Phones of Normal People

Now, I realize that there are some folks in the geek space who still make use of default apps. Robb Knight's project from the winter of 2023 taught us that. By and large though, the things that people in tech related fields do with our phones, laptops and tablets fall far, far outside of what normies do with theirs. Even further from the norm are what the professional nerds do. Those folks who make their living from monetized blogs, podcast ads, subscriptions and other forms of content are so far removed from what your Mom does with her phone that...
May 16th, 2024 WeblogPoMo2024

Prison Break

Note: As an unabashed and outspoken progressive, I feel like I need to explain how I came to be a part of the prison industrial complex in the south. If you are interested in how that happened, you can read this explanation. On a Friday afternoon in the spring of 1988, I was preparing to begin counting the inmates under my supervision at the prison where I worked in order to be ready for the pending shift change. I was making my rounds on C Block locking doors to confine prisoners into their 10 and 12-man rooms when my shift...
May 15th, 2024 WeblogPoMo2024

My Life Reading

I have some long-standing interests and past times, but only a few go back to my childhood. I'm 59, so I came of age in the 70s and 80s, ruling out anything tech related. There are a few things, though that though they have evolved, I consider to be just part of who I am. Reading is at the forefront. ReadingI got into trouble throughout my entire public education for reading books for pleasure when I was supposed to be doing other things, like "math". I went to 13 schools in 12 years and made friends with the school librarian...
May 14th, 2024 WeblogPoMo2024

On Writing

I was an early and voracious reader. At home, my parents weren't pedantic about language. They just used correct grammar and pronunciations and my siblings and I did the same. Although I'm a lifelong resident of the south, other Southerners will frequently ask me where I am from because my accent doesn't match theirs. It's not that I don't have an accent, people from other places can tell I'm a Southerner, it's just not real thick. Reading a lot helps build your vocabulary and that was always helpful in school. Having a good vocabulary can make you look smarter than...
May 13th, 2024 WeblogPoMo2024

My Reddit Account Can Vote

When I first joined Reddit back in 2006 it was ugly (I mean the design). It definitely had a Web 1.0 or 2.0 vibe. Over the years, people got so attached to the design that when the site was brought into the modern age, the company left the old design as an alternative to people who didn't want their favorite site changed. You can still go to https://old.reddit.com and have an early 2000s experience. Millions of people do every day. In fact, Reddit is one of the most popular sites on the Internet, with more registered accounts than there are...
May 12th, 2024 WeblogPoMo2024

A Distant Dad

My dad is a typical baby boomer, born a couple years after World War II to a vet from that war. He grew up during the Eisenhower era and the buildup to the Vietnam War. Born and raised in the tiniest county in North Carolina, he went to segregated schools for 12 years and graduated high school in 1965. He was always the youngest in his class, with a birthday right on the cutoff date to enroll. Only 11 months younger than his older brother, they were always in the same grade and have had a lifelong rivalry that still...
May 11th, 2024 WeblogPoMo2024

My First Computer

In December of 1993, I found myself single for the first time in my adult life. I'd just gone through several life changes, getting out of an unhappy marriage, leaving a stressful job and moving. While waiting to rent an apartment, I spent a week staying at my uncle's house. He was the only person I knew who had a computer and it wasn't much. I think it was a 386 running DOS 5 with maybe a 40MB hard drive. One thing it did have was a 2400bps modem and a connection to Prodigy, one of the early online services....
May 10th, 2024 WeblogPoMo2024

A Day in the Life

I got up at 4:10am today, about twenty minutes earlier than normal. After making my first cup of coffee, I checked to see if the two blog posts I had scheduled were posted. They were, so I cross posted my app review to Reddit, as is my habit. I opened my daily note in Obsidian and recorded the weather, my appointments and my wake-up time. Then I put my shoes on and went for a walk in the dark in our neighborhood while Wonder Woman went for her run. When I got home a took a quick cat nap before...
May 9th, 2024 WeblogPoMo2024

The Road to Hell

A Trip to the LibraryI did it to myself, I suppose. A while back, for a treat, I took a trip downtown, to the Big Library, as opposed to the smaller, local one I normally use. I like to go the library with specific intent. I carry with me a list of books gleaned from recently read reviews. Sometimes I have a list of authors I've been reading so that I might find their other works. Not to be rigid, I remain open to the off chance I might see something eye catching and in turn thought provoking. The Big...
May 8th, 2024 WeblogPoMo2024

Five Things I've Protested

I was relatively apolitical through my twenties. My mom and stepfather were Democrats when I was a kid and people like Richard Nixon and Jesse Helms didn't get many kind words in our home. Later I went to live with my Dad, a Vietnam veteran and staunch Republican but in those days politics just wasn't front and center in people's lives the way it is today. A lot of people in the south were glad to see Jimmy Carter get elected because he was one of us. Conversely, Reagan was also popular with the older generation who remembered him as...
May 7th, 2024

The Perfect Album

Released in 1982 when I was a junior in high school, Nebraska was Bruce Springsteen's follow-up to The River, a double album he recorded with the E Street Band. Nebraska on the other hand was recorded in his basement on a four-track recording machine and it features nobody but the Boss himself. I have owned this recording on LP, cassette, CD and audio download over the past 42 years. You can listen to it here. I used to listen to it on repeat when driving north on Interstate 95 to see my children, several states away, after their Mom and...
May 6th, 2024

Northern Ireland

I was the kind of little kid who read the newspaper and my parents copy of Time Magazine. I watched Walter Cronkite with my grandmother and started listening to NPR in high school. I grew up listening to reports of shootings and bombings in Northern Ireland. Those of us of a certain age became accustomed to hearing about the conflict in Belfast and Derry. We knew of the Falls Road in Catholic Belfast and the Shankhill Road in Protestant Belfast, perhaps without knowing they were actually in walking distance of one another. I remember when Bobby Sands and the other...
May 6th, 2024 WeblogPoMo2024

Rules of the Blues by Memphis Earlene

"Rules Of The Blues" by Memphis Earlene    1. Most Blues begin, "Woke up this morning..."     2. "I got a good woman" is a bad way to begin the Blues, unless you stick something nasty in the next line like, "I got a good woman, with the meanest face in town."     3. The Blues is simple. After you get the first line right, repeat it. Then find something that rhymes... sort of: "Got a good woman with the meanest face in town. Yes, I got a good woman with the meanest face in town. Got teeth...
May 5th, 2024

One Man's Obsession is Another Man's Passion

My GrandfatherIt is a hallmark of the men in my family to develop passionate, all-consuming interests. My grandfather was like this. Luckily for humanity, his passion was helping other people. One of the greatest favors you could do for him was let him mow your lawn. Into his 70s and 80s he had a route consisting of his rural church, country cemeteries, widows and shut-ins. Despite being raised in the early part of the 20th century in the south, he didn't care what color you were. If your grass needed cutting, he was your man, free of charge. He also...
May 5th, 2024 WeblogPoMo2024
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