Some days my techie brain is working behind the scenes and comes up with revelations such as:
PowerBook M4 Pro looks, sounds, and flows so much better than M4 Pro MacBook Pro.
The ticker symbol for the iShares MSCI Agriculture Producers ETF is VEGI. I applaud you, sirs and madams.
The SPDR Bloomberg High Yield Bond ETF’s ticker symbol is JNK, and that is some high-level dad joking/’80s referencing right there.
If you love reading thrillers, and you haven’t cracked open Jack Stewart’s Battle Born series, you need to correct this ASAP.
I just finished Bogey Spades, coming out mid-November, and it is fantastic. Jack keeps upping the ante and leaving you wanting more. Pre-order it now! 📚 www.amazon.com/dp/164875…
It was an absolute pleasure getting to meet Marc Cameron today, and Jack Stewart was a great host with superb questions that pulled amazing stories from Marc. A good time spent with my best bud Nathan as well. If you get the chance to hear Marc speak, I highly encourage you to!
What a multicultural evening: took my Rwandan, fresh off lacrosse practice, to get South African chicken, at Nando’s Peri-Peri. He left a fan.
“Two drive-thru lanes aren’t enough to handle the volume we have every day!”
“We can’t expand any more, there’s no more room on either side!”
“What if we build up instead?
A little over a third of the way through, Rob Kroese doesn’t so much break the fourth wall in High Plains Grifter as crack it. (It is not narrated in first person.)
Nevertheless, hilarity ensues. 📚🤣
Started a Pathfinder campaign a couple of weeks ago with my buddy Nathan as DM, and the party includes his brother, and an assortment of our respective kids. Had the second meetup tonight, and it was even funnier than the first. Can’t wait to see where this thing goes.
Signum Regis has released a new music video, “Ministry of Truth,” from their album “Undivided,” which came out this past November. The video features a professional cast and was shot on location in Argentina, an entire hemisphere away from the band’s home in Slovakia.
There’s a new episode of The Empowered Parent Podcast, and we’re discussing the new movie Sound of Hope: The Story of Possum Trot, which revolves around a small church in a small east Texas town that decided it was going to take the Biblical command to look after widows and orphans quite seriously.
Twenty-two families adopted 77 children out of the Texas foster care system, and not just any 77 children. They asked for “the ones no one else wants.” Listen as we discuss our thoughts on the film. 🎦
It’s so cute getting the spam email from [MyDomain] IT department about my email password expiring soon.
I am the [MyDomain] IT department.
In today’s episode of “Old Man Yells at Clouds”:
I resent the branding “Cheetos Crunchy.” They’re just Cheetos.
That’s all we had until some ad exec dreamed up pumping air into them and peddling that trash to the masses who they also thought were too dumb to differentiate between “Cheetos” and “Cheetos Puffs.”
I’m somewhere between a third and halfway through Rob Kroese’s “A Grift Too Far,” and if this thing wasn’t already off the rails in the first 20 pages, it most certainly is now. 📚🤣
On friction, and ownership
Some time ago, I was going back and forth on my choice of blogging platform. (Totally a #FirstWorldProblem.) WordPress was working fine, but felt heavy, which to be fair, it has become in some ways, at least for my own use. Not that that should detract from its versatility as a content management system, but it felt like a little too much for a personal blog.
Retrophisch.net was living here on Micro.blog, and while I was treating this as my main blog, it was essentially being mirrored over at Retrophisch.com, run by the aforementioned WordPress. Mid-May, I stopped doing that, committing myself to Micro.blog going forward.
Well, kinda. More on that in just a moment.
I have a future plan, months down the road, for retrophisch.com as a professional site. More on that when those plans come to fruition. I think in the mean time it may become just a landing page or a one-page personal site, a la what you find at About.me and other such sites/services.
I flirted briefly with moving Retrophisch.net to Blot.im. I love the simplicity of text files and images synced from a Dropbox folder. This was directly related to my earlier post about decoupling the domain from Micro.blog. And by the time you’re reading this, the domain should be reconnected, because I’m staying put.
In the end, moving from Micro.blog to Blot was simply trading one kind of friction for another, and the tradeoffs ultimately weren’t worth it to me. There were some minor things design-wise I wanted to do, and moving from the Kiko theme to Matt Langford’s Tiny Theme for Micro.blog allowed me to do those in short order. Matt is very active with the theme’s development, and has made all sorts of customizations possible, so I’m set for the road ahead.
Own your own domain, own your own space
I have long been an advocate for this concept: have your own domain name, and own your own space on the Internet. Own your own email. Stake out a homestead. Sure, you can use other services—you can see the ones I’m on at the bottom of each page on this site—but ultimately, everything is on your home base. Those in the know call this POSSE, which stands for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.
So yes, micro posts and photos you may see here you may also see on my Twitter or Instagram feeds, but they were here first, and even if those services were extinguished tomorrow, my posts remain here.
This is, after all, a personal blog, my little corner of the Internet. And thanks to the work Manton has done with Micro.blog, it’s a lot like blogging was in the early days, only without the hassle of hand-coding the HTML & CSS yourself (unless you feel like tweaking things). So my posts can just be posts, without a title, should I feel like they don’t warrant one, because that’s how it was back in the hand-coding days. (The dates for each post contain a permalink for the post.)
There’s still a lot of work to do. Lots of clean-up from imports I never did, and this is ongoing as time allows, what with work and family. But the place has been given a new paint job and tidied up a bit, so we can keep cleaning up the basement. 😃
Update, 14 August 2024: I’m now making use of Matt’s new theme, Sumo. It’s rather opinionated, and I love it.