There is something oddly satisfying about opening a mail app and finding no email. I think it is related to some form of PTSD of seeing spam.
The regional round of the 2023 NCAA men’s ice hockey tournament was too predictable. Except for Cornell upsetting Denver, all higher seeds won each game. The games on Friday, including Michigan Tech versus Penn State, were blowouts, suggesting a huge difference between the top eight and bottom eight seeds in the tournament and over all in college hockey. The Frozen Four will be on April 6, Minnesota plays Boston University at 5 PM, Quinnipiac plays Michigan at 8:30 PM, the winners play each other for the national championship at 8 PM on April 8. I don’t know what it means, but Michigan Tech beat Boston University in early January.
Populations are shrinking, but what does it mean over time?
Each month, Russia’s population diminishes by around 86,000 people (not including casualties from the war in Ukraine), Japan’s by around 50,000, and Italy’s by at least 20,000.
The 2023 NCAA Men’s Ice Hockey tournament starts today at 2 PM with Boston University Playing Western Michigan, Michigan Tech played both these teams, beat Boston University and lost to Western Michigan. In the games I am interested in, Minnesota State plays St. Cloud State at 5 PM and Minnesota plays Canisius at 9 PM. Michigan Tech plays Friday at 5 PM. Go Huskies!
I watched the final of the World Baseball Classic last night, and the semi-finals the days before. All the games we really exciting and bring good energy to the start of the baseball season. I know this will never happen due to obvious reasons, but I wonder whether the games would be better if they were played later in the season or at the end when presumably all the players are at the top of their game. Japan’s pitching really dominated. Happy that Kyle Schwarber had that big hit in the eighth inning to give us a chance, but up to that point it looked like the USA was completely out of the game.
My social network for two is called text messaging. Lots of prior art here, I think. Others might use Signal, Slack or even MS Teams. Heck, email works.
Just this past Wednesday I found myself in a conversation about what is woke and what is anti-woke, as the person who I was talking to didn’t understand. I think anti-woke as it is being used is easier to define. Basically, whenever someone is claiming they are anti-woke they mean they oppose the enforcement of beliefs upon themselves or others. For some it’s simply the label for ideas they don’t agree with or norms/rules they don’t want to abide by. I think at the root of this issue is a decrease in tolerance for each other. As an example, one side may say one must use proper pronouns in reference to a person, the other side says that one must not be forced to use certain words or have to listen to one other’s beliefs because listening is the same as indoctrination. There is no effort made to meet in the middle because each side wants their way, one side says they are just being polite, the other side says they are just using common sense.
This YouTube video of A History of Rock in Guitar Riffs from 1965 to now is really cool.
I expect the Silicon Valley Bank collapse is going to be quickly politicized. Before we get to who is doing what wrong, there should be an attempt to explain to the average American why it matters to them. These situations keep coming across as simply bail outs for rich people making mistakes, at the expense of the average person, and while that is true some times, it is not true all the times.
Last night we had thunder and lightning during the snow storm, our first experience of thunder snow. Endured several brief power outages while trying to watch college playoff hockey. (Let’s go Tech!) Woke up to see some of our bushes crushed and several trees with branches forced low due to weight of the wet snow.
To say it’s been a weird winter is an understatement.
Dave writes of the wish for the ChatGPT web site to render results so that he doesn’t have use screenshots. One can interact with ChatGPT via its API, I followed the instructions here to write my own script that I can keep running in a terminal window on my computer. Here is an example of copying an answer (result) to question I asked via the script to my day notes log.
We have another winter storm warning today, expecting snow to start around 1 PM and go throughout the night. I think that we have had a very mild winter, with very little action up until the last three weeks. During these three weeks we have alternated between spring and winter, with two ice storms and now the one today. We are now in meteorological spring, meaning temperatures are now warmer on average than during the winter. The constant big changes certainly bring the average up.
Today is the 25 year anniversary of Apple discontinuing the Newton Messagepad. The Messagepad was the first Apple product that I purchased, having long desired but not affording a Mac. I went in to debt to by the Messagepad because I saw it as transformative. Although it was over-hyped and set up for failure, it consider the Messagepad as the great grandfather of the iPhone. Most who know Newton at all recall its failures at handwriting recognition, a technology that today works very well and hardly talked about. As far as I know, Newton was also the first commercially available object oriented operating system that provided functionality not to dissimilar what assistants do today, 25 years ago!
Comcast has data caps and overage charges for most of their broadband customers, which conflicts with the idea of providing customers with higher bandwidth. I could pay $30 more per month to eliminate the cap, but do I really need gigabit per seconds speeds? After fix months or so Comcast “upgrades” our bandwidth for free and the only discernible reason is they want to push towards paying them more per month for our Internet service. It all feels like a scam.
I think Dave misunderstands what manton is doing in regards to the character limit. The character limit does not apply to blog posts, the character limit applies to what appears in the micro.blog timeline. As has always been, posts that are longer than X character are linked to the associated blog post that contains all of the content. From my perspective, how micro.blog handles long posts in it’s timeline is the same as how Feedland handles long posts in the feeds list.
Manton could change how the timeline works to expand/collapse long posts like Dave does in the Feedland “news” display, but that is his prerogative as the hosting/platform provider. As a writer, I am willing to work within the constraints that he is providing. I don’t see the constraint as limiting me as a writer in any way because the full content is provided on my blog, which frankly is where I prefer people to actual go and read what I write.
About the church in Laodicea described in Revelation 3:14-22, author Ted Grimsud writes (emphasis added):
“The danger for all the congregations is that they would become indistinguishable from their surrounding culture. In the US, the danger has been that Christianity becomes inextricably identified with the American empire. Then, it seems that the only way to oppose the empire is to reject Christian faith. What a terrible tragedy.”
— To Follow the Lamb: A Peaceable Reading of the Book of Revelation by Ted Grimsrud
Still gloomy out. Warm enough for melting but still a lot of ice on the trees.
We got about a third of an inch of ice yesterday.
Blogging from Drummer is now restored, so I can resume publishing of my daynotes. The alias URL that I created now redirects to the new location, which includes my email address. I don’t think I am thrilled about my email address being in the URL, though honestly it’s been so publicly distributed and collected it doesn’t matter, and that is not the address I use for my most important email. I do think that new users should be made aware of how their email address will be exposed.
I have changed the public URL for the OPML file that I use to write posts in Drummer for my blog, and this is a test to see if publishing works. Alas, it is not working. I search Manton’s blog and found the post in which I provided the instructions to configure the public URL of the outline in micro.blog. With luck, now that is done, this should post to my blog. Success!