I skipped last week. Did anybody even notice?

I was in Atlanta for work (and play) last week. DrupalCon North America was Mon-Thur this week, and having lived in Atlanta for most of the 90s, with my mom and brothers still there, I took advantage of the situation and flew down a few days early to visit family and friends before work started on Sunday night. And by "work," I mean the pre-conference happy hour party at a brewery. The conference kept me busy with the conference all day and industry parties (free food and drinks!) in the evenings. In what may be a sign of maturity, or maybe old age, I was in bed before midnight every night, and before 11 PM all nights except one.

I really didn't do much in Atlanta other than conference stuff. The preceeding weekend I did catch up with some old friends and have dinner with my mom and brothers. The Sunday before the conference started I wandered around the Atlanta Botanical Gardens and took pictures. I was probably about two weeks early for peak Spring blooms (no Azaleas in bloom and the Rhododendrons were just starting) but it was still plenty of pretty flowers to see.

One thing I noticed is that by being busy at the conference or socializing at the parties, I did not look at the news at all for 4 days. I was very happy those 4 days. Those two statements are probably not unrelated. I constantly struggle with finding the balance between engaging with the shit show that is my country's government right now, and just tuning it all out to benefit my mental health. Timothy Leary may have been onto something.

My flights both ways were uneventful, which is not a given in the US these days.

I came back home to delightful weather and wore shorts for the first time this year yesterday. Looking at the forecast, it looks certain that we are done with freezing temps until November. So you know what means...

Camping Season is here!

I will pull the camper out of storage next weekend and spend an afternoon testing all systems and getting it in order for camping season. We don't have any camping trips booked before Memorial Day (last weekend in May for my non-US friends) but we will certainly camp at least twice before then.

I have no links to share this week. If it's nice outside where you are turn off the computer and go get some natural Vitamin D.

That's all for this week. In a world where you can choose to be anything, choose to be kind.

If our lives are a movie or play, then many of the people we meet are walk-on actors. They are not central to the story. I'm talking about people like:

• The guy you met at a conference for 15 minutes in 2006 that is still on your LinkedIn contact list
• That fun German couple that you shared a table with in a Dublin pub while on vacation in 2012
• Most of your high school graduating class

Before social media, those people were just memories after their "scene" in your life. And that was fine. It's the natural order of things. Nobody thinks about the actors with walk-on roles once they are off-screen. And back in the day, you really didn't think about the walk-ons in your life after their scene, either.

But now, you are connected with the walk-ons on multiple social networks, and the algorithm tosses them into your view once in a while. Is that a good thing?

I'd argue that it is not. Our ability to juggle hundreds of social relationships at a time is much, much worse than we believe. The walk-ons in our lives are not supposed to stay front and center in our minds. Also, you may learn on Facebook that the nice German couple are actually neo-Nazis. In option one, you have the great memory of the night at a pub table, with little to zero chance of every running into them again. In option two, the memory is ruined when they post a picture with their new Cybertruck on Facebook.

Yes, every once in a great while, a walk-on makes it to Broadway. If that is going to happen in your life, it won't be because of a Facebook connection. It'll happen regardless. So relax and let it happen, or not. But stop trying to manage 1200 Facebook friends in the process. 50 meaningful relationships > 500 "Facebook friends."

Focus on the 50.

Note: I borrowed this concept from an article or maybe a post in the Fediverse. But I didn't note the source with my note about it. If you recognize it and know the source please share so I can provide proper credit, as this is not my original idea.

Tomorrow is St. Patrick's Day. As tomorrow is Monday, I assume all the celebrating took place last night. Not surprisingly, given my last name, I trace my roots back to Ireland. My great-grandfather immigrated to the US in 1905 from Inishmann, the middle of the three Aryan Isles off the coast of Galway in Southwest Ireland. Maybe surprisingly, I have not typically over indulged celebrating St. Patrick's Day. I did my graduate degree at night school over 3+ years through my early 20s, and mid-terms always hit on Saint Patrick's Day, which kept me at the kitchen table studying and not in a pub in the middle of March. There was a road trip to the University of Missouri at Rolla during Spring Break my sophomore year of college that is better not spoken of. Rolla had a reputation for its Saint Patrick's Day celebration, and although my memory of that weekend is hazy, I remember the reputation being legit. Note - my memory of the weekend's activities were hazy the next morning, and have only gotten hazier almost 40 years later.

And as I typed that last line, I just realized that I went to college in fall of 1985. That was 40 years ago. So in March 1985 I was coasting into high school graduation by doing as little as possible. By March, I had already accepted my offer from Purdue University, so I knew where I was going to school in the Fall. Looking back, I'm not sure how I got into Purdue. I was a B student with no extracurricular activities beyond sports. No student council, no school newspaper, none of that stuff. I did get nominated to the Honor Society in my final semester of high school, too late to include it on my college applications. I finished high school in the Marshall Islands, where my dad worked on a highly secret missile base out in the South Pacific Ocean. I've sometimes wondered if Purdue thought I was a Pacific Islander. My high school record really should not have gotten me into Purdue as an out-of-state student on its own merits. I'm glad they did accept me, though, as I met my wife there.

On to the links.

In Defense of Unpolished Websites talks about learning HTML from looking at "View Source" in the browser, and how kids today are losing out because so many CMS-powered websites have such complicated code that you can't learn anything from it. My first website probably looked a lot like IBM.com from 1995 because I remember looking at the code and figuring out what an "h1" tag did, and what a "b" tag did, and so on."

You Are Not Free to Move About the Country starts with the enshittification of Southwest Airlines this week (your bags no longer fly free) and expands it into a wider discussion of how life as an American is undergoing rapid enshittification across the board.

The Charismatic Voice is the YouTube channel of a retired professional opera singer who does reaction videos to all the music she never heard growing up since she was so insulated in the opera world. She has an amazingly profound understanding of the technical aspects of singing and voice control and watching her analyze Bruce Dickinson or Rob Halford is incredibly interesting, plus you get an expert explanation of just what makes these guys so great. This particular episode is notable not for her analysis of Ozzy's vocals in Crazy Train, but for her absolute and utter astonishment at discovering Randy Rhodes. Imagine going back 41 years and watching your friend hear the guitar solo on Crazy Train for the first time. This is that video. She goes from never having heard the song or Rhodes' name to "This might be the greatest guitar player I've ever heard" in about 5 minutes. It's just delightful, and a great reminder not only of the power of music, but just how crazy good Rhodes was at age 24. Can you even imagine the music he would have made if he had not died in that plane crash? Personally, I think he would quit rock music and revolutionized classical guitar, making it popular in a way that it has never been.

That's all for this week. In a world where you can choose to be anything, choose to be kind.

We were out running errands yesterday and I found myself staring at an end cap of Bero Edge Hill Hazy IPA non-alcoholic beer. It had been a while since I tried a new-to-me NA beer, so why not? I did not realize initially that the Bero founder is Tom Holland (Spider-Man).

The beer is not bad, it's drinkable. My initial reaction was that there was something about it that was very un-IPA like. In looking at the ingredients, I noticed that they used some wheat malt in the beer, and I think that is it. It's an NE IPA style beer, so the IBUs were never going to particularly high. Once I understood where that unexpected characteristic was coming from, the beer grew on me a bit. I drank two last night, and I'll likely finish the last two tonight. If I was out somewhere and this was the only NA option, I'd be perfectly happy drinking it. However, if the Sam Adams Hazy or Athletic Ale Hazy options are available, they are better choices.