It was a 72F and sunny today, perfect birding, or any outdoor activity, weather. We headed to Tuckahoe Creek Park with my new camera, a Nikon Coolpix B600. I took over 60 photos to end up with 5 that aren't horrible.

We identified 20 species, and we both saw a gorgeous blue indigo, which unfortunately didn't hang around long enough for me to get the camera pointed at him. We kept hearing the indigo bunting, but could not find him. So I googled the bird, got an understanding of his habitat preferences, and when we heard another on our way back to the car I was able to quickly find him quickly.

Yay for learning!

There were also at least a couple of dozen red-winged blackbirds in the park. The water lilies are blooming with yellow flowers that are covered in tiny aphid like bugs, and the blackbirds are feasting on the bugs. The circle of life.

Trip 31
Nights 101-102

You know you married the right person when she doesn’t blink at weekend camping plans that include getting up at 5 AM to go birding in a swamp. Camping season #4 with the Ascape has officially begun!

We started this season at Chippokes State Park, which was the closest campground (that I would stay in) to The Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge on the VA/NC border. It poured rain all day Friday, but the forecast showed clearing around dinnertime, and the forecast was right. The 90-minute drive was wet, but we got to set up camp without getting rained on.

Normally, I try to reserve campsites far from the Group campsite. That was not possible this weekend. The Group site was about 200 feet from us, and it contained about 7 tents that each held 8 kids. I’m not exaggerating, not by much anyway. The kids were generally well-behaved, and the parents did a good job of getting them quiet around 8 PM each night. So I’m not complaining. However, the group of kids, and there were seriously 20+ of them, were loud. They turned the campground loop into their bike and scooter racecourse and just pedaled and ran and make an astonishing amount of noise, which is exactly what a group of kids should be doing on a blue sky Saturday afternoon. I assume the parents were all drinking, because I don’t know how they could survive that cacophony without alcohol!

As mentioned, we had a 5 AM wake-up call to go birding, so Saturday was an early day. The forecast was for clouds and gloom all day, without rain. Mother nature delivered blue skies and a perfect 68F spring day, after a slow start of gloom and clouds. We IDed 35 species, including 4 or 5 lifers, so that was a good start to the day! That afternoon, my Aunt that lives in the area joined us at the campground, and we grilled steaks for dinner. So all in all, an A+ day that ended early because we were up at 5 AM.

There was an original Cabin A in the campground, which is the spiritual predecessor to the Aliner Ascape. I never saw the owners around, though, so I didn’t get a chance to say hello.

Sunday, we woke up to rain, but got enough of a break to pack up and head home before the next wave of raindrops hit. So trip 1 of the 2023 season is in the books. Next up is a weekend a Powhatan State Park, where birding will likely be the primary activity again. Our big trips this year are back loaded on the calendar, in October and November.

In other news, I am the proud new owner of a Nikon CoolPix B600 camera, purchased mostly for bird photography. If photos of birds are going to bother you, unsubscribe from this website now because bird pictures are going to be a thing around here.

This blog post puts forth a theory that Mastodon is doomed. His argument, as I interpret it, is based on several ideas:

1. Running an instance is hard
2. Picking a username and server is hard
3. Instance admins may not be up to the task of securing the server
4. He doesn’t like Eugen’s technology choices
5. There is no central plan for monetization
6. All the interesting development activity is with ActivityPub

Let’s take these on one by one.

1. Yes, running an instance is hard. So what? Blogging was hard until Blogger made it easy. Installing WordPress was hard until WordPress.org eliminated the need. Mastodon may or may not ever get to a point where somebody offers Mastodon-As-A-Service, but it doesn’t really matter. There are 1000’s of servers available that are happy to have you join, often for free, sometimes for a nominal fee of $5 or $10 a month. The ideal state of everybody owning their own instance is just that, an ideal. Nobody expects it to happen in real life. We may eventually end up with a handful of massive services, ala Gmail, Yahoo Mail, etc. It’s still early, and nobody knows where this will end up, including those who have already written it off.

2. I quote from the post, “The act of choosing a server has kept more than a few people away from Mastodon.”

And I respond, good.

Not everything has to be easy. The act of picking a server is no more complex than deciding if you wanted Gmail or Yahoo Mail back in the day. Mastodon is a tool for microblogging, short-form communication, or whatever. If you aren’t willing to invest 15 minutes to understand a tool before using it, you don’t need to be using that tool in the first place. I ran a tech blog for parents for a short period of time back in 2007/2008. Everybody was confused by Facebook and Twitter back then. Expecting something new to make sense instantly is, quite frankly, silly.

3. Every day, countless people have their Facebook and Twitter identities hacked. The world’s largest corporations and government entities get hacked regularly, too. Yes, the well-meaning person maintaining the Masto instance you use may get hacked, which will suck. But I don’t see the risk as any more critical than exists without Mastodon in the picture. Arguably, that risk is a point in favor of the decentralization that is being criticized here. With Mastodon, they have to hack your instance specifically to impact you. There are more targets, each one worth way less as a target than a centralized service like Twitter.

4. Debating technology choices is arguably the 2nd oldest sport online, after porn ;) His argument against Rails with a Postgres database is that it's ten-year-old technology. Another term for that would be mature technology. Not everything must be a React app storing data in a NoSQL database. Is there a better way to build Mastodon? Probably. There is almost always a better way to build anything online. Are the choices made by Eugen bad? I have no idea, but the author here didn’t provide any evidence that he made bad choices.

5. Again, I quote from the post.

For me, the final nail in the Mastodon coffin came from a Decoder podcast interview with Eugen Rochko , the CEO of Mastodon. Throughout the interview it’s clear that Eugen has no plans for monotization beyond donations and running instances for interested users.

The lack of a monetization plan is a feature, not a bug. Not everything has to be a VC-funded play to get rich. In fact, the Internet would be a far better place with fewer VC-funded start-ups trying to get rich. Does this mean that Mastodon will never scale to replace Twitter? Probably. Again, though, it’s a feature, not a bug. Mastodon is a success today. It’s a worldwide network of thousands of servers populated by millions of users, all chatting away and sharing stuff relatively seamlessly. As long as Eugen can pay the bills, feed himself, and pay his small staff, it’s all good. The lack of a growth imperative here is a good thing. A very good thing, actually.

Also, Mastodon is open source. If somebody wants to fork the code and build Twitter 2.0 with it, they are free to do so.

6. And finally, the focus on ActivityPub in the development world is also good for Mastodon. Masto is just one node in the Fediverse, but it is the overwhelmingly most important node today. Anything that spreads that risk across more entities is good for both Mastodon and the Fediverse. Masto can continue to be Masto, and Tumblr can be Tumbler, PixelFed can continue to be PixelFed, and they can talk to each other. Interoperability is the point of the ActivityPub protocol. It’s maturation as a protocol is good for everybody, except maybe VC funded centralized services serving algorithmic content to increasingly bored users.

Mastodon is Eugen Rochko’s idea of how a microblogging platform should work. He founded the service back in 2016 on a few key ideas that he thought would negate the worst aspects of Twitter, and he really hasn’t wavered much from it. It was built as an anti-Twitter, not a better Twitter. Bigger isn’t always better, and in this case, bigger is worse.

I’m referring specifically to Facebook camping groups here. I don’t know if any other forums (are there still other forums?) are the same.

1. A photo of your camper. Don’t do it. You will immediately be overrun with requests for the weight of the camper, photos of the inside, the measurements of the bathroom, etc. I used Google AI to crunch some data and determined that exactly one person in 2022 actually acted on your response when they asked those questions.*
2. A photo of your campsite. Again, just don’t do it. If you are doing it, be prepared for 20 people to want you to call in a surveying crew to assess the levelness of the campsite. Also, it doesn’t matter how prominent the campground name or location is in the post, the first comment will be somebody asking, “Where is this.” The second comment will be somebody asking you to post photos of every campsite in the campground, so they can pick the best site for the trip they will never actually take.
3. A photo of your tow vehicle hitched to the camper. Some dude, and it’s always a dude, will immediately post 1000 words on why your tow vehicle is too small for the camper.
4. A question about tires. Some dude, (again with the dudes) will use his Chinese made iPhone to tell you how all Chinese goods, including tires, are inferior.
5. A photo of your sun shelter. 40 people that have no intention of buying a new sun shelter will grill you about where you got it and what you paid for it.
6. A question about the best campground near X. It’s been asked and answered 5 times this week already. Just use the damn search feature.
7. A question about how to buy a camper with bad credit. If you are not sure if you can get a loan for a camper, you can’t afford a camper. Buy a nice tent.
8. Can I tow this with my Rav4 questions. First, you’ll hear from the guy in question 3, and he’ll be correct. Also, you already know the answer, you are just hoping somebody will convince you it’s okay to be unsafe.
9. Complaints about how crowded campgrounds are. The result is a 200 comment thread of people bitching. Campgrounds are crowded, and the best way to make sure you can go where you want for a holiday weekend is to reserve a site way, way in advance. It’s not fun, it’s not fair, and bitching on Facebook isn’t changing anything. Also, you have to hear from the "we never pay for campgrounds folks" and the "I only cowboy camp with a buck knife to hunt my dinner" guy.
10. And finally, never, ever post, “What camper should I buy?” Nobody can answer that question for you. Do your research, and asking for random opinions in a general Facebook group is not research.

*I didn’t really do this, but ya’ll just glossed over the sentence because in your heart, you know it’s true.

I leave it to the reader to decide if this is satire, sarcasm, or sincere.

Food Lion has had only Bud, Coors, etc. NA beers in the cooler, until this week. I checked this week and much to my surprise they had upgraded the selection. They had Guinness, Sam Adams, and a couple from Athletic Brewing. So I bought a six pack of the Athletic Golden Ale, and Breck and I finished it in one night. So that should be a tell.

It's tasty. It's got some fruit in the nose and flavor profile that don't really belong in a Golden Ale. It tastes more like a NA juicy IPA. So not particularly representative of what a golden ale should taste like, but a very tasty and drinkable beer, which is all that really matters.

I think we've hit the point that if you want to cut back on real beer but like the taste of beer, you have enough options for good NA beers that you can make the switch and lose nothing except calories, which is a good thing to lose.

I actually wrote a blog post this week. It's a super nerdy post about RSS Readers in Linux, so probably interesting to nobody reading this email. I promised you a weekly email. I never promised it would interesting.

As I was catching up on my book reviews log I noticed that both books I read this week were centered on teenagers with serious life issues. Don't take that as any sort of commentary on my life. I don't control when my on hold books at the library become available.

In interesting things I would have blogged about if I was more motivated...

Wil Wheaton was a keynote speaker at the Southern Kentucky Book Festival last week, and his speech is a home run. Everybody should read it.

Michelle can confirm that last year when Cigna rejected several claims as not medically necessary I stated that I was pretty sure they were just rejecting everything without even looking at it to see who appealed. I was right.

In news that will surprise nobody, Antisemitic content has more than doubled on Twitter since Evil Elmo took over the company.

This look at the job of Premier League referee is fascinating.

And finally, you may not know the name Bobbi Ercoline but you almost certainly know her photo from the iconic album cover for the Woodstock soundtrack. It turns out she married that guy she was hugging on the album cover and they had been married 54 years when she passed away recently.

I have used Thunderbird for email and RSS for years. There is nothing wrong that setup. It works perfectly. So of course it was time to change things up.

I've become fond of the open source Group Office webmail and calendar client that my email service provides. Thunderbird's calendar interface has always been a little quirky, and reminders sometimes go bonkers and just keep reminding, no matter how often you dismiss the event, TBF, I have not had that issue recently. This was more just Chris is bored, let's change how we do things.

So I'm using the webmail interface for email and calendar, and I really like it. But I needed an RSS solution. So off to the Pop_OS software repository I went. I tried the following RSS readers, and just did not connect for a variety of reasons.

Lifrea - It was the closest, but it randomly republished aas new about a lot of articles I had already marked as read. I even made sure I marked them as read, and deleted them, and back they came. It's possible something was up with the incoming RSS, but Thunderbird never had an issue with it so I wasn't willing to accept the problems from Liferea.

RSS Guard Lite - It took too much clicking to get through my feeds.

QuiteRSS - I installed it, opened it, imported my feeds, and uninstalled it. I don't even remember what I didn't like about it. Something about the UI didn't work for me.

Akregator - Didn't like it either.

There are also a selection of RSS readers that don't really manage your feeds They are desktop clients for web based RSS tools. I don't want an account out in the cloud for this, so those didn't help me.

Then I wondered if maybe anybody had done anything interesting with a Firefox extension. And that is where I found Feedbro, which is a horrible name but a fabulous RSS reader, or at least fabulous for me. It works the way I want it to work, which is roughly how Google Reader worked back in the day.

So the answer was right there in Firefox all along.

Three weeks without a real blog post. Those of you on the paid subscription plan can apply for a rebate. Also, I've renamed this thing 'Weekend Update,' because I write it on the weekend, and any callback to classic SNL is a good thing.

The Audubon Society was in the news this week for deciding not to rename the organization. John James Audubon, like many white men of his time, owned slaves. I totally understand the desire to rename the organization, but I'm also okay with leaving it as is. There is a line somewhere between erasing every human that ever enslaved another human and honoring people because they promoted and defended slavery. I don't know exactly where that line is, but honoring some people for the things they did, in spite of the fact they were enslavers, seems okay to me. The key is to account and maybe atone for the fact they were enslavers, and not bury that aspect of their history.

This story of the Aretha Franklin documentary that took 46 years to get made is wonderful. Also, I learned what a clapperboard is, and why they snap that thing loudly when they say action while filing a movie. I thought that was a trope, maybe something left over from the early days of movie making. It actually has a very important function that is the reason the Aretha Franklin documentary sat in the archives for 46 years.

This website is wrong. Tacos and hot dogs are not sandwiches.

I don't have any crazy St. Patrick's Days stories for you this year, because I'm old. However, this charming story from Bitter Southerner about what it takes to get a coveted parade route spot in Savannah will fill that void.

And finally, those of you that were blogging back in the 'oughts may remember Waiter Rant, a blog by a waiter at an upscale bistro in NYC. He ended up with a book deal from the blog. He might have been the first person to turn a blog into a book. The author is a social worker in NJ these days, married with a 9 year old daughter. He is still blogging, and this week's story of discussing religion with his daughter is fabulous.

The year is 20% done. Is that exciting, or terrifying?

No blog post this week, nothing caught my fancy to a level that a blog post formed in my mind. Well, actually, one did, but it's only about 80% done. I'll probably finish it this week. Maybe.

Elsewhere on the Internet tubes, there were a few interesting things published.

Speaking of tubes, the golden age of streaming is over.It's already getting more expensive, and selection is getting worse. Yay progress!

Staying in the entertainment world, vinyl outsold CDs in 2022 for the first time since the late 80s. Is it a hipster trend that is peaking, or is this desire to connect physically with music a real, sustainable thing?

The NYT ran a lengthy excerpt from an upcoming book titled, Why Does Poverty Persist in America?

The tldr; answer is that the ownership class profits from it.

More from the bad news department, parents exploiting their kids for profit online](https://www.teenvogue.com/story/influencer-parents-children-social-media-impact) is 100% legal and the kids can't do a damn thing about it, yet.

And to end on a fun note, this YouTube channel is nothing but 3 minute video compilations of short clips sent in by auto mechanics. It's as funny and terrifying (these people are on the roads with us!) as you are thinking.

I wrote one whole blog post this week. Sadly, averaging one per week would probably put me in the 1% for people still writing on a blog 2023. I questioned if a business with a dominant market position (Spotify) is really a viable business if they used that market dominance to lose $500,000,000 in 2022.

In other stuff...

This Rolling Stone listicle of the best songs by made up musicians is really fun, and I can't argue with their #1 pick.

I thought I knew how to read topographic maps, but it turns out I only kind of knew the basics. This article leveled me up, which might be useful in the coming social collapse of the country.

This chart on the National Park Service website ranks the parks and historical monuments by number of visitors. I would have guessed visits were more concentrated at the most popular parks, but the top park barely accounts for 5% of visits. However, there are probably multiple barely visited parks near you where you can get away from the crowds this summer.

This article confirms what you've been thinking about Amazon, it really is getting worse. We let Prime expire last year, and have not missed it.