It was a productive week on the personal privacy protection front. My 1 TB USB drive arrived and I now have an offline backup of my MP3s, photos, and document directory. I did it with rsync so I think I'll just plug it in quarterly and do a quick rsync to refresh the backup. It should take less than 5 minutes. The online backup is at pCloud. Now I just need to shut down the AWS and Google Accounts. Also, I mostly avoided Facebook all week.

Yesterday it was 72F and sunny. I went hiking. Today it's 42F, sunny, and windy. Nothing says Spring is coming like yo-yo weather in Richmond.

On to the links.

"Among white voters who had moved more than two hours from their hometown, Hillary Clinton enjoyed a solid six-point lead in the vote that year. Those living within a two-hour drive, though, backed Trump by nine points. And those who had never left their hometown supported him by a remarkable 26 points. Eight years later, he tapped that support again to recapture the White House." This is a fascinating article connecting the decline in mobility among people living in the US to the recent rise of fascism. And that decline in people's opportunity to choose their own communities can be tied directly to well meaning liberal policies.

Personal websites matter - now, more than ever - because we can see, clearly, with our own eyes, what happens when a handful of companies control and own the medium and the message.

Discover new idieweb sites with this random link generator that takes you to a new site every time you click it.

Also from Joan Westenberg (two links this week!), I'm tired of pretending that tech is making the world better.

A brief history of the Swiss Army Knife. My SAK is over 20 years old. It lives in my backpack.

This quote is brilliant. "You will experience climate change as a series of increasingly wild disaster videos, until one day you are the one making the video."

If you've been around tech and blogs since Web 1.0, you may recognize ReadWriteWeb. It was one of the top 10 tech blogs for many years. It's creator sold out at the right time, and recently wrote a book about the rise and fall of his blog. I finished it last week and greatly enjoyed it. His blog on that website is great to, as it looks back at the early days of the web. You know, back when we thought making everybody a worldwide publisher would lead to peace and love. Instead, we got Hitler 2.0.

And finally, Andreas has done a chronological re-listen to the entire Black Sabbath catalog.

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

We did about 6 miles of hiking, slowly, as we often stopped to look at the birds. It was kind of quiet day of birding, but we did manage to get 21 species.

On the way home we stopped at Talleysville Brewing, a new to us brewery that is co-located at New Kent Winery.Their red ale and coffee stout were both excellent.

The high tomorrow is going to be 42F. Ugh.

This is an ongoing series in which I dig into the dustier corners of my MP3 folder.

Elby Brass - Real Sound

Elby Brass is a local band in Fredericksburg VA that, IIRC, came into some surplus high school band uniforms and decided to form a band. So it's 7 or 8 people, all wearing high school band uniforms and playing brass instruments, just having a hell of a good time. Their live shows are a blast. They are one of those bands whose energy simply does not translate well to a recording. You need to see these guys live, and you can as they still play the occasional show in the Fredericksburg VA area. I'm sure I bought the CD after a show to support the band.

King's Got His Crown Back

Verdict: See them live, recordings just don't do them justice.

This is an ongoing series in which I dig into the dustier corners of my MP3 folder.

De La Cruz - De La Cruz

De La Cruz was an Australian metal band, which is exactly what you were expecting from the band name, right? I don't remember how or where I ran into this band, but I'm sure their tune "Back to the 80s" was involved. If Dokken had written that song in 1986 (with different lyrics because "Back to the 80s in 1986" would have made zero sense) it would have been a huge hit. If these kids had been playing the Sunset Strip in 1986 they certainly would have scored a record deal. Maybe surprisingly, they got a deal in 2012 and put out a full length album before breaking up.

This might be their demo EP as it only has six tunes, one of which is a power ballad, because of course they had a power ballad. There is nothing special about any of the other songs, but they look about 18 in the video, so some 18 year old Australian kids trying to make hair metal happen again in 2012 get mad respect from me. Most hair metal bands were doing good to write one killer tune, and these kids did that.

Back to the 80s

Verdict: Worth keeping for the one song.

I really do prefer working from home, but this was one of those weeks when I did not leave the house from the time we got home from grocery shopping on Sunday morning until we went out for dinner Friday night. That's not healthy. I was referring to mental health there, but the Mexican food wasn't particularly healthy either.

I started the week with the flu, and spent my day off on Monday sitting on the couch watching baseball documentaries. I did have my flu shot back in October, so instead of ending up really sick, I felt blah for two days and was back to normal on Tuesday. Vaccines work folks. It was also bitterly cold with some snow, which shut the city down for 2 days. This week promises temperatures in the 60s and sunny every day. My goal is to run at least 4 times this week.

We did go out last night to a concert. Bon Jovi tribute act Shot Thru the Heart played at a small theater in town, so why not? They were fabulous, really nailing the Bon Jovi vibe. The sad truth is the singer does Bon Jovi better than Bon Jovi can these days. Time catches up to all of us, eventually.

On to the links.

I was going to link to a truly terrible blog post about how we are all wasting our time blogging for fun, but the Internet feedback on the post was apparently so bad that the guy not only removed the post, he killed his entire site. Based on a couple of other terrible takes I saw on the site, we didn't lose anything here. Here is the post on archive.org if you want to read it.

This is a really great post from imaginary internet friend Alex Standiford, about how he has tamed the most distracting elements of his iPhone, and turned it into the productivity enhancing tool that Steve Jobs promised us back in 2007.

A love letter to the personal website.

Don't click this link unless you have time to kill exploring a wonderful animation.

A list of resources for those of us trying to minimize the Google in our lives.

I found this article very hopeful. The argument is that no government has ever stood up to 3.5% of the population actively resisting. That's all we need in the US, 3.5% to actively resist, and the orange shitbag crumbles. Let's do it!

Stay grounded in your physical space to avoid getting wrapped up in world events that you can't control.

The Guardian's food critic goes out with a bang, summarizing everything he learned in 15 years of writing about food.

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

In 2022, at about this time of year, I read Rethinking Fandom, a book that proposes that we don’t owe our sports teams our undying loyalty and attention. It struck a nerve with me, as I had become increasingly uncomfortable with the shitty way almost all professional sports teams (I’m counting the NCAA here too) are run. So I tried an experiment that year. I became a casual fan.

By casual fan, I mean I did not sign up for MLB.tv to obsessively follow the Red Sox. I did subscribe to the radio feeds because I like falling asleep to a west coast baseball audio feed during baseball season. And it’s nice sometimes to sit on the porch with a beer in the dark, listening to baseball. Between Apple TV Friday night games, and ESPN+ broadcasts, plus Sunday baseball on Peacock, there is generally a baseball game on TV just about every evening. As a casual fan, I no longer felt compelled to try to watch the Red Sox regularly. If I was in the mood to watch baseball, I watched whatever game was on.

It worked better than expected. I greatly enjoyed watching teams I normally would not watch, and I enjoyed not obsessively following the Red Sox ups and downs (well, mostly downs) daily. I did watch the World Series, probably closer than I had since the last time the Red Sox were in it. In past years, the Red Sox not being a part of the Series made it seem less worth watching. Now, though, watching the two “best” teams play for the trophy was more interesting without the Red Sox mental baggage. I continued that same model for the 2023 and 2024 seasons. I am officially a casual baseball fan.

Likewise, I followed through with college football and basketball. We canceled Hulu Live, so we did not have access to the Big 10 Network to obsessively watch Purdue. And it was fine. The occasional game that was promoted to the network made those games more special. Another thing we did was refuse to plan around Purdue sports. So if they were on Fox on a Saturday afternoon, we might watch if we were home, but we didn’t plan around the game like we used to. I think I saw one football game on TV and one in person in 2022, and maybe parts of one football game in 2023 and 2024. It helped that Purdue football was historically bad the last couple of years.

Basketball was a little different, as Purdue basketball was historically good in 2023 and 2024, going all the way to the National Championship game in 2024. So even though we still did not have the B1G Network, there were plenty of opportunities to watch basketball, including every game of the Big Dance. We still don't plan around regular season games, though. If we are home and the game is on, maybe we watch. Earlier this week, we chose our ongoing re-watch of Buffy over Purdue at Michigan State.

Also, I’m old enough to have become a baseball fan when my options were Monday Night Baseball, the Game of the Week on Saturday on NBC, and the Cubs because we lived in Northern Indiana at the time and I could pick up WGN with the rabbit ears. Being a baseball fan in the late 70s meant using the box scores and the AP write-ups in the newspaper as your primary source of information. It made a Red Sox appearance on TV a special event.

However, I've decided to pay more attention to the MLB in 2025. Primarily because I need the distraction from the decline and fall of the American Empire. So I've upgraded to the MLB Network, which will get me up to 15 games a week on TV, plus the radio feed for every game of the season by all teams. I don't really expect much from the Red Sox, though. They have upgraded the team, but the AL East is loaded, and they still feel like the 4th best team in the division to me. I had Spring Training games on in the background while working on Thursday and Friday this week, and I realized just how much I've missed baseball in the 13 years that have passed since the World Series ended in 2024.

What? Are you going to argue it doesn't feel like 13 years since late October 2024?

Anyway, play ball!

Note: I apparently wrote a first draft of this in 2022 and never published it. I stumbled into it this morning and decided to update it and put it online.