I heard that Microsoft was shoehorning its Copilot AI stuff into Microsoft 365 (née Office 365) because of course it was. AI for all, whether you want it or not!
But then I saw reports that Microsoft 365 plans were also going up in price. Indeed, when I checked my account, my $109/year package was going to be billed at $145 in April when it renewed. This is a substantial increase. The internet advised me that if I cancelled my current subscription, I would then be offered a “classic” version of my plan, without AI, for the previous $109 price. And lo, there it was:
To be clear, it is exactly the same plan I have now, just renamed. Microsoft moved me off that plan and to the new, more expensive “Microsoft 365 Family” plan, acting as if nothing had changed, just a simple (large) price increase.
It’s shady, it’s scummy, and it’s exactly what I expect of Microsoft these days.
My solution is to go back to storing everything locally and having backups available through my NAS, which will function almost as well as OneDrive would have, anyway.
Congrats, Microsoft, in your bid to shove AI down my throat and get more money from me, you will soon be getting none!
This apparently started on Bear blog, a minimalist blogging service, where people answer questions about…blogging!
I’m not going to tag anyone or anything, but I love lists and answering questions makes a list, so here are my answers to the Blog Question Challenge.
Why did you make the blog in the first place?
This blog, creolened.com, was started on February 2, 20025– nearly 20 years ago! The first post is here: Bloggity blog blog
That short post doesn’t explain why I started the blog, but does suggest blogging was a hot thing in 2005, and I wanted in on it. Also, I like writing and rambling, so a blog seemed like a good place to do this. Journals and diaries are fine (I keep a daily journal now and have kept journals in the past as well), but there’s something about having my thoughts hanging out in public that makes me write a bit differently. I have a voice and it comes through regardless of whether I am writing just for myself (diary) or not (blog), but there’s a little extra zestiness when I write on the blog. I know others can see what I’ve written. It adds pressure to at least check for typos. And maybe organize my thoughts and make them occasionally interesting.
Also, I find writing about something, then referencing back to it years later is just neat. And handy.
Mostly, I started the blog because I like to write and have things to say. Those things are not always serious or well-articulated, but that’s why this blog never had a particular angle. It’s just me rambling.
Why did you choose bear blog?
Sorry, bear, I tried you and liked you, but you are too minimalist for me, because I am a weirdo and spend too much time playing around with formatting and images and junk like that. It’s a fine service, though! Hopefully the person running it isn’t a monster. There is a weirdly large number of monsters on the internet these days.
Have you blogged on other platforms before?
WordPress was my first blogging platform. Prior to it, I posted on various forums, and had a gaming website I updated by editing the HTML files, then seeing how things looked in Firefox 1.5 or something.
I have more recently dabbled/tested many different blogging platforms. Search this blog to find my thoughts on them!
Do you write your posts directly in the editor or in another software?
It varies, but most of the time I write using the built-in WordPress editor. I occasionally use the Classic block editor when the block system, uh, blocks me from doing what I want.
Sometimes I write in other apps and then copy and paste over. For a time I thought of doing this permanently, so I’d always have a local copy of my stuff, but it just seemed like more work than I wanted. Other programs I’ve used to write for this blog:
Notepad
Notepad++
iA Writer
Ulysses
Obsidian
Maybe Microsoft Word at some point?
Probably a few others I’m forgetting
When do you feel most inspired to write?
Never! Inspiration comes and goes, and I have yet to observe any particular pattern to it. Sometimes I can get up and write a long, lovingly handcrafted post first thing in the morning, other times I scramble to find a cat pic to post at 11:30 p.m. It just depends.
I will note that when I am feeling down, I rarely feel inspired to write, so I reject the idea that one must suffer for one’s art (or writing). On the other hand, writing about weird or bad things that have happened to me is something I enjoy doing after the fact, when I’m at least one step removed (see my recent ER visit for an example).
Do you publish immediately after writing or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?
I publish immediately, baby. Sometimes I will look over the post for typos or awkward phrasing just before hitting Publish or just after it goes live. If I come across the same in an old post, I fix these things.
If a post is especially long or complex, I will sometimes save it as a draft, then come back later to finish it, but most drafts tend to go to the place where drafts die. Then they die.
Your favourite post on your blog?
At the time of writing this, I have 5,462 posts, so trying to pick a favourite one is pretty much impossible. I used to maintain a small list of favourites, but tossed it aside at some point.
Rather than specific favourites, I’ll list a few general themes:
Some of the writing prompt posts are entertaining, and not bad when you consider they are written in the moment, without any editing afterwards.
Some of my own (silly) writing prompt lists still amuse me. Others don’t, so this is definitely “your mileage may vary” kind of thing.
Birding posts with actual photos are nice. I’ve fallen out of the habit of posting the photos, but I’ve still got some decent ones up for viewing.
Some of my art is okay! These are found under Creative.
I tried to learn how to swim in 2009. It didn’t go well, but was kind of funny.
And more. I have a billion tags because I am a chronic tag abuser, but some of the odder ones sometimes have cute/interesting posts to go with them.
Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, changing the tag system, etc.?
I have redesigned my blog multiple times through the years and will no doubt do so again. Right now it is sporting a more minimal look, with little colour. I’ll probably change that again sometime.
The biggest upcoming change will be moving to a different platform. I am still thinking through this (and have documented the process here on this blog, to go all meta). I no longer have confidence in the WordPress platform, and it’s really more than I need. I am very used to it, though, so moving to something new is going to have a learning curve, accepting certain compromises and other stuff. But I feel I should, and the time to do so is pretty much now.
And that’s about it. Here are some other people who also took up this challenge:
Some of the feeders, squirrel gorging at the central one.
The nice thing about Richmond Nature House is the birds gather nicely together for you, thanks to a bunch of feeders arranged behind a fence just north of the house itself. It’s like a birding buffet.
Despite the cooler temperatures, there was no wind here, so it felt fine. As before, juncos were very well-represented, and towhees were also rather abundant. We did see a nuthatch, but it didn’t stay around long, though a hairy woodpecker gave us plenty of opportunity for photos. Squirrels of various types were back gorging themselves in the feeders and even the rat was back, nibbling at seeds on the ground with its creepy yet cute forepaws, which kind of look like little human hands.
A number of Anna’s hummingbirds were present, too, and I actually got some decent shots of them in flight (albeit with blurred wings, since I was letting the camera do all the heavy lifting).
In all, we got a very nice set of birb photos here.
Iona Beach
Shot as we were leaving, with the tide starting to go out. The foam at the bottom-right is frozen.
I wasn’t expecting to see a lot of birds at Iona, and the wind picked up, so it was a tad cold. The tide was also in, which meant the opportunities for seeing shorebirds was greatly reduced–or so we thought!
There were a bunch of herons ringing the main pond, like silent stabby sentinels. Unfortunately, most were a little too far away, but at least they don’t jump all over the place when you’re shooting them.
Our trek past the pond and through the wooded area yielded no birds, but we did see a pair of bald eagles land on a log boom as we swung by the river. Further up were a trio of cormorants resting on some pilings, along with some gadwalls and wigeons (to be clear, the gadwalls and wigeons were not on the pilings with the cormorants, though that would have made for some very interesting shots).
There was also a crow standing on top of a sign, acting very dramatic. We took pictures, it seemed satisfied, then flew off.
Just before heading out, we saw a very round song sparrow, which are probably the birbiest of birbs around here. We thought we were done, but as we started driving off, we saw the tide was now beginning to go out and lo, there were shorebirds!
We got some shots of dunlins and killdeer tooling around along the shore, as well as a look at probably hundreds of pintails gathered in one of the ponds adjacent to the sewer/water plant. Most were snoozing. Presumably it doesn’t smell that bad in there. Or pintails have a lousy sense of smell.
The biggest surprise, though, was an area of bushes and trees along the pipe leading to the jetty, where a surprisingly large number of ruby-crowned kinglets were flitting about. We both managed to get some decent shots of them, which is normally something of a miracle, especially for me.
I seemed to have better luck with Nic’s camera this time. I’m not sure what I did differently, though maybe having full use of both arms and hands helped. Whatever it was, it was nice to not have a giant boatload of blurry photos to sort through (I had a smaller boatload of blurry photos, but most were pretty decent!)
The Shots
Soon™
The Birds (and other critters). Rare or rarely-seen birds highlighted in bold.
Sparrows and sparrow-adjacent:
Anna’s hummingbird
Black-capped chickadee
Dark-eyed junco
Fox sparrow
Golden-crowned sparrow
Hairy woodpecker
House finch
Purple finch
Red-breasted nuthatch
Ruby-crowned kinglet
Song sparrow
Spotted towhee
Steller’s jay
Waterfowl and shorebirds:
American wigeon
Common merganser
Double-crested cormorant
Dunlin
Gadwall
Great blue heron
Green-winged teal
Mallard
Northern pintail
Common:
American crow
Assorted gulls
Rock pigeon
Raptors:
Bald eagle
Northern harrier
Non-birds:
Gray squirrel
Black squirrel
Douglas squirrel
A rat. An American rat? I am not an expert on rat types.
For fairly obvious reasons, I have dropped the subs to the politics channels I follow on YouTube, except for Steve Boots, because he is a zesty socialist who covers Canadian politics and his cat is constantly vamping in the background of his videos.
I’ve also filtered a few related words or phrases on Mastodon.
These things may change, but for now, it feels right. I still get a lot of news/doom through osmosis, anyway.
Today, getting blood work done to follow-up on some issues with my MOKI1Month of Kidney Infection, I am sitting at the lab, in the blood-giving chair, with my arm resting on the blood-giving tray. The tech shows up and is very pleasant and professional. She places some vials on the tray next to my arm. More than one or two vials. I count six.
I ask if she is going to fill all of them. She enthusiastically tells me yes, then says not to worry, I’ve got plenty of blood. I would like to know if my expression changed at all when she said yes. I think it might have, but just barely enough to notice before flipping back to whatever it had been before.
To her credit, she got all six vials filled quickly and painlessly. And I remembered to hydrate and eat before, so I didn’t pass out and slide awkwardly onto the floor.
Such is my life these days. But soon: Maybe I’ll post about other things, not related to my body or the fluids contained within!1
I feel like I have things to say, but I never really know how to say them, so I end up saying nothing. On the plus side, I’ve posted a lot of cats pics, which are the fuel of the internet.
For a change of pace, here’s the Brunette River, from a slightly different vantage point, as the river was quite low and I was able to sneak farther down than usual:
(Slightly altered in Luminar AI, mostly to remove the green runoff pipe and fix the sky a bit [but no giraffes])
Yes, I changed email again. Why? Because I am mad, perhaps.
But also, I find I am less willing to do business with companies where the people in charge loudly blare their terrible views in public.
And it happens my main email service has one such person as its CEO. The company is doing damage control, stating they are non-profit, the CEO does not control the company, etc. It doesn’t matter, the rot is at the top. I’m not interested in supporting you with my dollars anymore.
So, I’ve gone from:
Obscure ISP-based email (sjames@istar.net or something) 25+ years ago
Less obscure ISP email through Telus
Gmail
HEY
Outlook
Proton
A few others that were never primary addresses, some of which I still have
And now:
Fastmail
The one bonus in the latest move is I can now drop the “w” from my name and just use stanjames@fastmail.com. Plus, it sounds fast.
If Fastmail doesn’t work out, I am going to invest in carrier pigeons.
I never actually used Tumblr, but I did create an account awhile back for it. Unlike Meta’s properties, Tumblr doesn’t appear to care if you delete your account, because the process is:
Select Delete Account in Account Settings
Enter your username and password
Click the Delete Account button
It then confirms the account is gone and offers you to sign up (ho ho).
And now I wonder just how many other accounts I have on old-timey social media sites that are still shambling along, zombie-like.
It was a chilly but tolerable day of birding, thanks to little breeze, though it started getting a wee bit nippy toward the end at Piper Spit.
Where: Reifel Bird Sanctuary (Delta), Burnaby Lake Regional Park (Burnaby) Weather: Mostly sunny, 3-5°C
The Outing
Reifel Bird Sanctuary
A view over the marshland from the West Dyke, with Rusty the pipe mid-shot.
We started out a tad later than usual, thanks to my second-to-last IV therapy. Because my morning routine got disrupted, I also forgot to change into my trail runners for the outing, but my feet survived.
The parking lot was packed. There were people everywhere. There were chickadees everywhere. We started off by having an Anna’s hummingbird sit on a wire fence and pose in front of us, then got to mix and mingle up close with the Sandhill crane family (two adults, two kids, strutting around like dinosaurs of yore).
The east dyke provided a rare glimpse of a saw-whet owl, but it was all tucked in and hard to see. The first bird blind had a heron standing on a log right outside it, though, affording some nice backlit shots.
As mentioned, chickadees were flitting all over the place, but also a lot of towhees, perhaps being bolder due to the colder temperatures and scarcer food supplies.
The main pond was largely empty and the entire area was absent of all wood ducks and geese. Some geese were seen outside the sanctuary in nearby fields. I wonder if they don’t like mingling with the winter migrants. Maybe the shovelers scare them.
Many of the smaller ponds had thin layers of ice and I saw a few ducks landing, but they all proved fairly coordinated, so no slapstick opportunities to be had.
I managed to take photos with the IV in my arm, but my good-to-bad ratio is way off. I’m probably being a bit of a dope, since I’m not used to the camera, plus I was trying to be extra careful in how I loved my right arm. Anyway, I got some good shots, at least.
Piper Spit
Assorted waterfowl in front of the land mass at Piper Spit.
There were also people a-plenty at Piper Spit and by later in the afternoon, a bit of a breeze was picking up, so it was cooler, too, but not Fonzie cool1Kids, ask your parents. Or maybe even grandparents at this point.. The land mass seemed to be occupied mostly by crows and gulls. There were geese here, but not many, and they kept relatively quiet. Always unnerving.
Blackbirds were all over the place and the waterfowl were getting regular handfuls of seed, which makes it easy to get chaos shots of dozens of birds thrashing about, but less so for the “gliding serenely along the water by itself” ones. Most of the winter birds were accounted for. My best shot was probably one of a regular ol’ crow. But it was a nice shot.
We opted to not check the Butterfly Garden since it is currently bereft of butterflies or any real garden. Maybe in a few months!
We’ll see how the next outing goes. The last few have felt a bit weird due to various technology or health issues, not to mention the regularity has been very irregular due to bad weather and things. There might be a little SAD thrown in, too, though it was mainly sunny for the day, which was spiffy. But it was still nice to get out!
The Shots
Soon™
The Birds (and other critters). Rare or rarely-seen birds highlighted in bold.
Sparrows and sparrow-adjacent:
Anna’s hummingbird
Black-capped chickadee
Dark-eyed junco
Golden-crowned sparrow
House sparrow
Red-winged blackbird
Song sparrow
Spotted towhee
Woodpecker (possibly a Downy, we couldn’t see its head)
On Thursday, January 9th, I was administered antibiotics for an infection that was originally thought to be in the prostate, then the bladder, but in the meantime actually moved to one of my kidneys. Every day since then I have gone back for another daily round of IV therapy, the first five at Burnaby Hospital, the last six at Royal Columbian, which is literally a five-minute walk from home, so that part was at least convenient.
On Day 5 they removed the IV from my left arm, because the apparatus had bent, and switched to my right arm. This was better since I’m left-handed. But it still meant doing a lot of things was cumbersome and awkward, and I had to be careful not to damage the IV while sleeping and whatnot. A shower or bath was weird and vaguely unpleasant.
But now both arms are free and treatment has ended. I wait to see what happens next. Did the infection sneak into my prostate, and will I start showing symptoms in a week? I don’t know. I am not a pessimist (I swear), but am resigned to a 50/50 chance of more infection to come. But that also means I think it’s possible I’ll be good.
I’ll wait a few more days, then start thinking about running (not on a sidewalk) again.
Here’s hoping the rest of 2025 is kind of dull and boring for me. If there’s excitement, I request that it be of a pleasant variety, without any Twilight Zone-style twists.
