When I think about moving from WordPress to something perhaps simpler and easier to manage, it also occurs to me that since October 2023 I’ve not exactly struggled to post, but my output of roughly 2 posts per day has dipped to something like 1.1 posts per day. Maybe I don’t have enough to say anymore to warrant switching to another (paid) service.
Or maybe I’m just in a creative funk.
Or maybe I’m lazier than I used to be.
So many possibilities.
I will continue to ponder.
Meanwhile, here is a smart-looking cat1Yes, I’ve used this one before. Like I said, I’m lazy. I mean, I’m recycling and saving e-trees or something.:
Although to be fair, it was a fairly light drizzle. But we’ve had enough precipitation that the FIRE DANGER signs are now gone (for now, possibly until next summer).
Today is normally a run day, but I was not feeling very enthused about going out, partly because of the showery weather, and partly because I didn’t want to risk hurting the right knee, which is mostly feeling okay after a few days of rest.
In the end, I compromised by doing a brisk pair of walks, to the lake and back. There was pretty much no real running, save for a few brief moments here and there, but I maintained a pretty good pace on the way back.
The first walk was dry, but it began to rain very lightly on the way back. As it was still 19C, it didn’t feel cold or anything. It was nice to not have to slather all my exposed skin with sunblock before heading out.
As expected, it was fairly quiet due to the weather, though I did encounter a few other joggers and dog walkers (with leashed dogs, woo).
I might try a run tomorrow (Saturday) or may just wait till my next usual run day on Monday. I shall ponder.
I will not be running, however, on Sunday (the 25th):
“You can totally still stroll on the trail, just be ready to share it with 400 other people all at once.”
Walk 122 and 123 Average pace: 9:26 and 8:51/km Location: Brunette River trail/Burnaby Lake Distance: 4.01 km/4.03 km Time: 37:51/35:36 Weather: Clouds and light showers Temp: 19°C Humidity: 80% Wind: light BPM: 113/114 Weight: 166.1 pounds Devices: Garmin Forerunner 255 Total distance to date: 897.98 km
I saw a link on Mastodon1aka the one social media platform I still use that led me to write.as, which is one of the blogging solutions I pondered when I was thinking a lot about moving away from WordPress. Then some things happened:
I got distracted (this happens a lot)
The easier route of just tolerating WordPress and doing nothing settled in and took root
Not to mention, I know WordPress quite well after using it for almost 20 (!) years, so there’s muscle memory and all that encouraging me to stay put
But as someone who hopefully isn’t just an AI scraping my blog for weirds and probably untrue things to add to the AI Slurry of Knowledge (SOK), you may have noticed I’ve also been engaged in something I call The Culling for the last few years. I can’t recall if I’ve ever fully explained what it is, but it’s pretty simple.
The Culling, explained
Big corporations are generally bad
Big tech corporations seem to be extra bad, in that, “You think YOU’RE bad? Hold my beer. Hold all of my beers” way.
Growing increasingly disenchanted, while also experience things like subscription fatigue, I have begun The Culling. The Culling is meant to move me away from services and software offered by Big Tech™ and to use either free (possibly even FOSS) or paid options from smaller companies that still see their customers as humans and want to treat them fairly, a radical notion on the current interweb.
WordPress has made some dumb (IMO) moves regarding AI and are generally heading in a direction I don’t like. Also, the platform is bloated, creaking and there’s way more here than I need to just write inane things and post pictures on a daily basis to an audience of one to five people, of whom I count myself. Thus began the search for a replacement, which would also be part of The Culling.
And then lazy, too easy to do nothing, etc.
But now I’m looking again. I feel I’ve somehow managed to tap into one of those moments where I am invigorated for [x] period of time, and I am seizing it to move forward in several areas, one of which is this here blogging thing.
I find, especially using light mode, it can be difficult where across the vastness of my two 27 inch monitors my mouse pointer is. I do have the feature enabled where if you tap the CTRL key twice it gets a nice spotlight on its location, but I wanted something that didn’t require extra effort on my part, because I am lazy.
I went into the Accessibility options and made it look like this:
I like it! It’s sort of hideous, yet delightful. And much easier to see.
I was suspicious when my Garmin Forerunner declared a rest day today, as it’s normally a run day. But then I noticed the area around my right knee felt a little…tweaked. The Baker’s cyst (I really hate that word, but at least I don’t have my surname attached to it) never fully went away, but it feels a bit more fulsome right now, so it’s possible I may have aggravated it with all of my recent activity. That will teach me to exercise!
(To be fair, it’s not really hurting or anything, it just twinges a little at certain angles ‘n such.)
I’ll take it easy-ish tomorrow and see how it goes, but I’m still planning on a run on Friday.
I surprised myself today by going out and doing just that. I even rank a lot more than I expected. I just felt good, because it was cloudy and cooler (but not cool).
There was one off-leash dog (boo) but it stayed clear of me (yay). There was also some weird little mouse of some sort. I took a few photos of it (see below).
Also, when I got home, we had no hot water (boo).
Otherwise, a nice hour or so out touching trees and moving the legs.
This little mouse (with white belly) was running around on the river trail, unperturbed by my presence. Leaves coincidentally provided for scale.
Stats:
Walk 121 Average pace: 8:34/km Location: Brunette River trail/Burnaby Lake Distance: 8.03 km Time: 1:08:50 Weather: Cloudy Temp: 19-20°C Humidity: 76-73% Wind: light BPM: 121 Weight: 167.5 pounds Devices: Garmin Forerunner 255 Total distance to date: 889.94 km
First, this is my fourth regular run in a row, woo. And no cheating, also woo.
But I headed out later than planned and that meant it was sunny and humid, so boo (on me).
I opted to go clockwise again, figuring it would be shadier and also for the additional variety. This was fine, save for two things:
It was strangely crowded in the first 300m or so. I have no idea why so many people were bunched up like that on a Monday morning. Maybe everyone is heading out because they feel summer is slipping away.
I forgot they are resurfacing the trail from the bridge at Deer Lake Brook to the parking lot by the rowing pavilion. This seems a bit odd to me, as the section leading up to the bridge is still in very good condition and doesn’t need to be resurfaced (IMO), but I guess they have a set schedule or something. It looks like they may have started today, right from the bridge itself. They had done the first bit of compacting and the guy there seemed to be signalling me to go to the right, which would have been the ditch. This part of the trail essentially has no shoulders. I then ran across the non-compacted bit after, which had the consistency of semi-solid cement, leaving distinct footprints they probably had to fix. Oops. Still, I wasn’t going to go off into the ditch and risk twisting an ankle. Pedestrians are an occupational hazard when resurfacing a pedestrian trail.
The recent showers, combined with the sun and humidity, meant it would be muggy–and it was! This meant I worked harder to be slower, but I felt I turned in a solid performance. After getting progressively slower with each km, I managed to pick up the pace a bit at the end, for an overall pace of 5:49/km.
And I wore a new belt! Jeff picked up an $18 SPI-Belt knockoff and I wore it, and it worked surprisingly well, staying nice ‘n snug with my phone tucked inside. And unlike my old belt, I could have the phone on the front, where I could access volume controls easily. Which I did not do. But still, having a non-saggy belt was spiffy.
Overall, a good start to the week. If the forecast is accurate, Wednesday may be a bit damp. We’ll see!
Post-run view of Still Creek.
Stats:
Run 879 Average pace: 5:49/km Training status: Productive Location: Burnaby Lake (CW) Start: 11:11 a.m. Distance: 5.03 km Time: 29:13 Weather: Mostly sunny Temp: 21-22°C Humidity: 61-57% Wind: light BPM: 154 Weight: 166.9 Total distance to date: 6,255 km Devices: Garmin Forerunner 255 Music, iPhone 12, AirPods (3rd generation) Shoes: HOKA Speedgoat 6 (40/80/120)
We’re apparently in for a few days of showers–specifically, five of the next six days, starting today, but not including tomorrow, which is strangely listed as “mostly sunny”. I’m okay with that, though I’m never really sure how to dress for summer rain. The high today will be 24C. That is totes t-shirt and shorts weather. But you’ll be getting wet, so wear a rain jacket. But any rain jacket is going to feel too warm when it’s 24C. So just embrace the rain.
Brunette River, early in the walk. Still lush ‘n green.
After a regular week of running, my first walk-as-exercise involved little running, but a wee bit here and there. Mostly I wanted to get out, get some fresh air, stretch my legs, and touch trees.
I did these things.
It was 27-28C, but not overly unpleasant. The walk to the lake and back still affords a lot of canopy/shade.
There were no dogs off-leash, which is weird! I don’t think I saw any on the river trail, which is also kind of weird for a Saturday.
Also weird: Apparently someone spotted a bobcat or lynx at Burnaby Lake (as I did back in 2017), as the cat sign has appeared at the lake. AFAIK, it only goes up when there is an actual sighting:
Leash your pet, then hope it does not get eaten by a bear or wild cat.
Overall, a fine outing. Now I can eat an entire chocolate cake as reward!
Stats:
Walk 121 Average pace: 9:12/km Location: Brunette River trail/Burnaby Lake Distance: 8.03 km Time: 1:13:46 Weather: Sunny Temp: 27-28°C Humidity: 56% Wind: light BPM: 111 Weight: 166.9 pounds Devices: Garmin Forerunner 255 Total distance to date: 881.91 km
As Brad Colbow opined not long ago, there are no more tech good guys. It seems every large tech company goes bad at some point. Maybe they all start bad and it just gets worse as the companies scale up. Whatever the case, the people who now defend the likes of Google and Microsoft seem kind of weird, or they’re lawyers.
Here’s my somewhat arbitrary ranking of how evil each of the Big Tech™ companies are:
MOST EVIL: Meta. First, the name change didn’t fool anyone. This is still Facebook and all it entails. Also, Zuckerberg was pretty off on the metaverse being the Next Big Thing (NBT). He’s probably looked into changing the company name again to AI. They get top spot because they’ve valued engagement over actual people’s lives. They are literally willing to let people die if it benefits the company. Anyone posting or using Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or Threads would do well to remember this.
FROM A TO EVIL: Amazon. Like Google and MS, Amazon has used its monopoly to crush competition and then made its own experience that much worse, because why be good when you don’t need to be? They rank so high here because of their huge reach and influence. Bonus evil points for implementing a Vader-ish “Pray I don’t alter the deal further” by adding ads to Prime video, then demanding you pay extra to remove them. Good companies that respect their customers don’t do things like this.
DON’T BE EVIL: Google. Remember when web browsers started including pop-up blockers because web ads had become so pernicious and obnoxious? That was before Chrome even existed. In the early days of Google search, company stewards warned of mixing search with ads, fearing the latter would corrupt the former. Today, Google is a company that sacrifices everything to squeeze as much money as it can out of its ad/browser monopoly. They paid Apple over $20 billion in one year alone to be the default search engine in Safari. The company has no real purpose or vision except to sell ads and make profits fatter. It’s soulless, crushes competition through its monopoly muscle, and has directly contributed to making the internet a worse place.
EVIL, TOO: Microsoft. Speaking of monopoly abusers, there’s Microsoft. They got their wrists slapped in the late 90s, early 2000s by the US Department of Justice for their shenanigans with Windows and Internet Explorer. That wrist slap did create an opening for Chrome, though, so oops! Today, Microsoft leans heavily on its cloud services to make money. It also actively seeks to make Windows worse by shoving ads, tracking and other cruft into it. It may have directly contributed to Linux getting 1% more popular. That’s a lot for Linux! It got me to try Linux, for Pete’s sake. MS also seems soulless in the same way as Google, with no real vision except to chase trends (currently AI) and make as much money as possible.
THINK EVIL: Apple. Apple may be #4 on this list, but it’s rising fast. The first company to be valued at over $3 trillion US, Apple seems to exist now for two reasons: To make pretty good hardware that it sells at premium prices and to extract as much profit out of absolutely everything they do, and to keep extracting maximum profit, no matter what the cost to their reputation or long-term health. Apple, more than any other company here, is simply riven by greed, fostered by its long-standing culture of controlling all the things. Once services started making more money than anything but iPhone sales, Apple changed from a hardware company to “must always squeeze every dollar out of every avenue possible” company and has bitterly fought EU regulators, among others, to keep their gross profits untouched. I feel the tide is turning and Apple is determined to defy reality. We’ll see how that works for them. In the meantime, their once-beloved reputation is in tatters as they reveal themselves to be out-of-touch (see: the “Crush” ad), entitled and greedy.
BONUS EVIL : The company formerly known as Twitter. X gets included because it still carries outsize influence. Journalists, or people who call themselves journalists, have demonstrated repeatedly that they are quite happy to hang out at a Nazi bar. This particular Nazi bar is so ineptly run that it’s losing a ton of money, while allowing hate, racism and everything terrible about people, to flourish. But because it’s run (so to speak) by one of the richest (on paper) people in the world, there’s no danger it will go away any time soon.
This list may be updated if I realize I’ve forgotten one evil tech company or another (the original post missed Amazon, which is kind of funny, since I put them at #2).
