vanderwal.net

Eight Rounds of Link Clean-up

I completed this round of links clean-up of my links page, which was the eighth pass. I went from 943 links on the page to 866 after removals. I have added a few new links from my usual laissez-faire finding methods.

The process honed into the Python link checker outputing a markdown file with sections for: Broken; Blocked or access denied; Timed out; SSL / certificate errors; Connection errors; Working, but redirected. I have the script put the related links that have been flagged into tables in these sections.

After the fifth or sixth pass I added an additional column to the tables in the markdown output note for “Action Decisions” where I put my annotation for: Keep; Delete; new URL (with the link); and update (for the redirected links section). After this eighth pass I added a small table at the top of the markdown output from the Python script link checker with each of these four decisions at the top. I had a couple of days between the sixth run of the check and the seventh and eighth (the last check was the post final clean-up check). Going through what remained on the seventh pass (mostly the 90 redirections) I swore I had more decision action types I had used, so having the list in the note I use for my manual assessment seemed really helpful.

This Task was a Sad Task

I’ve run a version of this links page for about 30 years. It has largely been an act of accretion. There have been many links that have gone dead and things no longer living on the web (or no longer living period). My link checker has done a decent job until about three or four years ago when my local version of Python didn’t mesh well with the older BeautifulSoup package. A couple of years ago when I got them in alignment there were quite a few false positives. But the task also had many links that had gone away.

This current update to approach (see Links Weren’t Linking :: Off the Top :: vanderwal.net) drastically improved link checking, but also pointed to a fragile state of the web. Not only the cause of massively increased friction to run a link checker (a couple of orders of magnitude increase in crawler and bot traffic that is non-organic and non-productive). This traffic isn’t out of malice, but ignorance, poor thinking, and poor planning (a common aggregation that is a central consumable to build from is better than thousands of rogue entities).

I have many “archive” links that I grey out where the site is mostly functioning still, but not been updated in years. Many of these I found in this current run are now completely gone.

There are many personal sites and blogs gone. But, also many subject focussed sites in urban planning & cities focussed that are gone, along with many in the Food & Coffee & Travel section, Productivity / PKM / Systems, and the Enterprise / KM / Learning sections. So many good resources, mostly from individuals who are crafting, honing, and adding incredibly good and smart insights that are now gone.

Some of the redirects had gone from personal insights to machine-generated content with factual errors in abundance or ad driven content, which are pretty much indistinguishable from the former.

I’m Looking to Replace Lost Sources with Good Human Content

I started blogging in 2001 to put things out into the world to have conversation and share things from my personal world to my work world. I found blogging is an utterly insanely good way of finding people of like minds and interests. I found the fellow curious travelers who wanted to learn more and understand the small to the vast interconnections of systems, cultures, and diversities of understanding in this wonderful world of “other possibilities” that surrounds us. I write and share only what I personally create out of my mind to understand what I think and find cracks that inspire more curiosity. The nodes on the web that are blogs worked through good search, which is now mostly gone as Google seems to have lost interest and there isn’t really a viable replacement for that widening gap.

I’m deeply looking for replacements in the sections where I lost sites that provided good solid insights and sparked not only understanding but fact-based inspirations to understand more and incite more exploration.

Many of the people and voices that over the years drifted off from posting to their own sites I deeply miss. Some have drifted to silos that are (have become) horrible places for sharing information as they are really difficult to do anything positive with that information and what has been shared. Decent town square sites / services and plazas for people to digitally gather and share and interact have deteriorated and/or been manufactured by those running them to be problematic spaces by intent. Some I don’t go to at all, some I wander through, and some I wish their leadership cared (or had an inkling of understanding) to get back to something that was much better.

My Links Page is Largely in Decent Shape

My links pages has long been my loose tethering to others and other web spots that had information, people, and ideas of interest. It is for thin strands of interest as a weak attractor in a Model of Attraction sense. I can click a link and attract something to my screen of interest. People and their thoughts are drawn closer. These links are now mostly working after cleaning up more than 400 of them.

Once in A Lifetime with Sleeping Beauties

A few months back I received an email that was not the usual sort.

The email asked for clarification on how to pronounce my name. Hmm… So, I read a little further. It was from the producer for an audio book recording of an unreleased book by David Byrne called Sleeping Beauties: Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up. The email continued that the author was recording the audiobook and wanted to the pronunciation to be correct.

My first thought was, this couldn’t be David Byrne of the Talking Heads and the so many more wonderful contributions that entertained me and kicked off insightful considerations of the world and art that have been sprinkled through my life. I searched for the unreleased book and found it. It has an October 6th release date and it is from the only David Byrne I know of.

Say Your Name

My first thought was, “How do I share the pronunciation?” I looked up pronunciation guides and how to use them, which turned into a hot mess quickly. I reached out to a few friends to ask how to create a pronunciation guide of one’s own name. The responses pointed to the same and similar variety of non-aligned options. I turned to the best option I knew, just record myself saying my name. I did that quickly and made a quick edit of the file. I replied to the email request with a small audio file attached and asking if that would work, and it did perfectly.

This is a Road to Where?

Now the big question sat for months. Why was David Byrne using my name in his book? For months I’ve been deeply curious. I pre-ordered the hardback book, even though I’m really also interested in hearing David Byrne say my name, in whatever context it was used.

In the last week or so I looked at the Sleeping Beauties’ table of contents that were online and couldn’t sort out where my name would surface. Nor could I sort out the context for its use.

Sparking Innovative Understandings

Today I picked up my copy of the book and opened the box. I flipped to the book’s index (that is a habit I had for a good stretch of years, but now passed) to find my name. I found my name and it is listed on two contiguous pages. It was in the “Conclusion: Liberating the Imagination” section and is the focus of the subsection, “What You Call It Helps You Find It”, which was folksonomy (folksonomy marked posts) related. David Byrne’s write-up explained it incredibly well, and he called out my explanations. His wrap-up for the this sub-section had me insanely pleased as he really understands it:

Interestingly, although folksonomy tagging is nonhierarchical, a common shared set of terms and language has emerged despite the personal and subjective origin of the tags. Surprisingly, it’s not chaotic; there is an emergent self-organizing structure, though at the same time, as Vander Wal claims, it encourages exploration and serendipity – perfect for finding sleeping beauties!

Just prior to this conveyed understanding of not only the term folksonomy, but the deep river of understanding and possibilities it brings. David Byrne in the section goes through his own use of personal understandings and terms for what he calls things and calls when he shares with others. But, the breadth of his understanding is not only shown, but he has lived it, as he conveyed.

Now I’m deeply looking forward to reading the rest of the Sleeping Beauties book.

Can I See What You Are Writing

The medium for thinking and consumption is something I continually consider. I don’t consume audiobooks, they don’t work for me and I have too many foundational problems with them. But, I do enjoy podcasts, but that is a naturally spoken medium. For consumption of fiction and most non-fiction I have a strong preference for print (physical and/or electronic). Non-fiction text gives the opportunity for illustrations that help augment and anchor the meaning. Video can work for many concepts if they are done well and illustrate concepts.

Reading fiction my mind slips into vivid depictions of the story and scenes (if the book captures me). Being able to see characters in my head helps keep the storyline sorted. I really appreciate authors that are crafty with languages that trigger the visualizations as I am reading. With reading fiction my mind may also drift (if the book is good, but this also happens with non-fiction as I am framing where this new information sifts in with other things known). When my mind drifts I may still be “reading” and flipping pages, but when I snap out of it I can flip back to where my mind drifted and continue on again (as a couple of my college professor encourage this is a really good and engaging way to read). Most often the drifting is related to something in the book triggering ideas and it gets my mind going. Audio books have my mind drift out from a of lack of interest, but more problematic is there really isn’t a good way to go back and pick-up where my mind drifted (oddly podcasts my mind will drift from them triggering ideas and also from a conversation the podcast triggers, particularly when they run adjacent to things I know well or they mis-state something).

The visualization in my mind is really helpful to keep engaged and it is great for recall as well. But, when a book turns into a film or tv show it sometimes helps (when there are many characters) to anchor the “whos”. The reading of plays I find difficult, unless I have seen the play or have photos or sketches of who is playing the role and then I fully connect. But, if it a book with illustrated characters, like the Moomins (I read a lot of Moomin books when I was a kid) and that turns into tv or a movie it breaks things my mental image of the illustrations through the stories are not in alignment. The Moomins were quite off (at least in the US series). But, Paddington worked just fine. With the Moomins becoming semi-popular in the US with young adults, I’ll ask about a person’s favorite Moomin or story and I find we are talking about Moomins from different universes it seems.

Seeing is Understanding

The mental images and visualizing ideas and concepts also drive explainers in presentations and the use of animation in presentations. That same principle for my engaging also goes outward when explaining things for others. Creating images and animations, for complicated or complex ideas, models, or patterns allows for pulling them apart, seeing things interact, and also provides the ability to point and talk about something specific and makes things less abstract.

I’m thinking about text and visualizations as I’m working on creating small videos of some of the core concepts and ideas around folksonomy, Model of Attraction, InfoClouds, etc. Listening to words is a thin and ephemeral representation of the ideas. Seeing the words is a bit better. But words and seeing relationships are key to communicating far better. I’m mindful not all minds are alike nor process the same way, so having many paths for engaging works quite well.

Honey, The Thing Ate My Blog

In the past few months I’ve looked at the history of my blog analytically and captured some of it in, Personal Blog Data Analysis - Looking at 25 Years :: Off the Top, and I could see the changes in posts over time. I used to joke that “Twitter ate my blog”, as what I was posting on my site, was going into Twitter and not my site. Looking at the analysis that transition is clear. I have my archive of tweets from my three accounts (my main one turned private and two public accounts with one more work-related and the other responses to others and tracking sports).

Twitter vs. Blog

During that time posting to Twitter, my posts grew less frequent, but also longer. Twitter helped me write shorter sentences as it started with just 140 characters available. During this time I was still also keeping regular notes in text in my Notes directory. I most often used NVAlt that allowed for tagging the note file and it had really good search for the Notes directory that predated my using NVAlt by 10+ years (I started keeping notes there in 2003 in text, OmniOutliner, and HTML, but shifted to mostly text until about 2010 when it was a mix of text and markdown).

As my use of Twitter dwindled and conversations I had been having there moved to back channels and topic-focused groups, my blog post didn’t come back. The ideas and content had outlets, but that wasn’t my blog.

Notes Stayed Local

In June 2020 I had been trying to find a new notes app that worked similarly to NVAlt, which had stopped opening in the prior year. I had a few text and markdown apps I used to add notes to my normal location (one was Notional, which I used for about a year). I tried Notion for a short bit, but not having local notes and it being cloud only made it a serious no go for me. I tried Logseq, a couple apps heavily focused on zettelkasten, and I tried Obsidian. Obsidian stuck for a lot of reasons, but the most important was I just set it to watch over my existing Notes directory and just keep going. The ability to use backlinks / wikilinks, tags, and transclude notes was a great fit.

I went back to a daily note pattern using my Daily Dump set of sections as prompts for quick access to an area in the note to capture ideas and notes around things found, worked on, and ideas I cared about. The ability to have concept pages and hubs that linked back to everything related, make notes in my Daily Dump and then highlight a section and extract it out as its own separate note and bring a transclusion (see it in another context) back into the Daily Dump and other relevant concept pages, was magical.

It became the note platform I’ve long wanted. I was capturing and making notes in it a lot. Notes could easily turn into blog posts. But, they weren’t turning into blog posts they just stayed notes. “Obsidian ate my blog” became my tongue-in-cheek joke. But, it was pretty much what happened.

I was writing in my notes, much like I used to blog. From short snippets to longer worked-through ideas and concepts. It was pretty much (and still is) all in my notes that Obsidian sits over.

The Daily Notes Out to Blog

I run analytics on my Obsidian notes and I’m creating and touching 10 to 20 different notes a day. Some of these, thanks to Blaugust, have been turning into blog posts, which was my intent with Blaugust. But, I also have been fleshing things out that started as blog post ideas and I flesh them out in my “Thoughts” section of my Daily Dump note (just like this one is). This new idea blog posting isn’t helping work through my large (over 100 notes) that are flagged as “blogfodder”. Many of the blogfodder ideas are half-done and sitting for months or years. Others have been nearly fully drafted and need an edit. Some have been stuck because the post (in my belief) needs another post or two to set the foundation for the post that to be shared out (I realize this as I go to point to a post that doesn’t exist, as it is only regular content in Keynote for workshops, presentations, and work engagement foundation setting).

I’m starting to work through the some of the blogfodder. But, I’m working on my daily notes becoming blog posts more regularly. Blaugust has been helping move from notes to post. When Blaugust wraps I need to see where all of this lands.

Who is Who and Who is Real – Getting to Identity

It is getting to the point where “people” asking to connect or engage bring that uncertainty moment. A photo that looks older than their age, or looks straight out of the 2000 to 2010s stock photo collections, has odd generic postings (and very few of them). The image has AI telltale signs of touch-up or whole cloth fabrication. Is this a real account? Is this a real person? Is this a real somebody with a real identity?

I know many people who have limited, erased, or never really had an online presence. Quite a few of them are college-age age or out 3 to 6 years from undergrad. Having an online presence that is easy to find is a problem. When this is paired with questions of reality, it creates challenges.

Erasing Digital Self of a Person

In the late 00s I was talking to grad students who were focussing research on online presence and one of their questions was how easy would it be to erase a digital life that is created by the person or created through other’s capturing images and content and writing about it or them. The conversation was sort of funny as they felt I was the most difficult person to delete existence for, should they try. I can think of many more, but they are well-known individuals. I was a non-celebrity (who has had some moderate media coverage over time) who is known in some communities and academic circles. But, I have also found my work and sites have been translated to other languages and fully attributed to me. I have also been claimed to work with organizations, where they thought this inclusion was going to matter to getting money or attracting others (this at times has been quite problematic).

Now we are in a world of “manufactured” identities and “faked” accounts of real people. Where the questions of, “Is this who I think it is?”, “Is this a real person?”, “How many, not actually you(s) are there?”. But, how do you get rid of them? How difficult is it to remove the unreal you(s)?

Who is Who? I am Just One Thomas

My dad had a similar name with a different middle name, but same middle initial. Often we resorted to “older and younger” for a while. I have had a life of, “I’m not that person”. My dad went by Tom and I Thomas (getting Americans to say Thomas and not Tom when you state your name is Thomas can be a real challenge at times). I often don’t push on it, but the era of people politely asking about pronouns for a person, also has people thinking to ask what they should call you. To paraphrase Prince, “my name is Thomas”.

I also lived in a neighborhood for four or five years where in four houses in a row there were four Tom / Thomas names and a Tim. When outside and somebody calls out Tom the odds were it wasn’t me. I’d hear, “Tom. Tom. Tom. Thomas!”, and I realized when they hit Thomas it likely was me, and may have been me all along they were trying to get the attention of.

I do know around 12 other Thomas Vander Wals and I’ve had email, message, or calls with many of them, which is fun. In the last year there are one or two new ones that have a similar professional focus and I’ve not met them, but this gets messy. I’ve had people try and use my identity (personal, professional, and my (old long gone) company – I think I know who is behind some of it as they have tried it with others and I’ve know their past and it fits). So, I get wary. I still get confusion and messes around my dad and have to still prove something wasn’t me many years after he passed. Identity is tough.

Are You a You?

But, now with “crafted” and fabricated identities and backgrounds it is so much more difficult. It is to the point of a new identity I run across that wants to connect, unless I can trace back to real context I know is valid, I don’t think it is real. If I’ve met somebody in person, it is easier to some degree to know somebody is a somebody.

A Book Encompasses More than the Pages and What is on Them

Last evening I went down an odd rabbit hole. I’ve been doing two conflicting tasks with my bookshelves: 1) Taking pictures of them and converting that into markdown for titles and author lists of what is on what shelf and capture what I own; 2) Culling books that are vastly out of date, I didn’t find interesting nor helpful, or poorly written (or produced).

In doing this I ran across a book I picked up (or was gifted) in college during one summer. The book is Habits of the Heart - Google Books, which is academics and research writing a popularly approachable version (think of it as the precursor to Bowling Alone - Wikipedia). The book is a mixed social studies and sociology research look at patterns in America as of the 1980s. My paperback copy binding is a little brittle, but still doing alright. I remember reading the first half and then moved through reading what was of interest and new to me as it was covering familiar ground. I don’t remember much of the book, but I remember I did have a few long discussions about it. I thought I’d see what I highlighted and annotated to job my memory, but some of the notes and cues weren’t mine and I remembered two friends borrowed it (one for class and one also out of curiosity). My own highlights and marginalia are a mystery over time to myself, but now having mine combined with two other’s it is really muddled.

I had two “bookmarks”, one from Kepler’s Books in the first third and in the second third a airplane ticket sleeve for AirCal - Wikipedia with the paper ticket in it typed out for a $59 round trip from Oakland to San Diego. The ticket was from the travel agency connected to the college.

This had memories of college fresh in my head and thinking of great conversations with professors, classes that drastically changed and expanded my understanding of the world (in class and the many office hour visits to discuss something for class or say “hey” and then have an amazing couple hour conversation), and conversations with the president of the college, Brother Mel Anderson (there were a lot of these conversations).

The Habits of the Heart was largely calling out a pattern in the US of embracing individualism and going it alone. My college experience and beyond has all been heavily social and personal individual curiosity and drive, but those two have blended. I have long blogged to connect with others with similar curiosities. But, many years of focus on social software and its multiple patterns and scales with the differences as things scale. But in these, folksonomy / folksonomy - category is individuals tagging in their own vocabulary and out of their multiple deep contexts that are unique and this tagging is primarily for their own retrieval. But, in this tagging it is also social (public or semi-private) and others who have one or a few similar contexts and vocabularies using similar terminology sets use the tags to find the resources as well. This individual and social participant interweaving is key and essential. I don’t know how much I would agree with Habits of the Heart today. I may gut it to refresh it for me.

I wasn’t expecting so much to be wrapped in picking the book up off the shelf (it sat behind a stack of other books) and having the cover bring back memories before opening it and having so many more flood out along with a myriad of contexts colliding.

My Automations Over the Ages and Today’s View

For a few decades I’ve converted regular manual tasks into automated tasks for many things. I use short code keyboard conversions with TextExpander (TextExpander), Alfred (Alfred), Keyboard Maestro (Keyboard Maestro), Hazel (Hazel by Noodlesoft), Apple Shortcuts, and a couple other small apps and services. But, I also have quite a few scripts in python and Ruby, but a few pure bash scripts. I have a handful of apps that use Claude Cowork (Claude Cowork | Claude by Anthropic) on a schedule and used where the data is not always standard, so it aggregates and structures the data where it often later gets processed by python.

I started building and running automation scripts in the 1990s to handle tedious tasks with multiple steps, or would likely be victims for typos, and which I was handling daily. A task that would take 3 or more minutes (often longer) and had structured stable data I could search made it viable to become a script and automated. I had them to filter email to folders, filter downloads to common folders / directories, and one to turn off audio for the evening which monitored Twitter every 30 minutes for my nightly signoff (“off to read and sleep - zzzz”) and it would mute audio. I’ve had a few for audio that would capture podcasts I was on for a local copy during recording that took just one button click to set Audio Hijack Pro properly and it just worked.

Moving to the Current Adaptive Flows

The last six months (or a little more) I’ve been building aggregators to capture what I’ve done the day before (and the week prior for a manual review). I’ve also automated my morning Obsidian (Obsidian) setup, so that my daily note (or Daily Dump for my notes, in my vocabulary) templates are created for the week ahead with a python script, rather than creating a new note and use a TextExpander snippet to build the structure each morning. But, doing this I realized that I could take my daily task list and the list of potential tasks I keep at the top of my Daily Dump and script the moving uncompleted items to that day’s Daily Dump from the day prior, but also quickly run a calendar scan for the day with Claude and the BusyCal MCP to have my known items at the top of the note written directly in the note. The completed items and checked off were left on the prior day’s Daily Dump in their sections.

In order to run the scheduled python scripts I need my laptop to be awake in the background (but it still the screen remain locked) so to run early morning tasks. I found PMSET as the key to handle the wake-up for the first run and have a python script handle the remaining wake-up processes for that day.

I now have a mix of Claude Cowork Skills (which if I sort out the data is stable enough I convert them to python for consistency, speed, and sustainability) and python scripts that pull my prior day’s files created and worked on list, my items in a feed of the prior day’s additions to Instapaper, Pinboard, and a list of new items in DevonThink as PDF (with links to the PDF as well as a working URL to the source of the item), a list of Readwise articles and video transcripts, and videos I liked and sent to my personal instance of Slack. These lists are in markdown and placed into the directory Obsidian watches over. Most of them a little later in the morning are transcluded into my Daily Dump note for the day where I read through them.

Morning Process

My morning process is to read through what was done the day before and edit them to add links to other resources in Obsidian and write notes. Often I have some entries that will turn into that day’s list of things to do or one of the “potentials” list. I will take items that need to be their own item note or be included into a concept note. This keeps the items fresh on my brain and connecting things to where I can get back to them more easily.

I write this today, as this morning I found my morning automation hadn’t fully run properly, because my Sunday evening script to create the week’s Daily Dump notes didn’t run as it was a cronjob and I was cooking with the laptop asleep so the job didn’t kick off. This morning I converted the cronjob to a launchd task instead and to run on Sunday during another automated wake open window.

Weekly Aggregation

Sunday’s I also run a weekly wrap-up, that pulls everything done for the week. I’m finding this is a bit too much information for a quick review and a manual assessment for the week where I aim to map out things for the upcoming week. It is a bit too much information overload. I don’t know what I’m going to do about it. Now that I have things automated and aggregated I need to rework my human side of things.

The Value of the Automation

The goal of my automations is to give me time back and remove the manual and grunt work so I can do the thinking work. I’ve done this with personal life and work life (and large systems and projects). The current round of automation and aggregation surfaced that I am doing more than I thought I was doing. Another goal is to give more time to do the human thinking and the projects and work needed. I do this so I can do the creative human work and the human thinking work (I find large errors in summarization in nearly all generative AI and creative work so I keep that at bey and use it for grunt work that I check). The scripted automations don’t need the hand holding and I have some occasional test run to check on them to see if they need attention and honing.

Spokane Fire Loss

I’ve been monitoring the fires in Spokane, Washington the past few days. There is a very good chance my childhood home there, were I lived for about 18 months or so, is gone. But my grandparents former home is fine.

When I was a kid I’d go to my grandparent’s house for a week or two over summer. One summer there was a large fire on Old Trail and up on the southern hill from the Spokane River. We could see the fire from the porch across the river, but could also see the Old Trail fire ignite trees and flames lick up the tops of trees about a mile or so away on our side.

My first thought when I saw there were fires in Spokane was the Old Trail fire when I was a kid.

This now makes two childhood homes gone (or likely gone) in the last two years, with my junior high home in Pacific Palisades destoryed in that huge fire. It is a strange feeling to lose one childhood home, but two is a little more odd.

With Spokane I don’t have the exact address as the address book my mom kept was lost in a move, but I keep expecting to find it. While she was alive I always knew I could ask her or my dad for certain information as they were my Local InfoCloud resources I would query for certain things. I figured they would always be available to answer the queries. It is more of an interest than a need, but still odd not to have it at the ready.

My thoughts are those who are victims in the Spokane and other Oregon and Washington fires.

Peter Gabriel's New Blood Always Strikes Deeply

Peter Gabriel’s songs from his New Blood album have surfaced in playlists lately and they really resonate more than the original versions. The New Blood album is a hi-res recording with Gabriel reinterpreting his works to work with a symphony. Unlike nearly every rock or pop group that does an album with their songs it isn’t layering in swoopy strings and creating syrupy saccharine interpretations. Gabriel’s New Blood rewrote the pieces to be solid pieces and uses the orchestra as a percussive and large bold sound supporting his work. The deluxe version of the album includes instrumental versions and they hold up incredibly well on their own.

The album has no drumkit nor any other common pop or rock instrumentation. There is an abundance of strings, horns, woodwinds, and percussive instruments with a wonderful use of marimba (or possibly xylophone). The creation works really well for Gabriel’s music. There is really good interplay between sound and silence. The outcome is something more emotional and impactful.

Many of the songs selected and arranged are my favorite versions. San Jacinto is one I really like live versions, but the New Blood is incredibly moving and very cinematic. In Your Eyes is incredible on New Blood and it moves me really deeply the more I listen to it over the years. Don’t Give Up also hits much harder deep inside on New Blood.

About an Update

Earlier this week James popped up to ask if I truly still used Dreamweaver to build my website. I was a little lost as it has been 15 to 20 years since I used Dreamweaver for much of anything. He was reading it on my “About” page.

I had pretty much forgotten about my About page and looking at it needed a lot of content help and updating. I’ve mostly highlighted areas that need updating, adding, as well as adding, but I have had a few things ahead of it on my list and hopefully it will get done in the next week or two.

When I did my backend updating I updated the front page of the site, but not the about page. I need to get about updating my About page is what this is about.

In Our Time Loses Melvyn Bragg

I woke a bit early this morning, and as one does when not quite ready to get up and embrace the day, I talked to the lady in the can to play an episode of In Our Time. The episode was preempted with a notification that Melvyn Bragg had retired so there would be an episode from the catalog.

I had completely missed that Bragg had retired on September 3rd. He was doing a lot of wonderful interviews the last few years that I’ve really enjoyed. As I had read them I was impressed how he just kept going and going with In Our Time. Bragg presided over and lead discussion and inquiry into each week’s subject for more than 1,000 episodes.

I got hooked on Bragg and his good interviewing method on The Southbank Show (it was broadcast on Bravo not long after each episode came out). I was pleased to find he had a radio show (In Our Time) and finally sorted out how to listen somewhere between 2001 and 2003, but listening wasn’t easy to do on a regular nor consistent basis.

In Our Time has been an utter gem of an offering as its half hour to hour of in depth and intelligent conversation around a specific subject. Bragg would bring in three academics (usually) with deep expertise on the subject having solid in depth conversations about the subject, while keeping the depth of the discussion to a level it is accessible to non-academic audiences.

I always learned something from each episode I listened to and they give me a better foothold to learn more. I also often look into who the people were that were part of the discussion for deeper dives into their works.

I feel a great sense of gratitude to Melvyn Bragg for all the enjoyment, discovery, and learning his leading In Our Time has brought me. There have been times where I will listen and have no idea what the subject is nor fits into anything I remotely know and in 30 minutes to an hour I have a relatively decent foothold to explore more, it not a solid understanding. I know of little else out like this.

I hope the BBC keeps In Our Time going as it is a real treasure. It won’t be the same without Melvyn Bragg, but it would a complete shame to lose something of this great quality and capability to provide a wonderful way to learn as a great value to civilization.

If you are new to In Our Time the BBC site is a good place to start, as is Braggoscope by Matt Webb who has built a great way to navigate all the episodes of In Out Time.

Second Person Bird Carnival

Sophia took on the September 2025 IndieWeb Carnival with the topic second person birds. I had some different takes, but settled into one…

Growing up on the US West Coast there were two birds I knew of birds that I had never seen, thanks to sports teams. Cardinals and Orioles are the two that stood out. We had robins, scrub jays, woodpeckers, and a multitude of other birds, but there were no orioles nor cardinals.

Moving east for grad school I saw my first oriole, which I found was more rare than I figured. But, cardinals are more abundant.

A few years back I found the Merlin Bird ID app and its ability to recognize bird songs. I hear many different bird calls and songs regularly. During the pandemic lockdown there became even more birds signing and calling out. Merlin helped me find out what my favorite discernible songs were. One I regularly heard and enjoyed, particularly in the morning on walks is the cardinal.

As we started coming out of lockdown I took my son to a workout with his trainer. The training sessions were outside and to fit in to the outside environment he asked, not what music, but what bird song he should play on the speakers. My son didn’t have any idea and he looked to me and I knew exactly what I would want another (second person) to play, the cardinal bird song (go ahead and go listen).

Getting the summary Complexity Lenses - An Overview Out

I finally got a “simple” overview post out and posted today to my Personal InfoCloud site - Complexity Lenses – An Overview – Personal InfoCloud.

This post isn’t really long. It is a short version of a few elevator pitches about my Complexity Lenses / Social Lenses. Today there are more than 90 Lenses (actually just shy of 100) and each have elements that are beneath them and many elements have components under them. My full outline in Outlining Software For Pros - OmniOutliner - The Omni Group has more than 1,500 nodes between the parents (lenses) and children combined.

Getting this boiled down to a few paragraphs is a bit of a chore, to get at a high level explanation why the Complexity Lenses are used to tease apart complex environments to see more clearly through the fog of complexity (and even help make a dent to find something to hold onto in times of chaos). Every attempt to tease this out and whittle it down turned into something I didn’t like. These also turned into something more dense than I wanted.

Breaking it down to sentences

Today I looked at the task item for the Overview on my list and then clicked to look at the current state of the draft (or more like multiple drafts) and decided to take a different route. I took the core sentences and put them into a box in an Obsidian Canvas and honed each sentence a bit. I had about 10 sentences and moved the boxes around to get an order. I put lines between the sentence boxes that would be a paragraph.

I then looked at what I had and started asking the editor’s questions: “What are the Lenses”; “What is the value to people using them”; and down the line was “What is the background”. I didn’t have the first answer to the first question at the top. This helped change my structure, which helped keep things relatively tight (for me). I then realized I had a gap in the middle around what are traits of people who use the Lenses and have success with them look like, so I pulled that in.

I had a set piece around “seeing through the fog of complexity” that often helps start the Complexity Lens portion of a talk, so I added that in. The final paragraph became a mixture of other summarizations I’ve used across the years and edited that down.

Wrapping it and Posting

With this in Obsidian Canvas I copied each sentence back into my draft and wiped the initial variations of drafts I had been trying to bludgeon for months. I did a quick read through and another light edit. Then I moved it into Personal InfoCloud and posted it.

I’m may tweak it a little in coming weeks. But, this post will likely be pinned to the top on the Personal InfoCloud, so I can regularly refer to it. This referring and pointing capability is something I haven’t been able to do and I’m happy to have it now.

James’ Gravity Button

Thinking about James’ gravity button, which I find to be fun.

It was in part was inspired by my gravity story about the time I was working in San Francisco and the bottom of a file box I was carrying gave out. Rather than picking up the files and papers, I turned to my desk and picked up the phone and called the property management office for our office to ask them to, “Turn down the gravity as it seems a bit too strong.” I then went and picked up the files and papers and put them back in the box, which I had reinforced the bottom with packing tape.

Gravity could (/ should?) be a controllable element much like a thermostat does with temperature. Right?

IndieWeb Carnival - Totems

This is following the prompt - IndieWeb Carnival July 2025: Totems | Maxwell’s Realm, as set by Maxwell Joslyn. All interpretations of totems have come to mind from things I’ve kept in my pockets, a Swatch watch on my belt loop from high school through much of college, my dad’s watch, to a regular cap. But, growing up in the Pacific Northwest the idea that comes to mind when someone says “totem” are the native tribes of the Pacific Northwest’s totem poles and art.

As a young child living in the Seattle area and Portland there were not only totem poles around, but a lot of Totem poles - (Wikipedia) around and I enjoyed them and if we were traveling and there were totem poles around, we needed to go see them. I picked up a couple replicas for my book shelves as a kid and had them for a long time (I swore I still had them). But, it was not just the poles, it was Northwest Coast art - (Wikipedia) that also drew me in.

We would take regular trips each year to Vancouver, British Columbia, which meant even more totem poles and art. Stanley Park had is large totem pole, which we needed to visit, but as I found or more we needed to go see those as well. I could stand and look at them for a long time, but my parents didn’t have the same interest in staring at them and walking around them.

Once my family moved to Portland, Oregon the opportunities weren’t as prevalent to see the totem poles, but the art was all around. In my perspective the best thing about Portland was being close to Lelooska Foundation & Cultural Center – Living History Museum. Going to see Chief Lelooska and the Cultural Center for school trip and cub scout trips, and any other opportunity, was a perfect time in my book. Going to the long house celebrations with the stories and dancing, which came with explanations were fantastic.

This art and gathering called out the local salmon, ravens, hawks, orcas, and more in celebration and made each of them seem even more special. The sometimes world around you that can get overlooked by the day to day (even for kids) gets pulled into pure focus.