Category: Writing

Sep 24

AVFTCN 036 – A Hard Drive Failure, a Puppy, Climatebase, a New Role… and an Unplanned Hiatus

Hi! Remember this newsletter you subscribed to? The one you haven’t seen since back on April 22, 2024?

Welllllll… it’s been a wild ride… and an unplanned hiatus.

But… my goal now is to get back into this a bit more, and so I want to fire off this short note to just give a personal update.

Next time, I’ll be climbing up into that proverbial crow’s nest and looking out at the horizon ahead of us. For this newsletter… I’m going to look back instead at where the ship has sailed over the past few months.

If you visit my danyork.me aggregation site, you’d see that I have published some work articles… but nothing personal since the last issue (035) of this newsletter back on April 22, 2024. No blog posts. No podcast episodes. No newsletters. No livestreaming to Twitch. No… nothing. Zip. Nada. Zilch. Nichts.

So here’s the story…

The fun began back in early May when the 2017 iMac I’d been using to produce my podcasts, do all my livestreaming, and write many of my posts started acting really funky. It was acting very slow.. and freezing completely. Many reboots and upgrade attempts later, I was finally able to identify that it was having “S.M.A.R.T. disk errors”. Which wasn’t good.

“It’s dead, Jim” would be the Star Trek (Original Series) way to say it.

Given that it’s from 2017, I can’t upgrade it to the latest MacOS X. And heck, it’s so old Apple won’t even give me anything for a trade-in. (But they’ll help recycle it for me if I want. 🤦‍♂️) Giving other things going on (see below!) fixing it has been super LOW priority… which has meant that my normal platform for content creation and production has been offline. So no podcast episodes or livestreaming.

As that was all happening, a more massive disruption was entering our life – we adopted an 8-week-old puppy!

Named “Barkley”, he’s a very lovable and adorable mix of a pug and a miniature schnauzer (apparently called a “Schnug”) who keeps growing and growing and now at 6 months old is larger than our 17-year-old miniature poodle.

But.. my wife and I had never had a puppy before! We’ve had a couple of dogs (and cats) but they’ve all been a few years old when we adopted them. Anyone who has had a puppy probably understands what these last months have been like! Constantly watching where he is… “puppy-proofing” the entire house… constantly watching where he is… stopping him from eating everything… trying to train him a bit… constantly watching where he is… trying to prevent him from always attacking our 17yo dog… stopping him from eating whatever… oh, and constantly watching what he’s doing. It’s been… exhausting!

Basically like having a newborn child again… only one that can run fast all over and has sharp teeth! 😀

But in the end… he’s a wonderful addition and we’ve come to love him dearly. He’s curled up against my foot as I write this… and tomorrow night you’ll find me in a class with him.

While all of this was going on, I was also enrolled as a Climatebase Fellow in a very intense 12-week program of 10-15 hours of sessions each week all related to improving my understanding of the current state of information and science around climate change. As shown in the image below, it covered a very wide range of topics:

A grid of 12 blocks showing the 12 weeks of the program. At the top is the title "Climatebase Fellowship program overview by weeks"

Participating in this fellowship was part of my professional development at my employer, the Internet Society. In the last issue, I pointed to my article about “The Internet and Climate Change” and that continues to be an area of great interest and exploration for me. I’ll undoubtedly write some future newsletters specifically around this whole area.

My interest was mostly to refresh my understanding of current climate thinking. I’ve been involved in “environmental” issues since the 1980s, and was very active in the broader movement in the early 1990s, serving in different volunteer leadership roles for different organizations. But then life took me away from that heavy involvement and my knowledge has aged. I heard phrases like “regenerative agriculture” but didn’t know what they meant. (Now I do!)

It was a good program and I met some great people and enjoyed participating in the community (which I am still doing).

As we came into summer here in Vermont, the Climatebase Fellowship wrapped up, but the intensity of the puppy and work and family and everything else continued.

And then a very cool opportunity was presented to me… at the Internet Society we had a new President and CEO, Sally Wentworth, start on September 1, 2024. Back in July she approached me about taking on a new role that we eventually called “CEO communications” where I’m helping with developing and executing plans across both the Internet Society and Internet Society Foundation for consistent communication from the CEO’s office internally, externally, and with our community and partners.

I formally took on this role on September 1 (and mentioned something on LinkedIn later) but began some aspects of it back in August. I’ve known Sally for the 13 years that I’ve been at the Internet Society (she’s been there 15 years) and have deep and great respect for her. So I’ve been excited about the new role, grateful for this opportunity to stretch my own skills in new and different ways… and just… busy! 😀

And now on this 24th day of September… it’s time to get back in the flow again and start creating some content again. There are so many stories to tell… so many changes happening… so much ahead on the horizon… both icebergs to avoid and opportunities to explore!

Time to climb up into that crow’s nest, whip out the spyglass, and get back to looking out ahead at the horizon and sharing what I see!

See you soon!

[The End]

Recent Posts and Podcasts

Here is some of the content I’ve published and produced recently on my personal sites:

  • <nothing!>

[I do still contribute reports to the “monthly” episodes of the For Immediate Release podcast.]

I did publish some new posts for the Internet Society (who has no connection to this newsletter):

More on why so many of them are law-related… in a future newsletter!

Thanks for reading to the end. I welcome any comments and feedback you may have.

Please drop me a note in email – if you are a subscriber, you should just be able to reply back. And if you aren’t a subscriber, just hit this button 👇 and you’ll get future messages.

This IS also a WordPress hosted blog, so you can visit the main site and add a comment to this post, like we used to do back in glory days of blogging.

Or if you don’t want to do email, send me a message on one of the various social media services where I’ve posted this. (My preference continues to be Mastodon, but I do go on others from time to time.)

Until the next time,
Dan

Connect

The best place to connect with me these days is:

You can also find all the content I’m creating at:

If you use Mastodon or another Fediverse system, you should be able to follow this newsletter by searching for “@crowsnest.danyork.com“

You can also connect with me at these services, although I do not interact there quite as much (listed in decreasing order of usage):

Disclaimer

Disclaimer: This newsletter is a personal project I’ve been doing since 2007, several years before I joined the Internet Society in 2011. While I may at times mention information or activities from the Internet Society, all viewpoints are my personal opinion and do not represent any formal positions or views of the Internet Society. This is just me, saying some of the things on my mind.

Feb 01

I’m Doing It Again… Getting Sucked Into Consuming Vs Creating

IMG_4021I’m doing it again… instead of writing and creating new posts in the morning, I’m sitting there scrolling through Mastodon… or reading the latest news on Memeorandum or Techmeme… or jumping into work email or Slack before I really need to. And sooner or later, any of the “free” time I had is gone and it’s time to start the work day. The time has melted away.

Consumption has triumphed over creation, yet again.

That’s no way to get back into writing more. That’s no way to develop habits of consistent writing.

And yet it is so incredibly easy to fall into that pattern… again and again and again….

So today I’ll write this small post of self-reflection to start yet again. Here’s to yet another attempt to break that pattern and build newer, stronger habits! 

——

Image credit: a generated image from Leonardo.ai

Jan 07

A New Plan For Getting in the Habit of Consistently Publishing Podcasts and Newsletters

a screenshot of a black calendar of the month of January with a large green checkmark on every Friday and a large orange checkmark on every MondayIn thinking about my themes for 2024 and specifically about changing my habits, one change that I am going to try is to get consistent with both my “The Dan York Report” podcast and also my “A View From The Crow’s Nest” newsletter.

Right now they are both “irregular” or “periodic”… meaning I just do them whenever I think about them or have some reason for doing them. Which means that sometimes I publish 4 of them in a week… and then I don’t publish anything for four weeks or more! 🤦‍♂️

I want to get in the *habit* of doing both.  I want to instill in myself the discipline of regular production.

And I also want to be realistic by planning a weekly production. Sometimes in the past I have tried to “get back into producing content” and targeted daily production. But that’s not realistic for me with everything else going on in life. 

We’ll see. Weekly may turn out to be too much. Perhaps I will shoot for every other week.

My logic for the podcast being on Mondays is that it gives me time on the weekend to do the production. My logic for the newsletter on Fridays is that sometimes I write about stuff that people might want to experiment with over a weekend - or I have links to other longer reads or items that may take more time than people have in a typical week day.

There’s also a symbiosis where either the Friday newsletter can feed into the Monday podcast… or vice versa where the Monday podcast becomes the topic for the Friday newsletter.

Another aspect is that by limiting myself to weekly, I’m hoping to plan ahead and produce both newsletters and podcasts in advance! (Wild concept for me!!)

Which isn’t to say that I won’t also put out a podcast or newsletter at another time when something interesting or breaking news makes me want to publish a new edition. But I want to get to a consistent cadence.

Again… we’ll see! It’s all a grand experiment. Stay tuned… if I actually execute on this I’ll drop a podcast episode tomorrow…. 🙂

 

Jan 03

20 Years Ago, LiveJournal Was My Home On The Web

IMG_3981This morning brought a reminder that it was twenty years ago that I opened up an account on LiveJournal. For about four years, “LJ” was my home on the web. It was where I wrote MANY articles, connected with people across their journals, and started interacting with a few people with whom I am still in touch today.

My journal site is still there today, with a much younger photo of me (I still had brown hair!), but my last entry was 11 years ago in April 2013, and that was just an update to a post four years earlier in April 2009 saying where people could find my writing. I haven’t really written there for most of 16 years… since back in 2008.

In those early days in the mid-2000s, LJ was a vibrant, social place to be. There were no advertisements and it was one of those amazing places of creativity during that time. Strong communities were built and thrived. Many of the ways we started interacting there (ex. “friends”) would carry over into later services.

Wikipedia outlines some of what happened after that… Brad Fitzpatrick sold the site to SixApart and I think they understandably wanted to figure out how to turn it into a business. But then in 2007 it was sold to a Russian media company… and things changed more and more after that.  (Viewing my site today I am amused to see some of the ads displayed to me having Cyrillic text.)

In my own case, I’d started to branch out. Those were the glory days of “blogging” as a thing, and at the end of 2005 I’d launched first Disruptive Telephony and then Disruptive Conversations as places where I very prolifically wrote on different topics. I continued to use LJ as a place for “personal” blogging… up until I decided to start up the site you are reading this article on.

Still, for a few years, it was my home on the Web - and I’m grateful for the time that I was there!

Feb 26

The Single Biggest Thing Preventing Me From Doing More Writing Is…

screenshot of a mastodon client running on an iphone. Screenshot is tilted to the left on a white background. The client is in dark mode and so is mostly black. One of the posts shown in the client includes a photo of two hands in front of a keyboard.

As I’ve frequently lamented in my yearly themes (although not this year), I would like to get myself to write more. And back on December 1, 2022, I tried to commit to #100DaysOfBlogging, but that hasn't worked out so well.

I’ve been watching how I spend my time lately, and to I’m sure the surprise of absolutely NO ONE, including myself, it would seem the single biggest thing preventing me from doing more writing is… getting distracted by social media! 🤣🤣🤣

Take this morning. I was awake early at around 5:00am (courtesy of our wonderful but early-rising dog) and I sat on our couch drinking some tea and browsing through Mastodon (you can find me there). About 1.5 hours later, I’d read some great commentary, found some new articles to share, engaged in some conversations, and generally had an enjoyable time interacting with people.

But… could part of that time have been better spent getting some writing done?

I struggle with this, because on the one hand I learn things from social media that are then useful in new articles or other work. It’s “research” of one form. And engaging with people in an online community is a good thing to do.

But on the other hand, I find myself doing this a bit too much.

I’ll note, of course, that THIS IS NOT A NEW ISSUE FOR ME! In fact, I can easily scan my archives and find I’ve been writing more or less this same kind of post for ** 15 years **! 🤦‍♂️

The common theme through all of that is… “I’ve got to change… I’ve got to not get so sucked into <whatever services>”.

And yet I do. 

The siren song of distraction is incredibly strong.

Perhaps this is the thing where I’ll keep shouting about it in the hopes that eventually by saying it enough I will make it happen in my life.

Or perhaps in 2033 I’ll be writing the same basic post again, lamenting how much time I spend with some new service. 🤣

P.S. And I don’t even mention TikTok, which seems to be wired into my brain in a way that whenever I open up the app it is then an hour or so later when I emerge again! (Hence why I don’t open it all that often.)

Dec 14

Au Revoir Revue! Twitter to Kill Off Newsletter Service at End of 2022 – I Guess I Need To Move My Newsletter!

 

The text "Au revoir revue" on a blue background

I was a little surprised to learn this morning that Twitter is shutting down its Revue newsletter service. Casey Newton first wrote about this back on November 3 in his Platformer newsletter, but subsequent articles after the massive layoffs confirmed that Revue is shutting down - and basically all the associated staff have been let go.

I had missed all those articles and just randomly saw a reference this morning when scanning social feeds.

It’s NOT actually surprising if you think about the fact that Elon Musk has to be laser-focused on revenue right now, particularly as his self-induced chaos is causing users and advertisers to leave Twitter. Revue was about long-form content published in email - and was not really a quick and easy way to increase advertising 

So as they note, it’s all going away:

  • December 20, 2022 – Revue will set all outstanding paid subscriptions to cancel at the end of their billing cycle
  • January 18, 2023 – Revue will shut down and all data will be deleted

It’s too bad as it was a nice platform… if you were a strong Twitter user.

It had the nice feature that it showed up right on your Twitter profile page, offering people the ability to easily subscribe:

screen shot of a Twitter feed showing a newsletter box in the feed

On the back end, there were some simple tools to easily add tweets into your newsletter.

Also, unlike Substack, you could set up your Revue newsletter with a custom domain, such as I did with choices.danyork.com.

So What Will I Do Next?

As that image shows, I started a newsletter on Revue called “A Choice of Futures” back in October 2021 and published a whopping two issues! 🎉

I had great plans to do more, but ran into several challenges in timing and then got super busy with work and volunteer responsibilities in 2022.

But I was thinking about getting back to it in 2023.

So what now?

I could move that newsletter over to Substack, Medium, AWeber, or any of a zillion other places.

Or.. I can just shut down this particular newsletter. 

Realistically, that’s probably what I’ll do. Send one final issue as the period at the end of the sentence, and then be done.

You see… I actually already have a Substack newsletter at danyork.substack.com called “A View From The Crow’s Nest” where the intent is to write about new technology out on the horizon. It’s an even older newsletter that I used to run through an email service provider. I moved it to Substack back in March 2020 when Substack was getting a lot of attention. I wanted to learn about Substack and it was my intention to start doing more with it.

But then.. pandemic… and so much else of the craziness of COVID-19 and how our world was changing. I dropped that newsletter and so much else, just caught in the moment of trying to make it through each day.

By the time late 2021 came around and I was interested in a newsletter again, I had some concerns about the direction Substack was going… and so I thought I’d give Revue a try.

Ha!

Turns out the concerns would end up being with where Twitter and Revue were going instead!  (Although I do still have concerns about Substack!)

So that will be my personal plan. I’ve hit the button to export all my data from Revue, and I’ll invite folks there to join my other newsletter on Substack.

Any of you reading this are welcome to join too!

 

Dec 01

#100DaysOfBlogging – Let’s Do This!

The words "100 Days Of Blogging" on a gray / blue background

Joe Brockmeier, who I’ve known from back in the amazing early days of Linux in the early 1990s, recently posted to his Mastodon account:

With the renewed focus on owning your content and DIY web / #IndieWeb ethos, I'd love to encourage folks to think about more long-form content.

Mastodon allows for longer thoughts than the birdsite, but I miss the days of blogrings, conversations in comments, and so forth. I don't think we're going to get back to blogging's heyday, but a revival would be great.

And with that, he announced he was going to do a “100 day blogging challenge”. As he writes, “let’s get those RSS feeds going again!"

He then invited others to join in on the creation of long-form content:

If you’re reading this, consider this an invitation to start or dust off your own blog and update it regularly. If 100 days straight is too much, how about twice per week?

So… okay, Joe, I’m in! Since I said way back on January 1 that I hoped to create more content this year… and haven’t really… let’s see if I can finish strong!

I’ve long wanted to start writing again on sites that *I* control, versus writing on the platforms and social sites. (See… POSSE … from four years ago! 🤦‍♂️)

Today is December 1 - a random site on the Internet tells me that 100 days from today will be March 11, 2023.

Let’s see if I can go that long. If so, hopefully it will then be back to being a “habit” that I will just continue indefinitely.

To be clear, I’m not going to commit to write here on THIS site alone for 100 days, although maybe that would be good. My goal will be to write across my various personal sites and other sites like CircleID and the Internet Society’s blog. I’ll also be scheduling content in advance, since I don’t expect to actually be writing on Christmas. We’ll see!

If you care to follow along, or just want to hold me accountable 🙂, you’ll be able to see my writing at danyork.me. In theory, that little calendar on the right side should show a bold date from here on out to March 11!

Care to join in? 

Let’s bring some more long-form content back to the Web! (Tip: you can use this site to find your end date.)

Jan 05

Poem: In the end, it didn’t matter

In the end
It didn’t matter
That their kids got many other required vaccines for school

It didn’t matter
That their jobs required annual flu shots

It didn’t matter
That unvaxxed people they knew died

It didn’t matter,
Their lords said this vaccine was bad

Nothing else mattered
In the end

Jan 03

Finding the Toolchain to Consistently Create Content

tools on a pegboard

If one of my aspirations for this year is to consistently create content, one of my personal challenges is to figure out HOW to easily do that.

Ideally, creating content on my own sites should be as easy as sending out a tweet, posting a message to Facebook or Mastodon, or posting an image to Instagram.

And therein lies my challenge.

I’d like to make it so that I could just post from my mobile phone or iPad, so that whenever I have a story idea I want to write I can just post something easily. And, I can also post from my laptop or desktop. I want to be able to post content from anywhere, just as I can with Twitter, Mastodon, and Facebook.

I want to remove any friction from creating content.

However, the main personal sites I write on - this DanYork.com site, Disruptive Telephony, and Disruptive Conversations - are all still hosted on TypePad, because that is where I created them 15 years ago! 😀 And, alas, there is no mobile app or easy way to create content. There IS a mobile web interface, but it doesn’t provide me with a way to create drafts and have a queue.

Now, if the sites were on WordPress, the WordPress mobile apps provide a great experience, but they aren’t… and the switching costs are large. There’s a great amount of work to move thousands of posts and images, including substantial URL rewriting/redirecting. It’s not an easy task.

I’d like to move the sites to WordPress eventually, but not this year.

For the moment, I’m using MarsEdit on my Macs, as I’ve done for many years. For the mobile side, I’m still exploring options. One thought is to use the DayOne journaling app that is now part of my daily workflow. Write the posts there and then copy/paste to the mobile TypePad interface. But I don’t know… I’m looking at other IOS editors, too, and so far not  yet finding the toolchain I need.

The search continues!  The goal is to remove friction from the creation process.

Jan 01

My Themes for 2022

3 Words 2022

Following my pattern of the past 13 years (see list), my first post of 2022 across all my sites is of three words that are my aspirations or “themes” for the year ahead. They are not “resolutions” so much as guiding thoughts or principles.

In so many ways 2021 was a good bit of a “dumpster fire” of a year. We started off with such great hope that the pandemic would be under control … and ended with even higher case counts and more deaths that we’d had the previous year. It often does truly feel like the 672nd day of March 2020. So many of us struggled in so many ways. Yet amidst all that chaos, there were positive signs - and I remain grateful that I reached the end of the year with all my family in decent health (at least physically).

Looking on toward 2022...

HOPE

Last year brought me great clarity around what I see as my own my personal mission to help people understand our choice of futures - for the Internet, but also for ourselves and for our society. 

But 2021 also brought clarity that it is so easy to fall into despair. It does seem like we’re stuck in a perpetual Groundhog Day. The state of the pandemic is so frustrating, particularly for those of us who have done everything we can to protect ourselves, our families, and our communities. The breakdown in civility and discourse that we are seeing across the USA and across the world is extremely saddening. The polarization and politicization of even trivial issues is tragic. And our governments and leaders often seem incapable of doing anything helpful - and in fact sometimes seem to be doing the exact opposite of what makes sense - or are so mired in disagreement that nothing happens at all. And… weather events around the world seem to indicate that climate change is happening quicker than many forecast. There are so many tragic events happening to so many people, and even for those not directly affected, there is so much to fear that it can be paralyzing.

It often feels like we are on the edge of living in any of the zillion dystopian, post-apocalyptic movies or TV series that are out there.

It’s easy to despair. 

And yet… we can’t. For if we fall into the depths of despair, what is the point of being here? And who will pull us out?

We must hold on to the possibility of hope. 

We must.

And so what I want to do this year is to do whatever I can to help shine the light on and amplify the good work going on. (And there definitely IS - read "99 Good News Stories You Probably Didn’t Hear About in 2021”)

Not with “rose-colored glasses” or with naive, excessive optimism that just ignores everything else to hope things get better.. but rather with an action of seeking out the hopeful, positive, and optimistic in the midst of the chaos and despair. As I said in a tweet:

The challenge that lies before us is more than choosing hope over fear.
It is choosing hope *amidst* the overwhelming narratives of fear and doom.
It is choosing hope and optimism *despite* those fears.
It is choosing hope as a daily, gritty act of resistance and resilience.

To me, that is the work we all must do.

CONTENT

As I wrote at some length last year, I’ve been struggling through this whole pandemic, but even before that, to consistently create content, be it blog posts, podcast episodes, videos, newsletters or more. I optimistically wrote:

A goal in 2021 is to break through those blockages. I want to get writing again. I want to more consistently create podcast episodes. I’d like to send out more than one email newsletter in an entire year!

That didn’t happen. In fact, I sent out zero issues of that particular email newsletter, although I did send out two issues of a new newsletter. 

I produced a whopping 8 podcast episodes in 2021 (7 for my The Dan York Report podcast, and one for my “FIR On Technology” podcast), although I did submit all 12 monthly reports into the FIR podcast.

And… I only wrote * 11 * posts across all my different blog sites, including my employer’s site, and almost all of those were “administrative” notices such as about upcoming deadlines for various awards or elections. A far cry from the days when would write hundreds of posts each year. 🙁

A sad state of affairs for someone who loves to create content.

Now, I do give myself a bit of a break. I mean… pandemic!  It’s been hard on all of us and quite honestly simply surviving 2021 is a beautiful thing!

On the positive side, I was live-streaming on Twitch most of the year, and in doing so continued to learn an amazing amount more about Wikipedia. And, I set up a TikTok account to actually start playing with that platform.

But my aspiration in 2022 is to get back in the game… to be back telling the stories I want to tell… and to be helping promote the hopeful aspects of the futures we need to choose. And… to do so on my OWN sites! Lately I’ve started to write very long threads on Twitter that then get lost in the noise. I really need to be taking those threads and writing them as posts for their longevity - and to have them on sites I control, rather than being lost in some proprietary platform.

We’ll see!

HEALTH

Finally, I’ve really got to focus on my health. Like many people, I’ve been a bit too sedentary during the pandemic and eaten a bit too much comfort food. My weight is almost the heaviest I’ve ever been and I seriously need to start making some better food choices. And, being in my mid-50s there’s a number of medical checks I need to have. 

I need to focus on this!

Looking forward...

Overall I’m quite looking forward to 2022. I’m hopeful that maybe we can finally get the pandemic to a more reasonable state. I look forward to hopefully getting together with friends in our local area, and making new friends, too. I look forward to seeing family more frequently. I look forward to getting back to attending user group meetings and other professional events, and going to concerts and church services and so much more. I miss singing!

Hopefully we can get there… although admittedly 2022 isn’t starting off so great with the rising numbers.

I am also very excited about a new project I’m leading at the Internet Society about understanding Internet access via low earth orbit (LEO) satellites. It’s a hot topic with a lot of marketing hype right now - and we’ll be working to bring some clarity to that whole area. It should be both educational and fun!  

Let us hope this all continues to go well!

What about you? What are your aspirations for 2022?