Facebook fast one week out

So far in being away from facebook I've found that

1. I'm more contemplative
2. I'm more plan focused
3. I'm less grumpy
4. I'm actually kind of decent at my job
5. I think about what I'd like to write about
6. I think about what I'd like to think about

At this point I see no negatives to my absence from FB.  I'm more social and less irked.

Guess what we found?

That's right, we found our snapshot camera.  It was lost in the little glove box under the passenger side seat.  So here we have the pictures from that snapshot of time.

Some blooming stuff from our house:


Josie on field trips:



And finally her epic six year birthday party:

Darwin Day fasting

Yesterday was Darwin Day.  It was also some other sorta kinda memorial proceedings called 'Lent'.  As in I lent you my lawnmower and now I forgive you for never returning it.

In honor of the spirit of evolution and giving up things, I have hereby stopped using FaceBook until Easter, or bunnies with candy come to my door.  The reasons for this are simple.  I'd like to find out what 'value' FaceBook adds to my life.  I've had a hard time figuring out what that value is.  It seems to make me short-tempered an intolerant.  It's also kept me away from producing any original content or curating my families photos.  Those two things seem more valuable to me than kitten/games/dumb repeaters.

Let this be the first day of the rest of my internet life.

Unexpected passings

My good friend Keith Mickunas contacted me this last Saturday to pass on some news.  Our mutual friend and colleague Randy Rathbun had passed away.  Randy had been fighting cancer, and I didn't expect him to pass quite so suddenly.  I always thought there would be more warning - foolish me.

Randy is one of the main reasons Janet and I got into blogging in the first place.  You can see parts of his now defunct website from 2003.  He was also kind enough to link to my own self-hosted effort.

Keith put in a great post about Randy.  He was a geek's geek, and one of the best nerds I know.  I owe him more to my online life then I can ever sum up, but as well as Keith's listed qualities of nerd-dom, Randy was also kind, helpful, and pretty much always there for any technical issue.  He was also the curator of the Jello Biafra newsgroup alt.fan.jello-biafra.

As I look back upon the many years that I have known Randy, I realize how much of my internet and nerd-presence he influenced.  I also realize how much better this planet was with him on it.

You are missed Randy.

Randy from our first ever KC bloggers gathering - March 24, 2003.

Thinking of music

While using Spotify, I was qualifying music 'eras' and styles by decade and influential bands.  These are bands that go on to inspire other musicians, not particularly bands that sell lots of records. Here's a rough list of decades & bands:

70s - Led Zeppelin, Ramones, Sex Pistols, Rush, Sugarhilll Gang, Isley Brothers
80s - Talking Heads, Pixies, Run DMC, The Clash, Elvis Costello
90s - Nirvana, Soundgarden, NWA, Primus
00s - ???, Death Cab?  Jimmy Eat World? Dresden Dolls?

It seems like I've missed a whole decade of bands that make other bands want to play music.   I can think of popular bands, but I can't think of any influential ones.  Where are they, did we lose a decade of music?

Writing

The way to get into something is to begin again, so let this be my re-entrance into writing. I need some way of doing usefully vague and interesting creative expository things and this seems to be a decent outlet.

Once more dear friends, into the breach.

First Android post

Nothing to see here, just playing around.