J. Palmer

# Untitled
## Sun 12 Feb 2023 11:32:02 AM EST

One thing that I used to do that kinda helped me write more in the old days was keep my computer accessible–which really wasn’t hard, considering the bulk of that period had me living in a townhouse-style apartment with the living and dining rooms open to one-another. I took advantage of this layout and had a desk splitting the living and dining room–and on that desk my computer sat. So, for the most part, I would be passing that computer throughout the day as I cleaned–so a quick stop by the keyboard to punch out whatever randome thought I’d had while cleaning house was very, very easy.

It was very therapeutic, though I’m not entirely sure if it did much to help anyone else in my life–especially as I would frequently write without a filter on my thoughts or audience. I did eventually start filtering things…

…and then I started to filter out everything.

…and then I simply stopped altogether.

Thanks for reading;

–J

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# Untitled
## Sun 12 Feb 2023 10:24:35 AM EST

I’m not getting to write as frequently as I would like to. Honestly, I would like to try and write something at least once a day. I’m halfway hoping that with the introduction of the pup into the family [see footnote] that I can alter what has become the everyday timeline and establish a new routine and new habits that can include me sitting down for a little bit and writing things.

With the pup in the house I’ve got to get myself up and take care of it–and beginning that much earlier than when the kids wake makes things a lot easier. So, if I were to begin waking at around 5am, I should be able to take the pup out in the morning before the kids wake–so that they don’t end up begging to go outside with me–and then have a couple of hours in which to fully wake and get my morning rolling with a few cups of coffee and the news followed by my commentary on the news or life in general.

I mean, that’s essentially how I did things long ago–minus the taking care of a dog part.

I think I can do this.

blah.

Thanks for reading;

–J

[footnote]
=> 2023-02-12-we-got-a-dog.gmi We got a dog…

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# We got a dog…
## Sun 12 Feb 2023 08:57:17 AM EST

So, we got a dog. And it’s in the house. And I hate dogs in houses.

It’s been a few days since we brought the dog home. I can’t remember what day it was.

I can’t think of much to say that won’t make me sound like a total ass.

[*sigh*]

So, the other week the Mrs. sends me a message saying that she’s going to visit with an associate of hers to she the pups that the associate has been raising. I think nothing of it because, yeah, ok, associate has pups and is proud of them and has a want and or need to show them off in order to re-home them, yada-yada-yada; we ain’t getting one, she’s just checking them out. I would say I should’ve known better, but, no, I really shouldn’t have–the Mrs. doesn’t typically do anything on a whim, nor does she usually do any of the stereotypical girly things of falling for baby animals, and so on. Well…

So, later that evening when she’s retelling her day, the pups do come up, of course. I’m asked in a kind of cutesy and excited voice if I want to see pictures. Quickly, I say no–because I really don’t care what a mess of pups that I have no connection with looks like. Yeah, well…

After two nights of having to deal with a depressed wife and us rehashing our plans to get a dog later this year, I cave and say we can go ahead and get a pup.

…and now the dog is sitting at my feet, under the kitchen table.

…and I hate having dogs in houses.

[*sigh*]

The plan was–or the *original* plan was–to perform maintenace on the fence dividing ours and our direct neighbor’s property and then construct a fence in the back yard in which to 1.) contain / restrict our kids when we’re outside 2.) keep the pack of mutts our varied neighbors have out of our yard; after the fencework was completed, we’d look for a pup to become the family mutt. The timeline for this was to be hopefully no later than late summer, so that the pup would be able to grow and be prepped for an outdoor life come winter.

Well, that didn’t happen, obviously, as we haven’t even gotten to spring yet. So, we’ve got a pup inside the house, as she’s too young to fend off the other dogs and it’s too cold outside for her.

[*grrr*]

So, we’re hoping to speed up plans on fencework once funds come available. I need to keep those murderous sons-of-bitches out of the yard. Yes, murderous. They killed our cats.

It’s kind of to be expected that a family of cats might need to take some time to adjust when moving–hey, this window is mine, that corner is mine–whatever. Okay, let me back up a second and define the plural family as two in our case. Anyway, the cats had a nice time trying to adjust to our new home and had left many markings and protesting gestures all over the house. I finally saw an end to cleaning up messes about a month or two later, and then; spring came and for whatever reason they started leaving messes for me to clean, again. One day, shortly after cleaning up a fresh mess, I get presented a new one in the exact same spot. That’s it–cats outside for the day. One came back that evening; the other scared us and came back a week later. Regardless, both did come back, and did so unharmed. The one actually began to ask to go out, which wasn’t surprising, as he’d always had an interest in the outdoors and would slip out whenever he’d gotten a chance.

Awesome; these cats are seemingly cool with being indoor/outdoor cats–something I’d loved about the cats I’d had as a child.

Well, unfortanetely, that didn’t turn out. Several weeks later, the one that started asking to be let out regularly disappeared. A week or so later I’d found a part of an animal in the yard, but didn’t connect it to my missing cat as it didn’t resemble my cat.

A month later, I’d let the other cat out–he, too, disappeared. I found him–or most of him–a couple days later in the barn surrounded by dog prints. And no, I don’t feel as though I’m not jumping to conclusions, as I’ve chased the neighbors’ dogs out of my yard and out of my barn ever since we moved in.

Anyway. I need to keep those mongrels out my yard before putting any animals out there.

[In the somewhat near future we also plan to raise a few chicks for egg production; and an interesting little thing happens whence we raise chicks–we’re given permission, per state law, to fire upon dogs that are suspected or guilty of agitating or harming livestock. I’m planning on putting a camera on our coop after we build it, and getting some sort of non-lethal weapon.]

[*sigh*]

So, yeah, we have a dog.

…and it’s in the house.

…and I hate dogs in houses.

…and I can hardly wait to be able to move it outside.

Thanks for reading;

–J

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# Weechat, Mastodon and Memories
## Fri 03 Feb 2023 09:32:56 AM EST

So, I made just a quick note last night in case I forgot to write something this morning about the ways in which I wasted time yesterday. Guess I’ll touch on that now;

# Fighting Weechat:

I’m not sure what I was doing or thinking, but I realized that it was possible for me to try and use Weechat outside of MobaXterm on my Windows machine, as MobaXterm is providing Cygwin. […and I just remembered what brought me to Weechat; the other day I was playing with ZNC, and moved on to changing my laptop’s Weechat settings to reflect that.]

Anyway, that was an awesomely frustrating adventure; I discovered that I had to make a number of changes to my Weechat configuration in order to get things to display at least partially correct–the customizations I’d made to make it look all nice and pretty on my Linux machines didn’t translate well on the win-box. At any rate, I finally have something usuable. Unfortunately, I discovered that I can’t run it through a Windows terminal and then decide to launch MobaXterm without killing it; I can, however, launch MobaXterm and then start an instance of Weechat in Windows Terminal or through the regular ol’ command prompt.

Honestly, though, I’m better off visually firing up an instance of Weechat on one of the other machines.

# Mastodon:

So, while I was playing with Weechat my eyes caught a glimpse of a random tweet about Twitter killing free access to the API. I couldn’t believe it. Okay, yeah, I could. But it upset me; to think that the API was going to become paywalled after having been freely accessible for all the years. Sure, I’m not a programmer or scripter, nor am I any influential person with a need to stay on top and connected to social media; but I am someone that has made use of the API through tools and scripts created by several talented individuals. Something like eight years ago, I had managed the online media accounts for the local emergency management agency–in fact, I had created the presence nearly twenty years ago. [Dear God, has it really been that long? Is the Internet *really* that old?]

Anyway, when Twitter rolled around, I saw a great opportunity for something to be done locally–and I saw that I wasn’t the only one. Some of the first “bots” were sharing information that was important to some–if not many–users of the service; out in California people were able to get information on fires, earthquakes, road hazards and so on–so why not bring that to a sleepy little town in Kentucky? And, it turned out, I was smart in doing so. I gained a small following on twitter–and back then, part of my sell was that people could use it to sign up for SMS alerts from the EM. Sadly, the SMS gateway was eventually shut down, but by then a dozen Twitter clients were around, and even the offical Twitter app worked fairly well. Around that time also came the advancement of Facebook Pages, which initially had “official” hooks to the Twitter API; I was in heaven–two major rising social media platforms with ways to connect and share information with the public at zero cost! [Of course, Facebook began to close off some of those hooks and wall things up–but it was kind of expected, as Facebook had never been as open as Twitter was. And then came Facebook turning their nose up to Google, Twitter, and pretty much everyone that was somehow competing in the social media space.]

…so, to try and bring myself back to the point I think I’m trying to make, I took advantage of the free access to the Twitter API; I created hooks to the EM’s main site and to the EM’s Facebook Page thanks to Twitter’s API. I shared articles on varying disaster and safety topics, posted weather bulletins and alerts; I did my part to try and help make my little part of the world a safer place–and I couldn’t have done it so damned well without my free access to the API.

…and what pisses me off, to be quite frank, is that despite the (questionably) necessary reaping of bots from Twitter, I thought that what I just expressed–that safe hometown information sharing–was part of Musk’s vision of Twitter. And now, I learn that, no, money is unfortunately more important.

*sigh*

At the same time that I was messing around with Weechat, I was listening to The Best Podcast in the Universe(tm) a.k.a. No Agenda. Still internally fuming at the thoughts of my future inability to do what I’d once done–which doesn’t really matter to me, as I don’t do it anymore, but still–I hear Adam plug NoAgendaSocial.com, and I figure, yeah, sure, let’s check out Mastodon. See, while I have unplugged myself from the Internet for several years, now–at least compared to the ways in which I had been active–I knew of Mastodon, and knew that while the servers are individual and decentralized, they are also still connected. I knew that I could claim one server as a home, and explore the universe from there. I’d just not taken the time to check it out.

…so, I’m now on Mastadon and presently residing at the NAS server.

I just wonder if I’ll be able to get the same level of information I once had via Twitter in this universe. Already, I can see that it’s very splintered and untamed–untamed depending upon which server you call home. I don’t think that I will be sharing some of the things I once shared on Twitter over here–at least not yet. So, I guess my previously stated ideas of becoming more active with my personally served stuff may come to fruition.

# Emergency Management:

Okay, since I’d mentioned it… Twitter had killed the EM’s account I don’t know how long ago. I remember hearing that there had been a purge or two of dormant accounts years ago; apparently @harrisonema fell victim to one of those purges. I never saved any of the tweets–never saw a point in it as the bulk of them were links to HarrisonEMA.com posts or NWS-LMK products. If you’re curious, you can google for a Russian or Czech archive of Twitter and see if you can find @harrisonema; I’ve done it, though I can’t remember who’s Twitter archive I’d used. You can also find HarrisonEMA.com in the Wayback Machine, but it’s archive is very incomplete. At some point I moved away from static HTML and went to WordPress–which 1.) made things a lot easier to manage, and 2.) provided me with access to calling Twitter via various plugins.

…and if you’re really into Internet archaeology, one of the GeoCities archives has the pre- .com version of the site; sorry, I can’t remember which archive has it, nor can I remember the exact username or the location. I think the username was HarrisonEM (if not, add an A); if you need to browse by community, I think it was in Andes-something.

# Nonsensical and Pointless Ramblings:

…yeah, this post is definitely filled with those. Apologies for that. But, if you’re here, hopefully you expected that.

Honestly, I kind of amazed at how much I’ve written. I guess I still have it in me, whatever it is.

Thanks for reading;

–J

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