In October of 2014, the remnants of Hurricane Gonzalo hit Ireland while I was touring Northern Ireland. 3 years later, Hurricane Ophelia is heading toward Ireland and I’m preparing to head there and tour for a few days off with family before I have business to conduct. Timing is everything.

In preparation for a trip I’m starting tomorrow, I’ve joined Instagram and Swarm, but not necessarily for the reasons you might think, and for the reasons you might think. I’ve spent some time building tools which I use on my site(although not enough), to add location awareness, among other things.

But obviously, professional teams of programmers who spend all day working on things can probably do a better job than I can, so I am taking advantage of tools that automatically send posts made on these services to my site. Many of the people who use my code have pointed out it doesn’t work perfectly with those tools and this gives me an excuse to try and fix it, while posting more to my site.

Chris Aldrich, a user of more social networks and tools than I can shake a stick at(if you don’t believe me, click here), suggested I think of those services as highly customized mobile apps that post to my site. Let’s see how that works out. However, if you aren’t interested in following me on my website, you can continue to follow me elsewhere, including the two latest places. Anything you say on those sites should be pushed back here.

I haven’t logged onto AOL Instant Messenger in a conventional way in some time. I’ve been keeping it logged in through a proxy.

Oath, the successor to AOL, announced that the platform will shut down for good on December 15th.

But today, I shut my instance down. Goodbye two decades of an online identity. Let’s just take a moment there to think about that. The friends and connections made on this service by not just me, but others. We may have moved on to other places, I may have lost touch with some, and migrated to new services with others, but I still think about them now and then.

You can usually find me on Hangouts…until they shut that down, or several alternative platforms.

 

Counting down the minutes till fast time. I know I’m not supposed to focus on that…but I really do not enjoy that aspect of the holiday. To anyone else who is fasting, have an easy one.

There have been times on this site where I have not posted something because it was too technical, or I haven’t distributed it to its normal locations because of the audience. So, I’ve arranged to contribute those topics and thoughts to another site, Gadget Wisdom.

So, when I want to talk about my latest tech obsession, and I do have a few, I’ll be doing it over there. Feel free to subscribe. The site already had it’s own Twitter, Facebook, and other feeds as well.

For those of you Indieweb-inclined…I made sure it supports webmentions and such, and will likely add more of that in the future.