My high school reunion is coming up. I remain uncertain about going. Do I want to see people who, for the most part, cut ties after high school? Then I found out, in different rooms in the same venue space, the school is having 60th, 50th, 45th, 40th, 35th, 30th, 25th, 20th, 10th, and 5th reunions. That’s a lot of alumni in one place. Oddly, the 65th, 70th, and 75th get the day before. Wondering if it is worth revisiting the past.
This was originally part of an introduction at IWC Online in 2020, but I’d never posted it. As my 10th anniversary of joining the Indieweb chat is today, I thought I’d post on it.
“Your high school’s yearbook club just graduated and knows HTML”—Chloe Weil
I first heard about the IndieWeb on March 6, 2014 when Amber Case, who co-founded IndieWebCamps, appeared episode 80 of the now defunct podcast, In Beta, talking about the upcoming IWC SF.
The ideas meshed with what I myself thought…you should have a website and post there. I’d flirted with websites, and by 2014, I had been writing blog entries elsewhere under a variety of different usernames and identities regularly for years. I had tried to resurrect my website because I was tired of the only identity people could find being one on someone else’s site.
My First IndieWebCamp
I found out that there was an upcoming Indiewebcamp in my area. So my involvement with the Indieweb physically began on April 26, 2014 when I visited my first IndieWebCamp, IWC NYC 2014.
IndieWebCamp NYC 2014 Day 1
IndieWebCamps
The original IndieWebCamp, in Portland Oregon, which was later renamed the IndieWeb Summit, has been going on since 2011. A UK event joined in 2012, but 2014, the year I joined, was the first year we really took the idea on the road. We had events at MIT, Online, San Francisco, New York, the UK, and for the first time, the Portland event had counterparts running concurrently in New York and Berlin.
I continued to participate in Indiewebcamps until 2020, when the pandemic put that on hold, and this past December, we finally got a US based one together again.
Evolution
Here is an early screenshot of my site from April 2014. My site has changed its look many times, but the data still remains the same.
Not much. When I joined in 2014, I wasn’t much of a developer. I have gotten better, building my knowledge of IndieWeb and WordPress concepts and helping to maintain Indieweb plugins for WordPress.
As a community, when I started we had Microformats and Webmentions, IndieAuth was only something one person had implemented. We’ve added Micropub and Microsub and continued to iterate on the other building blocks.
So, the U.N. Security Council passed Resolution 2728…which notes that the taking of hostages is prohibited under international law and demands the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages. I don’t expect Hamas to do that, and I don’t think the U.N. Security Council does either. The other part of the demand is a ceasefire demand for the month of Ramadan, leading to a lasting sustainable ceasefire. The U.N. Security Council does expect, I’d imagine, Israel to do that, despite the fact the last pause in the fighting was interrupted by Hamas.
After field testing my mini PC mobile setup, I realized I didn’t bring a speaker. No wonder the Youtube video I queued up didn’t work. Okay, time for a checklist.
After all this work I’m doing today to get Bluesky syndication working…I hope someone replies on Bluesky.
Looks like my syndicating to Bluesky is still a bit messed up. Ah, well. Work in progress.
Writing code at a hotel. Wondering if I’ve gone a bit overboard on the mobile setup. Portable monitor, mini PC, keyboard and trackball.
Heading back home to NYC in the morning. Left home on February 17th, 18 days ago. I miss my bed.
It’s Leap Day and I’m in Sofia, Bulgaria. I’m about to finish a two week deployment. It’s been 4 years since my last deployment here ended in the pandemic. I can hear the sound of planes flying over the hotel.
Testing syndication from my website to Bluesky. Have been meaning to do this for a while.
In my previous post, Finding The Right Outdoor Air Quality Monitor, I laid out my decision making process for purchasing the AirGradient Open Air outdoor air quality monitor kit.
Posted pictures of my new air quality sensor construction over at the tech site I contribute to. Excitedly hoping it doesn’t fail like the previous one.
One of the biggest mistakes of critics of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza is attempting to compare the war to a past modern war (post WWII) or battle that is not what Israel is conducting in Gaza. 🧵 pic.twitter.com/StGeCgcLra
This is probably the best analysis of why the situation in Gaza is often misconstrued by the international community that I’ve seen. I’ve tried to repost it below, with appropriate attribution, as it was sent out as a series of X/Twitter posts.
The Author is John Spencer, who according to his bio is an expert on Urban Warfare and the Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern Warfare Institute at West Point. Sounds like a man with the credentials to speak with authority on the subject.
One of the biggest mistakes of critics of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza is attempting to compare the war to a past modern war (post WWII) or battle that is not what Israel is conducting in Gaza.
Israel is not conducting a counterinsurgency, counter-terror campaign (it may later) in a semi-permissive environment with host nation support, or fighting a single battle against a small terror force that has temporarily seized an urban area.
Initially I too tried to explain that the closest comparison of Israel’s initial attack of Gaza City was the 2016-2017 Battle of Mosul. As in a city attack of an enemy held city where the defenders were using human shields & had prepared a complex defense. But, even Mosul fails on multiple levels to compare in context to Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. None of the battles of Raqqa, Aleppo, Marawi, Mosul, or Fallujah are comparable to Israel’s operations for many reasons.
Again, Israel is not trying to find a few terrorists embedded in an urban environment where they have host-nation support and 90% of the civilians are not combatants or are not present such as 2004 Fallujah with 3,000 enemy fighters in a single city or the 2016-2017 Mosul with 5,000 ISIS fighters in a single city.
The IDF is fighting a full-scale war against a terrorist military of over 30,000 fighters with a massive arsenal of rockets, who has spent decades & millions of dollars digging an underground world of hundreds of miles of tunnels woven into the civilian society & with the design to reverse engineer the current laws of war (lawfare) to achieve their strategic goals.
Unlike other battles, the Hamas strategic goals are not to hold terrain or defeat Israel’s military but to sacrifice their civilians (so not human shields, but human sacrifices) to cause the international community to force Israel to stop their counter-attack.
No modern military has faced 13,000 plus rockets being launched over their heads at their homes while conducting their war/battle/operation.
Nor since World War II has a military fought in a situation where hundreds (now 136) of their own citizens (to include babies, women, elderly) are being illegally held hostage inside the combat area and a strategic factor in their timeline of the war.
Israel is not fighting in one city. It is fighting in five major cities. It is fighting a real and definable existential threat to the survival of their citizens and nation.
IMO, the fact is that Israel has followed the laws of war, has implemented civilian harm mitigation steps that no military has implemented in modern urban battles and people still attempt a moral equivalence with out of context battles.
Looks like I’ll be ringing in 2024 with my Lyft driver.
The title sort of says it all. Three years of changing my behavior, getting criticized for still wearing a mask(which I’m not sure is anyone’s business any more than if I wore a bowler hat), my number finally came up.
It was a surprise to many people, including me. And to be honest, despite keeping up on things, I’m not an expert. I keep asking myself what chain of events led to this, but I’ll likely never figure out.
The incubation period of COVID is such that during the period I could have gotten it I was on a plane(and no one sat in the seat next to me), a train(also no one next to me), and walking around outside. Could I have been too close to someone when I took an outdoor mask break? Maybe. Who knows?
As of now, people who were close to me when I subsequently calculated I was probably contagious have not reported getting ill themselves. That was also hard for me to determine. I’ve had every COVID booster, which is supposed to reduce symptoms. And the symptoms felt like a sinus infection…which I get multiple times a year. I sniffle all year round, and there were several people where I was reporting sinus issues because of pollen that was flying around, so I made an assumption.
So, this gets to the…what do I learn from this? I’m still not sure. I don’t know how often I should test when I feel no symptoms. I didn’t go to anything when pre-testing was common etiquette. It clearly isn’t now for most people. So, I have come up with a few possible asymptomatic testing ideas and am trying to decide which to adopt.
Test after any plane flight or similar as a confined space with close contact.
Test before and after any gathering. Gathering being in close contact with a group of people for an extended period. Before to ensure not spreading anything unknowingly.
Test after being in an outdoor space with other people for an extended period of time.
Assume any respiratory illness or distress could be COVID and test.
So, I have been in isolation for 5 days as of tomorrow. The CDC has a page of advice on this. If you had symptoms, Day 0 is the day of symptom onset, regardless of your first test. Day 1 is the first full day after the symptoms start.
They advise staying at home for 5 days and isolating from others. You can end isolation after 5 days if you have no symptoms or if you have been fever free for 24 hours after Day 5.
Regardless of when you end isolation, you are supposed to, until Day 11, avoid being around high risk individuals and wear a mask. I got stuck in my parent’s guest room, and they are high risk individuals, so we’ll see what I figure out. They note that with two sequential negative tests 48 hours apart, you may remove your mask sooner than day 10.
There is also the risk of COVID Rebound. COVID rebound is defined as a recurrence of COVID symptoms and/or receiving a positive COVID test after having the disease and then testing negative. It has been reported to occur between two and eight days after initial recovery.
Of course, all of this is the advice of the US CDC. I checked the UK’s NIH website, and they don’t say anything about masks. The Canadian authorities state you should stay home until you experience no symptoms, and then wear a mask for 10 days. No wonder I’m confused.
I’m also trying to figure out the issue of cleaning…again for the benefit of high risk individuals. I have laundry piling up, and this building has a shared laundry room. So, how long before I put any laundry in? Do I disinfect the machine after? How? What do I do with things and surfaces I touched? The information on how long the virus might stay on a surface is somewhat varied. However, the general agreement is that the chance of catching COVID through surface contact is slim. Still want to clean everything though.
As an analytical person, I want to refine my behavior as a result of this, but I’m not sure exactly how. What do others think?
