Being a post on the many things I’ve read, half-read, meant to read.
But first, here’s Joe with a San Diego weather follow-up: The Jan. 22 Floods Displaced More Than 1,000 San Diegans from Their Homes. The Bruce Sterling prediction for the future from back when he was doing Viridian remains as true as ever: “the future is old people, in cities, afraid of the sky.” I have personally escaped much impact beyond wet roads and not being able to go to the beach but I know this will pass.
BBedit 15 came out recently. It’s never been my favorite editor but I’ve had a license since the 1990s. The more you explore what it does the more you realize it can do most anything. The document I’m pulling the links in this post from is sitting in BBEdit right now. My favorite thing back in the day was columnar editing and multi-document regular expression search-and-replace. Terrific for taking content sent in spreadsheets and wrangling it into HTML tables.
During the 1920 U.S. Census–The Fourteenth Census of the United States–my great grandfather was 13 years old and lived in Pasadena. There’s a document with the neighborhood census data and it reminds me how much I love the polyglot multicultural aspect of Los Angeles as I look at surnames like Mendibles, Hidashi, Grosberg, and Miller.
This also reminds me that on my todo list is to visit the gravesite of his father, Elmer Trujillo Mendibles, in Altadena. What can I say, I love a cemetery and I love Los Angeles.
And did you know that about 1 in 10 restaurants in the U.S. serve Mexican food but Los Angeles tops the list.
I find San Diego’s Mexican food best but it is my home.
I’m not quite ready to join RSS Club but I appreciate it.
Speaking of which, Anil Dash’s latest “Wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement is right on.
More bottom-up surveillance-free formats please world!
Recently I added Mastodon comment import to my site. If I post a link to Mastodon using my @artlung@xoxo.zone account, and it gets a reply, then it will be pulled in here. I use hacks: mastodon-to-wp-comments.php and mastodon-upload.pl. It required minor editing to work properly with my own permalink structure and of course customizing the default account for myself but it’s great. And as noted: This is unidirectional and not realtime: it is not an ActivityPub implementation.
And speaking of jwz, he pointed out that all the issues of the magazine Boardwatch was put online at the Internet Archive: Boardwatch Magazine:
Boardwatch Magazine, informally known as Boardwatch, was initially published and edited by Jack Rickard. Founded in 1987, it began as a publication for the online Bulletin Board Systems of the 1980s and 1990s and ultimately evolved into a trade magazine for the Internet service provider (ISP) industry in the late 1990s. The magazine was based in Lakewood, Colorado, and was published monthly.
Also on my mind recently was Ted Nelson. And jwz relates the fact that he once visited the team at Netscape to tell them they were messing up the internet (just as they were being lauded as the darlings of the www). Hypertext emerges from his well to shame the tech industry:
He came to Netscape to, basically, yell at us for fucking up his dream, with our unidirectional hyperlinks, our documents that were not editable by all readers, our complete lack of version control and transclusion. This halfassed abomination we had built, this was no MEMEX. This garbage had set back the dream at least 50 years.
We just sat there and took it, no lie detected.
I am overdue to watch serial experiments lain [wiki], which sounded cool when I first heard of it a very long time ago but I’ve never made the effort. Perhaps I will.
What’s next today? More rain I think. Ugh.
It’ll be a few more days before I can get in the ocean again. Not great for my mood.
I’m making due.
Onward.
