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September 2024 Twenty-four posts
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Got up before dawn, walked 5 miles, saw dolphin, sea lion, fish, lobster carcasses, the Mushroom House, walked on rocks, broke a flip flop, rode waves at Blacks and Shores, scavenged 6 kinds of washed-up eyewear, caught many waves, watched my cousin catch many waves, and stayed out too long.
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I’ve been riding waves a while. Sometimes I can find @surfline footage of rides through @dawnpatrol.app … and I’ve been learning to use @procreate Dreams to animate overlays on the rides. For now they’re in Instagram Stories though I intend to put them on websites I have better control over too. Always more to learn and improve in and out of the water.
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Played with the surfers at Tourmaline today and got inadvertently capped by @dronedudeed
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As I left the OB a musician was playing “Hey Joe”
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During this morning’s session I caught @quantumprimordial taking off on a wave!
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Got a flu shot. Then PB. Was scheduled for COVID boost and flu shot but out of stock where I went so it’ll have to wait. As I left I chatted about ocean conditions with an elderly tourist couple from AZ who asked me about The Mighty Pacific. I wish I’d done some Harris electioneering on those nice Zonies!
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Lola Blanc’s new single: The Silence
I mentioned her in my post Musical Miscellany back in March. She’s still terrific. Listen and watch now.
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I like being able to look at game footage to see what I’m doing right and wrong in the water. I’ve also had a run of being in the water watching other people—kids, amateurs, experts—bodysurfing. Every wave’s a lesson. #stoke #bodysurfing
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Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair
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In Golden Gate Park with my sweetie earlier today
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Yesterday evening we went to Twin Peaks which overlooks San Francisco, to the east.
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YOU’RE PART OF THE PIECE NOW #SanFrancisco
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“We are the Custard Pie Appreciation Consortium”
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News of the Day
It seems I’ve not blogged much lately.
For why, Joe?
Well, I think I’ve been thinking, deeply.
That’s how I view it, anyway.
So, let’s change things up. It’s time to do some blogging.
Consider this post the lid on top of the pot of my simmering brain pan starting to make the tell-tale sound of the lid oscillating.
I got my latest COVID-19 booster this morning. I’d been waiting on my health plan to have the latest available, available. And now it’s in me. The molecules and compounds bouncing against my bodily humours to make my body stronger.
And so, thanks for reading.
More soon.
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Talking about Writing
In my head I have a quote I attribute to Rod Serling:
A writer writes.
I love The Twilight Zone. I still do. I saw It’s a Good Life at age 11 and was scared as much as I could be scared. Later I acquired a book called The Twilight Zone Companion which featured synopses of the episodes and other production background. I would mark the episodes I had seen. There was no way I knew to watch old episodes but on television, in syndication.
A writer writes.
That quote among the oldest quotes in my head. I have not so far found a source. The quote is not on Rod Serling’s Wikiquote page or on his Good Reads page as of right now. Maybe he said it. Maybe not. Maybe it’s apocryphal. Or truncated. Or misremembered. I can’t say. I’d love to be corrected on the quote.
Young me liked things which were pithy and zen-like. “A writer writes.” might be my edit of a larger quote. Or maybe it was said in The Twilight Zone. Or I’m misremembering it all. Apocrypha or not, it’s great. It appeals to me the same way golf-clubs vs golf-books thought experiment appeals to me.
And so, action.
A writer writes.
Part of a traditional Homebrew Website Club is “a quiet writing period followed by discussion” (see HWC). That’s something we did in the HWC events gRegor and I co-organized pre-COVID.
The excuse to write is always worth taking. And an event with other folks who write, or want to write, or used to write, that’s great stuff. The “writing” page on the IndieWeb wiki has a lot of great links and thoughts. I am planning to attend Homebrew Website Club – Writing Edition (a Zoom event) on October 8th, 2024.
Homebrew Website Club – Writing Edition is about the writing part of being on the web. So no matter who you are, if you write and you publish your writing on your website (no matter what type of writing) or you would be interested in doing this, this meetup is for you.
James is hosting this one. He’s thoughtful about writing. Read a piece of his from June. An excerpt:
Perhaps there are seasons of writing, like how the seasons effect my rose. My feeling earlier this week could be equated to spring: I was excited for the opportunity ahead, but there was nothing in particular I wanted to say. I wanted to be, to enjoy the time. Then there are the periods where I sit down and write, when I have many ideas and can articulate them on paper, whether in notes, poetry, essays, or blog posts.
See you there.
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Actually everything is healthcare
In theory I write code for a living.
But the “lung” from my online handle is the echo of my career in medicine. I practiced Respiratory Therapy for under 10 years but even now I look at things from that perspective.
I was reading today’s California Sun and saw that locally a man named Keith Galen Bach died at the Men’s Central Jail. People die every day, of course. But in this case Mr. Bach was awaiting a charge at the jail. He had diabetes which required insulin to control. He asked for care, and his insulin monitor beeped. And he was denied care. And what happens to a diabetic denied insulin is that their blood becomes more acidic. And more, and more. And they develop a ketoacidosis. The “keto” in that word are the byproducts of the body starving–unable to process sugar, you get ketones in the blood. “Acidosis” is nicely self-explanatory. I drew blood–arterial blood–to measure the blood gases of people in that condition many times. They hyperventilate to blow off more carbon dioxide, the body compensating for disordered sugar processing by trying to expel every bit of CO2 possible to try to make the body ok. If the condition is mild, or temporary, it probably helps. But for a diabetic known to require insulin, it’s not enough.
And so, Keith Bach died of his well-understood medical condition.
Because jailers are in the business of healthcare. They are responsible for the death of that unfortunate soul. It sounds like he was ignored. And the medical devices responsible for indicating trouble were ignored.
My caveat is that I have only one news story to go on. I can’t possibly know the totality of the circumstance. But it sure looks like system failure.
A jailer is actually in healthcare.
I wrote a related comic about it during COVID: Best Practices.
Actually, everything is healthcare. And that ought to sober us up. Healthcare is hard to do right. It gets things wrong. It can do more harm than good at times.
But the best of healthcare is to dispassionately look at mistakes and correct them. It’s to care equally for those who had a hand in their own disease with the same care as those who we deem innocent. It’s to do good for as many as we can.
Everything is healthcare.
Also in newsletters today Google’s AI Mushrooms Could Have ‘Devastating Consequences’.
People eat mushrooms. Not all mushrooms are edible. People use resources to make evaluations about what mushrooms are edible. And what mushrooms might incapacitate or even kill people.
Google is an information resource. What happens when Google, as part of its function, puts incorrect information front-and-center? To wit: making incorrectly identified mushrooms high in search results that people use as reference.
I can’t help but think everything is healthcare. I don’t really remember a time when I didn’t think that way. Maybe I can convince you to start thinking about things that way too.
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A person with a website is powerful.
Yesterday I learned Ken Klippenstein posted a document on the web. On X, he posted a link to his commentary on his own website. That page also included a link to that document, a dossier on JD Vance. Not soon after, he was suspended from the service X for it. As of this morning, he remains suspended.
Will his account remain suspended? How would a person in that situation get an answer to that question?
We’re far enough along in the history of “social media” that we all known someone who has had an account suspended or banned from some service. Sometimes such an action was a fair decision, sometimes not.
Human society is made of conflicting people and conflicting laws. It may seem obvious to say “well you must follow the law” or “you have to follow the rules” but that is not really enough of an answer. Some laws and rights are in conflict. In fact, laws and rights are often in tension with each other. Journalism’s history is filled with examples like that. I’m a big fan of the movie The Post, which is about the story behind the story of the Washington Post’s decision to publish The Pentagon Papers. If you have 2 hours to spare and never thought about how journalists and publishers make decisions about documents that are in the public interest it’s a solid primer.
That case, in hindsight, is clearer than Klippenstein’s case, which has not entered any sort of court of law as of my writing. It may yet, but I won’t hold my breath for X, the name of what was Twitter after Elon Musk bought it, will make reasonable decisions about a journalistic free speech case.
I don’t want to get into specific details about the case but one thing that strikes me is that the link he made seems not to have been to “sensitive documents” as such, but to a web page which linked to the documents. The link is this string of characters:
https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/read-the-jd-vance-dossier
I read that link soon after learning about it. The link is words from Klippenstein, and a link to the actual document. He sets the context in a way I find convincing:
It reportedly comes from an alleged Iranian government hack of the Trump campaign, and since June, the news media has been sitting on it (and other documents), declining to publish in fear of finding itself at odds with the government’s campaign against “foreign malign influence.”
I disagree. The dossier has been offered to me and I’ve decided to publish it because it’s of keen public interest in an election season. It’s a 271-page research paper the Trump campaign prepared to vet now vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance. As far as I can tell, it hasn’t been altered, but even if it was, its contents are publicly verifiable. I’ll let it speak for itself.
I read some of the large PDF document at that link, on his own website, “kenklippenstein dot com.” It seems credible enough to me. It also doesn’t seem particularly sensitive. The rationale seems to be that because it contains personal addresses it triggers rules about “doxing” (revealing personal information) and thus must be banned. I’m not sure that makes sense. We expect candidates to the offices of President and Vice-President to be put under scrutiny. But reasonable people might disagree about whether that’s fair or not.
Earlier this year I talked about mistrust-based technology decisions. For me, the ban from X for this link is a fine reminder that the only website you can rely on is your own.
During an IndieWeb meetup Wednesday I talked about the ethos of using services like Instagram and regularly doing a calculation: “what are the restrictions and annoyances of using the service?” vs “what utility do I get from the service?” Depending on the result of that equation I can choose to stop using it or stick with it. This blog you’re reading was once powered by Blogger. At some point I made a different decision and left that service. I once regularly checked my MySpace page and it was a valuable place to keep in touch with friends and family and my interests. Now I don’t.
Given the flow of this post I find myself sneaking up on a decision to leave a service, but there’ll be no silo-quit punchline for me today. But I do want to report that as I sometimes do, I posted the link to Facebook, which I keep mostly for family and friend-reasons. My aunts and uncles are there. Family photos are there. And I have many Comic-Con friends there. I used it to coordinate tickets for the 2025 Comic-Con just this past weekend.
Anyway, I posted the link that got Klippenstein banned to Facebook because I found it an interesting commentary on the state of the media landscape. I didn’t view that link as particularly suspect. Once can read his commentary and not actually visit the link to the dossier itself. To me, it’s the dossier that is sensitive.
But the punchline is that a few hours after posting that link it was removed:
I’m not sure that was the right “decision” for Facebook to take. I’m not really sure it was wrong. But I do think that I like Klippenstein’s rationale for posting his commentary. And I am free to post my own comments on my own site without much fear of removal. I’m glad that I have stuck with having a website that I am in control of. I might not be newspaper in 1971 but in some sense I am a publisher. I am not a whistleblower like Ellsberg. I am not a journalist.
I am a person with my own website.