Nightbitch, 2024 - ★★½

Strong start, faded in the third act.

You can continue to doomscroll the news reading US politics, or you can consider whether salad excites you. If you choose the latter, Hemispheric Views E129 is for you!

Pizza shop stools.

I hate anxiety, especially the work-induced kind. Neither my parents nor grandparents held senior positions across their working careers. It makes me consider how impacted they were by similar challenges. I wonder how I am managing to hold it all together and even why I continue trying to do so.

I’m not sure I will be able to deal with another 4 years of Trump news. Not my country, not my President, but I can’t help but think Australia will suffer at least some collateral damage. Get ready for the era of US oligarchs, featuring tech bros.

I’ve been re-engaging with my blog, and the micro.blog community, over the past few days. Still the nicest place on the internet.

Severance S2E01 was weird! Not that I should be surprised by that.

I’m playing around with Pixelfed. Have set up my account and posted a single photo.

Good Friends and Dead Websites

I’m really not qualified to own and manage a website. 🤷

In attempting to tweak a few things last night I broke everything. The site was down and dead. 💀

I was stuck. I couldn’t fix it. 😬

Enter my pal @Burk. While I slept in my Australian timezone, he worked to fix it in his US one. 🤖

Also enter micro.blog founder and owner @manton. He responded to my help email overnight and also worked on it like the internet greybeard wizard he is. 🧙‍♂️

I woke up and the site is back. 🔙

Thank you, friends, Jason and Manton. I’m fortunate to be connected to you both. 🙏

Blog Question Challenge 2025

Thanks for the tag, Gabz.

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

It is so long ago, it’s hard to remember why. Was there even a why? I was a nerd interested in technology, and blogs were the hot new thing. There was a cool platform called Movable Type and I wanted to try it out. So I started a blog. This was all a very long time ago.

My blog varies between a diary, an opinion platform, a software review centre and a place to dump thoughts, photos, audio and video. A blog in incredibly versatile!

What platform are you using to manage your blog, and why do you use it?

I use micro.blog and I can’t picture myself moving away from that platform for the foreseeable future, even though my friend Adam is building a cool new thing called Neato, and my friend Vincent has Scribbles. For my purposes, micro.blog is perfect.

Have you blogged on other platforms before? 

I’ve used Wordpress, Blot and Movable Type.

How do you write your posts?

However I feel like it. Sometimes I use the micro.blog app. Right now I’m drafting this in Paper. I might use iA Writer or Ulysses or MarsEdit. I might use Drafts. That’s the beauty of Markdown. It doesn’t matter what I use and I can bounce between them freely. I love that.

What’s your favorite post on your blog?

I love all my children the same.

Looking at what my readers like, my Duel of the Defaults post that stemmed from the viral podcast sensation which was Episode 097 of Hemispheric Views is clearly the favourite with 2,464 views over the lifetime of me tracking stats with Tinylytics. That one page accounts for 16.7% of all my website traffic.

Any future plans for the blog?

Nothing really. I haven’t changed anything for quite a while. It’s doing its job and I’m okay with that.

Who will participate next?

I would like to hear from Rach Smith and Scotty Jackson.

I couldn’t be bothered walking back from the pub where I had dinner.

My 9-year old is asking how consoles work. This is testing my ability to teach computing hardware principles based on my knowledge that was established 30 years ago. Do I still talk CPU, GPU, RAM/ROM? HDD v SSD?

Our @hemisphericviews with a Tight 45 on the button for 2024.

Kung Fury, 2015 - ★★★★

Funnier now than when I watched it on release.

Paddington in Peru, 2024 - ★★

Lacked the charm of the earlier two. Perhaps it was the different Director.

Robot Dreams, 2023 - ★★★½

Enjoy love where you find it and accept that things may change.

I had a foot massage today. I think it’s the first one I’ve ever had. It was nice - even the painful bits!

I See You, 2019 - ★★★

I chatted throughout, which might make it seem like I wasn’t into it, but I was into it! Although what has Helen Hunt done to her face?

My New Year’s resolution is not to change my PKM app stack for 12 months. OmniFocus plus Obsidian (work), DevonThink (home).

These are lovely words from Tim Klapdor about my podcast Hemispheric Views.

A Year in Podcasts:

Hemispheric Views:

This is the only “guys having a chat” podcast in my feed. I really enjoy the dynamic of these guys and the community they’ve built around them. Recommend: The Battle of the Defaults and the App Defaults craze it created is a great place to start.