Good morning. Third morning of backyard tenting, our Easter holiday experience in a time of COVID-19. I can report the birds in our neighbourhood are loud.
Keep Practising: S01, E02
Keep Practising: S01, E02. In this time of COVID-19 quarantines, I consider the value of social media platforms to my life.
It’s not Easter without camping. Our COVID-19 response has been to set up in the backyard. David cooks the best marshmallows even though he doesn’t like eating them. So sit near him!
We played Cards Against Humanity - Family Edition today. 8 year-old loved it, 4 year-old playing with random selection won the game.
My plan to upgrade my webcam from the iMac camera to a digital camera was foiled by both my cameras being too old to support a clean signal sent via HDMI. Seems I’m stuck with the rubbish webcam.
I had to pay $138 for 454g of ant killer today - and that’s not even COVID-19 pricing! Research indicated that it was the only stuff likely to work for this particular type of critter. Early signs are positive.
I’ve cancelled my web host. Now I’ve got my web page hosted on Fastmail. Nice way to save some money.
It was fun to listen to my friend Emily Dickinson speak on the just Steve podcast. 🎙
My 8-year old son is obsessed with US politics, even though he is Australian. I think he has inherited his Poppy’s genes.
It’s nice to look at my calendar for tomorrow and see that while I have three client calls, all of them are people I know well enough at this point to consider them friends. Turns a business call into an opportunity to catch up.
Keep Practising: S01, E01
Keep Practising: S01, E01.
Andrew starts a podcast. As is the cultural norm, this first podcast episode is dominated with talk about podcasting.
🔗 Link Post: “Introducing 1.1.1.1 for Families”
“Introducing 1.1.1.1 for Families — the easiest way to add a layer of protection to your home network and protect it from malware and adult content. "
I used Cloudflare DNS in the past, but more recently have been using OpenDNS to block non-kid-safe content but its relatively slow. Now I’m moving back to Cloudflare.
I recognise all the dodgy security and behavioural issues at Zoom. At the same time, their service has been rock solid helping me get work done during the day, and in touch with family and friends at night.
PSA: If your home network goes down, don’t assume it’s the fault of a device. It might just be a dodgy Ethernet cable. Of course, I would realise that straight away and not waste 2 hours diagnosing various other possible causes.
I’ve rebuilt my Raspberry Pi and am once again avoiding ads, thanks to Pi-hole.
Furniture rearranging day. We converted a bedroom to a kids activity room, reorganised the layout in the study, and created a second home office desk. I’ve surely had my exercise for today.
My Raspberry Pi died. Already missing Pi-hole ad blocking.
I’ve spent the morning rearranging furniture in my study. After a week of Zoom meetings I discovered the lighting was terrible, making my head look like a tomato. Hopefully this change improves things!
I never anticipated that I would experience (and hopefully live through) a pandemic in my lifetime. Our lives - and our dominion over the planet - are fragile. We need to come out of this much more aware as a global society.
🔗 Link Post: “Donald Trump Is a Menace to Public Health”
The entire article is certainly worth reading. It was hard to pick out excerpts because it’s all so well written.
Adam Serwer writing for The Atlantic:
Authoritarian leaders prize loyalty over expertise, and part of the way such leaders determine loyalty is through demanding sycophantic praise from underlings, smoking out those unwilling to bend the knee.
Democracy can be thought of as a garden; if you don’t tend to it, it doesn’t take long to be overtaken by the weeds of alternative, less-preferred civic models.
“Trumpist media outlets, by contrast, have created a bubble of unreality where nothing but the most effusive praise of Trump is acceptable, where anyone who disagrees with or criticizes the president is part of a grand conspiracy to destroy him, and where the only facts that exist are those that reflect well on the president.”
Having denied that the coronavirus was a major issue for months, the president sought to recast himself as an oracle, and conservative media followed suit, shifting their tone from downplaying the severity of the pandemic to praising the heroic efforts of the president to address it.
I’m old fashioned in that I like my news to give me the news, not an opinion. Right-wing media is out of control - pretending to be news but actually delivering propaganda.
The president is a relentless scammer at heart, and even during a pandemic he will attempt to get what he wants while providing as little as possible in return, as though he were trying to save cash by stiffing a contractor.
This pretty much nails it. Everything is for personal gain; not for the collective good. In Trump’s world, everything is a zero-sum game.