My goal in the coming months is to get my full blogging archive - starting in early 2000 through today and across many different blogs/sites - into a comprehensive PDF and printed book. Then starts the task of figuring out what it all meant.
#A new year. I'm archiving the previous entries and starting the
Drummer outline fresh for 2025.
#
Writing myself a reminder of the next steps to complete my offline blogging archive. I have a Pages document with the text of every blog post I've written -- since 2000 -- on my blogs at mistersugar.com and zuiker.com. Now I want to add my posts from the various other blogs, including this one (Drummer),
Wan Smol Blog (Micro.blog), and
Coconut Wireless (1999). Then maybe use an LLM to explore the themes and connections, and holes, in my writing.
Back in 2013, Beck Tench and I talked about how we might glean such threads.
#
It's time for annual performance reviews at work, and already I'm seeing that the
monthly worknotes I ask my team (and myself) to wrire indeed are helping each person to prepare better self evaluations and feedback for others. In March, I read
Doing weeknotes by Giles Turnbull and that was really good. I also recently came across the
cool website of artist Ahn, who writes weeknotes on her blog. And just now I found Frank McPherson's
Daynotes (also a Drummer blog). Three good reminders to write regularly.
#On Scripting News, Dave
mentions me by name for being first to put a blogroll on a Drummer blog. That was unexpected and nice. It was 19 years ago that I first made it onto Scripting News, first through Dave's reflections about attending the Triangle Bloggers Conference, then my mistersugar pig icon made a
cameo. Thanks Dave for coming to that event and for documenting the little contributions from others. Scripting News is the epitome of notetaking and I've learned much from you.
#I'm adding a blogroll per instructions
here.
It may take me a few tries to get the attributes right. Well, that was easy. I'm currently showing the bloggers category. My full Feedland is
here.
#
I've finally gotten around to addressing the
Duke River of News, which stopped working last year right as we were moving into our new house and I was realizing I needed to focus on my mental wellbeing (explained
here and
here). The Duke river had been working as an advanced form of the Feedland News Product, but something changed and I haven't had time to focus on what might be happening. Now, though, with Feedland.com, I figured I should create a new account just for the Duke feeds and use the built-in news product to serve the Duke river. And I registered
dukeriver.news, which is more intuitive than the previous dukeriver.co. The river is up again. Best would be for me to find a colleague at Duke who can help me determine the best set of tabs and a way to find other feeds we're missing.
#
In the car today, somewhere in the misty mountains of West Virginia, I punched in The Football Show (it's about soccer) on SiriusXM and Ray Hudson on the Grumpy Pundits was talking about
Israel Kamakawiwoole and his beautiful version of Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Charlie Stillitano said the song is on the album Iz, but really the album is
Facing Future and Iz is the biggest word on the cover. I know because Iz himself handed me the CD after he signed it. I blogged about it
here. In the car, I smiled, happy with the memory and always glad to think about soccer.
#
Enjoying my morning coffee with buttered toast and guava jam. I made the jam last night from a carton of yellow guavas that I bought at Costco. The aroma of guavas takes me back to the trails in the hills above Makiki, a refuge with views of Honololu, calls of wild peafowl, ripe guava on the ground, and cool breezes.
#
I'm hoping I'll stumble across an opml list of all the newsfeeds from across the
National Institutes of Health, but for now I'm adding them singly to Feedland as I find them in my searches. The
NIH tab at
scienceblogging.com is where we can read the NIH aggregation.
#I've used the restored Micro.blog tweets import to begin building my archive
here. Since I seem to have deleted all of my tweets in 2014 (during my
social media sabbatical), I've started with a download of recent years. I'll try to get 2007-2014 in there this weekend.
#
Dave
writes about Chat Thing, which he's using for AI interaction with his extensive blog. archive. I wonder if I could use that tool to connect to my own blog archive. I could ask it, for example, to index my
blog posts about each of the Vanuatu islands that I mentioned. I'd want to see
Paama, of course, but also
Lopevi and
Ambrym and
Epi and
Malekula and
Vao and
Efate and
Iririki and
Tanna.#
Just finished the excellent, sad, inspirational series
Alaska Daily.
#
Received for my birthday: 50th anniversary edition of
Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child (and Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck), first edition of
Victory City by Salman Rushdie, a bottle of
Basil Hayden bourbon, an
Indian Food 101 cooking class tonight, and a
friendship bracelet woven by my son.
#
Family movie night, just me and Erin and Oliver, was with
Finding Forrester, one of my favorites. The film ends with
Israel Kamakawiwoole singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow, and that took me back to
that day I met the Hawaiian superman.
#
I'm in Bethesda tonight after a drive from North Carolina to drop Malia at American University. Soon after we left Chapel Hill, near Falls Lake, I glanced up to see a
bald eagle soaring high above, it's white tail feathers brilliant against the cloudless blue sky. And on the drive for the next few hours I enjoyed an endless display of redbud tree blossoms. When Malia took over the driving, I wrote a
haiku. Now I'm about to sleep, ready for a work day down at the
Duke in DC office so close to the White House.
#
No soccer for me today, but another game for Oliver, who scored toward the end and had a last-minute chance to even the game but he got swarmed by defenders. I'm proud of the way he played today; his teammates have improved their passing and pushing to the goal, and I have enjoyed watching their games.
#
I see a
note about the possibility of a News tab. Going to try to figure out how to add one. There must be a header attribute to add. I checked the drummercms template but didn't see anything related to a tab for a news product. I'll sit back and wait for documentation.
#I will add the Links tab, now, too.
#The About tab is back. Thanks, Dave!
#Still nursing this strained calf on this cold, rainy day so couldn't do my usual Saturday work in the woods. Oliver had a soccer game, played well and would have scored if the goalie hadn't come out and knocked him sideways (for a yellow card that would have been a goal and red in the
English Premier League). I came home and sketched ideas for the hallway desk that will be my workspace in the new house. Watching the UNC-Virginia men's basketball game now.
#
Updated the public link to the Drummer
glossary. Now let's see if I remember how to use it. For example, tomorrow I will watch a few of the
English Premier League matches.
#
Updating additional outlines needed by my Drummer blog and Feedland news products (such as the
Duke River of News) by removing the previous public links. But I'm not seeing my About tab or Links tab, and the OPML headers have old links. Will have to look into this, and maybe post a comment to the Github Drummer repository issues.
#
Speaking of muscles, as Dave was updating Drummer over the last few weeks I wasn't able to post to this blog. But writing that gastric post just now, and hearing the satisfying blip once the blog was rebuilt, sparked that ol' blogging muscle memory. I may not be able to run and play for the next couple of weeks, but I can blog!
#Home again after my mid-day visit to the ortho urgent care. I seem to have suffered a
medial gastrocnemius strain. Hope I can heal as fast I felt I was going for the ball when this injury happened this morning. Such a perfect morning for soccer. I had a good shot for goal, and a couple of tap ins because I was in the right spot at the right time. Such fun. Injuries suck.
#The Washington Post has a
feature story exploring how "Americans over 50 are doing extreme sports their grandparents never imagined." Not sure I should read it. I'm 52 and sitting in the Duke Orthopaedics Urgent Care waiting to have my leg evaluated. I played soccer this morning with the guys (a few of them over 50, others in their 40s, a couple younger) until I got kicked in the calf. Let me heal and let me play!
#
I found a pile of scrap CAT6 cable in the house that we're having built, so my weekend project was learning how to crimp ethernet plugs to the ends.
#
I've been telling people that I follow Tottenham Hostpur in the English Premier League. I guess that means I should watch them play today, even though the other games look more interesting. Leeds and Tottenham Forest are fun to watch, and Wolves have talent but a bad record so far this season.
#The NYTimes has this 'farewell to Stomp'
feature to mark the show's Broadway close. Back in October, I
wrote about how Stomp inspired one of my Peace Corps activities in Vanuatu.
#
The day was so warm that I was outside again (after watching Brentford beat Liverpool), making a second, smaller firewood rack. There's a photo
here on Wan Smol Blog. I'm happy with those stacks of wood, which represent a lot of effort over the last couple of years to gather, saw, chop, and stack. Oliver asked me why I've gone to the trouble to make the racks. I explained that it's all in preparation for the new house and the fireplace on the screened patio.
#An observed holiday today, Oliver is at school, Erin is with our daughters in Baja California, and the house is quiet. A good day to clean out my clothes closet, refresh my blogs, read a book, drink coffee in the solitude.
#New header image of a box turtle. See more photos and posts about turtles on my
Wan Smol Blog.
#
Hello, world. Happy new year.
#Justin Watt has time on his hands in a new city (he and Stephanie moved to Monterey Bay after Stephanie earned her doctorate of physical therapy), so he let Craiglist know that he wanted to help others with their projects. Justin wrote a
detailed blog post about why he did this, and what happened next.
#