Quitting Twitter seems to be all the rage these days, and if you’d like to do that, here’s where you go: https://twitter.com/settings/your_twitter_data

Once you’re there, I humbly suggest downloading the archive of your activity first, then deleting your account. Yes, you will have to wait a few hours to a few days for the archive to become available, then download it. But that keeps you from the rage-quit impulse which is probably good whether you like it or not.

Me? I’ve exited 5 different Twitter accounts in the last week. But not because of Elon Musk.

I’ve finally been cleaning up my digital footprint, and frankly I’d forgotten that I even had different Twitter accounts. It’s not like I was using any of them, and in most cases I hadn’t for quite a few years. They were accounts that made sense at the time for a specific purpose for a specific project. But then, like so many projects, I moved on and never tidied up until now.

In the last few weeks, I’ve been on a colossal cancelation spree, finding, archiving, and deactivating not just Twitter accounts, but all kinds of accounts and profiles all kinds of places from Google to Amazon to Paypal to the dozens of smaller websites & service providers that were just hanging out there, dormant. Some were client-related drafts or experiments that never panned out. Some were bands or businesses of my own that have long since gone defunct. Some were just me being an early adopter and slow leaver. It’s time to leave all of this now.

I’ve also been unsubscribing like mad from everything, everywhere. Opting instead for RSS, where available and relevant. Most things aren’t really relevant anymore, though. It feels good to just stop tracking so much, as there is simply too much sprawling out in my inbox on a daily basis to track.

The truth is that I’m not developing apps these days, not publishing books or podcasts, not making music or stage shows, and certainly not touring internationally. These are all things I did, but I doubt I’ll be doing them again and certainly no time soon. Anything that I did pre-pandemic seems like it could probably use a full-scale reboot anyway. The world gets a do-over, so I’m taking one too.

All this self-canceling does take time, I’m not gonna lie. But it pairs nicely with spending so much time sick and in bed lately, so I just went with it.

Yet I still have plenty more to do! I’m sure this effort will stretch out into the coming weeks as well, but not months. I’ve set a goal of getting deactivated and updated in all my accounts, everywhere, by the onset of 2023, which in case you hadn’t noticed, is lurking right around the corner.

I find it’s best not to do extended sessions, but rather to dip in for 20min or so at a time. That’s enough time to solve a problem should you encounter one (I have to call to cancel an online service?!?), and leave feeling like some progress was made. Do this for too long in one stretch and it can feel like you’re not getting anywhere, when in fact you are.

Have you ever done anything like this? Do you think you might like to? Share your experiences & thoughts in the comments below as you please.

After having a big COVID scare back in March of 2020, and two more this year when people in my immediate circle tested positive, it’s finally my turn to take a ride with the ‘Rona for real. Yup, big blue line on the T in my quicktest recently.

Being sick sucks anytime it happens. Fortunately for me, having been vaccinated and kept my immune system strong, I hope I can steer clear of any hospital emergency rooms or dire consequences of SARS-CoV-2. I got sick a few days ago and think I’m through the worst of it now. I have friends & family members who’ve not be so fortunate. Some have not survived.

There are plenty of debunked myths out there still circulating about COVID (and for my conspiracy-minded friends, the link I provide there is the Mayo clinic, not to agencies like the CDC or the WHO). I am not one to propagate bad science or pseudoscientific superstitions — nor do I give any medical advice, as I am not a doctor and don’t play one on the internet. But I think it might be helpful to share what I am doing with my own body based on my own research and my own discussions with medical professionals. Please, you go talk to your own doctors about your own needs before doing what I do, okay? Okay.

That said, as a result of the pandemic, I’ve gotten pretty serious about a certain basic immunological regimen that I believe has contributed to my health standard over the last few years. In my present state, it should go without saying that it doesn’t work 100% — and I don’t think anything does, do you? Though I do believe that the fact that I’ve been dosing a lot of L-Lysine lately is contributing to my fairly rapid recovery, and being as exposed as I’ve been as often as I have over the last two years and only finally getting COVID for the first time now is a testament to my health & my health regimen below.

Daily, and spread across 1-3 meals:

• multi-vitamin, I usually go for these from Costco, which were recommended by my Naturopath and cost less than a quarter per day. But multivitamins are generally cheap and plentiful, and good general coverage for the deficiencies and inconsistencies in our diets.
• B-complex, because a vegan diet tends to be particularly low in B vitamins and my multivitamin doesn’t boost it quite enough. I go with these, also super cheap from Costco at less than a nickel each, and containing some electrolytes and extra Vitamin C too.
• Vitamin D3, additional 1000 to 4000 IU (depending on my recent sunlight exposure, less in summer more in winter, etc.). Usually these, also from Costco. The 25mcg / 1000 IU ones are $.02 each and I prefer these over the higher dosages because I can spread them out over the day and adjust my intake in smaller increments. People often point out that the body needs Vitamin K to aid in the absorption of Vitamin D, and though this it is not present in the multi-vitamin I take (nor is it in most multi-vitamins from what I understand), I do generally eat a lot of Vitamin K rich foods, so I personally don’t take K daily along with D as it is often recommended.
• Arginine, which started taking recently based on some specific advice from a doctor I’m working with on a specific issue. I don’t plan to continue taking this supplement more than a few months.

When traveling, and a day before and after traveling just to be safe:

• multi-vitamin (same)
• Vitamin C, additional 1000-4000 IU because metadata analysis of dozens of studies covering thousands of common cold episodes demonstrated regular supplementation with vitamin C correlating with a modest but consistent reduction in duration of cold symptoms and I grew up believing in it so it may still have some supplementary placebo affect in my case.
• Vitamin D3, 5000 IU along with Vitamin K2, in this Costco-friendly form and “I ain’t messin’ around here” dose.
• L-Lysine, 1000 IU (and DROP the Arginine that argues with it) for its general anti-viral properties and suspected specific COVID-related benefits. Though there is much more study to be done here, one very interesting paper on L-Lysine & COVID can be found here with the concluding statement Lysine and Lys-ester can prevent SARS-CoV-2 and IAV infection, particularly in the entry stage. In contrast to that, Arg-ester can potently boost infection of both viruses. It would therefore be beneficial to consider the nutrient intake of COVID-19 and flu patients. We recommend the inclusion of lysine supplementation in addition to a reduced arginine intake for the prevention and treatment of SARS-CoV-2 and IAV infections.

Immediately upon any cold or flu-like symptoms, which is largely based upon the results of this 20-Week Study of Clinical Outcomes of Over-the-Counter COVID-19 Prophylaxis and Treatment and for L-Lysine also this paper.

• Zinc, which I usually keep handy as Cold-eze or other lozenge form
• Vitamin C, which I typically have dissolved warm water like in one of those Emergen-C packets, Airborne tablets, or similar
• L-Lysine, first a 4000 IU wallop, then 1000 IU 2x daily on an empty stomach
• Quinine, which is easy to find in the form of tonic water (it only contains a little, but a little is all that is needed). It’s considered a “zinc ionophore” as in the study above, and I find that this also often helps settle my stomach and take the sick taste out of my mouth.
• It’s important to drop all caffeine, alcohol, and any Arginine-rich foods as these can promote viral spread, bacterial replication, and/or weaken the body’s defenses more generally.

Oh and also if it’s a simple intestinal discomfort issue, as in I just think I maybe ate something that tasted funny, then a couple drops of GSE in water goes down the hatch real fast. As I’ve learned in my world travels, this stuff is a great prevention for those food poisoning episodes we’d all rather not have.

In addition to all this, if it’s handy or if someone offers, yeah okay sure I’ll have some echinecia, garlic, or other non-caffeinated herbs. But I don’t travel with these, and though they don’t hurt I don’t put much faith in them these days. I studied Chinese medicine a bit in my shiatsu training way back when (pulse & tongue assessments, five element theory, herbs, etc.). I think there’s plenty of there there, medicinally, but the quality of anything I can get my hands on is so variable and the supply chain and storage conditions so untraceable that I just don’t trust the stuff anymore, even when the theory is seems sound.

How about you? Any studies you’ve seen that I should know about? Other things that I might want to try in my recovery or immune defenses going forward? The comments are here for you! …But I’m going back to bed. Rest makes more difference than anything.

This website has gone through many different iterations over the last two decades, and the current iteration has been going strong since November of 2019. Now that it’s been 3 years, I’m evaluating how it has been working for me and for you, what I like about it now and what I don’t, and…what might come next?

Some things I like about this site are:

• Fairly easy to update text in markdown.
• With a few intentional exceptions, I’ve kept pretty consistent and posting here 2-3x per week. I don’t take much time at all in doing this, so it’s been a great writing practice.
• Only in the last 3 years have I joined together all the various aspects of myself that I present to the world into this one place. It’s been nice not to feel as fractured, and to have someplace to migrate old projects to, such as my One Mouth Band stage persona.

Some things that I don’t like about this site are:

• Still uses database on backend, and I’d prefer flat-file for various reasons.
• Images & audio embeds are clunky, so I’ve deviated from my original goal to have one per post.
• It has always suffered from plenty of shoemaker’s children problems that do me no favors. Though this site is intended to be very informal, often the unpolished nature of what I post here makes me look unpolished too.

Some other thoughts:

1. As for here forward, I’m thinking differently about the purpose this site serves. I’ve often referred to it as my “second brain”, but now that I’m actually building one of those for real, I see more advantages in keeping it private by default to build it as an asset.
2. Though I do occasionally link to things for sale here, what I write here first is essentially undercutting any potential market for what I might want to package for sale at some future date. I’ve always had such a strong bent toward free & open-sourced everything that this was fine by me so far. Now, I’m reconsidering the wide-reaching & eternal implications of my historically philosophical stance. Basically, while I still pine for the early internet culture of the 90s, the internet itself has definitely moved on. Maybe I should too?
3. Many of my writings age well, but those that don’t really don’t. This is true of not just this one URL, but all that I’ve contributed to Medium, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc in my articles and posts. My conversational & typically playful tone is not always received as it was intended, especially with the passage of time and the shifting of cultural norms. As I’ve said many times before “when in doubt, just assume I’m trying to be funny” which is as true now as ever. But with “funny” itself coming under attack so much in recent years, I don’t know if saying this helps. The fact that I can’t be canceled from my own puny little website might just make things worse.
4. My recent explorations into privacy, security, and open-source intelligence have me seeing things like this public-facing website as a potential liability. Most of the things I post here are merely thoughts inspired by my encounters with the media and the world around me, and many of them are not fully-formed. I don’t tend to post overly-personal things here like I used to do on social media, but what I do post could still introduce vulnerabilities and social-engineering attack vectors that I’d rather not have. In the future (well, even today really), sites like this could get ingested into automated systems that impersonate me for fun & profit. But I don’t find such ideas either fun or profitable for me.
5. Talking things through, even if merely into the void here, is part of how I’ve kept myself feeling sane though the isolation of living in the middle of nowhere — especially through the pandemic. But as my life moves forward to I-know-not-where, I might not need it so much. After this stage of life is complete, I really hope not to need it so much! I’d like to connect with real people in the real world more often, becoming more mobile and more useful to the world around me again. And I’d always rather do things than talk about doing things.
6. There’s more that I could analyze about this site’s traffic, but suffice it to say that it is infinitesimally small most of the time. Like literally no one reads much of what I write. Thank you for being an exception today!

And since you are so exceptional, now I’d like to ask you what you’d like to see here? What made you come here today? What makes you come back? What would you like to see on your next visit? As always, the comments are open and I’m ever-so-curious about what you have to share :)

And if you’re thinking similar thoughts now about your own website or social media, check out this article for even more to think about.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here about one of my all-time favorite YouTubers, Deviant Olam but as you can tell, I love his stuff. This presentation may be his best one yet in terms of practicality, relevance, and emotional impact. My words are only in the way of you clicking to view this 1:20 video, so I’ll quit while I’m ahead and just say “WATCH as if your life depends on it!”

The slides for this talk are available here. And now I’ve got some homework to do.

Thanks for this, Dev <3

Yesterday I helped introduce over 20 local kids to the joys of aviation as part of the EAA’s Young Eagles program, which was a feelgood event for everyone involved. I wasn’t flying, just part of the ground crew helping this event happen safely. But I still got a healthy helping of smiles from children and parents alike!

Then I remembered I had never posted the video I made last month, so here’s the video I made for our local airport’s annual Fly-in event on September 10, 2022. The soundtrack is “Crescent Steps” from my Dad’s album Slideways and all the video footage and editing are by yours truly via my business, Snap Synapse. Enjoy!

This was my first fly-in, and another fun day of volunteering, amplified by the effort of making this video. Though I used to teach video production, due mostly to the constraints of my job, it’s been a year or so since I produced a project like this myself. It was great to refresh with this little project, which was captured entirely on my (handheld) iPhone — just like I always told people not to do! Turns out it is much easier to get away with these days with some basic techniques. Also, other than the fade in/out and basic title/close, there are ZERO added effects. That’s rare for me, and it was a very worthwhile constraint to work within. I learned a lot.