Today feels like the day the war in Iraq began. Wars are easy to start, hard to end. They actually called Bush a "visionary" on MSNBC, they were so in awe of his courage, but that would end soon. And this time, no doubt Trump started the war with the approval of China and Russia, which will be left alone by the US in their conquest of Taiwan and Ukraine. Leaders of smaller countries must be wondering where they can hide from this. A very depressing moment. I've lived through two voluntary wars by the US, first Vietnam, then the post-911 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and now this war.

This is one of those times when you pay the price for working past your timeout, like a pitcher pitching too many pitches in one game. There's an item on your checklist, and you'd love to take it off before you start the next session. You copy paste something, get it to work...

BTW, I used to have a tradition in the early days of this blog to write new stuff about an important idea on January 1 each year. At some point I stopped doing that. Now I realized that unintentionally I have just written such a piece, below. There's a lot of good stuff in that piece and in the places it links to. See the web is still useful. You won't hear these ideas on CNN or MS.NOW or in the NYT, WP, or from any billionaires either. I'm not saying I'm right, I've definitely been wrong before. But I think I'm mostly right. ;-)

This year I switched to Original Medicare for 2026 after being on super duper insurance industry enhanced Medicare for the first five years. I should've known that it's super duper for them but not so great for the insured person or the taxpayer, that is -- me. They have set...

I still use Google. And I like the AI response they put at the top of the page, even though I get that it's bad for the web. Maybe there's a position for a web-only search engine. One where my writing has a chance of being seen by interested parties, rather than being conver...

Liked The Staircase on Netflix. I had watched it before but had forgotten all the different conflicting stories. It is a bit irritating, but I think that's an important part of the story.

Loving my Keurig coffee maker. I've been stocking up on all kinds of pods. Favorite so far is hazelnut flavored, not real -- really tasty. I never thought I'd want to try out all these different kinds of coffee. I wonder if I'm getting an espresso machine next.

A note to Josh Marshall, David Frum, Jay Rosen and Heather Cox Richardson, just a few of the political pundits I read. Now you all have seen up close the "move fast and break things" philosophy of Silicon Valley. They do this with investors' money. This was a preview of how they will govern, after Trump, when Silicon Valley is fully running the world. We need to get some tech background in your writing. The history of tech is very much the history of politics as we go forward. We had a merger, and you can and should incorporate our history in your understanding of US history.

All the Scripting News OPML's for 2025 in one GitHub folder. That's an example of user-owned storage. It's going to be repo's like that tie the world together, if we ever manage to get it together. There's a bit of hope. Paul Frazee of Bluesky pushed a piece last night about user-owned storage. He bound it to his invention, AT Proto, which has very few instances. That's why we need an API above all of this, so he can have his AT Proto stores and I can use RSS and Markdown and someone else who may not even be born yet can use whatever they love. The protocol that connects our services won't know or care how we're storing stuff behind the API. A great prototype for such an API is imho the WordPress wpcom API.

I'm enjoying the break between years, always get a lot of thinking and writing done in this period. Not much more to say but that's all for 2025. Bring on the next year.

If you've had trouble unsubscribing from the nightly email, I fixed a big problem there this morning, so please try again. If the problem persists, here's a place to report.

Manton Reece explains why Micro.blog uses Markdown. I use Markdown because Manton does. It's for interop.

If I had billions of dollars I'd divest. And if my country did a good job of investing in education, health, voting rights, stuff like that, I'd just give most of it back to the country. Thanks for the education, and saving my life with medicine not just once but twice. Thanks for being such a cool country. If only we lived up to the promise, but now we'd certainly need to come up with another way of distributing the benefits to the country and its people.

2016: Your human-size life.

No one got any sleep in these parts last night, was like a non-stop tornado, but I did watch a couple of artsy movies that were really good. And this morning power was out and internet, and I thought for sure some trees had to be down, but only one was, a huge one, and I had to walk to the post office to use their phone to call a friend with a big saw and truck, and I wondered how he'd get rid of the tree, and this is how. First he chopped it up into bits with a saw, and then used the same plow he uses to get rid of the snow to push the tree parts off to the side of the road. And when I got home the internet was back on and I'm going to spend most of the rest of the day sleeping, maybe or drinking a load of coffee and trying to stay on a normal schedule.,

I'm doing some really excellent work on WordLand II, which is almost starting to get useful. We should be doing a lot more than writing posts next year. It's helping that a few of us are using Instant Outlines in Drummer to coordinate work. I work so much better this way, but it's not something you can do on your own.

"I don't have time for this." That might be the name of a podcast. I just ended one with that exact phrase, and it totally fits the way I feel about these rambling diatribes by the time I'm about to sign off.

When you're buying a house, the most important thing to check is the roof. Get two inspections. Get three. A house with a good roof will keep you dry. A house with a shitty roof isn't really a house is it?

This came up on Kottke. I'm going to try commenting on other old school blogs more. Want to see if we can reboot the original sphere as a way of priming a new one.

We love Pluribus because it has all the features that we find irresistible.

1. AppleTV.
2. The makers of two previous huge hits.
3. An unsung and much loved star in the last hit.
4. An intriguing sci-fi plot.
5. It’s pretty good adventure type thriller in the first episodes that settles into a slower sexy love story.
6. A clever final scene in the final episode.
7. A typical long wait for the next season.

But all this is incidental, what really matters is that we’re all involved, have opinions, and thank goodness it doesn’t actually matter like the other stuff we debate.

I rated Common Side Effects as Loved, the second highest rating on Bingeworthy.

The biggest contribution ChatGPT et al could make to software development, beyond what it has already done, which is enormous -- is help us come up with a new general purpose programming language which is a lot easier for human programmers to work with, esp over time. I work in one of the most complex environments imaginable -- browser apps talking to server apps in JavaScript. We could do so much better. And now we have a partner that knows all about all our languages, unlike any human being on the planet. Instead of having a lot of disconnected bubbles, it would be great if programmers could come together on a new language that make it easier for us to manage lots of software projects.

Sarah Kendzior is a political writer who I greatly admire. Her frustration sounds a lot like mine. I wrote in 2017 that the bankers in tech should watch out because Twitter had just elected a president, and its market capitalization was so low that it was bound to get bought...

Just realized I'm like a Black Lab. I always have to have a ball to chase, and really like it if someone says I'm a good boy. I think it really is that simple. Maybe it's different for other men, but I think a lot of us are just that simple.

It is Christmas Day, and last night the emails did not go out. I think I know what the problem is and if it's correct the emails should go out very shortly. Lucky that it's Christmas themed! Ho ho ho.

I asked ChatGPT to put together a subscription list of student newspapers at American universities. Added it to lists.opml.org.

Joni Mitchell wrote a sad and lovely Christmas song.

I got a Kuerig single cup coffee maker and it's perfect. Exactly what I needed. The coffee is great and hot, and one cup is what I usually want. So now I can have a cup of hot coffee when I'm up late and want to stay up for a while longer. Or if I have to be extra sharp for some development project I've been putting off.