Erstwhile Okie on St. Mark's Place. "That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been; and God requireth that which is past."
Last night's dreams:
1. I bought a grape vine from a hardware store and planted it on the edge of the woods beside my old house upstate. In the morning I went back and hundred of fully ripe white grapes had grown. I was shocked and thrilled thinking I could make my own winery. So I bought a large bucket and put the grapes in there and figured I'd keep filling it with the daily harvest and maybe it would all just liquify and ferment naturally. But the next day I saw other people had started using it to store other things like cheese and cucumbers. I was annoyed.
2. I was in the mountains with a couple of cousins and my grandmother's 1993 Buick Century, which she gave to me in 2001 to be my first car. It wouldn't start so I tried jumping it; the battery wires for some reason were in the backseat. I attached the black and red clips to the wires I thought they went to and it sparked like crazy so I switched them around but it still sparked like crazy. I put them back on the wires I thought were correct and it still sparked wildly but I figured that's just how it was. Shouted to one cousin to try and start the car, quick, because the sparks were burning the interior and melting through the wires. But she had wandered off and said she was coming back but didn't, so it just kept sparking and burning and melting. Eventually there was no wire left to connect to but the car started and we got on our way.
3. I drew a picture of a roller coaster and was able to use AI to turn it into a lifelike video of the roller coaster running and felt pretty pleased with myself. I was able to then ride in the roller coaster and I was beside a girl and whenever she moved her head it glitched and disconnected from her elongated neck briefly.
When I first built this site, it was an attempt to make something that could be my own personal facebook / instagram / twitter site that I was in complete control of. I even downloaded all of my Facebook and Instagram posts at the time and imported them since the main thing that kept me on Facebook at the time was the "memories" feature.
Later on, I imagined maybe I could build it in such a way that other people could download and host it and add their own name and bio and pictrue, etc... and quickly have their own personal social media.
Then, I imagined that maybe I could give these different sites the ability to connect to one another via some central registry, allowing them to see other sites' posts on their own, and like and share and comment, etc... without ever leaving their own personal domain. But ultimately, social media is only ever as successful as the number of people you know on it, and setting up your own site and hosting it was never going to attract many people.
A couple of years ago, a service called Mastodon came into existence, which had a similar premise. You host your own account (or use one of many, many sites out there, eg. https://mastodon.social) and it can be viewed, liked, etc... by any other Mastodon account.
For a hot minute, when Elon Musk was buying Twitter, it seemed like it might take off, but ultimately I think it was just too confusing for it to ever be mass-adopted.
At any rate, on a whim, I refactored this site to integrate with Mastodon, so if I create a post (like this one), it displays here like it always has, but also publishes to Mastodon (in places like this: https://mastodon.social/@patrick@pg.mccullo.ug) and I have a feed (visible only to me) of other Mastodon users I follow. Unfortunately, right now it's just the creator and a bot that spits out Mastodon stats and analytics. I couldn't find anyone else that seemed very interesting. I got excited to find Stephen Fry, but his last post is from 2023. But it's been a fun distraction from the lingering ache of a breakup...
· 1 min read
2 years ago
Feeling whole after next-day Amazon delivery of this $15 watch. A year or two ago, I spent months not letting myself splurge on a Fossil watch that had an analog timepiece, but also tracked heart rate, connected to Bluetooth, etc... When the band on that broke a couple of weeks ago, I realized that the "smart" elements of the watch had either never worked properly, or long since stopped, and that I hadn't cared; I just wanted to be able to glance at the time.
Petition for phones to not autocorrect "its" to "it's". Half the time my phone gets it wrong and it's error is mortifying.
Dreaming of 16 GBs of RAM at Best Buy.
Cool software engineers.
I thought these error codes were a cool rendering of the local skyline at first.
· 1 min read
4 years ago
So in building a set-up where I can easily swap out a cover image and profile image and some sort of daily or momentary word--for no particular reason--I thought it might be fun to play with image EXIF data, which I hadn't ever done.
Embedded in the code of the image is a bunch of info about aperture, exposure, colors, and other photography stuff I don't understand, but also GPS. Interestingly, I learned that it doesn't seem to provide latitude-comma-longitude, but instead three different numbers for each. Degrees, minutes, seconds. And you run an equation on those to produce the coordinates. Got it wrong initially, but fixed it so now when I upload a cover or profile image, it says when it was uploaded, and has a pin showing where it was taken.
I have the day completely to myself today so looking forward to continuing indulgence in similarly pointless pursuits.
Read about some teenager who made millions from an app, so figured I'd start teaching the boys to code. Sammy picked up HTML tags more quickly than I expected! This is my new 5-year retirement plan.
Oculus Quest 2 bought marked-up in a Dollar General parking lot an hour out of town since every store in a 100 mile radius was sold out.
· 1 min read
5 years ago
Really tired of social media for a number of different reasons, but still occasionally feel the urge to share thoughts and pictures with the 2-3 people who follow me on different platforms. A blog might seem like a sensible answer, but that's always overwhelming and never holds my interest long. Piecing together 140 characters that no one will read is a lot more appealing than writing a couple thousand words that no one will read.
So, I built this. It doesn't look like much, but it's got a pretty nifty backend (if I do say so myself) that makes it more or less a clone/amalgam of all the major social media websites. And since I host it, I have full and total control over every video, photo, or note I post.
I have a long-term vision of getting the code for it tidied up enough to be able to have other people run it on their own websites, and allow said websites the ability to connect with other websites on the same platform so that there could potentially be a traditional social-media-esque feed.
Which basically means that a random visitor to your website just sees your posts, but when you, the owner of the website, visit it, you see your posts intermingled with the latest posts from websites you follow, and have all of the usual social media methods for interaction (liking/commenting). But in a completely decentralized system.
Just an idea, and I'll probably get bored of it before I get far, but in the meantime, at least I have an easy way to store thoughts and memories outside of Facebook/Instagram/Twitter.
So, I built this. It doesn't look like much, but it's got a pretty nifty backend (if I do say so myself) that makes it more or less a clone/amalgam of all the major social media websites. And since I host it, I have full and total control over every video, photo, or note I post.
I have a long-term vision of getting the code for it tidied up enough to be able to have other people run it on their own websites, and allow said websites the ability to connect with other websites on the same platform so that there could potentially be a traditional social-media-esque feed.
Which basically means that a random visitor to your website just sees your posts, but when you, the owner of the website, visit it, you see your posts intermingled with the latest posts from websites you follow, and have all of the usual social media methods for interaction (liking/commenting). But in a completely decentralized system.
Just an idea, and I'll probably get bored of it before I get far, but in the meantime, at least I have an easy way to store thoughts and memories outside of Facebook/Instagram/Twitter.
Good work tablet.
When Vivi and Averill commandeer my iPod and take a picture of me.
Does everyone else now have the ability to not just "like" a post, but express other responses? Don't know what I think about it.
Glad for the iPod's flash so I could get a picture during Averill's insisted blackout. It's like being in England during the Blitz. He's been into stories about blackouts.
Eating the iPod
I wonder how long it would take for Instagram servers to explode if I had the kids during the week too
Anyone need a copy of excel?
Is it just me or is youtube down?
My psychoanalyst (ChatGPT) had what seemed like a pretty good interpretation:
"...as a little trilogy produced by one brain on one night, there really is an unusually coherent theme: things work—but never cleanly. You get the grapes. The Buick starts. The AI roller coaster becomes real. Every dream actually ends with the impossible thing succeeding. It's just that success arrives accompanied by contamination, fire, or grotesque rendering errors."