I had a Durango Soda Co. (Zuberfizz) root beer with today’s lunch, celebrating 14 years of marriage with Eleanor (our anniversary was earlier in the week). So tasty and refreshing, exactly what you’d want during the summer.
I linked to the Zuberfizz website, but its a bit of a mess: cookie notices, popup chat windows, two different terms and conditions links in the footer… hire me to do your website, Zuberfizz! You deserve something as good as your soda.
I think [a typeface is] more than one thing. I haven’t got it totally figured out and I probably never will, which is good. I think it can be quite a few things all at once but mainly it’s a human creation, it’s a little piece of somebody’s soul, it’s functional, but it mainly acts as a material.
It’s something that you will use to make something else. And when you use it to make something else, it’s in that product. Whereas if you use a hammer to bang in a nail as a tool, you can’t see the hammer in the final building, maybe traces of it but not the hammer itself. While the typeface becomes a part of the new thing, it’s like an ingredient in a dish.
Likes Job searching in 2024 is horribly broken by .
I’m trying to be gentle and helpful to all my pals who are looking for work right now. Because it is tough out there. Leave it to a network engineer to find all the security and system failures with the current job sites and hiring tools.
Every web account requires you to register some kind of username, and I’ve been using “nsmsn” everywhere for more than a decade now. I registered the domain name nsmsn.co and have it currently pointed at my omg.lol profile, since that destination kind of collects almost all of my various accounts with the same handle.
I don’t think I’ve ever documented the “why” behind my dumb 5 character username, so here we go:
It is short. Twitter used to be constrained by a 140 character limit, which included the @ symbol for mentions, anyone’s username, plus link addresses (hence the creation of short URLs in the pre-to-early 2010s). By the time I signed up for Twitter, I’m pretty sure my initials (NES) were taken, so I went my first initial and last name, sans vowels.
That’s it. Boring. My username has nothing to do with msn.com or MSNBC, either.
I’ve never read this book, but its cover was probably on my mind when I registered my username:
I have kind of a common sounding first and last name, but my last name is often misspelled. I don’t even know if my dumb 5 character username helps anyone remember how to spell it correctly, since it itself is kind of forgettable.
Twitter and GitHub users mrmrs and jxnblk have cooler, more memorable names and bigger followings than I will ever enjoy. But when I first encountered their works online, I felt like maybe I was in good company or doing something right with my identity.
I’m no longer active on Twitter (sorry, X) but I kept my username there because for better or worse it is inextricably linked to my identity. I don’t want someone to take that handle over and post God knows what with it. I go by that handle on Mastodon now, and a few other places, too.
I like that nsmsn is short. I like that it has a meaning, even if it’s just my name but shorter. And I like that it’s a palindrome, too. But it’s not really pronounceable (I always spell it out N-S-M-S-N, and the Ns often sound like “M”) or memorable, either.
Now, more than a decade later, nsmsn is something that is usually available on new services, and something I’m probably stuck with as long as either these accounts or I personally continue to exist.
We work to become, not to acquire.
Elbert Hubbard
Likes How To Do Nothing Course by .
I find myself thinking about Jenny Odell’s book often. Would love to audit this course based on her work.
this is a quick test from an ActivityPub-enabled WordPress site.
Made a couple updates to my /now page.
This thing is now powered by several widgets pulling in stuff automatically, plus some blocks of text I update manually.
From top to bottom:
I signed up for a Letterboxd account recently, and I might add a widget for that next if I can find a good one. But I don’t watch a lot of movies these days, so I don’t know how appropriate it is for my /now page.
I like to think of a now page as a snapshot in time, and mine is a mix of things that are updated hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, or on an ongoing basis.
If I were a better programmer this would all be APIs, not this fragile mix of third-party widgets. What’s nice is that none of this third-party stuff contains ad trackers or cookies (as best as I can tell).
Well yesterday morning I blogged about how I no longer found following politics interesting and entertaining, so I guess you’re welcome, America.
Likes Your blog is a vulnerability. by .
Wow, plenty of stuff to think about here.
I used to find it interesting and entertaining to follow politics. Then… that kind of stopped being fun. Now I follow baseball.
After reading Susan’s note and Gregory’s post about streaming baseball last year, I decided to get the MLB At Bat subscription, which lets me listen to every single regular season MLB radio broadcast. I think it costs around 30 dollars. I actually listen to baseball games on the radio almost every day of the week. When the Amazin’ New York Mets are playing in the MLB.tv Free Game of the Day, I tune in to that (I’ll be watching the Mets play the Braves on Sunday, 7/28).
I agree with almost every part of Linda’s endorsement, except for the Phillies section. If you want to jump on a bandwagon because a writer at NPR convinced you, go for it. But 162 3-4 hour games each year is a huge commitment. If you don’t already have a MLB team to follow, you should make your own decision. Here are a few different strategies for picking a baseball team:
Let’s Go Mets! ⚾
Bookmarked CSS Grid Areas by .
Another absolute banger by Ahmad. I don’t know how he does it.
Likes Send a Friend a Webmention Day by .
July 30 is the International Day of Friendship, but folks in the indie web celebrate by sending their friends a webmention.
With some troubleshooting help from David, you can now send a generic webmention to nicksimson.com, and it will show up (probably after some comment moderation) on my Mentions page.
Please, keep it friendly.