Following a practice I’ve been doing for the past 16 years (see list), my first post of 2025 across all my sites is of three words that are my aspirations or “themes” for the year ahead. They are not “resolutions” so much as guiding thoughts or principles. This year they are: Resilience, Hope, and Health. Resilience Over the past year or so, and particularly over the past six months, it’s become increasingly clear to me that right now a focus for me needs to be around the general area of “resilience” on a number of different levels. We’re in a... Continue reading

Today is a special anniversary for me. It was 20 years ago that I set up an account and first made an edit to Wikipedia! On that day I became a "Wikipedian"... although I'm not sure if that name was being used yet. Wikipedia had only been launched in January 2001, so it was a VERY different world in those days. With the complete transparency of Wikipedia, I can of course go back and see what my earliest edits were. It's fun to scroll down the list. Amusingly, my very first edit would be frowned upon today. I added the... Continue reading

The Vermont Eclipse Dilemma: do we leave our houses and go out and enjoy all the eclipse-related festivities? Or do we just stay at home and leave all the events to the 534,873,937 people that are expected to arrive here to visit? (Not the actual number, but that’s what it feels like according to the media articles!🤣) In case you weren’t aware, there’s a solar eclipse happening on this coming Monday, April 8, 2024. And we here in northwestern Vermont are right in the path of “totality”. For about 3 minutes on Monday afternoon, the moon will completely block the... Continue reading

Back in June 2021, Automattic announced that they were acquiring Day One, a journaling app. I had never heard of Day One, but being a strong WordPress user I paid attention to news from Automattic. Given that so much of Automattic’s tools are aimed at public writing and publishing (ex WordPress, Tumblr), I found the addition of the private publishing of Day One to be curious. I investigated… and rapidly became intrigued. I liked the fact that it seamlessly worked across all my Apple devices and systems. As a security geek, I loved that all the journals are end-to-end encrypted... Continue reading

I’m doing it again… instead of writing and creating new posts in the morning, I’m sitting there scrolling through Mastodon… or reading the latest news on Memeorandum or Techmeme… or jumping into work email or Slack before I really need to. And sooner or later, any of the “free” time I had is gone and it’s time to start the work day. The time has melted away. Consumption has triumphed over creation, yet again. That’s no way to get back into writing more. That’s no way to develop habits of consistent writing. And yet it is so incredibly easy to... Continue reading

Tonight I was looking at my danyork.me aggregation site and I was confused… why were my posts from my danyork.com site NOT appearing in the master list? I *knew* I had written there. Of course my initial thought was some problem with the RSS feed. Yep! On danyork.me I’m using the older FeedWordPress plugin for WordPress that does RSS syndication. A quick look told me that the feed it was supposed to be pulling in was: https://www.danyork.com/rss.xml Except… that was showing up as invalid XML. 🤷‍♂️ After some trial and error, I discovered that… I need to drop the “www”... Continue reading

If you want to understand how we got to the Web that we have today, I would strongly recommend reading this beautiful piece by Mia Sato at The Verge on the theme of “Google shapes everything on the Web” It... Continue reading

As I was posting about on Mastodon, early this morning United Launch Alliance (ULA) successfully launched their new Vulcan Centaur rocket into space from their launch site in Florida. The rocket carried the first US moon lander (Peregrine) from a private company (Astrobiotic), as well as a whole range of science experiments, part of the remains of several people, and even a collection of stories from writers. Some great coverage is available from ArsTechnica, SpaceNews, SpaceFlight Now, and Space.com (many photos). The key point is that the rocket launched successfully! As I wrote about back in my November 3rd issue... Continue reading

In thinking about my themes for 2024 and specifically about changing my habits, one change that I am going to try is to get consistent with both my “The Dan York Report” podcast and also my “A View From The Crow’s Nest” newsletter. Right now they are both “irregular” or “periodic”… meaning I just do them whenever I think about them or have some reason for doing them. Which means that sometimes I publish 4 of them in a week… and then I don’t publish anything for four weeks or more! 🤦‍♂️ I want to get in the *habit* of... Continue reading

From the Burlington, Vermont area, it’s only about a 45 minute drive to the Canadian border. (Yes, we are *that*close!🙂) As you get close to the border on Interstate 89, there is a sign on the right side that says: Latitude 45° North Midpoint Equator to North Pole Yes, indeed, once you drive past that point you are now getting closer to the North Pole than the Equator from a latitude perspective! Wikipedia of course has some interesting info about the 45th parallel, including that it has formed part of the US / Canada border at times. In fact, when... Continue reading

Have you ever been curious about the process of creating a Request For Comments (RFC) document within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)? These are the standards like, oh, “HTTP”, that power the Internet. Have you been interested in understanding... Continue reading

This morning brought a reminder that it was twenty years ago that I opened up an account on LiveJournal. For about four years, “LJ” was my home on the web. It was where I wrote MANY articles, connected with people across their journals, and started interacting with a few people with whom I am still in touch today. My journal site is still there today, with a much younger photo of me (I still had brown hair!), but my last entry was 11 years ago in April 2013, and that was just an update to a post four years earlier... Continue reading

Visit “Aitana Lopez” on Instagram. As you scroll down, the account looks like that of any of the hundreds (or thousands) of “influencer” accounts on Instagram. “Aitana” post photos from her travels, of her wearing various clothes, and making references... Continue reading

As I have been doing for the past 15 years (see list), my first post of 2024 across all my sites is of three words that are my aspirations or “themes” for the year ahead. They are not “resolutions” so much as guiding thoughts or principles. This year I decided on 3 H’s: Hope, Health, and Habits. Hope We live in challenging times… and 2024 looks to present even greater challenges. A colleague of mine noted that there will be over 100 elections in 67 countries in 2024 - all of which will undoubtedly create communication and societal challenges in... Continue reading

Today at the ISC2 Security Congress 2023 in Nashville, TN, I gave a well-received talk on "Demystifying the World of Routing Security". Unfortunately, the mobile app for the event had (and still has) the wrong set of slides. Instead of mine, the attached deck was for a 2019 talk. So I told participants I would put the slides up on one of my sites. And here they are: Download 2023-ISC2-Security-Congress-RoutingSecurity-Final.pdf (12033.0K) As you will see, a great amount of the slides are about the Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS) initiative. Also, for people seeking info about how to... Continue reading

Booking airline tickets for my first business trip since December 2019, I get down to the part where United notes your status level and it says… “General” No “Premier” status of any level. Which makes total sense given: 2020 - 0 flights 2021 - 0 flights 2022 - 0 flights 2023 - 2 flights (so far) 🤣 I totally understand why I am now just a “general” traveler. 😀 Continue reading

I find it fascinating that Meta just announced the ability of Facebook users to have multiple accounts attached to their single Facebook account. So you can have different “personas” for interacting with different communities differently. Now, this is nothing very... Continue reading

As of today, May 1, 2023, 43% of web sites will no longer be able to easily auto-share posts to Twitter. I’m referring, of course, to WordPress, which W3Techs shows as powering around 43% of all sites they scan. Due... Continue reading

When ChatGPT and similar systems started being available, people noticed right away that they could provide completely wrong answers. But they would do so in language that was so confident and plausible (because that is how they are designed). Some people started to say “ChatGPT lies about information”. But somewhat immediately, people started pushing back and saying that it isn’t “lying” because that implies sentience or consciousness. Say it is “lying” is “anthropomorphizing”, i.e. attributing human behavior to something that is very definitely not human. Instead, some people said, let’s refer to this false information as “hallucinations”, as that is... Continue reading

UPDATE - 2 Jan 2024 - Back in July 2023, the Obsidian team announced an officially-supported "Importer" plugin that includes the ability to import from Evernote. This sounds easier than the method I outline below using YARLE. I have not tried this new "Importer" plugin (because I already migrated from Evernote!), but you may want to go try that new plugin before doing what I outline below. On April 8, 2008, I started using Evernote as a place to store all my various notes. It would come to be a critical part of my daily workflow… so much so that... Continue reading

Today I was wondering why “March 13” was pulling at the back of my brain as a date of some importance… and then I realized why. Three years ago today, everything changed. It was on Friday, March 13, 2020, that Governor Phil Scott issued Executive Order 01-20, “Declaration of State of Emergency in Response to COVID-19 and National Guard Call-Out”. It imposed visitor restrictions at hospitals and state facilities, restricted travel by state employees, prohibited large gatherings, and called up the National Guard to assist. The Executive Order did not itself shut down schools, but it directed the Secretary of... Continue reading

For most of 50 years, I held very firm to the belief that the ONLY time I should ever see a time beginning with a “4” in the morning was when I needed to get up and go to the airport to catch an early flight. Otherwise, any time like 4:30am was just downright uncivil and hostile. I should be asleep at that time. I should NEVER be awake at times beginning with a 4. And yet… here I am writing this post at 4:55am. 🤷‍♂️ What happened? Well, our dog got older! (And I might have, too.😉) For some... Continue reading

As I’ve frequently lamented in my yearly themes (although not this year), I would like to get myself to write more. And back on December 1, 2022, I tried to commit to #100DaysOfBlogging, but that hasn't worked out so well. I’ve been watching how I spend my time lately, and to I’m sure the surprise of absolutely NO ONE, including myself, it would seem the single biggest thing preventing me from doing more writing is… getting distracted by social media! 🤣🤣🤣 Take this morning. I was awake early at around 5:00am (courtesy of our wonderful but early-rising dog) and I... Continue reading