In a world drowning in email, and increasingly with email newsletters, one of the messages I actually look forward to receiving each day is: Proximities: Today's three stories you should know It’s an email newsletter from a journalist named Barry Malone that comes out almost every day. His goal is to highlight three “non-Western news stories you should know”. What I enjoy is that he very simply and succinctly provides a summary and then a link to read more. It’s three quick paragraphs that I can quickly scan and then decide if I want to read more. Living in the... Continue reading

In the end It didn’t matter That their kids got many other required vaccines for school It didn’t matter That their jobs required annual flu shots It didn’t matter That unvaxxed people they knew died It didn’t matter, Their lords said this vaccine was bad Nothing else mattered In the end Continue reading

Yesterday was my first day back at work after 10 days away on vacation where I did not check work email or Slack. I approached it with the usual perspective of “Ugh! How many messages will I have to wade through!” Quite often it can take a day or a couple of days to get caught up.. and sometimes you can feel like you need a vacation from taking a vacation! 😀 I have a whole regular “return from vacation" routine down. The first thing I do is copy my entire email inbox to a mail folder so that my... Continue reading

If one of my aspirations for this year is to consistently create content, one of my personal challenges is to figure out HOW to easily do that. Ideally, creating content on my own sites should be as easy as sending out a tweet, posting a message to Facebook or Mastodon, or posting an image to Instagram. And therein lies my challenge. I’d like to make it so that I could just post from my mobile phone or iPad, so that whenever I have a story idea I want to write I can just post something easily. And, I can also... Continue reading

When my wife and I were raising our daughters, there came a point when we tried to impress upon them that just because something was true didn’t mean you needed to SAY that right then. Yes, Dad might have dark circles under his eyes and look terrible because he was up all night sick, but does he really need to hear “you look terrible” right at this exact moment in time? That may be true, but did he need to hear it? At some point we started suggesting running comments though a filter of three questions: Is it TRUE? Is... Continue reading

Following my pattern of the past 13 years (see list), my first post of 2022 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. In so many ways 2021 was a good bit of a “dumpster fire” of a year. We started off with such great hope that the pandemic would be under control … and ended with even higher case counts and more deaths that we’d had the previous year. It often does truly feel like the 672nd day... Continue reading

Every night… usually sometime between 8:00 and 10:00pm US Eastern time, you can usually find me streaming on Twitch (danyork324) while … editing Wikipedia! 😀 If you’d like to learn more about Wikipedia editing - or just want to chat... Continue reading

As I have for the past 12 years (see list), my first post of 2021 across all my sites is of three(-ish) words that are my aspirations or “themes” for the year ahead. As my 18yo daughter has reminded me, the beginning of a new calendar year is a completely arbitrary marker 🙂, but it does provide a moment to pause and reflect. Particularly THIS year with the pandemic, we’ve had a great amount of reflection time! Note: while last year’s post was super short, this one is much longer... CLARITY (MISSION) Some of my colleagues at the Internet Society... Continue reading

Today is a special anniversary for me. It was 10 years ago, on May 30, 2010, that I made a decision to get serious about my health. I was about 60+ pounds over what a target weight should be for someone my age. I got winded just walking a few blocks. I needed to change! My wife and I both decided we were going to start getting in shape by just going walking. It was SO helpful to have her as a partner in doing this. We started walking in a beautiful, large cemetery in Keene, New Hampshire. Over the... Continue reading

As we celebrate the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day today, April 22, 2020, my mind jumped back 30 years to "Earth Day 1990" in the state of New Hampshire. I made some choices that year and seized some opportunities that introduced me to the worlds of communications, community organizing, and public relations. I approached 1990 thinking I was going to be finishing up a Masters in Education degree and heading back to Connecticut to teach in a public high school. But life took very different turns and presented new opportunities. The choices I made then set me on the path... Continue reading

With so many people now having to learn to work remotely due to restrictions related to COVID-19, what information can people share who have been working from home? Back in October 2019, I realized it was 20 years ago when... Continue reading

As I have for every year since 2010 (see list), I decided to start out 2020 with four words that are aspirations for the "themes" of my activities in this next year. In truth... this 2020 post is really just a re-do of the 2019 post - read that one first. Basically, it's the same with one addition. HEALTH Still working on this. Doing some more exercise and trying to reduce the amount of carbs and sugar. Let's see what happens. VOICE Still want to work on this. I had a period in November 2019 where I tried with NaPodPoMo... Continue reading

There's something about November that seems to encourage people to take on challenges. Maybe for people in the Northern hemisphere it is because November is the grey, cold, rainy period between autumn and winter. Maybe the timing is just random...... Continue reading

Today was a wonderful day. It was the one-year anniversary of the surgery (28 Aug 2018) that removed the sigmoid section of my colon, taking with it any potential cancer (there wasn’t any!). By virtue of the joys of trying to align various schedules, it was also the day for a follow-up colonoscopy to see if there were any more polyps or signs of cancer. After the rather horrid preparation process, I went to the hospital this morning, had the test, and received the news that there were NO further signs of cancer! Between this colonoscopy today, a CT scan... Continue reading

As I have now done every year since 2010 (see past years), here are three words that I aspire to be the "themes" of my activity this year. You'll note that these are really quite similar to my 3 words for 2018 - and in truth I think 2019 is really a continuation of everything in 2018 that was left undone with the severe disruption and chaos of both: 1) uprooting our family to move to Vermont; and 2) the unwelcome guest of colon cancer. I am SO ready to put a period at the end of the sentence of... Continue reading

I may have just found my new favorite "Lorem ipsum" text generator - HIPSTER IPSUM! https://hipsum.co/ For the longest time, my choice when I just needed some columns to fill in with filler text[1] was Bacon Ipsum, which is always... Continue reading

Tonight in Nashville, Matt Mullenweg delivered his "State of the Word" presentation at WordCamp US. Not being there in person, I watched the live stream. The recorded stream has about 28 minutes of various quotes that were displayed. Matt starts... Continue reading

Yesterday (Dec 6, 2018) was TheBigDay when WordPress 5.0 with the Gutenberg block-based editor landed in all of our WordPress sites for upgrade. Some of the places to learn more about the launch include: WordPress 5.0 launch announcement (with videos)... Continue reading

Have we given up on personal blogging? Are we instead doing that all writing in Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and similar services? Is the personal blog dead? [1] I had lunch this week with a friend who, like me, has been... Continue reading

The news out of Matt Mullenweg last night was... THURSDAY! That day, December 6 (2018), is the next target release date for WordPress 5.0. If you have been paying attention to WordPress, or listening to any of my reports into... Continue reading

October 31, 2018, was a special day for me. Not because it was Halloween, but because after 10 years a small little document I co-authored about the "P-Charge-Info" header for SIP-based Voice-over-IP (VoIP) was published as informational RFC 8496. You... Continue reading

The good folks over at WordPress.com are doing something interesting - they are giving free .blog subdomains for any new sites created on WordPress.com. Now, to be clear, this is not ANY subdomain under .blog. For instance, I was immediately... Continue reading

Here is a quick 3-step process for launching WordPress in a Docker container. You can use this to easily launch a new WordPress instance on your local system to test out new versions, new plugins or anything else. First, though,... Continue reading

Over the past few weeks as I’ve been grappling with colon cancer, it has been soooooooooo tempting to just pop open the Facebook app, write a story in the box and press “Share”. Simple. Easy. Done! Or inside the Twitter... Continue reading

The call came this morning, right as my regular weekly Strategic Communications team meeting was starting up. Once I saw the call was the Burlington hospital, I muted my connection, shut off the video ... and waited breathlessly for the news... The surgeon was delighted to call and say... no more cancer was found in the colon walls or lymph nodes! It's done. Finished. Fertig. I'm as close to "cancer-free" as anyone with colon cancer can be. No further tests needed. No chemo. No other treatments. I'll go back in about three months for a "flexible sigmoidoscopy" where they'll use... Continue reading