me

There are 279 posts tagged me (this is page 1 of 40).

wraps up VII

the front window of my reading room where you can see some ficus trees, a big bushy boston fern and some geraniums. I seem to have more plants every year.

This year I really had to hold off on writing this (though I started drafting it early) because I was still going to libraries and editing Wikipedia until the very end of 2025! I know it seems that a lot of my blogging is repeated stuff, but I am okay with that and I hope you are too. It was a weird year both for US politics reasons but also for some discombobulation reasons. The new roof on my house is glorious but was a major project at a time when I didn’t feel I had the energy for it. I’m happy to see the back of it and gearing up for 2026 house projects. Maybe a generator? Some major painting? Maybe nothing at all.

You can view past wrap-ups here: 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024.

It’s been a year of not owning MetaFilter and while there was a little flurry of actions-requiring-some-input when the final non-interim board took over, it’s been mostly peaceful once MeFi taxes got filed. I will probably have various changes of heart about how I view that time in my life, when I stepped in to try to save a drowning website that was once very important to me, but as of right now my thoughts are “I’m glad it worked, but that was a bad idea.”

You can find me on the same socials as last year. I’m more active on Bluesky than I was last year and it’s funny how much it’s just a different sort of place for me than Mastodon. I know some people just cross-post to both, but I mostly don’t. Still using Flickr especially for holiday and event-type stuff. MLTSHP is where I hang out still.

I can barely remember what I did this year which wasn’t “get a new roof” because that was such a big deal and I wasn’t blogging much so I check my calendar and my texts. I edit these posts in raw HTML like some sort of dinosaur. I think it’s good to know the old ways. Thanks for reading.

my year in cities and towns, 2025

bed at my sister's place which is a nice antique bed with a tall stack of seven pillows on it.

What even is a hotel anyhow? I was talking to a friend and saying that in some way I’ve “retired from public life” meaning that I do talks locally but I do not hit the librarian circuit anymore. It’s been pretty good. I gave one online talk which I really enjoyed and a few more which I liked. I’d like to do more of that sort of thing. I miss seeing as many people, but I do not miss airports, hotels, and trying to find something to eat in some new location at 9 pm. One of my goals was to see my sister more. I did that and it was time well spent. Four trips down to MA, two of them were last month. Did not make it to Westport but there’s still time. Got some home improvement stuff done and that’s made staying here at home even nicer than it was before. I’ll keep counting the places just because I love my routine, but I’ll feel okay if there aren’t many of them.

Past years: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008 2007, 2006, 2005.

reflection

my hand holding a puffy lichen ball

I posted a little thing over at librarian.net and I figured I should pop over here also and say hello. There’s been a lot of talk, in these weird and troubling times, about “owning your own content” which is what this blog does, though it’s doing that through a CMS that is itself sort of weird and troubling.

Anyhow, I am fine but like that kid with the oatmeal, I just haven’t had much to say. Been doing stuff locally. Getting my work (mostly) done. Writing my book reviews. Chatting a bit on social media (I’m on Mastodon and Bluesky with some regularity) but not much here. No real reason. Some of it is vaguely negative stuff I haven’t wanted to talk about (house stuff getting resolved, health stuff I am working through, more elders in my life who have died, the state of the US) because I don’t really use this space for that. If I see you in person I am happy to talk about it. Mostly.

It’s been porch weather which is terrific. The parade came through as it regularly does and we all enjoyed it. Half-year JIMSMAS happened, though I haven’t gotten any pictures of it up yet. I put a landline phone in my house and connected it to my cell via bluetooth and have started enjoying making telephone calls. Sometimes. Hoping to check back in here more often than every six months. We’ll see what happens.

a summer day down by the river

wraps up VI

a sunny window with many plants on a tables soaking up the sun

The wrap-ups of the wrap-ups are now their own thing! You can view past wrap-ups here: 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023.

I’ve now completely moved over to Mastodon and I like it there. I am also on Bluesky which is fun in its own way. I still have accounts on all the Big Platforms, but I’m there a lot less often. I do put pictures on Flickr if you want to follow along. Biggest deal of the past year was that I’m no longer the legal owner of MetaFilter; it’s been transitioned into a community-owned model and while the site is still going to have some challenges, I was (mostly) happy to have been able to help it stay afloat. MLTSHP is still run by the community, with paperwork and legal stuff mainly done by me, and it’s delightful.

My regular job has been going mostly well. I’ve gotten to oversee adding more people to Flickr Commons which is pretty exciting. There’s a fun content browser here if you’d like to see what kind of stuff is there. My house remains standing despite all my concerns that it’s falling apart. Jim and I saw the total solar eclipse from a few miles up the road and it was transcendent. Thanks for reading.

my year in cities and towns, 2024

photograph of a bed in a small guesrtoom. There is a small cat on the bed and a large chicken head from a mascot costume

I’ve been doing this guestroom tracking for twenty years! Last year I went one place, twice, for one night each. I am enjoying staying put, still. No hotels at all. The longer I stay away from hotels and airplanes, the more they seem mysterious and unpleasant to me. There’s a rhythm to local life here, one that I wasn’t as in tune with when I was traveling as much. I’d still like to get out and about a bit more, go down to Westport, see my sister more than twice, do fun things with Jim in distant locations, see my non-local friends more than rarely.

Past years: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008 2007, 2006, 2005.

How your email finds me…

A small tortiseshell cat sits in a backyard full of tall grass and thinks it is harder to see than it really is

My Virgo Month of Leisure was a blur. Like many people, I’ve been alternating between torpor and panic as the days get shorter and colder. Here are a few things you might like to know if you’re someone who reads this space.

I turned on my heat, meaning the boiler, for the first time this season today. I actually enjoy the Vermont ritual of making small talk by talking about how you heat your house. My heat pumps have been a delight. Having them means I can keep my office and bedroom warm without heating a whole half-house at the same time (I have two zones!). But they can’t really make a chilly bathtub warm up very quickly and today was the day I woke up wanting to take a shower and not be chilly so on it went.

I applied for an ISSN for my other blog today. I just made a post there the other day and thought I should make one here too.

old memes

Sometimes I see a thing which hits me in a very specific way but it’s not a way that makes sense in a tiny social media post, depending how much you know about me. This image is one of those things.

screenshot from the website for Jan which shows the name of their newsletter which is Soul of a New Machine

This is a screenshot from the web page of a robotics company which has created a standalone tool called Jan that enables you to run a large language model (LLM) on your personal computer. This allows you to mess around with chatbot-type stuff without your interactions with it becoming part of the “training” for those things. I don’t want to be training an AI. I don’t have much use for chatbot/AI-type stuff in my life and work currently, but I feel it’s important to know a bit more about it than I do. So I downloaded and installed this thing and have been messing around with it. As I was reading its (scant) documentation, I scrolled down on the company’s home page and saw that their newsletter is called The Soul of a New Machine. This is funny.

It’s funny because The Soul of a New Machine is also the name of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book published over forty years ago about a computer project my dad led, back in the mainframe days. It was a big deal at the time. It was a big deal in my family and my dad got well-known for it for a while. A lot of people I know who are about my age considered it formative. Tracy Kidder went on to write a bunch of other terrific books. After growing up in a household where computers were considered “normal” even back in the 1980s, I’ve brought that information forward with me to my library, technology, and community work and I think it’s helped me to be better at what I do.

I’m now what folks might consider later-career. I’m faffing about with this newfangled technological stuff knowing both that it’s a big deal and also that I only sort of care about it (at my peril? perhaps.) and to come across this blast from the past in an “everything old is new again, huh?” way made me laugh.