my dad was quite an eeyore.

our extended family lived in florida when i grew up, and my dad would often elucidate lengthy lists of complaints about the state of the state, and indeed, nearly any other place in the world, always ending with a wish to return to one nirvanic location.

if only he could be in his home state of kentucky, all of his problems would be solved.

apparently at some point my grandmother, who was tough enough for chicago speakeasies and whose biting wit lives on in me, had enough, and told him “things are bad all over, even in kentucky.”

no doubt with her offhand glance that would ice over hell.

the marriage to my mother lasted about a year.

the family saying lives on to this day.

…to queerspace.com. i’m rather proud of being prescient enough to figure out how register a url in 1998, and hand-code a website. you can see the old site at archive dot org (sadly no archive of the first two years).

it’s a boring ass wordpress site now, and it’s a miracle if you are reading this as the site has a nofollow tag to block search engines.

take a moment though and click around. there’s some cool stuff here.

i was gobsmacked to see that my all time favorite site on the web is no longer up and running.

thankfully we have archive.org to preserve such things.

if you don’t want to bother to click through, here is the tl;dr:

old fashioneds do not have fruit of any kind. it’s sugar, bitters, and the whiskey of your choice. if you must have ice (and why would you…dilution!) it should be one large cube that fills the entire glass.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150102001057/http://oldfashioned101.com/

never used to get insomnia, but now i occasionally do. last night, got about two hours of sleep.

the sleep tracker on my apple watch says I got seven hours.

i’m going with that.

“out on the road today, i saw a deadhead sticker on a cadillac.”

actually, out on the road today, i saw a iii% sticker on a nissan pickup.

You have to be tough to make it in my yard.

For one thing, we live in the inner city, in a row home, with a tiny backyard. Lots of squirrels, feral cats, spotted lantern flies, and various other hardy and unidentified critters.

But we do our best to make it individual and beautiful. And completely low maintenance. It’s all river rock, so no grass and no mowing. There are many perennial herbs, annual flowers responsible for reseeding themselves, a big rhubarb plant, black raspberry vines, a huge Russian sage plant that attracts floods of bees (My sage! Brings all the bees to the yard!) There’s a rudimentary drip irrigation system that we hook up to a garden hose.

And a four-by-four raised bed garden. We always get a head start with volunteer tomato plants from last year, and Swiss chard that’s at least two years old and never seems to die. To that we add indeterminate heirloom tomato plants from Countryside Nursery, with attempts at a couple of other things that never seem to work.

And a few types of complementary basil.

It gets used frequently in summertime cooking. Quite often it’s layered between sliced tomatoes, olive oil, balsamic, and mozzarella for a light dinner. And in early to mid September, when the weeds are starting to take over, we cut back most of it, sit around the patio table, pick and wash the leaves.

Then it comes inside and I make fresh pesto for the year. It gets whirred in an ancient food processor in batches, put into ice cube trays, frozen, and bagged in gallon Ziplocs.

The recipe? Don’t have one. I have a list of ingredients though. Basil, olive oil, Parmesan, garlic, walnuts. I can’t afford pine nuts in that quantity, so it’s nearly always walnuts. Some years it was deluxe unsalted mixed nuts (no peanuts – that would be total heresy and I know I’m skirting the nut line anyway). This year our new Lidl grocery store (Do you have one? Best store ever) had huge bags of whole walnuts for $4 and change. Score.

So today was pesto day. It’s so relaxing. The leaf picking and washing is meditative. The entire process is relaxing and mindful. I feel linked to hundreds (thousands?) of years of people doing the same thing.

And, soon, I’ll probably break out the hand-crank pasta machine.

No Italian heritage, yet I feel a connection.

…today, i deleted my facebook account. i will leave it to you, dear reader, to connect the dots on that one.

over the years i’ve come to rely on a few key sources to get my news. some of them are algorithm-based, and some are curated by humans. i think it’s important to not be in a self-reinforcing bubble and i tend to not go to major media as a starting point, as there can be a bias stemming from the stories they choose to cover and feature. i like exercising my critical thinking skills.

here they are, with a few notes of explanation.

memeorandum.com – this is my go to site for news. it’s mainly algorithm-based with a limited human touch, and surfaces news topics that are currently in vogue. they link to everything from the ny times and washington post to breitbart and the daily caller.

joemygod.com – curated by joe jervis, this is a left-leaning compendium of current news from an lgbt perspective.

nextdraft.com – dave pell is the self-styled “editor of the internet” and his daily email newsletter compiles his top ten topics of the day. always clever and entertaining, and for my money he does the best job from the standpoint of curation. subscribe to the daily email at the link.

daringfireball.net – a combination of news about apple, tech, and current events from john gruber, a thinker i’ve come to respect.

do you have any favorites? let me know if the comments.

chances are you clicked over from my “goodbye facebook” post. this is queerspace.com, an off-and-on project of mine since 1998. there’s oodles of crap to explore. click around, or try these links to get started:

to register with the site: https://www.queerspace.com/wp-login.php?action=register

a very typical queerspace story: https://www.queerspace.com/2006/08/24/mosquito-trucks-ddt-clouds-and-me/

a very popular page: https://www.queerspace.com/kirk-jamies-wedding/our-hedwig-wedding-rings/

thanks for stopping by! have fun : )

kid at grocery store exit: “would you like to buy some girl scout cookies?”

no

mom: “would you like to help make food bank donations possible?”

hell no.

but a+ for creativity.

years ago (five? more?) i ran across

https://www.tilde.club

…a throwback web community where you logged in via ssh (using terminal on the mac) to make text-only web pages. i requested an invite and promptly forgot all about it.

in mid-september of this year i got in! talk about a delay.

anyway they provided pretty good instructions for a noob like me. i followed their clear directions, set up a public/private key, logged in via terminal, and copied/pasted my hand-coded html index file (tweaked a bit to strip out graphics) from september of 2004. i keep nearly everything that’s digital – i have saved many versions of the old site. i throw out most physical items. my hoarding is in bytes, not house space. i digress. the result is at:

https://tilde.club/~jahimword/

I wanted to update the link image that Facebook uses for one of my websites (TWSS.tv) which runs WordPress, and it sent me down a rabbit hole.

Here’s what I did to force Facebook to update that pesky thumbnail:

• Turn off my caching plug-in (for me it was WP Super Cache)

• Added a featured image to my sticky post on the front page (an option when editing the post if your theme supports it)

• Added and enabled the plug-in OG (this step was necessary for me to override the default Jetpack image which I couldn’t figure out how to refresh)

• Went to the Facebook developer’s site (https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/sharing/), debugged, and refreshed the image

• Reenabled the caching plug-in

• Success!

Hope this helps someone 🙂

be there or be square, on april 14th.

mayor pete announcement, live and streaming

ny times mini crossword for 4/2/19

two clues in particular are great!

Led by Kirk in 2001, when he talked me through my trepidation and we got rid of our telephone landline, we have been on a steady march to simplify our connectivity.

After 20+ years with at&t, we recently got a deal with t-mobile that was too good to pass up. We had been spending $140 per month for two phones with at&t, mainly because I was afraid to switch and somehow lose my treasured New York 212 cell phone number.

T-mobile has a $70 all in package for two phones for people aged 55+. We took the plunge, my 212 cell phone number is perfectly intact, and we are very very happy.

The t-mobile customer service model (flat pricing including fees, stellar customer service) got me thinking about Comcast again.

There exists no company I detest more, but I’m forced to do business with them because I have no broadband alternative. Their business model is the opposite of t-mobile: horrible customer service, constant reliance on promotional pricing which forces you to call and threaten to cancel each time your deal expires, and deceptive packages that force you to take on services you don’t want or need.

I cut the tv cord with Comcast a couple of years ago, and have a broadband only package with non-promotional pricing. I would dearly love to drop Comcast – hopefully t-mobile and true 5G will make that possible.

In addition to Comcast broadband, we have a few OTT channel packages. Netflix, Amazon Prime, and DirectTV Now. I tried DTVN when at&t offered an ongoing discount, HBO included, and a free Apple TV. I liked the simplicity of the flat fee bill (net $25), the channel selection, and the well-working app.

Now I’ve been off at&t for two billing cycles. But my dtvn discount goes on. No idea when or if it will stop. The monthly fee recently went up $10 a month, so my net fee will be $35 with discount and free hbo. If the at&t discount and free hbo ends, it will be $61 which is waaaaaay too much.

Twice in the last month I canceled dtvn. The first time we tried Sling for a week. Constant buffering and low res connections, a problem we never had with dtvn. So I went back. Then the $10 price hike, and I cancelled again. They sent me an offer to discount my fee by $10 for six months. So I went back again, but they won’t honor the discount code they emailed me because they say I’m already getting an at&t discount. WTH.

I’ve reached out to dtvn via apple business chat, but two days have gone by with no response.

I really think I will end up trying the philo $16 skinny bundle. I don’t need sports and I think I can get by without local channels.

The other option is the AT&T skinny bundle for $15 per month. Given my weird experiences with dtvn, I’m a bit leery to go with what is basically the same company.

I was looking forward to apple’s offering but it holds no interest for me given the scant details they provided.

Frankly I think I need to make the same logical leap I made when dropping the landline. Why do I feel I need to pay to have channels shoveling live television at me? I bet I could get by with Netflix and Prime.