antipaucity

After months years of threatening, I’ve finally removed one item from my round tuit plate: https://sweetree.ga is the latest Mastodon instance in the fediverse.

There are still a few bugs to iron-out of this instance, but it’s live, and I’m – once-again – tooting.

Come follow me – @warrenmyers@sweetree.ga

In the coming days, fully-automated registrations will be live .. mail settings are wonky right now, but I can manually approve anyone who’d like to join my instance.

Based on some slightly simplified math, here are approximate distances to an uninterrupted horizon from various viewing heights:

• 6 feet – slightly-above-average human eye level: 3 miles
• 20 feet – top of the roof of a typical one-story house: 5.5 miles
• 50 feet – short hill / top of a tree or boom truck: 8.7 miles
• 100 feet – ~10th story window : 12.3 miles
• 250 feet – ~20th floor of an office building: 19.4 miles
• 350 feet – top of the Cliffs of Dover: 22.9 miles
• 1050 feet – Empire State Building observation deck: 39.7 miles
• 1800 feet – observatory of Burj Khalifa : 52 miles
• 14,115 feet – top of Pike’s Peak: 145.6 miles

Over the past month, and through the end of March, I’ve done, and will be doing, a lot of travel for work.

Nothing I haven’t done before, but it’s been a long time since I’ve had to be onsite for more than a couple weeks at a time – most customer leap at the chance to do remote work.

Sadly, that has not been possible with one customer, and the other is highly reticent to allow contractors to engage remotely until they’ve put in several weeks of face time.

Face-to-face interactions are certainly important (I even noted so 4.5 years ago), but conference calls, webexes, and the like can most assuredly replace much of that.

I wrote an article on passwords, passphrases, entropy, and data breaches for my employer’s blog: https://augustschell.com/passwords-passphrases-complexity-length-crackability-memorability-data-breaches

I’ve published another super-simple tool.

A la whatismyip.com, but with no extra cruft (and no queer formatting of the IP address under the hood), welcome IPv4.cf to the world with me!

Along with becoming more active on Mastodon,  I’ve been thinking more about concision recently.

One of the big selling points for Mastodon is that the character limit per post is 500 instead of Twitter’s 140.

And I was thinking, “what if there was a way to force you to write better by writing less / more compactly / more concisely?”

So after a couple weeks, I sat down and wrote an incredibly simple WordPress plugin. Introducing Paragraph.

Paragraph removes all formatting of a post or page, effectively turning it into a wall of text.

How does this help you?

If you see your writing as an uninterrupted wall of text – or a “paragraph” – you may notice that what you’re trying to say is getting lost in the noise.

It could also help force you to write more often but shorter each time.

Or maybe you’ll find it completely useless: and that’s OK, too.

“Ladies and Gentlemen. Boys and Girls. Children of ALL ages. Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey’s Circus is proud to present … GUNTHER .. GABLE .. WILLIAMS!!!”

Is about all I recall in vivid detail from when I went to see the RB&B&B circus as a kid with my parents, aunt, and friends. (And, as a sidebar, gave me the idea to be a host of something “cool” someday.”)

Saturday, my wife and I are taking our three to see Ringling Brothers on their farewell tour.

It’s exciting that I get to take my kids to see it.

But incredibly sad they won’t get to go again.