Retired engineer, former sailor, living off grid in Puerto Rico. Volunteer for climate change mitigation efforts.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • I worked for an engineering company that had “secret” projects. So when you were assigned to a secret project, you’d move all your desk stuff into that project area where everyone coming and going had to enter a security code to get through the door. But the size of projects would vary over the weeks. I remember one Friday I finished my work on a secret project along with several other people in the desks and drafting tables near me. The next Monday, we found that our desks were in the same place, but they’d moved the wall; so we were outside the project area - or actually we had been absorbed into a different project area with a different door code. So in those big buildings, there may be small offices, but they are easily reconfigured.

    I wonder if squatting in high-rise office space might give rise to sort of communal life - something more social than single-family units of today. It will be an interesting social experiment



  • The guy living across the hall from me at Georgia Tech in about '80 had bought an Apple II with a 50hz power supply. He was an electrical engineer and rigged up a new power supply for US grid. All he had was the motherboard and a keyboard, the screen was an old TV. The memory was a regular audio cassette player. He had a game called “Orbital Mechanic” and we played with it quite a bit. It turns out that the paths of objects thrown from one orbit to another are not so intuitive - so it was a real challenge to toss a wrench from Astronaut A in orbit 1, to Astronaut B in orbit 2. That game used WASD for aiming the throw, and when I later began playing PC games, I wondered if that old game might have been the originator of the concept or if it goes even further back.


  • The demise of reddit marks my third foray into the fediverse - first after Google+ shut down and Mastodon was a squalling infant. I made accounts in numerous fediverse instances to try them out, and most withered from disuse. Then Musk began the death of Twitter and I moved solidly into fediverse and our distant cousin, Diaspora. I did not think of reddit as social, but as a news source - my bad. But now that it is effectively gone, I am all in with the fediverse. I again have multiple accounts, and they work remarkably differently for being so connected. Like if someone comments on Lemmy in direct reply, and I commented from Mastodon, I get the notification on Lemmy AND Mastodon (because the first @ is the same on both accounts I suppose). Anyway, hard to say how the platforms will evolve, but I love having a front row seat for these things and participating.

    I created magazines, not to stake out space, but to make a “bus stop” for fellow explorers. I have no long-term desire to own a piece of the fediverse. When a more robust space arises for a group’s topical interests, we’ll subscribe there too, and let the weeds take the old bus stop where we first gathered.