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About Me

I decided to start this blog as a way to put some of my writings out there.  I will occasionally post (keyword occasionally) whatever I feel like.

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The End of Neeva Search

This morning I went to Neeva Search to see if rain was on the forecast. I had been up since 5 AM and noticed that there were quite a bit of clouds moving overhead. During a hike along a local nature trail I could feel the crispness of morning retreating and the mugginess of an oncoming rainstorm permeating the air. I never did search for what the weather was going to do; instead, I went to Neeva and saw that they were shutting down on June 2nd.  I have quite liked Neeva Search from when I first started using it about six months ago. I was disheartened to see that it could not keep its doors (tubes? ports?) open any longer. What they were doing was admirable. Google has amassed a veritable fortune through what Shoshana Zuboff has dubbed "Surveillance Capitalism." It would be easy to try and replicate that, easier still to lay down and admit Google's dominance in the internet search and ad-server realm. Neeva tried to fight back. The whole philosophy of Neeva was to have a ...
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Going Smartish

Going Smart ish Three weeks ago, I gave my Google Pixel 6 to someone else. Their phone broke and they needed a new one. I offered mine up as a replacement. I finally had an excuse to try living without a smartphone for a while. I'm now walking around with a Nokia Flip 2780. It's not the same "dumb" phone I remember from my days of the Motorola RAZR, instead, it's smart- ish . It features quite a basic app store in its Linux-based KaiOS. There is a basic— basic —app store that has a few hundred apps. I was surprised to find that the phone came preinstalled with a simple version of Google Maps, a basic web browser, and some email connectivity. These apps work, but they are clunky, slow, and nowhere near the user-experience offered on Android or iOS. That's a good thing. This phone sits idly in my pocket primarily as a phone or message receiver. I don't  want to do anything else with it precisely because it is so bad at other things. Now, I am reclaiming my ...
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Starlight

Photo by Nathan Anderson on Unsplash Just as Peter was about to drift off, the hiss of the machines in his walls started their nightly concert of industrial cacophony. It always started the same. An invisible worm would burrow its way into his ear and start buzzing around in his brain. He would toss and turn to shake it loose, and, after it was dislodged, it would scurry into the walls to conduct the nightly concerts. All hope of sleeping was lost. He was desperate for sleep. The isolation of working remotely was tearing at his seams of sanity and he had been unable to sleep for the last few days. He said to no one, “I am going to sleep tonight, I am going to sleep tonight, I am going to sleep tonight…” even though there were no dreams to come. He lay awake, starting at the popcorn ceiling he told himself he would scrape off five years ago. His clock was staring at him from the dresser, he could feel it. It put out a menacing red glow that filled the room. It was in league with...
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