Author Archives: Steve Mays

Twenty years of blogging

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Twenty years ago (February 2, 2002) I posted my first entry here at smays.com. 5,981 posts. About 25 posts a month, 299 posts a year. My original tag line was, “I really have to start writing some of this down.” I’d hear or read a memorable quote and wanted a place to put it where I could find it later. A place where I could add some context to a photo or video clip, although video was really hard to do in those days. Took forever to encode and even longer to upload. I made the clips tiny to keep the file size small. The media archive contains 2,982 images; 191 video clips (with lots of links to YouTube); and 86 audio files.

From the beginning I’ve been diligent about categories (30) and tags (228). Metadata. Only found half a dozen I missed, now fixed. A few of my categories: Books (438), Family/Friends (583), Gadgets/apps (492), Internet (796), Media/Entertainment (1,185), Politics/gov (552), Sci/Tech (613), Miscellany (689), Video. You can see the full list in the sidebar.

For me tags are the most important part of a blog spanning two decades. Can’t imagine finding anything without them. A few examples: Blogging (346), Consciousness (102), Dogs (152), Google (230), Music (209), Television (157). With almost 6,000 posts, you don’t know what to search for if you don’t know it’s there. Tagging addresses that.

Many people will highlight portions of text or make margin notes while reading a book. But how would you ever find that bit later? Flip thorough all the pages? And that require you remember the quote you’re looking for. When I finish a a book (usually this is with non-fiction) I transcribe anything I underlined, and turn that into a blog post. WordPress does such a good job indexing posts I can search for some obscure word or phrase –even if I don’t remember the title of the book– and I’ve got it.

When I was working with clients (15 years ago?), helping them set up a blog and make their first post, one of two things would happen: There would be a dozen posts within 24 hours (very rare); or they wouldn’t post again for weeks. They wanted to have a blog, just just didn’t want to write blog posts. I believe there is blogging gene. You have it or you don’t.

Another pitfall I’ve mostly avoided is the need to make every post a brilliant essay. They do this because they expect people to read their blog and they want every post to be a work of art. I knew from the beginning it was unlikely anyone would read my blog. Not with any regularity. This was liberating. If I found something interesting (to me) in the New York Times, for example, I could copy a couple of grafs and paste to my blog with a link back to the original NYT story and done.

Social media platforms have pretty much killed off blogs. Nobody expects much effort for those posts. (They even have a name for them: “shitposts“) And in ten minutes every post is washed away in the stream. And those LIKES make you think someone is reading what you posted.

I was hooked on blogging from the beginning and believed it was/would be an important part of the Internet. I was wrong about that but that’s okay. From time to time I think about what will become of smays.com when I’m gone. Is there any way to keep it live, just as an archive of course? Probably not. The WayBack Machine (Internet Archive) has some of it. And that’s good enough.

Is life better when we’re together?

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“Sometimes, it was hard just to stop focusing on the simple reality that other human beings can kill you — and often, it seemed, that they can kill you without much compunction or consequence. They can kill you by refusing to pull their mask over their nostrils, by bureaucratically denying you adequate health care, by allowing you to live on the street, by keeping you at work while a tornado closes in, by shooting you with their guns just because they felt scared.”

— New York Times

Road rot? Where?

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When I purchased my 1977 Ford F150 pickup truck it was comparatively rust-free, having spent it’s life in Colorado where — I’m told — they add corrosion inhibitors to the salt they put on their highways. Had the truck spent those same 40+ years on Missouri highways, it would have rusted away long ago. But my truck did have (does have) some rust spots which I’ve successfully ignored. But the two holes in floor of the cab are getting bigger and sucking some cold air in.

My buddy George Tergin — the master of the automotive hack — suggested I patch these using old license plates, silicone, and self-tapping screws. Before and after photos below.

Hadn’t planned to do much about the other rust spots until Mr. Wolf pointed me to POR-15, a rust preventative coating that I can “glop on the other rust spots. Like so many things in my life now, the pickup only has to last as long as I do.

It is the Tao

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“He, like everyone else, […] is exactly where, exactly what, exactly when he is meant to be. It is the Tao.”

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read William Gibson’s All Tomorrow’s Parties but that line didn’t hit me until I came across it today. Timing, right? American democracy on the ropes. Millions dead/dying from a global pandemic. The planet gasping for breath. And here I am, exactly where/what/when I was meant to be. Seriously, this is the most peaceful I’ve felt in months.

Termination Shock

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Set in the near-ish future, Neal Stephenson’s latest novel (Termination Shock) charts a world gone haywire with the aftereffects of human-driven climate calamity. Like the last couple of novels I’ve read, it incorporated COVID into the storyline as well as the January 6th insurrection.

“…before you knew it there was a white guy in red-white-and blue war paint sacking the U.S. Capitol in what the media described as some kind of Viking getup but Rufus knew perfectly well was a Plains Indian-style bison headdress. And just like Comanches with their raids, those people didn’t stick around and try to plant their yellow rattlesnake flags on the Capitol dome. They just wandered off, having counted coup on democracy and taken a few cop scalps, and melted back into their nomadic trailer park encampments.

This excerpt reminded me of some of his descriptions in Snow Crash.