Category Archives: Blogging

“If you’re watching this video…”

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Every blog has a final post. Today I had a flash fantasy of what mine might be and asked ChatGPT to write a short story based on the following scenario:

An elderly man has been posting to his blog for more than twenty years. More than 6,000 posts. It was a very personal journal and very few ever visited or read his posts.

Before dying he wrote a post he recorded a video saying he had hidden one hundred thousand dollars in cash somewhere in the world… and a clue to the location was hidden somewhere on his blog. In a single post, perhaps… or one some combination of posts. Or within one of the many videos or audio files on the blog.

Before his death he shared this information on a number of social media sites with no idea if anyone would notice or believe the story.

As these things sometimes do, his story went viral and his blog was deluged with people from all over the world, searching for clues to the location of the fortune.

Prior to his death he set up a trust to cover the expense of maintaining his blog.

This could be a story about one person’s search or the story-line could follow a number of different people. Lots of ways to go with this. Good luck.

Here’s what she came up with…

Blog-worthy in 2024

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I’ve been thinking about a “things-Steve-put-on-his-blog-in-2004” post. With 252 posts it could quickly get out of hand and become one of those endless Xmas letters people send out and almost nobody reads. (Much like this post) It seems unlikely anyone would want to browse all 252 posts but this link will pull them up.

  • If one topic dominated throughout the year it was Artificial Intelligence. Mostly ChatGPT/DALL•E and Perplexity. Fifty-two posts (20% of all posts).
  • Fell and broke my arm in early February so did lots of reading this year, passing 1,000 books in my LibraryThing in March. (I only read about 50 books in 2024)
  • I created and posted a fair amount of video in 2024 and I started playing with the DJI Osmo Pocket 3 camera in April but found it had almost too many features so it set on the shelf for much of 2024. 
  • Had a lot of fun with the Jeep this year and drove it topless for most of the summer.
  • My meditation streak (2,288 consecutive days) ended in July when I just forgot. Less traumatic and more liberating than I expected.
  • Not sure about a date but I moved from Google’s cloud to iCloud this year in anticipation of Apple Intelligence with came late in the year. 
  • Barb and I killed three Copperhead snakes last summer and I dispatched an armadillo and a possum.
  • After ten years I finally broke down and got an Apple Watch. Don’t know how l got by without out one. Yes, I’ve become one of those annoying Apple Watch people.
  • Started letting my hair grow in the fall and don’t plan to cut it as long as Keith Richards is still alive.
  • Around the end of October I started using Apple’s Journal app.
  • In December I got to try Sora, an AI-powered platform that generates videos based on text prompts, and Apple’s Image Playground

See what I mean? Just like one of those Xmas letters that nobody reads. But this is blogging in its purest form

Claude does bio rewrite

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My bio here was written in 2003. I had ChatGPT do a rewrite when I started chatting with her. Decided to give Claude a crack at it.

Let me rewrite your compelling life story with a focus on the cultural touchstones and pivotal moments, taking inspiration from the conversational style of a radio DJ (since that was such an important part of your journey):

Hey there, folks! Let me spin you the tale of a Missouri kid who came of age right at the sweet spot of American culture. Picture this: 1948, Poplar Bluff, Missouri. A farm girl meets a city boy in St. Louis after the war, and boom – that’s where our story begins.

Growing up in Kennett with a radio announcer dad and a mom working at the welfare department, I was your typical Baby Boomer kid, hypnotized by that Motorola TV’s Indian-head test pattern in the early ’50s. Pure Norman Rockwell Americana, folks.

The soundtrack of my life kicked into high gear when The Beatles dropped “I Want to Hold Your Hand” in late ’63. There I was, a sophomore in high school, riding the first wave of the British Invasion. But the B-side of that record was Vietnam, and by ’66, we college guys were all doing the draft-number shuffle.

Speaking of numbers, mine came up 210 in the first lottery – talk about living on the edge! Did a brief stint in law school (thanks for the suggestion, Dad!) until Nixon froze the draft at 195. Then it was time for a career change-up: Postal Inspector in the Pacific Northwest, investigating exploded mailboxes like some rural Sherlock Holmes.

But the turntable of fate kept spinning, and in ’72, I found my true groove back in radio at KBOA, working the overnight shift. The best record I ever played? Meeting Barb at Tommy’s North-End Cafe in ’73 – took six years to make that hit single into a long-playing album, if you know what I mean.

The final track brought me to Learfield Communications in ’84, where I rode the waves of radio networks until the digital revolution came calling. Signed off from that gig on December 31, 2012, but hey – every good DJ knows when it’s time to let the next song play.

And that’s the way this record spins – from test patterns to transistors, from draft numbers to digital networks. What a long, strange, wonderful trip it’s been!

Dave Winer’s blogroll

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I recently discovered I was on Dave Winer’s blogroll. If you don’t know who Dave Winer is and why he is/was important to blogging, you can wait in the car and I’ll be out in a minute. Today I noticed what I believe is a new feature of that blogroll. The blogs are ordered by most recent updates. 

PS: Those fortunate enough to be included are too smart to try and game this by throwing up junk.

If I could have only one person reading my blog…

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I’m not real active on social media. The occasional post on Fosstodon (following 53, 39 followers). I can go six months without seeing a like (is that what they call it there?) or a comment. So you can imagine my surprise when I see TWO comments in as many days (really one comment and a follow-up). From Dave Winer (@davew) no less.

For a long-time blogger like me, that’s like getting a phone call from Bob Dylan to tell you someone sent him a link to the YouTube video of you performing Blowin’ In the Wind at last year’s Elks Club Talent Night… and thought you did a good job. I can think of no one more influential in the early days of blogging than Dave Winer. The  Wikipedia page tells that story better than I could.

I’ve been sharing his insights and observations (31 posts) here since 2002, which was the year I started blogging. People have been born and grown into adulthood since then. The earliest post I could find also mentioned Robert Scoble and Chris Pirillo. Proto-bloggers, both.

This reads like an old-guy-remember-when post because, well… I’m an old guy remembering when. Before blogs came along in the late 1990’s, if you had something to say and wanted to share it with the world… a letter to the editor was pretty much it and there no certainty it would be printed. Blogging changed that.

Social media platforms pushed blogging off the online stage. Fact is, most folks didn’t have much to say and writing a post every day was just too much work. But anyone can shit-post on Facebook or Twitter and anyone did/does.

But Dave Winer never stopped blogging and I never stopped blogging.