This is 2020
Everybody throws that title out with Barbara Walters saying it, so I’m going to go with the Hugh Downs version…
There are too many topics to cover in this one introduction to the new year, but I do want to plan around some teases:
- Danny DeKeto needs an update, but basically I gained a few pounds due to lack of exercise. My Keto+Exercise model basically works, but there were some other circumstances
- My dad is doing much better after a rather distressing diagnosis and dire prognosis in June 2019. I did a lot of reading and learned a lot about his medical condition, and over the next few months we kept an eye on it with my mom taking great care of him in home hospice and taking great notes.
- In college I took a class called The History of European Unification, and as my final project I presented a slide show called “An Engineering View of European Unification.” I’ve been reflecting on that lately, and I think I was more right than my professor gave me credit for (he dubbed it a hand wave and I got a B, if I recall).
- I have too many projects in flight at the moment, so I’m pruning the less favorites and saving the trimmings to plan in some glass jars on my window sill. Maybe they’ll root, maybe they’ll whither. In the mean time, I’ve learned yet more about the life of solo entrepreneurialism and I have many things to say…
- I still live in Las Vegas and I am still car[e]free, which has been quite a load off of the mind in almost all aspects. Ride share and public transportation (not in that order) enable travel all over, and day-to-day I walk a whole lot, which is not a bad thing. It’s unfortunate that this city (well, the Regional Transportation Commission) doesn’t quite have their eye on the ball with public transportation, in my opinion.
- My 5000-friend experiment with Facebook has been rather enlightening, though not very surprising. Social media for me in general is losing its luster for another year running, with posts on Medium one example of where I think it’s a nice idea to swing back to more vertical publishing (or perhaps more variety?). I like Flickr (I hope they stick around under SmugMug’s ownership), I like Medium, I like Tumblr, I like owning my own content (so self-publishing on my own platform), and so on, with less reliance on the big players and their weird rules.
I am seriously considering re-entering the podcast fray, which I haven’t done for a while, but I think this live type of interaction is much more interesting than sniping comments on the big social media platforms. Long-form chat, call-in or other listener participation, and so on are so much more possible and interesting than they were back in 2010 or so when we were trying to build RadioSunnyvale. Add YouTube livestreaming and superchats and all that, with multiple participants in group video chat, and it all gets more interesting than the awfulness that is Facebook. Twitter is not much better. Again, my own opinions there.
Obviously the events at the beginning of 2020 on the global scene are interesting to say the very least, but it’s far too early at this point to pick sides and point fingers. I remember back in college when we returned after winter break, as we were watching Desert Storm unfold with clamoring about who did what and whether we would be drafted and all of this craziness, based on partial information and media releases of crafted messages. This is definitely a topic I will follow outside of the social media echo chamber (there are several such topics, and that list grows almost daily).
Finally, I need to write more, mostly because I enjoy it regardless of readership, but I would like to set up more of a history of ponderings on various topics and possibly integrate these views with more discussion or other interaction via a podcast or some kind of multimedia collaborative effort. Actual chat without hiding behind social media profiles, if that is at all possible without being a “famous” show host.
So Happy New Year five days into it, let’s see how the other 360 or so turn out.
