Links and Notes - Thu, Aug 15, 2019

9:11 a.m.

Toledo Express Airport (KTOL)
Aug 15, 2019 8:52 am EDT
Weather : Mostly Cloudy
Temperature : 71 F
Humidity : 76%
Wind Speed : ENE 3 mph
Barometer : 29.94 in
Dewpoint: 63 F
Visibility : 10.00 statute miles

Toledo Executive Airport (KTDZ)
Aug 15, 2019 8:53 am EDT
Weather : Mostly Cloudy
Temperature : 72 F
Humidity : 73%
Wind Speed : E 6 mph
Barometer : 29.95 in
Dewpoint: 63 F
Visibility : 10.00 statute miles

Toledo Suburban Airport (KDUH)
Aug 15, 2019 8:56 am EDT
Weather : Overcast
Temperature : 73 F
Humidity : 73%
Wind Speed : E 5 mph
Barometer : 29.95 in
Dewpoint: 64 F
Visibility : 10.00 statute miles

hazardous weather outlook
national weather service cleveland oh
528 am edt thu aug 15 2019

528 am edt thu aug 15 2019

this hazardous weather outlook is for north central ohio, northeast
ohio, northwest ohio and northwest pennsylvania.

.day and tonight.

thunderstorms are expected to develop across the area early this
afternoon and may continue into the early evening hours. some of the
storms may become severe with damaging winds the primary threat,
although large hail cannot be ruled out.

.days two through seven...friday through wednesday.

no hazardous weather is expected at this time.

.spotter information statement...

spotter activation is not expected at this time.

Toledo 7-day forecast
Last Update: Aug 15, 2019 6:33 am

Today: A chance of showers and thunderstorms, mainly after 1pm. Partly sunny, with a high near 81. East wind 3 to 7 mph. Chance of precipitation is 40%. New rainfall amounts between a tenth and quarter of an inch, except higher amounts possible in thunderstorms.

Tonight: A chance of showers and thunderstorms, mainly before 7pm. Mostly cloudy, with a low around 63. Northeast wind around 5 mph becoming calm in the evening. Chance of precipitation is 30%. New precipitation amounts of less than a tenth of an inch, except higher amounts possible in thunderstorms.

Friday: A chance of showers and thunderstorms, mainly after 3pm. Mostly cloudy, with a high near 82. Calm wind becoming southwest 5 to 8 mph in the afternoon. Chance of precipitation is 30%. New rainfall amounts of less than a tenth of an inch, except higher amounts possible in thunderstorms.


Saturday: A chance of showers and thunderstorms, mainly after 3pm. Mostly cloudy, with a high near 86. Southwest wind 6 to 8 mph. Chance of precipitation is 30%. New rainfall amounts of less than a tenth of an inch, except higher amounts possible in thunderstorms.

Saturday Night: A chance of showers and thunderstorms, mainly before midnight. Mostly cloudy, with a low around 70. Chance of precipitation is 30%. New rainfall amounts of less than a tenth of an inch, except higher amounts possible in thunderstorms.

Sunday: Partly sunny, with a high near 90.

Sunday Night: Mostly cloudy, with a low around 71.

Monday: A chance of showers and thunderstorms after 10am. Partly sunny, with a high near 89. Chance of precipitation is 30%.

Monday Night: A chance of showers and thunderstorms before 10pm. Mostly cloudy, with a low around 70. Chance of precipitation is 30%.

Tuesday: A chance of showers and thunderstorms. Partly sunny, with a high near 88. Chance of precipitation is 30%.

Tuesday Night: A chance of showers and thunderstorms. Mostly cloudy, with a low around 68. Chance of precipitation is 30%.

Wednesday: Mostly sunny, with a high near 88.


New Netflix documentary series 'The Family' features Clintonville couple

White pelicans extend their Great Lakes range, study finds




Now they’re spreading eastward.






On Aug 18, 2017 while waiting at the dock for our Jet Express boat, we saw two White Pelicans fly over, south of us. The birds flew northeast to the southwest. That was a surprise sighting for me for August. We see the White Pelicans pass through northwest Ohio in April and May. Apparently this summer, a pair of White Pelicans successfully nested on a western Lake Erie island in Canadian waters.

She's 63 and living by beach in Mexico on $1,000 a month: 'Can't imagine living in U.S. again'

FOXNEWS POLL: Trump disapproval rises to 56%...

in addition to focusing on the gun issue, the philly mayor needs to address why a serial killer was free.


Hill’s history in the adult criminal justice system began in 2001 when he was 18 and was arrested with a gun that had an altered serial number.







Mediagazer headline:

Ben Kaufman is stepping down as BuzzFeed CMO at the end of 2019; sources: company expects to break even this year, partly due to revenue from commerce business

BuzzFeed expects to break even this year?? Well, that's better than being in the negative. BuzzFeed is heavily backed by venture capital. And the above shows that to sustain a far-reaching digital media org like BuzzFeed, revenue needs to come from non-media related sources. Revenue from commerce business??

Like many of its peers, BuzzFeed has been looking for new sources of revenue, after relying too heavily on Facebook for traffic and ad revenue.

It's a long-term, losing business model when media orgs enslave themselves to the silos for referral traffic. I have no sympathy for media orgs that make such moronic, shortsighted business decisions.


I have no idea what BuzzFeed is selling in its "commerce business." Coffee mugs, grass seed, food, housewares, books?


Kara Swisher / New York Times: Who Killed Tumblr? We All Did — What plagues the internet today hit …
Max Willens / Digiday: With Tumblr acquisition, Automattic gets a chance to win more brands' business

Whoa. Brands?? I hope that is not Matt's goal. Attracting amateur creatives and people who like to read and write will hopefully be Matt's goal. The so-called brands can use everything else to promote their garbage.

Mathew Ingram / @mathewi: Blogging is back, baby! via @Verge
@automattic: “I hope and believe that Tumblr's best days are actually ahead of it.” @photomatt in conversation with @verge's @reckless and @loudmouthjulia:
Nilay Patel / @reckless: I totally blew the chance to make a “blogging is back, baby!” joke in this subhed so I have corrected it. Thank you.
@prettyarbitrary: HOLY SHIT HE GETS IT. AUTOMATTIC GETS TUMBLR. Targeted ads! Freemium features! BRINGING BACK RSS. A GOOD API. ONSITE E-COMMERCE OPTIONS. Maybe even open sourcing the Tumblr code!
Timothy B. Lee / @binarybits: Apple and Google now have veto power over the kinds of content that pretty much every content platform is allowed to host. This seems not great.
Carrie Brown / @brizzyc: I hope so. I was just saying yesterday how kidz these days are really missing out on all the fun we used to have. I mean, they have TikTok and all, but there's nothing like a good ol' blog.
Jay Rosen / @jayrosen_nyu: As a tech mogul, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg is different. Read this interview about the acquisition of Tumblr to see what I mean.
Nilay Patel / @reckless: One thing that jumped out in this interview: the real sense that Tumblr didn't lose nearly as many users due to the porn ban as people think.
Nilay Patel / @reckless: Emergency ~exclusive~ Vergecast! I talked to @photomatt about his plans for Tumblr, with a big assist from @loudmouthjulia. It sounds like the plan is to reinvigorate blogging, which, frankly, would be awesome.

This is a dumb take, yet again, by Swisher about technology. Swisher uses Twitter at such an obscene level that she should be studied by scientists to see if she is detached from reality.

Why does Swisher use the cesspool of the internet? Why does Swisher use the same website that is used by white supremacists, terrorists, trolls, and bots?

Twitter is a radicalization machine. Twitter spreads violence, hate, and misinformation better than probably any other website, and Swisher loves to use that site.

Swisher's heavy use of Twitter enables Twitter's toxicity and detriment to society because Swisher's engagement brings revenue to Twitter, which means Twitter has no financial incentive to change the site.

If Swisher truly cared, she would delete her Twitter account and post on her website that uses a domain name that she leases. If she truly cared about the crap that she writes, then she would leave the silos behind and embrace the open web and some concepts.

From Swisher's NY Times opinion piece:

It’s most definitely a nasty digital world out there these days.

It might be that way in Swisher's filter bubble and echo chamber. And it might be that way because she lives on Twitter. But it's not that way for people who do not use social media. It's not that way for me when I watch YouTube videos on our Roku TV because I watch videos about watercolor painting, sewing, and crocheting.

It's possible that some Twitter users never see any toxicity because they use Twitter like I use YouTube. I don't post to YouTube. A Twitter user could follow artists, crafters, local businesses, and local non-profits and never post to Twitter, and they may never experience Twitter's cesspool reputation. But that's now how journalists use Twitter.

... the insane conspiracy theories that cycle through social media ...

Mainly through Twitter, which get amplified by journalists. Journalists deserve a lot of the blame for what Swisher describes.

Or the endless flood of news that flashes so fast past your eyes ...

Again, I blame journalists who use Twitter.

It’s all that, but more broadly, it’s that this is the ugly place where we live now ...

No, it's not like that at all. Some people who use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube will never experience the "ugly place" that Swisher describes because they use social media, the internet, and the web DIFFERENTLY than Swisher.

Swisher's opinion is describing HER internet usage, and like most journalist, she assumes that this how everyone functions.

I don't see any of Swisher's ugliness in my feed reader account at, nor in my homemade, simple feed reader I'm not a journalist. I'm not a part of Swisher's filter bubble.

I also do not see the ugliness at Hacker News.

... and it’s very hard to figure out how to find our way out.

No, it's not. It's damn easy.

  1. delete all social media accounts, especially Twitter
  2. buy/lease a domain name
  3. create a personal website at Blogger, WordPress, Svbtle, Ghost, etc., and point the domain name to the website. All of those CMS-hosted solutions will automatically provide RSS or Atom feeds.
  4. use a feed reader to follow other individuals

Maybe eventually, down the road a ways, incorporate some IndieWeb concepts, such as the Webmention for cross-site commenting, but this might require migrating to a server-hosted solution. But this idea is unnecessary. Email can be used as a commenting system if comments are desired. Do not use Twitter for discussions.

Are you completely exhausted by it? Me too.

Nope. I'm not exhausted by the "it" that bothers Swisher. Maybe Swisher needs to do a self evaluation and re-think her internet usage.

Which is why, sometimes really late at night when it is quiet, I think about an alternate universe for the internet: one in which the internet actually managed to remain a pretty nifty place, as it was in the early days.

Huh? Is she discussing the internet or the web? I can guarantee that whatever alternate universe for the internet that Swisher craves already exists. She chooses not to use this alternate internet because she's addicted to Twitter.

121,369 TWEETS

WTF??? 121K tweets???

Her Twitter profile does not contain a link to her personal website. The so-called blogosphere of the late 1990s and early 2000s still exists, but alleged tech writers like Swisher don't write about personal websites, feeds, feed readers, concepts, email, IRC, Gopher, etc. because these so-called tech writers are so immersed in Twitter that they have a narrow view of the world.

Has Swisher heard of the IndieWeb community that has existed since 2010? Has she ever written about the IndieWeb? Has she attended an IndieWeb gatherings?

The IndieWeb is a community of individual personal websites, connected by simple standards, based on the principles of owning your domain, using it as your primary identity, to publish on your own site (optionally syndicate elsewhere), and own your data.

That's it. That's the main principle of the IndieWeb. It's not anything new. It's what many web authors were doing in the 1990s.

The IndieWeb wiki contains a ton of information and concepts. Personal website authors can pick and choose which IndieWeb tech ideas to implement. They can choose to implement none of the IndieWeb tech ideas, but their sites would be IndieWeb-ish because they maintain their own personal website.

The IndieWeb is new because it's not about dropping social media. It's about posting on personal websites first and then syndicating their content to social media. And the IndieWeb has created tech that enables social media interactions to be backfed to the personal websites.

Swisher could do that. She could keep her cesspool account at Twitter, but everything she posts would originate from her personal website first. And all of the comments, shares, and whatever occurs at Twitter would get backfed to her personal website. It would appear that people are commenting directly on Swisher's personal website, but the "comments" would be occurring at Twitter, and those Twitter interactions would get pushed to Swisher's website via

The IndieWeb encourages people to use the open web in addition to using the social media silos.

About Swisher's alternate internet universe dream:

Is it just a fantasy?

No. It has existed on the web, since the web got invented around 1990. It probably existed on the internet prior to 1990 thanks to Usenet (NNTP) and email.

Swisher's fantasy also currently exists at a much smaller scale on the internet in Gopherspace. Many people still maintain Gopher sites, which are similar to websites, except Gopher is 100 percent plain text, except for the links, which are clickable within Gopher.

Here's my gopher site: gopher://

Unfortunately, today's massively bloated and complex web browsers that support too much crap do not support the simple Gopher protocol. The text-based web browser Lynx supports Gopher. cURL supports Gopher.

On the iPhone, a Gopher browser exists called iGopher.

As a tech writer, I think, Swisher could write about text-based web browsers, such as Lynx, Links, and elinks. She could discuss limited graphical web browsers, such NetSurf and links2 -g. Swisher would learn that the problem on the web is not what Swisher thinks. The web's main problem is obnoxiously bloated web design that relies too much on JavaScript to display text and images. That's something worthy of writing about by Swisher.

Swisher answers her fantasy question:

Maybe, but it certainly seemed that could be the internet’s path when I first saw Tumblr.

In its earliest incarnation, the kaleidoscope of a microblogging platform was rich with quirky communities, wonderful memes and, most of all, where vibrant creativity once reigned and often astonished. It was one of the most delightful places one could be at the time.

That's because most people in the late 2000s were creating web content by using their desktop and laptop computers. Tumblr started either too late or too early.

Tumblr launched in 2007, which is near the peak or past the peak of the blogosphere's popularity. Apple released its first iPhone in 2007, but most of us are not early adopters.

I would say that the popularity of the iPhone and Android smartphones began around 2010 and grew wildly world wide in the years since. Now most web content produced by amateurs is probably done via the smartphones and native social media apps and not within web browsers.

Instagram and SnapChat launched as mobile app-only services. They still do not permit creating content through web browsers.

If Tumblr has formed and launched in 2010, it would have probably been a mobile app service only, possibly adding support for web browsers later. But Tumblr launched as an easier, simpler, and more creative way to blog compared to Blogger, Moveable Type/Typepad, and WordPress.

Tumblr was founded in early 2007 by David Karp and Marco Arment. It quickly became the brightest in a flurry of truly innovative social media developments of the time. Pronounced “tumbler,” it allowed users to post all kinds of short-form blogs called tumblelogs, which could be followed by others.

Social media developments "of the time" in 2007 included MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. But in 2007, I don't remember these services being called "social media". Facebook was called a social networking site.

... the dull blue suburb that was the then 3-year-old Facebook.

Huh, that sounds like revisionist history. Facebook opened in February 2004, but it remained closed to certain email addresses or groups until September 2006 when it opened up to the world.

Facebook was about one-year-old to the entire world when Tumblr launched. No way were people calling Facebook a dull suburb in 2007. Most people joined Facebook after 2007, obviously.

About early Tumblr, Swisher wrote:

And so much terrific art and so many amazing photos and a cornucopia of funny bits and pieces of just about everything.

When was the last time that Swisher visited

Ello is a global community of artists dedicated to creative excellence. Built by artists, for artists.

It truly is a world wide web. Swisher is wearing web blinders.

[Tumblr] quickly got its lofty valuation with $125 million in investments from tech’s smartest investors and took off. It hit a billion blog posts by 2010, and when the site started accepting advertising in 2012, Tumblr seemed golden.

Fool’s gold. What plagues the internet today hit Tumblr hard and early. There were the inevitable copyright problems and spam and security problems and product problems. And the content itself, which started as edgy, got rather gnarly, from self-harm sites to neo-Nazis to what really tanked Tumblr: sex.

What plagued Tumblr was the fact that it never made a profit, and it was heavily funded by venture capital. After a while, the investors want their money back and more. Thus the inevitable sale to Yahoo.

Maybe Tumblr and Twitter would have been better if those companies CHARGED A USER FEE.

What in the hell is wrong with services like Tumblr and Twitter charging monthly or annual fees? This funding barrier would slow down the bots and trolls.

But the funding barrier could also produce less web traffic and fewer users, and those metrics are coveted because it attracts more venture capital. is free UNLESS users want additional features, which cost money. It's like a menu. Twitter and Tumblr should have adopted something similar. Basic functionality was free, but if users desired more functionality, then each feature would cost some money.

It's not the internet's fault. It's not even a societal fault. It's the fault of the people who managed Tumblr and who manage Twitter. It's probably too late to save Twitter or change Twitter from its cesspool status, since it's basically owned by Wall Street.

But with Automattic's successful track record with providing free features and open source code in addition to providing hosting services that require users to pay money to access some feature, then I'm bullish on Automattic improving Tumblr and someday, making Tumblr better than it was 10 years ago.

There was no good way of making that stuff disappear, although Tumblr tried to a lot of ways — from using filters, to making the safe mode the default, to outright bans of sex acts and more. But terrible stuff inevitably slipped through, even causing Apple to pull Tumblr’s mobile app in 2018 when child pornography showed up.

Tumblr supported or still supports domain name mapping. That makes Tumblr work similar to Blogger and

But that description of Tumblr by Swisher makes Tumblr appear more like a 100 percent walled silo, like Facebook and Twitter.

Swisher overlooks the obvious solution, which is embracing the open web. People create their own islands on the web. These can be connected by linking (URLs). That's the web.

Automattic supports the open web. I believe that Automattic will make Tumblr support the open web more than Tumblr did in the past, if it did.

Fast forward to now, Tumblr has landed with WordPress, a former rival and the kind of company that it probably should have been with all along.

It was probably impossible for Automattic to afford to buy Tumblr back in 2013, due to Tumblr's heavy VC support and misleading valuation. Automattic was much smaller back in 2010 to 2013. It could not buy Tumblr.

As to why he bought it, despite all the rough times Tumblr has endured? “It’s just fun,” Mr. Mullenweg said to The Wall Street Journal in an interview. “We’re not going to change any of that.”

Fun? On the internet? Today? From his lips to our ears — and, maybe, to our souls, to take us back to when we were all a little bit better. Because we were.

The internet and the web have always been fun. The problem is that journalists like Swisher have changed how they use the internet/web, and they incorrectly assume that their miserable experiences are identical to everyone else's. Why are journalists so closed-minded?


Blogging is back, baby!… via @Verge

Journalist Mathew Ingram does not link to his personal website/blog if he maintains one. But he likes to use Twitter an unhealthy level.

236,437 TWEETS

Holy hell.

Journalist Carrie Brown:


Carrie links to her personal website from her Twitter page. But that personal website is not a blog or a site that hosts regularly-created content. That personal site, however, liked to a hosted blog, but she last updated it in 2015.

Journalist Nilay Patel


Blogging or personal website publishing has never disappeared. Nilay does not link to her personal website from his Twitter page.

Back in the summer of 2015, Nilay wrote what could be the dumbest tech article of this decade when he blamed the web slowness on web browser developers, instead of putting ALL of the blame on website creators, especially media orgs.

To learn how fast our internet connections can be and how fast websites can load, people should try to links2 -g web browser.

The best web speed testing tool is

This person may or may not be a journalist. I'm unsure. But this person does not link to her personal website either.


What are these people waiting for, especially the journalists? They could maintain their own personal websites now, somewhere. What haven't they?

Pathetically, the journalists live on Twitter and have become clueless about the World Wide Web.

Journalists should cover and USE or play with other internet/web technologies, such as ActivityPub, Scuttlebutt, IPFS, and DAT.

Swisher and other complaining journalists are not helping to change their toxic internet experiences by continuing to use Twitter. They could help by deleting their Twitter accounts and focusing on their personal websites. Since they are journalists, they could write at their respective media orgs about personal websites and the open web. That could encourage more people to try to use the open web and maybe use the silos less.

A transgender employee of The Guardian resigned last month accusing it of being “an incredibly transphobic organisation”; a second employee quit weeks later

ProPublica releases a guide on how newsrooms can collaborate around large datasets, announces it is open-sourcing its software and making it available this fall

Here's another example of Twitter's cesspool reputation, and it's another example how journalists or media people should stop using Twitter. The media whines about the lack of civility in the world, but journalists use one of the worst websites on the planet.

Nate Silver made his name as The New York Times’ data guru, creating the methodology that predicted Barack Obama’s reelection.

Now, Silver’s method seems to be to stir up trouble for the Times.

The 41-year-old editor of the data-driven news site FiveThirtyEight recently called his former employer arrogant, engaged in an extended Twitter debate with his successor ...

No wonder people look down on the media when they act like that.

Wow, based upon that Politico article, Silver is unhinged.

In the spring of 2016, Nate's fabulous prediction system said that Hillary had over a 90 percent chance to win the Michigan primary. Bernie Sanders won it. That's not a little miss. That's a massive epic failure.

538 does not do polling, but their methodology to create predictions is based upon polls and who knows what else. Clearly, their methods don't work well.

"Man dies after competing in California taco-eating contest"

Matthew Boylan, who watched Tuesday’s taco eating contest from his seat in Section 105, told the Fresno Bee he quickly noticed Hutchings because “he was eating so fast compared to the other two (contestants).”

“It was like he’d never eaten before,” Boylan said. “He was just shoving the tacos down his mouth without chewing.”


javascript framework discussion

Introduction to Svelte (

This looks nice. I'm not a framework guy (more on that in a second) but they at least seem to be heading in the direction of letting me get work done without forcing me to do it their way.

That said; first it was Backbone which wasn't terrible but kinda clunky in my opinion. But then Angular came along and everybody rushed over to that pasture. But then React came along and everybody rushed over to that pasture. Now Vue is appearing to be greener than the others. Is Svelte where everyone will go next?

My point is this: if all these frameworks were so great, why do we keep running to the latest new one? I actually heard a contractor say the other day, "five years ago everybody wanted Ember developers and now everybody wants React developers. I even have those old Ember clients coming back asking for developers to rewrite the Ember projects in React."

Maybe it really is turtles all the way down...

golang - the proper term

I completed Ultimate Go, took good notes and commented directly on source code (

Learn Go with Tests is the best programming language course I've ever gone through.

That's all. Just sharing that the methodology worked so well. I felt like I could legitimately jump right into a Go developer team.

i assume that this is a joke, otherwise, ohio state the university is as rabid as their football fans.