Some Thoughts in Bullets

• I’ve started training for a marathon again, hoping to run the Toronto Waterfront Marathon in October of 2024. Last year a flair-up of plantar fasciitis ruined my progress and bumped me down to the half-marathon, and I ended up taking this whole year basically off running because of it. Hopefully this year with stretching and orthopaedics I can get past it.
• I’ve been getting back into reading via RSS feeds. Google Reader may have died a horrible death, but I’m glad that most of my favourite blogs and websites still publish feeds. I’m using the absolutely fabulous Reeder for Mac and iPhone, and it’s a great experience. (I publish my favourite finds to my linkroll and push these to Mastodon as well!)
• I’ve also been getting more into Bluesky. The more I curate my home feed display, and find cool people to follow, the more it feels like Old Twitter. I didn’t realize how much I missed the internet of 2007 but I think I pretty clearly did based on how I’ve been browsing (and running this blog) in the past couple of weeks.
• My company just invited us all to a Holiday party on December 6th. I work from home, so I am under no obligation. But if I were, I think the last thing I would want to do is ring in the Holiday season by standing around my office building on a Wednesday afternoon. You couldn’t even rent out a banquet hall?
• I’ve been re-watching the Grand Tour and reading what some describe as “chick-lit” and I have nothing to say about either of these things, really, except that they are, I suppose, media targeted at different demographics but I’m very much enjoying both.
• This is an interesting acquisition by Automattic, the company who runs Tumblr and Wordpress. After being back as an active member on Tumblr, for just about exactly twelve months, my main problem was that the parent company seemed so profit-driven that every change they made almost felt designed to alienate core-and-long-term users. It was like they didn’t understand what made Tumblr both special, and fun, to use. Wordpress was something I explored as an alternative to Tumblr when I was considering moving this blog, but the dashboard is so bloated and overly complicated that it, too, felt completely different than when I first started using it years ago. I wonder if this acquisition is going to try to bring in chat or DM features, which users also don’t really want in my opinion, to Tumblr.
• I enjoyed this post format, I think I’ll use it again.

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