2020
We’re All in the Bathroom Filming Ourselves
Bathrooms are “the perfect stage set” for TikTok videos. “Most home bathrooms are well lit and have nice, bright acoustics. Unlike the kitchen, living room or even bedroom, bathrooms are private spaces, where parents and siblings are trained to not barge in.” Also, that big mirror is great for filming selfies.
“Spending a lot of time on TikTok, and it seems that knowing how to film yourself speaking with a cellphone in a bathroom mirror is a new skill to be mastered,” Jon-Stephen Stansel, a digital marketer, tweeted. “It’s like a stand-up learning to work a microphone, it’s part of the craft.”
The case for replacing air travel with high-speed sleeper trains
Like Cory, I’ve taken the sleeper train from London to Edinburgh and found it was a great trip.
I’ve often wished there was a sleeper train running between San Diego (where we live) and San Francisco (where I often travel for work). There’s a sleeper bus that runs between LA and SF but I don’t think that’ll work for me.
DirecTV Satellite at Risk of Exploding in Orbit — Jeff Baumgartner/Light Reading
AT&T and Boeing need to move the DirecTV Spaceway-1 satellite to a new orbit, over fears that a crippling battery malfunction could cause the bird to explode and threaten other satellites.
Podcast: Don’t Call Us an SD-WAN Provider – Cato Networks – Me/Light Reading
Cato Networks would rather you didn’t call them an SD-WAN provider anymore. Instead, Cato is delivering a new kind of service – Secure Access Service Edge – or SASE (pronounced “sassy”).
I talked with Cato’s David Greenfield about what the heck SASE is anyway, the shifting needs of the market formerly known as SD-WAN, and the relative virtues of gelato vs. Ben & Jerry’s on the Light Reading podcast.
Automating cross-posts to Tumblr, using duct tape and rubber cement
I’ve been having a lot of trouble over the years posting to Tumblr. The native Tumblr apps and web page for creating new posts have gotten more and more difficult to use. I suspect the software has been redesigned over and over again by people who do not actually use Tumblr, and think Tumblr users are semi-literate idiots and perverts.
We are not semi-literate idiots.
There are several automated channels for posting to Tumblr, but they all result in ugly, ugly formatting errors, or duplicate posts.
I think I may have hit on a solution: For years now I’ve been automatically generating a daily email newsletter of my blog posts, using RSS and MailChimp. I realized this evening that MailChimp automatically generates its own RSS feeds. I wired the RSS to Tumblr using IFTTT and voila – a daily post on my Tumblr. Hopefully. If it works.
You can subscribe to the newsletter here, by the way, if that’s your thing: Subscribe.
And this is me on Tumblr: Mitch’s Tumblr.
For the past couple of weeks, my blog home has been on micro.blog: mitchwagner.micro.blog. So far I am very happy with it and not inclined to go anywhere.
I have seen this car parked at Lake Murray occasionally for years. It’s always been beat up and decaying, but I used to think it looked beautiful, like a well worn leather jacket. Now it looks like it wants to die.
An earlier product name, “Gee, Your Hair Smells Like a Cheesesteak,” was rejected by focus groups. 1982 ad via
La Mesa Shop Owner Arrested After Attack on San Diego Media (I have a slight personal connection to this story)
A La Mesa shop owner – already the subject of a sexual harassment investigation – was arrested on battery and vandalism charges Tuesday following a physical altercation between him and local media members recorded on video.
Peter Carzis, 76, was being investigated for reports of alleged harassment on female customers when members of the news media appeared at his shop, Peter’s Men’s Apparel on La Mesa Boulevard, Monday afternoon.
We live in La Mesa, and I have several jackets I’ve bought at this store. I’ve seen reports about Carzis on the La Mesa Happenings Facebook group over the past few months. He was always fine with me when I went in.
Last week I saw a video on the group of someone who appeared to be Carzis, engaging in lewd behavior with a woman while seated on a chair on the sidewalk.
Monday I was meeting a friend for for lunch in La Mesa Village and arrived early, so I decided to walk past Carzis’s shop to see what there was to see. There were two media trucks on the sidewalk; they looked like they were breaking down and getting ready to go.
The La Mesa Happenings group has more than 1,500 new signups since this story broke two days ago.
UPDATE: The store may have had different ownership when I shopped there.
Black Texas teen told to cut his dreadlocks to walk at graduation nbcnews.com
VMware Extends Its SD-WAN Tentacles With Nyansa Acquisition Me/Light Reading
CenturyLink Inks $1.6B Networking Deal With US Interior Department – Me/Light Reading
