Dan York

Welcome to DanYork.com

Welcome to DanYork.com, the home of Dan York on the web. The reality is that I don't write often here on this specific site (danyork.com) as my writing is usually found on my various focused sites, particularly these five:

Disruptive Telephony	Disruptive Conversations
Code.DanYork.com	Voice of VOIPSA
Deploy360 Programme

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You can visit danyork.me for a stream of all my latest writing across all my sites.

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For an explanation of those sites and the full list of sites to which I contribute, please visit my blogs and podcasts pages. The best way to track what I am writing or doing is probably to follow me on Twitter where I am @danyork and tweet frequently. Feel free to browse around this site since you are here... look at my photos... scan my presentations... check out my books... sign up for my newsletter... or just generally learn more about who I am. Thanks for stopping by!

Celebrating 20 Years as a Wikipedia Editor

Today is a special anniversary for me. It was 20 years ago that I set up an account and first made an edit to Wikipedia! On that day I became a "Wikipedian"... although I'm not sure if that name was being used yet. Wikipedia had only been launched in January 2001, so it was a VERY different world in those days.

With the complete transparency of Wikipedia, I can of course go back and see what my earliest edits were. It's fun to scroll down the list. Amusingly, my very first edit would be frowned upon today. I added the URL for my employer at the time, Mitel, to what was then a very sparse article with five paragraphs of text with no sources or references. (Compare that to today's article for Mitel.) Today this would be considered a "COI edit" as I had a "conflict of interest" and per the "WP:COI guidelines" it would be recommended that I not make this edit directly (although it was just adding something factual in the form of a URL, so other editors may allow it).

But back in 2004, those were still the very early days when everyone was still trying to figure out what this Wikipedia thing was all about. The norms and conventions for things such as WP:COI hadn't yet been developed.

The only other edit I made that first year was that same day when I first created my "user page" with one sentence linking to the other sites where I wrote. (How many people remember Advogato?😀) Twenty years later, that user page looks MUCH different!

Then in January 2005 I started creating and editing pages around Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption and later in the year about.. Canadian food! 🤣 (We were living in Ottawa, Ontario, at that time.) And then a whole bunch of other pages, many of which are still in Wikipedia 20 years later, although substantially edited by others since that time.

After that, I didn't really do a whole lot of editing. In the first 15 years (2004-2019) I made a grand total of 146 edits.

And then... came the COVID pandemic.

As one of the ways I dealt with my own mental health during that time, I started livestreaming Wikipedia editing to Twitch! 🤣 (Which I haven't done lately, but will probably do tonight just to celebrate the anniversary.)

Every. Single. Day!  For most of a year-and-a-half! 🤯

You can see this clearly in one of the tools available to see contributions from Wikipedia editors:

You can see there was even a year (2008) when I didn't make a single edit, and one year (2012) where I made only one single edit.

And then... BOOM... 2020 hit and there I was!

What's interesting about 2020 and 2021 is the salmon-colored block on the right. This was what is called a "template" and was where I was manually copying in the daily data from the Vermont Department of Health to update the chart that appears on the side of the article about the COVID-19 pandemic in Vermont. Every single day. Later in 2021 someone thankfully automated that so that it pulled the data direct from the Vermont Department of Health's system, but for all that initial time it was a completely manual process - and was part of what I did each night on my Twitch livestream.

With that burst of activity during the pandemic, it caused me to dive deep into Wikipedia and learn about parts of the site and community that I had never really engaged with, and that in many cases hadn't even been around in the earlier days when I first got involved. I learned a huge amount.

And out of that I became endlessly fascinated with how the whole Wikipedia community - and broader Wikimedia movement - has evolved, and I continue that fascination today. As you can see from the chart, I'm continuing to edit in 2024 and plan to keep on going.

In fact, I'm seriously thinking about bringing back the livestreaming. (Follow me on Twitch to be notified or over on Mastodon where I'll post if I'm streaming.)

Wikipedia has definitely changed a huge amount over time, from being a site that was initially dismissed and derided, to today being one of the sites where you can go for well-sourced information. Sure, it definitely has its quirks and problems, but overall I believe it's definitely a positive force in these times when we are so challenged for good information.

Given all the changes that are happening with the way we find and consume information (thinking of generative AI in particular), it will be interesting to see how Wikipedia evolves over the next 20 years!

Meanwhile, there are articles to edit and users to welcome... 😀🎉

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An companion podcast episode is available at:

DanYork · TDYR-416-20-years-of-Wikipedia-editing

Should I Stay (In) or Go (Out) Now? The Vermont Eclipse Dilemma

The Vermont Eclipse Dilemma: do we leave our houses and go out and enjoy all the eclipse-related festivities? Or do we just stay at home and leave all the events to the 534,873,937 people that are expected to arrive here to visit?  (Not the actual number, but that’s what it feels like according to the media articles!🤣)

In case you weren’t aware, there’s a solar eclipse happening on this coming Monday, April 8, 2024. And we here in northwestern Vermont are right in the path of “totality”. For about 3 minutes on Monday afternoon, the moon will completely block the sun. It’s supposed to be amazing by those who have seen it!

And … ABC News and other sources have declared the Burlington, VT, area to be THE best place in the USA to view the eclipse! 😲🤯😱

Now, the “path of totality” stretches from western Mexico up through Texas, Ohio, and on up through northern New York (including Niagra Falls), northern Vermont and New Hampshire, and then through Maine into New Brunswick and maritime Canada.

Everywhere along that path, hotel and AirBnB rooms sold out months ago. You can’t book any rooms unless you want to pay obscene amounts of money. Events are sold out. Everything’s sold out! People have been planning trips for years, in some cases. And with all the media attention, so many people are expected to drive to the path of totality on Monday.

Here’s the thing… we here in Vermont were expecting to see some visitors, but in early April it’s usually cloudy and rainy. The early predictions were for all of that. If you really wanted to see the eclipse, the smart approach was to head to Texas where the chances of sun were SIGNIFICANTLY higher!

Still, we have prepared. Our schools are closed on Monday. Many businesses have encouraged people who can work remotely to do so. Everyone has been encouraged to do all their grocery shopping before the weekend. Big signs on the highways are telling everyone to STAY HOME if at all possible!

You see, we’re a rural state. We only have around 646,000 people in total.  And about 150,000 of those people live up in the northwest corner when I live. We have only two Interstate highways: I-91 running up the east side, and I-89 going diagonally northwest across the top half of the state.

Outside of those two interstates, almost all of our other roads are your regular old two lane roads (one going one direction, one going the other). Sure, we sometimes might have sections with two lanes on both sides. Sometimes we’ll throw in a passing lane or a turning lane in the middle. We might even have small stretches of divided highway.

But most of our roads are small. We don’t need them to be huge.

And so… what happens when 10s of thousands - or maybe 100s of thousands! - of people come up to visit? On roads that are really more for hundreds of people? (If that!)

Yeah… that’s why we closed our schools and told everyone to stay home!

And of course, with the weather being as unpredictable as it is, current forecasts for Texas are that it will be CLOUDY on Monday! 🤦‍♂️

And we… are expected to have bright, sunny, clear skies! 🤯

Hence the news from ABC and other places that Vermont is the place to be! 

Add to this the fact that we’re only a few hours drive for people down in Massachusetts and even Pennsylvania and New York… there truly are 100s of thousands of people who could make the drive.

So we’re ready… we have so many different events planned. Restaurants that usually are closed on Monday are all opening up. Massive events are planned for the Burlington waterfront, the airport, and in so many other places. We’ll welcome you all up here warmly!

But for Vermonters we do have the dilemma… do we actually go out and join in any of the festivities? Or do we leave those for the visitors … and just watch the eclipse from our yards? 

Either way… we’ve got our eclipse glasses and we’re excited to experience this once-in-a-lifetime event!

Bring it on!

P.S. Good luck to all the visitors trying to get home on Monday after the eclipse… did I mention about our small roads and only two Interstate highways?  Have you considered staying until Tuesday? 😀

1000 Days of Journaling with Day One

Back in June 2021, Automattic announced that they were acquiring Day One, a journaling app. I had never heard of Day One, but being a strong WordPress user I paid attention to news from Automattic. Given that so much of Automattic’s tools are aimed at public writing and publishing (ex WordPress, Tumblr), I found the addition of the private publishing of Day One to be curious.

I investigated… and rapidly became intrigued.

I liked the fact that it seamlessly worked across all my Apple devices and systems. As a security geek, I loved that all the journals are end-to-end encrypted so that not even Automattic can see them. I enjoyed how I could easily add photos, audio, and video into posts. I was amused that there was an Apple Watch app that let you add audio (which I’ve used maybe twice, but it’s fun that it’s there).

Pretty soon Day One just became an integral part of my daily life.

Today marks 1,000 days straight of using the app. BUT… unlike Duolingo where a “streak” is a gamified way of keeping you involved, this streak is purely a recognition of how much the app has become woven into what I do. Unlike Duolingo, I wasn’t trying to keep a streak going… I was just constantly using the app.

To be clear, I haven’t been writing brilliant pieces of text every day for 1,000 days. When you pay for a Day One subscription, as I do, you can create as many different “journals” as you want.

And so for me, Day One has become a chronological note-keeping database. I do have a “Journal” where I occasionally write down thoughts, poems, ideas, etc. But I also have journals for:

• Gratitude - I do keep a daily gratitude journal of things I am grateful for
• Health - Notes about medical appointments, blood pressure, weight, exercise
• Games - Records of Wordle (yes, I still play daily!) and other games
• Clothing - What I wear during the work week (mostly so that I don’t show up at my weekly Rotary Club meeting wearing the exact same thing as I did last week! 🤣)
• House - Notes about changes, updates, repairs, etc, on our house
• Cars - Records of oil changes, repairs, and other aspects of car ownership
• Home IT - Updates about things I’ve done on our home systems
• Instagram - It automagically pulls in any Instagram photos I post so that I have my own local copy
• And several other journals for notes about family and other life aspects

You can see from the list why it’s never a struggle for a “streak” to happen… the app is just woven into the fabric of what I do every single day.

I’ve also started using it for journals for focused activities. For example, I recently spent a week in Honduras on a service trip. I created a separate journal, and while there spent time each capturing my memories of what I did during the day, and adding photos and videos so that I could remember when I got back home. This worked out well, and by virtue of the new “Shared Journals” feature, I was able to share this journal with my daughter who also accompanied me. As I started using the app more intentionally in Honduras, it was fun to see that it created a map of where I was when I posted each post, so I could geographically see where I had been.

I’ve also started a journal up for the 12-week Climatebase Fellowship that I began yesterday. Again, to capture notes and thoughts while in the middle of that focused work.

I also very much enjoy the “On This Day” aspect that shows you want entries you made across your various journals over the years. It’s a fun and interesting way to reflect back and understand where you were and where you have come from over time.  (There are even more features of Day One that I haven’t played with at all.)

But wait, you might say… didn’t I write about moving note taking from Evernote to Obsidian? How does Obsidian fit in here?

The answer is that I’m using both. Day One is what I use every day for chronological notes. It’s my daily diary of life. It’s where I record thoughts I randomly have, or what I’m grateful for, or photos of what happened on a particular day. It’s also where I check to see when was the last time I got an oil change for the truck - or what clothes I wore to Rotary last Wednesday 😀.

Obsidian is what I use for more long-term or structured notes and storage. For example, when I was taking French classes, all my notes are there. I have a note with the various biographies that I use so that if I need a bio to submit to a conference, I can rapidly get one. I have notes with abstracts for various talks. I have “link dumps” of research I’ve done on various topics.

I use Obsidian for things that I want to retrieve based on topic or search term, rather than date.

I could use Obsidian for the daily diary aspect. I know some people do. The reality is that I was already using Day One when I discovered Obsidian, and so I already had solved the chronological note taking in my daily life.

And so here I am… 1,000 days of using an app… every…. single…. day!

If you haven’t checked out Day One, I encourage you to do so. For me, it’s an amazing app that helps me every day with capturing what is going on in my life, and in my thinking.

I’m Doing It Again… Getting Sucked Into Consuming Vs Creating

I’m doing it again… instead of writing and creating new posts in the morning, I’m sitting there scrolling through Mastodon… or reading the latest news on Memeorandum or Techmeme… or jumping into work email or Slack before I really need to. And sooner or later, any of the “free” time I had is gone and it’s time to start the work day. The time has melted away.

Consumption has triumphed over creation, yet again.

That’s no way to get back into writing more. That’s no way to develop habits of consistent writing.

And yet it is so incredibly easy to fall into that pattern… again and again and again….

So today I’ll write this small post of self-reflection to start yet again. Here’s to yet another attempt to break that pattern and build newer, stronger habits! 

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Image credit: a generated image from Leonardo.ai

The Joys Of Being Your Own IT Department - And Of DNS and RSS

Tonight I was looking at my danyork.me aggregation site and I was confused… why were my posts from my danyork.com site NOT appearing in the master list? I *knew* I had written there.

Of course my initial thought was some problem with the RSS feed. Yep! 

On danyork.me I’m using the older FeedWordPress plugin for WordPress that does RSS syndication. A quick look told me that the feed it was supposed to be pulling in was:

https://www.danyork.com/rss.xml

Except… that was showing up as invalid XML. 🤷‍♂️

After some trial and error, I discovered that… I need to drop the “www” on the feed! 🤦‍♂️ If I instead use this:

https://danyork.com/rss.xml

Then… everything works!

I made the update to the FeedWordPress settings, forced an “Update Now” and … 🎉 …. the posts started appearing again at danyork.me!

So it’s somewhere between a DNS issue (cue “it’s always DNS!”) and a web hosting issue. My DanYork.com site is one of the ones that I still have running on the old TypePad platform…. and THAT  is where I suspect the issue lies.

www.danyork.com is just a CNAME pointing over to lodestar.typepad.com, where TypePad is then redirecting it to my specific blog. However, if I do a ‘curl’ for the www URL, I can see I get a plain HTML page that looks like it may be trying to do a meta refresh. If I do a ‘curl’ on the non-www URL, I get the correct RSS feed.

However, in an amusing bit of 🤦‍♂️, the RSS feed says that it should be at “www.danyork.com”:

<atom10:link xmlns:atom10="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" rel="self" href="https://www.danyork.com/rss.xml" type="application/rss+xml" />

But of course that won’t work.

So… something for me to dive into at some point and figure out.

Maybe I should call my IT team!  Oh, wait… that’s … me! 🤦‍♂️

 

ULA's Successful Vulcan Centaur Rocket Launch Is Good News

As I was posting about on Mastodon, early this morning United Launch Alliance (ULA) successfully launched their new Vulcan Centaur rocket into space from their launch site in Florida. The rocket carried the first US moon lander (Peregrine) from a private company (Astrobiotic), as well as a whole range of science experiments, part of the remains of several people, and even a collection of stories from writers.

Some great coverage is available from ArsTechnica, SpaceNews, SpaceFlight Now, and Space.com (many photos).

The key point is that the rocket launched successfully!

As I wrote about back in my November 3rd issue of my “A View From the Crow’s Nest” newsletter, we are currently in this strange spot where there has been only ONE launch provider - globally - that has been consistently launching rockets… SpaceX.

And SpaceX has done AMAZING work! In 2023 they launched an incredible 98 rockets (96 Falcon 9s, 2 Starships) from four different launch locations. That’s a launch cadence that is truly amazing.

But as amazing as the SpaceX team is, it’s a bit scary from a resilience point-of-view to have only one company consistently launching systems into space. It would be good for all of us to have more competition.

And meanwhile, ULA in 2023 launched a grand total of… *3* rockets.

Yes, 3!

Largely because ULA is running out of its Atlas and Delta rockets and has been betting everything on this new Vulcan Centaur. However, as the Wikipedia page notes, the Vulcan Centaur has been in the works since 2014. It was supposed to first launch 5 years ago in 2019… and then it was delayed… and delayed… and delayed… and delayed… until today!

So it is great to see this successful launch. Hopefully this will lead to many more.

But we’ll have to see.

Right now ULA has only booked six launches over the rest of 2024 … while SpaceX is reportedly shooting for 144 launches! ULA could of course book more, particularly now that they’ve had a successful launch. But they are still far away from the volume and cadence that SpaceX is achieving.

And, as Eric Berger wrote in an excellent piece over at ArsTechnica, it’s not clear where ULA is heading as a company. There seems to be a good bit of tension between the company and its Boeing and Lockheed owners. And the owners are also putting the company up for sale. (The Wikipedia article about ULA is a good read.)

The good news for now is that the Vulcan Centaur’s first launch was successful. Hopefully their next will be as well, and they can start launching more and more satellites and systems.

Meanwhile, SpaceX will keep launching and launching and launching… 

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Image credit: Tweet from ULA

A New Plan For Getting in the Habit of Consistently Publishing Podcasts and Newsletters

In thinking about my themes for 2024 and specifically about changing my habits, one change that I am going to try is to get consistent with both my “The Dan York Report” podcast and also my “A View From The Crow’s Nest” newsletter.

Right now they are both “irregular” or “periodic”… meaning I just do them whenever I think about them or have some reason for doing them. Which means that sometimes I publish 4 of them in a week… and then I don’t publish anything for four weeks or more! 🤦‍♂️

I want to get in the *habit* of doing both.  I want to instill in myself the discipline of regular production.

And I also want to be realistic by planning a weekly production. Sometimes in the past I have tried to “get back into producing content” and targeted daily production. But that’s not realistic for me with everything else going on in life. 

We’ll see. Weekly may turn out to be too much. Perhaps I will shoot for every other week.

My logic for the podcast being on Mondays is that it gives me time on the weekend to do the production. My logic for the newsletter on Fridays is that sometimes I write about stuff that people might want to experiment with over a weekend - or I have links to other longer reads or items that may take more time than people have in a typical week day.

There’s also a symbiosis where either the Friday newsletter can feed into the Monday podcast… or vice versa where the Monday podcast becomes the topic for the Friday newsletter.

Another aspect is that by limiting myself to weekly, I’m hoping to plan ahead and produce both newsletters and podcasts in advance! (Wild concept for me!!)

Which isn’t to say that I won’t also put out a podcast or newsletter at another time when something interesting or breaking news makes me want to publish a new edition. But I want to get to a consistent cadence.

Again… we’ll see! It’s all a grand experiment. Stay tuned… if I actually execute on this I’ll drop a podcast episode tomorrow…. 🙂

 

Crossing the 45th Parallel in Northern Vermont

From the Burlington, Vermont area, it’s only about a 45 minute drive to the Canadian border. (Yes, we are *that*close!🙂) As you get close to the border on Interstate 89, there is a sign on the right side that says:

Latitude 45° North
Midpoint
Equator to
North Pole

Yes, indeed, once you drive past that point you are now getting closer to the North Pole than the Equator from a latitude perspective!

Wikipedia of course has some interesting info about the 45th parallel, including that it has formed part of the US / Canada border at times. 

In fact, when we lived in Ottawa, Ontario, for five years from 2000-2005, I maintained a blog called “North of 45” about our experience living there. (Sadly now all filled with ads because of the decline of LiveJournal.)

These days, we mostly drive north of the 45th to either: 1) go curling just over the border in Bedford, Quebec; 2) go to the Montreal airport (YUL) to fly somewhere; or 3) go to our closest IKEA in Boucherville, Quebec, just to the east of Montreal. 😀

I just smile whenever I see the sign. We are definitely in the northern part of the northern hemisphere!

 

20 Years Ago, LiveJournal Was My Home On The Web

This morning brought a reminder that it was twenty years ago that I opened up an account on LiveJournal. For about four years, “LJ” was my home on the web. It was where I wrote MANY articles, connected with people across their journals, and started interacting with a few people with whom I am still in touch today.

My journal site is still there today, with a much younger photo of me (I still had brown hair!), but my last entry was 11 years ago in April 2013, and that was just an update to a post four years earlier in April 2009 saying where people could find my writing. I haven’t really written there for most of 16 years… since back in 2008.

In those early days in the mid-2000s, LJ was a vibrant, social place to be. There were no advertisements and it was one of those amazing places of creativity during that time. Strong communities were built and thrived. Many of the ways we started interacting there (ex. “friends”) would carry over into later services.

Wikipedia outlines some of what happened after that… Brad Fitzpatrick sold the site to SixApart and I think they understandably wanted to figure out how to turn it into a business. But then in 2007 it was sold to a Russian media company… and things changed more and more after that.  (Viewing my site today I am amused to see some of the ads displayed to me having Cyrillic text.)

In my own case, I’d started to branch out. Those were the glory days of “blogging” as a thing, and at the end of 2005 I’d launched first Disruptive Telephony and then Disruptive Conversations as places where I very prolifically wrote on different topics. I continued to use LJ as a place for “personal” blogging… up until I decided to start up the site you are reading this article on.

Still, for a few years, it was my home on the Web - and I’m grateful for the time that I was there!

My Themes for 2024

As I have been doing for the past 15 years (see list), my first post of 2024 across all my sites is of three words that are my aspirations or “themes” for the year ahead. They are not “resolutions” so much as guiding thoughts or principles.

This year I decided on 3 H’s: Hope, Health, and Habits.

Hope

We live in challenging times… and 2024 looks to present even greater challenges. A colleague of mine noted that there will be over 100 elections in 67 countries in 2024 - all of which will undoubtedly create communication and societal challenges in this time of great polarization. I expect great amounts of mis/disinformation, especially in this era of “generative AI”. With the climate, we’re just coming off the hottest year in recorded history, and signs are that 2024 could be even worse. Economic inequality keeps rising. Fewer and fewer people can afford to buy houses around where I live. We have a dictator who wants to be our next US President (and some % of people seem ready to vote for him 🤯). There’s a lot of gloom out there.

And yet… as the good folks at FutureCrunch remind us - there are a lot of good things going on: “66 Good News Stories You Didn't Hear About in 2023”. The challenge is that all of that gets drowned out in the media’s desire to get eyeballs. (“If it bleeds, it leads!”)

A couple of years ago I wrote this (re-shared on Mastodon last year):

The challenge that lies before us is more than choosing hope over fear.

 

It is choosing hope *amidst* the overwhelming narratives of fear and doom.

 

It is choosing hope and optimism *despite* those fears.

 

It is choosing hope as a daily, gritty act of resistance and resilience.

I believe that is truly our calling.

Last year, as I was preparing to become President of our local Rotary Club in July 2023, I was thrilled to find that the “theme” for this year’s Rotary International president is “Create Hope in the World”. That resonates so strongly with me.

Now, more than ever, with so much chaos around us, we need to provide whatever small shreds of hope we can.

Health

Health (or a health-related word) has been one of my three words in 12 of these 15 years, including last year. This year I had some tests done and some checkups, and while I’m okay overall, my bad cholesterol levels are too high, my blood pressure is creeping toward a point where I need to be concerned, and I’m at the heaviest weight I’ve ever been. Addressing this MUST be a focus, or I won’t be here to write the 2025 version. 🙁

Habits

In 2023, I spent some time looking at how I spend my time, and some of the habits I have. Some of those are good (ex. daily language practice), but others need to change, such as being far too sedentary… or doomscrolling through social media instead of creating content. In 2024, I want to change and form some healthier habits… for my actual health, but also just for how I interact in the world. One of these I’ve already started is to rejuvenate my email newsletter (all are welcome to subscribe!) and to start writing there versus on social media.

To that point, I really want to focus on the POSSE model of publishing on my own sites first, and THEN sharing it out on social channels. Too much of what I’ve been writing lately has been on other people’s platforms. I want to form the strong habit of writing on my own sites first.

Interestingly, Om Malik recently wrote about his own desire to return to blogging, specifically to use his blog as more of a “commonplace journal”. I like that framing. Stay tuned to see if I actually do it!

I’m also hoping that the habit I’ve started in 2023 of doing a bit more with music continues. I’m trying to carve out time each day to noodle a bit with the piano or guitar. I want to see about doing even more.

The challenge, of course, will be to excise some of the not-so-good habits that have formed in my life. It will be an interesting year!

That’s what I’m looking forward to this year. How about you?