Dan York

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?

Slides for my ISC2 Security Congress session on "Demystifying Routing Security"

Today at the ISC2 Security Congress 2023 in Nashville, TN, I gave a well-received talk on "Demystifying the World of Routing Security". Unfortunately, the mobile app for the event had (and still has) the wrong set of slides. Instead of mine, the attached deck was for a 2019 talk. So I told participants I would put the slides up on one of my sites. And here they are:

• Download 2023-ISC2-Security-Congress-RoutingSecurity-Final.pdf (12033.0K)

As you will see, a great amount of the slides are about the Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS) initiative.

Also, for people seeking info about how to be involved with the "MANRS+" effort, the link is: https://www.manrs.org/about/manrs-working-group/

Thanks to all who attended - and especially to the five who helped me with the on-stage demonstration. 😀

No More Status

Booking airline tickets for my first business trip since December 2019, I get down to the part where United notes your status level and it says…

“General”

No “Premier” status of any level.

Which makes total sense given:

2020 - 0 flights
2021 - 0 flights
2022 - 0 flights
2023 - 2 flights (so far)

🤣

I totally understand why I am now just a “general” traveler. 😀

Do AI Systems Lie, Hallucinate, or Confabulate? (I’ll go for “lying”)

When ChatGPT and similar systems started being available, people noticed right away that they could provide completely wrong answers. But they would do so in language that was so confident and plausible (because that is how they are designed).

Some people started to say “ChatGPT lies about information”.

But somewhat immediately, people started pushing back and saying that it isn’t “lying” because that implies sentience or consciousness. Say it is “lying” is “anthropomorphizing”, i.e. attributing human behavior to something that is very definitely not human.

Instead, some people said, let’s refer to this false information as “hallucinations”, as that is in fact a term used in AI research. So we say instead “ChatGPT hallucinates information.”

I personally like that term. It provides a way to explain to people that these AI tools just make stuff up!

But, as noted in this excellent Ars Technica article by Benj Edwards (that you really need to read to understand all this!), the use of “hallucination” has two issues:

• It also is anthropomorphizing and ascribing human behavior to a non-sentient / non-human thing.
• More importantly, saying an AI “hallucinates” has a nuance of being excusable behavior. “Oh, yes, Fred was just hallucinating when he said all that.” As if it was just random memories or a trip on some kind of drugs. It lets the AI creators off the hook a bit. They don’t have to take responsibility for their errors, because “it’s just the AI hallucinating”!

Which is fine… I can go along with that reasoning.

But… the author then suggests instead we use the term from psychology of “confabulation”, as in:

”ChatGPT confabulates information”

Hmm. While I get that “confabulation” may be more technically accurate, I think it still has the issues:

• It is still anthropomorphizing.
• It still lets developers not take responsibility. “Oh, it’s just the AI confabulating.”

But more importantly… “confabulation” is NOT A WORD PEOPLE REGULARLY USE!

At least, people who are not in psychology.

If we as technologists want to help the broader public understand these AI systems, both their opportunities and challenges, then we need to speak in plain language.

I do think we need to go back to the beginning and just say “ChatGPT lies”.

This has two important aspects:

• All of us understand “lying”.
• It puts the responsibility on the AI system - and its developers - for “behaving” that way.

Yes, it’s anthropomorphizing. No, ChatGPT and other AI systems are NOT human or sentient. No, they can’t really “lie” in the human understanding of it.

But we can use that term to help people understand what is happening here.

ChatGPT and other systems are lying. They are NOT giving you true information.

Let’s call it like it is.

——

P.S. It turns out that Simon Willison, who has been diving deep into the world of AI far more than I, has written something similar: “We need to tell people ChatGPT will lie to them, not debate linguistics” - please read Simon’s post for a another view!

——

Image credit: from Bing Image Create (DALL-E) using prompt “create an image showing an AI that is hallucinating”

After Almost 15 Years, Saying Goodbye to Evernote (and Moving to Obsidian)

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UPDATE - 2 Jan 2024 - Back in July 2023, the Obsidian team announced an officially-supported "Importer" plugin that includes the ability to import from Evernote.

This sounds easier than the method I outline below using YARLE. I have not tried this new "Importer" plugin (because I already migrated from Evernote!), but you may want to go try that new plugin before doing what I outline below.

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On April 8, 2008, I started using Evernote as a place to store all my various notes. It would come to be a critical part of my daily workflow… so much so that I became a paying customer back in 2011 or so.

Today, March 13, 2023, I uninstalled it from my devices.

I’m done.

It’s been a long time coming. Way back in 2012 I was super frustrated with how they destroyed the Skitch application with its 2.0 release. And yet I kept using Evernote because it had become my central repository. And… I hung on long enough that many of the Skitch features I complained about in that post were brought back.

In fact, I basically stayed with Evernote BECAUSE of how easy Skitch made taking - and adjusting - screenshots. Do a quick screenshot, tweak it, adjust it, annotate it… and have the result live on inside of Evernote, where it could then be tagged and further annotated.

Pretty much every single screenshot I’ve taken across my blogs in the past 10+ years has been done with Skitch.

I stayed with Evernote through all their various pivots… getting more annoyed each time they did something new. No, I didn’t want Chat to be everywhere… no, I didn’t want collaboration pieces - I’m the only user of my Evernote account! No, I didn’t want any of the other features they kept adding. All I wanted to do was add simple notes and also screen captures! I also watched in concern as there were layoffs at various times.

Then yet another redesign happened in early 2021 that changed how the application operated! When you opened up the app, the notes were no longer instantly there. It seemed like you had to wait for them to download from the server.

It was at that point that I actively started looking at ALL THE MANY alternatives that had emerged… and getting into a bit of “analysis paralysis”.

Finally, what pushed me to end was their latest price increase this year that jumped the pricing I was on by about 40%. Combined with my continually growing dissatisfaction, and a concern about the uncertainty of the direction of the new owners… I migrated all my notes and canceled my subscription.

The good news, as I understand it, is that even with the free version all my data will still be intact inside the Evernote app. So if I missed anything in the migration I should be able to get it.

Switching to Obsidian

I chose to migrate to using Obsidian. I could probably write several posts about WHY, but the simplest answer is:

• I’M NOT LOCKED IN TO A PROPRIETARY FORMAT!
• I’m not LOCKED IN to a proprietary user interface.
• I’m not LOCKED IN to a proprietary server infrastructure.

The beauty of Obsidian is that it uses plain, old, regular Markdown files! They are just md files in a directory. You can edit them with ANY appropriate editor! You don’t need to use the actual Obsidian app. You can open them with other editors. You can move them around and re-organize them simply in Finder on a Mac.

And you can put those Markdown files wherever you want. In my case I’ve put them in a folder on my personal iCloud Drive. This enables me to easily access them across all my IOS devices and Macs. And I can do so without using a centralized architecture from the vendor. I mean, yes, iCloud is centralized… but that is needed for the sync between devices. I could have used Dropbox or Microsoft OneDrive or Google Drive or even set up my own NextCloud instance.

I mean.. yes, the Obsidian developers do offer an “Obsidian Sync” service … and I might choose to use that if I see issues with syncing via iCloud. But the point is I HAVE CHOICES, which I didn’t have with Evernote. I was locked into whatever they were doing - and however they were changing the user interface - or the pricing.

With Obsidian I have the freedom that if I don’t like what they’re doing, I can just stop using the app. The “vault” is just a folder of markdown files. Easy enough to use with other apps.

Migrating from Evernote to Obsidian

The actual process of migrating was not terribly difficult. Douglas Muth, another frustrated long-time Evernote user, wrote out excellent instructions about his migration to Obsidian. 

1. Export each Evernote notebook as an Evernote XML (“ENEX”) file. (Select notebook, Ctrl- or right-click to bring up menu, choose Export…)

2. Install YARLE and run it for every ENEX file. This will create folders full of markdown files and at lease one with attachments.

3. Move the folders of markdown files into your Obsidian vault (wherever you have stored it). Now Obsidian will show those notes there!

That’s it!

Now… it DID take a bit to figure out the various YARLE settings and what I wanted to do. If you install YARLE for the command line, Douglas Muth provides a script to help use the common configuration options.  I opted to try the graphical version of YARLE which required some different tweaking. I also had an issue where the graphical YARLE was not putting images into an attachments folder inside each folder… no matter how many times I changed the options.

But in the end, it all worked.  

I have the Obsidian app on all my devices, and, courtesy of iCloud Drive, they are all working off the same set of markdown files.

So… goodbye, Evernote!   You were super helpful at different times… when you weren’t trying to get me to use whatever latest pivot you were making.

P.S. I’ll note that someone else did the migration by using Notion as an intermediary. That may perhaps work for you, but I wanted to keep all my files on my local computer and not give them to yet another service.

Three Years Ago Today, Vermont Shut Down Due to COVID-19

Today I was wondering why “March 13” was pulling at the back of my brain as a date of some importance… and then I realized why.

Three years ago today, everything changed.

It was on Friday, March 13, 2020, that Governor Phil Scott issued Executive Order 01-20, “Declaration of State of Emergency in Response to COVID-19 and National Guard Call-Out”. It imposed visitor restrictions at hospitals and state facilities, restricted travel by state employees, prohibited large gatherings, and called up the National Guard to assist. The Executive Order did not itself shut down schools, but it directed the Secretary of Education to prepare for school closings. And only a few days later, all schools would shut down.

It concludes with this section that was in retrospect rather optimistic (my emphasis added):

This Executive Order shall take effect upon signing and shall continue in full force and effect until April 15, 2020, at which time the Governor, in consultation with VDH and DPS/VEM, shall assess the emergency and determine whether to amend or extend this Order.

How little did we know then...

The Governor would of course extend that Order… again and again and again...

Our lives would change in SO MANY ways.

And in fact we would come to divide our lives and world into “now” and a “time before the pandemic”.

 For us here in Vermont, that journey into pandemic precautions all began… three years ago… today.

Waking Up at Times Beginning With A "4"

For most of 50 years, I held very firm to the belief that the ONLY time I should ever see a time beginning with a “4” in the morning was when I needed to get up and go to the airport to catch an early flight. Otherwise, any time like 4:30am was just downright uncivil and hostile. I should be asleep at that time. I should NEVER be awake at times beginning with a 4.

And yet… here I am writing this post at 4:55am. 🤷‍♂️

What happened? Well, our dog got older! (And I might have, too.😉)

For some context, I have always been an early riser. Ever since I was a child.

But for the first 35 years of my life “early” was defined as 6:00am.

That was when I woke up. Never at times beginning with a 5, either. 6:00am or later.

I am also one of those people who snaps wide awake and is fully alert and ready to go. No “wake up time” needed. It’s like a light switch where I am no longer asleep - I am now fully awake. And… fully talkative 😀, to the immense annoyance of every roommate I have ever had, including my wife.  (The success of our marriage for 26 years so far is perhaps in part because I learned NOT to talk to her when she wakes up! 🤣)

And then our first daughter was born… and in a bit of karmic retribution, she had the same “instant on and fully talkative” characteristics as me, but she ratcheted the wake up time back to 5:30am! 😀

Suddenly, I was seeing times that began with a 5!

Seven years later, our second daughter was born and she continued the progression by getting up even earlier, closer to 5:00am!

And so it was for many years until they hit teenage years and flipped to wanting to sleep in later. (They are now 20 and 13.)

By that time, however, I was stuck with a body that had now adjusted to waking up in times beginning with a “5”.

Still, times with a “4” were only ever to be for airport trips!

Then, starting about five years ago or so, our dear dog started to wake up increasingly early and want to go outside. At times like 4:30am!

At 15 years old, she’s still in great physical condition, prancing around sometimes like she is MUCH younger. But… when a girl’s gotta go… someone has to let her outside… and due to the aforementioned “instant on” capabilities, that someone is… me. 

We’ve tried all sorts of things to see if we could get her to just wait until maybe a time starting with a “5”. We kept her up much later. We changed feeding schedules. We let her out very late in the evening. (Okay, which for us.. “very late” means 10pm 🤣)

Nothing worked. She still gets up sometime between 4:30 and 5:00 am.

So here I am! Wide awake, alert, enthusiastic… at a time beginning with a 4!

 

The Single Biggest Thing Preventing Me From Doing More Writing Is...

As I’ve frequently lamented in my yearly themes (although not this year), I would like to get myself to write more. And back on December 1, 2022, I tried to commit to #100DaysOfBlogging, but that hasn't worked out so well.

I’ve been watching how I spend my time lately, and to I’m sure the surprise of absolutely NO ONE, including myself, it would seem the single biggest thing preventing me from doing more writing is… getting distracted by social media! 🤣🤣🤣

Take this morning. I was awake early at around 5:00am (courtesy of our wonderful but early-rising dog) and I sat on our couch drinking some tea and browsing through Mastodon (you can find me there). About 1.5 hours later, I’d read some great commentary, found some new articles to share, engaged in some conversations, and generally had an enjoyable time interacting with people.

But… could part of that time have been better spent getting some writing done?

I struggle with this, because on the one hand I learn things from social media that are then useful in new articles or other work. It’s “research” of one form. And engaging with people in an online community is a good thing to do.

But on the other hand, I find myself doing this a bit too much.

I’ll note, of course, that THIS IS NOT A NEW ISSUE FOR ME! In fact, I can easily scan my archives and find I’ve been writing more or less this same kind of post for ** 15 years **! 🤦‍♂️

• 2008 - Paying Yourself First - Starting the day with blogging…  (email, work deadlines, and Twitter were seen as issues)
• 2011 - On The Need To FOCUS In Our Age Of Hyper-Distraction… (Google+, Facebook, Twitter)
• 2012 - Barriers to Blogging - #1 - Distraction By Facebook, Twitter, News, Internet (everything! 😀)
• 2013 - Every Minute You Spend Consuming Content Is A Minute You Are Not Creating Content (everything)
• 2015 - The Tension Between Consumption and Creation of Content (a.k.a. spending time reading Facebook doesn't help with writing)
• 2018 - Revisiting a Not-So-New Rule - No Social Media Usage Until I Have Created Something New 
• 2023 - This post (where I mention Mastodon)

The common theme through all of that is… “I’ve got to change… I’ve got to not get so sucked into <whatever services>”.

And yet I do. 

The siren song of distraction is incredibly strong.

Perhaps this is the thing where I’ll keep shouting about it in the hopes that eventually by saying it enough I will make it happen in my life.

Or perhaps in 2033 I’ll be writing the same basic post again, lamenting how much time I spend with some new service. 🤣

P.S. And I don’t even mention TikTok, which seems to be wired into my brain in a way that whenever I open up the app it is then an hour or so later when I emerge again! (Hence why I don’t open it all that often.)

Listening to Hear Versus Listening to Fix

In the last six months or so, I have had an unpleasant revelation about myself. I realized that for most of my 55 years of life whenever I’ve been listening to people, I’ve been listening to offer “fixes”, i.e. solutions. You’ve probably done this yourself at some point. The classic example is something like:

Someone: “Ugh.. my legs hurt so much from <skiing | biking | skating | running | hiking | etc.>"

Me: “Oh, that’s rough! You should take two ibuprofen. You’ll feel better!"

There I was, jumping in with a solution and trying to help.

But here’s the thing - they were NOT asking for help! 

They were simply sharing their current condition. Perhaps looking for sympathy or empathy, but perhaps not. Maybe just saying how they were feeling.

An article I read (and now can’t find) clued me in to my errors. A couple of points:

• If I’m thinking ahead to solutions, then I’m probably only half-listening. I’m not necessarily completely hearing them. I’m hearing enough to send me down the path of thinking of solutions… and so part of my brain is now focused on that instead of hearing all of what they are saying.

• They may already have a solution. In my example, they may have already taken ibuprofen or something else. They aren’t seeking a solution. They just want someone to listen and hear them.

• My quick jump to offering an unsolicited “fix” may cause them to NOT want to share anything with me.. as they don’t want a fix!

Once I became aware of this, I realized that I did this all the time... with our oldest daughter away at university… with my wife… with our youngest daughter… with co-workers… with friends… with probably most everyone. 🙁

Part of it is, I think, my natural desire to help people. Part of it is that I’ve just always been a “fixer”.. the person you drop into a situation to figure out what needs to be done … and to get it done. And I enjoy doing that!

But I’ve realized that this is not always appropriate. That often people just want to share.. that they want to “bend an ear” and have someone listen to them. That they’re not necessarily looking for fixes. And that perhaps a better path is to ask before offering a fix.

So I’ve been trying to change. To listen more fully and to just… listen. To close my mind to what solutions might be out there and to just focus on what they are saying. To truly hear them.

I’m trying to have my responses more along the lines of one of these:

Someone: “Ugh.. my legs hurt so much from <skiing | biking | skating | running | hiking | etc.>"

Me: “Oh, that’s rough!"

Me: "Oh, that’s rough! Are you okay?"

Me: "Oh, that’s rough! Are you okay? Can I get you anything?"

And then depending upon the answer and the situation, I may now try to say something more like:

Me: “Do you want an idea that may help? Or are you all set?"

All of that before getting to offering the solution.

It’s a hard path to being a better listener… to simply “listening to hear” rather than “listening to fix”. But it’s a path I’m trying to follow..

 

 

 

The Awesome Clarity of Prioritizing Health

There is an awesome clarity that comes when you have very clear priorities - and in my case one of those is my health. As I alluded to in my three words for 2023, I’ve had a couple of recent minor incidents that have brought this home to me.

A key one was back in November 2022 when I went for a routine colonoscopy. Having had colon cancer, this was my three year checkup and all was great. No signs of cancer and everything looked good. 

BUT… they had to keep me a bit afterward in the recovery area until they could get an acceptable blood pressure reading. I didn’t think a whole lot of it, but a few days later when I went to our local pharmacy to pick up a prescription for our daughter, I had to wait for a bit and so I sat down in one of those blood pressure test machines that we often have in pharmacies here in the US.

And.. I had elevated blood pressure!

Not high enough to be in the “Get thee to a doctor now!” category, but more in the form of “Dude! You need to make some changes NOW if you want to be around for a while!"

So I have.

I’ve been eating healthier, reducing my sodium intake (such as not eating the pretzels and chips I love to eat), drinking more water, and… a key point… trying to get at least 30 minutes of exercise each day.

Given that I work in a home office and don’t have to go anywhere, it’s tempting on very cold days to just stay inside, but I’ve been forcing myself to leave and go outside.

This health lens has caused me to make some choices:

• If I have a block of time when I can exercise, but I want to write a blog post or record a podcast episode, I ask myself “Is this due TODAY?” and “will it matter if I do it tomorrow?” If the answer is no (as it usually is), then I don’t do it and go exercise.

• If I want to listen to a recording of a work meeting I missed, rather than listen to it while sitting in my office, I open the recording on my iPhone and listen to the meeting recording while walking around my neighborhood. This has the added value that I actually focus on what is being said in the meeting rather than being at my desk only half-listening while I look at Slack, websites, email, etc.

• I have continued my enjoyment of walking at Shelburne Farms, an amazing and beautiful area that I’m lucky to have about 5 minutes away from our house. Living so close, I can time it to fit a good walk in between other things going on in the day. And when it gets lighter (and warmer) I’ll start going in the very early morning again.

• For days when it’s too cold and windy to enjoy an outdoor walk, I have started going to a local ice skating rink. I’ve figured out how I can drive there, skate for 30 minutes, and then get back home all within an hour. 

In general, I’ve used the lens of “will this help me improve my health?"

Owning an Apple Watch has also been helpful. I’d dismissed the “closing the rings” Activity thing as a silly gimmick, but I’ll admit that there is a certain satisfaction in knowing I hit my daily goals. The Health app is also useful, and tracking my heart rates, sleeping, etc, is all useful.

Thankfully I have a job that is project-driven and so I can shift my work hours around and start earlier or work later so that I can do some of these things during the day. (And I do recognize that this is a privilege that many people do not have when their jobs are tied to specific hours or locations.)

My goal is that by the time summer comes around, I’m hoping to get back into the running I used to do. We’ll see. I need to be walking faster before I jump into the running again.

The good news is that this all does seem to be working. Two months later, my blood pressure is back down to near normal levels and in fact is even reading as “normal” sometimes. I’ve lost a little bit of weight (still have a long way to go). I’ve found that “Hint of salt” Wheat Thins taste pretty much the same as the regular ones - and I’ve learned how much additional sodium is in so many different foods! And I’m feeling a bit better in general.

Amazing what happens when you have that clarity of priorities in making daily choices!

P.S. I’m also playing in a curling league every Thursday night an hour north in Bedford, Quebec, which gives me two hours of movement that can be intense at times if you need to do a lot of sweeping. It’s kind of fun to look at the heart rates recorded by the Apple Watch after a game and see how up and down they can be.