More adventures at the cardiologist’s office:
Again, no doctors or nurses were masked. One nurse had a couple big sneezes. There were a lot more people in the waiting room this time; only one of them was masked. I ended up waiting in the hallway for a bit since it was emptier and had better ventilation since it was close to an automatic outside door.
I didn’t work up the courage to ask the tech and nurse in the patient room to wear a mask (it’s such a weird, exhausting, psychological thing.) However, when I was checking out and scheduling my next appointment, I asked them to include a request in my file that people mask in the room. She seemed entirely pleasant about it as she made the note, so that’s a positive. We’ll see how it goes next visit. I expect I will still need to remind them when I get in the room, but I feel better having it on the record at least.
Want to read: Art As Politics in the Third Reich by (ISBN 9780807848098)
Not too surprisingly, I never heard back on this message. I just forwarded it again with the comment:
I never heard back on this message. I would appreciate some attention to this since we are in yet another, entirely predictable surge of COVID-19. Hospital admissions are up 33% since last week. What steps are being taken to encourage/require masking, improve ventilation, etc?
Want to read: Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto by (ISBN 9780316365215)
Want to read: The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex by (ISBN 9780822369004)
Want to read: It Was Vulgar and It Was Beautiful: How AIDS Activists Used Art to Fight a Pandemic by (ISBN 9781645036586)
I’m trying out Obsidian and getting back into Mark Forster’s task management explorations, specifically “Final Version Perfected.” I’ve used that method off-and-on and I think it works well as long as I can stick to it. I’m also hoping that regular note-taking will help me put together more blog posts. I’ve had plenty of ideas float by, but if I don’t capture them somewhere, they’re not likely to crystalize into a blog post.
Throwback to 2007-04-28 at Radio Radio for the Wolfy, Cabin, and Little Voice show with Isha and Allison. I think this is one of my first pictures with Isha. This was only a couple weeks before my heart incident too. Whoa.
We were so young. I miss going to shows with Indianapolis friends.
Original photos by Allison
Want to read: Call It Sleep by (ISBN 9780374522926)
via Stone Reader
Want to read: The Stones of Summer by (ISBN 9781585675173)
via Stone Reader
I got a spammy message via my contact page from “PostBy AI” trying to sell me on adding a chatbot to my site to answer customer questions, generate leads, yada yada. Annoying, but not a big deal in itself.
The part that really bugged me, though, was “I went ahead and created a custom chatbot tailored for your site, and want to let you try it out for free.” I find that to be a really creepy practice if they actually had their software train against the text on my site, so I replied with the email below. I’ll update here based on how they reply.
— gRegor Morrill via emailWas this message generated by a chat bot? It doesn’t seem like a human looked at my website at all. I have no need for any of the things listed because it’s not a business site and there are no sales. It’s just my personal site that I share things on.
I think it’s a creepy practice to create a chatbot tailored to my site without my request or permission. If you have scraped information from my site or trained an LLM against its content, please remove all such data from your systems immediately.
Also please let me know what user agent your software uses so I can add it to my robots.txt disallow list, or let me know what other methods your software respects to let a site opt out.
Oof. They responded to me:
You're making a lot of demands for someone who did something nice for you. It's your responsibility to add your own robot files, not mine.
However, I've destroyed the bot and removed you from any scraping on my end.
I just wrote back:
What an absolutely unprofessional response. “Please remove my data” is a polite request and should be understandable for your business, regardless of whether you think you’ve done something “nice” for me.
Yes, robots.txt is for me to update. That’s why I requested what user agent your software uses so I can update accordingly. Please let me know.
I added back the posting activity visualization that was on my site a while ago. Now it's on the homepage under my bio instead of at the bottom of each post. There's four shades of blue based on relative number of posts. Hovering on a square shows the date and number of posts.
Next I would like to set up daily archive pages that each box can link to.
Throwback to 2008-08-03. Oddfellows, indeed. Left to right: me, Greg, Alex, and Ian.
Original photo by ishkid
I went with pink, sorry to disappoint 😂 I thought it was really good! Really funny and good message.
Looking forward to seeing Barbie this weekend. Poll: should I wear the pink(ish) or the blue? I know pink is usually a guy color but maybe we can reclaim blue?
This is awesome. A right-wing reactionary tried to call out Derek Webb for making a song with drag queen Flamy Grant. He told Flamy on Twitter, “good for us hardly anyone listens or cares what you do.” Flamy asked fans and followers to stream the song “Good Day” to get it on Christian charts and it hit #1 on the iTunes Christian charts. It’s a great song and great album, especially if you’ve ever been made to feel out of place by the church. Check it out!
“Drag Queen Flamy Grant Tops the iTunes Christian Charts”. Paste Magazine. .
I felt similarly when I recently found out Florida governor man is just a few months older than me. Seems impossible.
Rest assured you are kinder than those doofi, though!
You could progressively add more red threads between pins on the board between calls 😂