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  • Twitter

    I logged in the first time soon after it started in 2007. I did my ten years and then mostly logged off by 2017. I’m not likely to start using it again regularly although I still use it occasionally as a people bookmarking service of sorts. I logged in last week to get an ‘archive’ of all of my data and publish it elsewhere1,2.  I tweeted 828 times and based on the IDs in the data, I’m guessing that I was the 950,535th person to ever tweet. The process felt achingly familiar3. I’ve had some discussions with others about it recently and it reminds me to think about how I use the web. Per the course… I like to flush it out, write it down, and publish it so I can send a link instead of hashing it out in an email or text thread.

    Twitter was built as a MicroBlogging service. Microblogging as a type of broadcast medium was the forerunner to social networking platforms. Social networking existed from the moment the first network computer connections were made. Twitter had a good name and was the best breed of something not unique amongst the landscape at the time. The fundamentals of Twitter already existed elsewhere. The Twitter idea originated from Odeo4,5, a podcasting company. It was just a means of having an SMS group chat.  Evan Williams created Blogger which was sold to Google and was the basis of the ideas behind both podcasting and blogging. Before Twitter, social media meant connecting with others online primarily through email and RSS, both of which could be read from the same client and in a browser. Some folks worked out unique ways to notify others via email for pingbacks and trackbacks6. I was a fan of Friendfeed because it supported pulling feeds from various sources. Facebook acquired it for $15 million and shut it down7.  Similarly, Pump.io, StatusNet, and identi.ca were using the open-source Activity Streams format which was a precursor to the ‘Fediverse’ or federated social network terms tossed around today. 

    Inter-Net-work….the web was inherently social long before the media part. In Silicon Valley’s race to capitalize, proprietary methodologies were created because open standards hinder income potential. Even the data archive I got from Twitter last week isn’t exactly portable. The WC3, who sets the standards has recommended Web Mentions, Activity Streams, and Activity Pub9 standards which is the protocol that makes Mastodon federated. I migrated most of my Twitter follows over to Mastadon while I was at it last week. Watching the other platforms pivot to gain new users is amusing. Substack has added ‘mentions’, ’cross-posts’, and ‘best seller’ badges10. Tumblr rolled out a $7 badge and the owner insisted they would be implementing the activitypub specification which I noted appropriately11. I’m sure folks will figure out a way to spam those protocols too as long as there is a way to profit from them. Twitter turned to bots after it gained popularity and the account APIs were introduced. The bot, spam, link farms, etc were online long before Twitter too.

    Elon Musk recently tweeted “Vox Populi, Vox Dei” likely in reference to his surveys on reinstating previously banned accounts. It translates to the “Voice of the People is the Voice of God”,  but the full context of the most cited reference to that term is:

    Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, Vox populi, vox Dei, quum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit.  “ And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness. 

    ~ Alcuin in his letters to Charlamagne Epistle 127 in 760AD12.

    The riotousness of the crowd is Twitter. And Twitter is just a bellwether for the internet as a whole as we adapt to new communications mediums. Those first couple of years were just techie types tweeting because those were most of the same folks with websites.  Then came the journalists, media, celebrities, publishers, and internet celebrities. Then everyone’s uncle had it installed on their phone.  When those other folks started rambling on about their other interests, I lost interest. And then they started to monetize it all with adverts, tracking users across the web, and rewriting shared URLs so they could track those too.  The most retweeted thing ever was a pyramid scheme offering a reward for retweets. The web was already decentralized and will likely always be outside some platforms’ walled gardens. I just hope that the efforts to improve the open standards aren’t sabotaged by private interests.

    I’m sure in the coming year we’ll end up hearing a lot more on free speech and social media. I have a very simple minded approach to it which I wrote about pretty extensively in my article on Section 23013. I think that you’re welcome to espouse your opinions, ideas, or theories however you’d like but not entirely without consequence if they are damanging to others. I think that the main product of social media platforms, aside from usability, is sorting and moderating that information so that it’s vaulable to it’s end users. A platform like Twitter is a private company and can make itself reponsible for moderation however it best see’s fit to it’s own business model. And likewise, I can excersize my own liberty to not pay it any attention.

    I’d use social media again if I had something to promote and I suppose I’m lucky not to have the need. Former Twitter CEO Evan Williams apologized saying he was “wrong to think that an open platform where people could speak freely would make the world a better place”.  I wouldn’t completely agree with him on that because I believe there have been some good things gained through social networking platforms.  I read an essay recently fed to me, not via social media but my handy dandy good ole’ fashion hosted RSS reader…  entitled A Tweet Before Dying that said “What then? We’ll all move over to some Twitter replacement like Mastodon, hundreds of millions of us, and ruin that too? Sigh.”13. Other than echoing my sentiments here, whatever happens with Twitter means very little to me because I choose to rely not on the platform itself but on the interoperable standards of the internet which were social from the get go. 

    2022/12/03 Update:

    Right on Cue… Matt Taibbi, the investigative journalist published a series of tweets he’s calling the Twitter Files15 yesterday afternoon looking into the content moderation efforts of Twitter during the last election. Main takeaway for me was the fact that, imagine this… people are sending emails around requesting removals and questioning various policies. Sometimes just having an audience has it’s own consequences.

    2025/11/15 Update:

    The thing is… all this new reporting on foreign spam accounts seems so obvious to me, I can’t even really understand how it’s news other than the fact that they added the ‘about this account’ features showing country of origin16. The new reporting did kinda touch on something I hinted at here and that America’s Polarization Has Become the World’s Side Hustle17. Perhaps I’ll log in again and leave this as my only ‘tweet’ since I previously deleted all of the others… na, ole Space Karen isn’t getting any eyeballs from me.

    1. @windhamdavid tweets – https://davidwindham.com/til/lists/tweets 
    2. @windhamdavid follows – https://davidwindham.com/til/lists/people#i-follow-on-twitter
    3. Windham, D. 2020. Dirty Algorithm – https://davidwindham.com/dirty-algorithm/
    4. Odeo – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odeo
    5. Twitter History – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter#History 
    6. Pingback https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingback
    7. FriendFeed – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FriendFeed 
    8. Silicon Valley – S3E10 – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_(TV_series)
    9. W3C Social Web Protocols- https://www.w3.org/TR/social-web-protocols/ 
    10. Substack – https://on.substack.com/p/introducing-mentions-and-cross-posts
    11. Tumblr –https://windhamdavid.tumblr.com/
    12. Alcuin – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcuin
    13. Windham, D. 2021. Section 230 – https://davidwindham.com/section-230/
    14. Ford, P. 2022. A Tweet Before Dying – https://www.wired.com/story/tweet-dying-revolutionary-internet/
    15. Taibbi, M. 2022. The Twitter Files – https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598822959866683394
    16. Elon Musk’s Worthless, Poisoned Hall of Mirrors – https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/11/x-about-this-account/685042/
    17. America’s Polarization Has Become the World’s Side Hustle – https://www.404media.co/americas-polarization-has-become-the-worlds-side-hustle

  • David Byrne

    I went to see David Byrne in Asheville a couple weeks ago. We were in the first rows and the audience started following the performers dance moves. It was like being in some sorta intimate line dance with the band. It was stellar. Watching him perform is more akin to watching a preacher than a rock musician. I’ve had a long held fascination with David Byrne and I think it began in August of 1981 when MTV first went on the air and I saw this video.

    I would have been just under 10 years old the first time I saw the video, but I remember quite vividly the debut of MTV on our console television in the living room. MTV aired a bunch of the same videos1 over and over, but none of them grabbed my attention the way Once In A Lifetime by the Talking Heads2 did. In retrospect, I believe the innovative use of film editing was just the product of the art school background of the Talking Heads band members. At that age, I didn’t really understand the meaning of the lyrics and it was only the motion that intrigued me. Regardless, the song reappeared in a 1989 film entitled Down and Out In Beverly Hills3, which gave me a bit of insight into the meaning of it. The theme of the film kinda nailed the existential crisis of the song lyrics. About that same time (1989) I owned exactly two concert films on VHS: The Song Remains the Same by Led Zepplin and Stop Making Sense by the Talking Heads4. Both of which are two of my all time favorite concert films. I bought up about every Talking Heads and David Byrne CDs I could get my hands on. And I played them non-stop. I had a couple friends who also enjoyed them, but they were few and far between.

    Skip ahead fifteen years or so, when I met my wife in college. Two things really stood out about our first date from my other gal pals. The first is that she had a really good sense of humor, not just the giggle type, but the dark and cynical gut rolling humor I like. The second thing is that she really liked the David Byrne and Talking Heads. It wasn’t just the ‘oh yeah, they’re cool’ type of like. She knew all of the lyrics to most of the songs and understood them. The first birthday gift I ever bought her was a talking heads CD box set. We played that thing out on every trip we took. I’ve since read How Music Works6 and followed about every recording project, film, or book he’s been involved with. I’m also particularly fond of his internet radio station7 because of the way he curates the playlists. I can’t say there is anything he’s created that I don’t like. I am particularly fond of a couple though… the film True Stories, Look Into the Eyeball, and Uh-Oh. I also really like the soundtrack to The Last Emperor and it was nice seeing him play himself on the Simpsons Dude, Where’s My Ranch? and in This Must Be the Place.

    Neither of us have ever seen David Byrne in concert. I bought the tickets as soon as they went on sale and put us in the second row. As with what has been noted the style of that original video in that he studied archive footage of “preachers, evangelists, people in trances, African tribes, Japanese religious sects” to see how he could incorporate them into his performance… the live performance we watched wasn’t too far off. The way he engaged the audience wasn’t that of a rock star, but of an evangelist. Because the set design was so simple and the accompanying band members engaged in a rehearsed synchronized dance routine, the first ten rows of the auditorium were completely engaged in the performance. Him and his crew were working hard breaking a sweat, and had obviously spent countless hours rehearsing the material and choreography. Like I said… it was top notch. We already knew the lyrics to the new album so we listened to the Imelda Marcos inspired musical Here Lies Love5 written by Byrne on the way up, while Ginny researched the Marcos’ real life. On the way back we listened to Brian Eno. I’d give the American Utopia concert a 10/10. And I give David a 10/10 on being an artist and a decent human being.

    Here’s the setlist for the show (Asheville, NC – May 8th, 2018):
    Here – Lazy- I Zimbra (Talking Heads) – Slippery People (Talking Heads) – I Should Watch TV (David Byrne & St. Vincent) – Dog’s Mind – Everybody’s Coming to My House – This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody) (Talking Heads) – Once In a Lifetime (Talking Heads) – Doing the Right Thing – Toe Jam (Brighton Port Authority) – Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)(Talking Heads) – I Dance Like This – Bullet – Every Day Is a Miracle – Like Humans Do – Blind (Talking Heads) – Burning Down the House (Talking Heads) – Encore: Dancing Together – The Great Curve (Talking Heads) – Hell You Talmbout (Janelle Monáe)

    25/12/04 Update: We saw David again last night in Atlanta for the Who Is the Sky? tour8. The thing is I’ve seen a lot of concerts in my lifetime and it’s definitely different. David takes a bunch of highly trained dancers, musicians, and vocalists and puts em through their paces in a thematic visually stunning choreographed set. He gave em what they wanted on this tour, yet the set list of songs somehow still felt like a tightly planned concept album. It’s really about him as an artist. It’s kinda hard to explain, but it’s like he’s floating up above it to steal a line from his song. He’s not rooted in any physical place or timeline even though several of the songs have very physical references. The lyricism is timeless and abstract – he blended a setlist that spans almost fifty years. Here’s the setlist:

    • Heaven ( Fear of Music )
    • Everybody Laughs ( Who Is the Sky? )
    • And She Was ( Little Creatures )
    • Strange Overtones (Brian Eno – Everything That Happens Will Happen Today )
    • Houses in Motion ( Remain in Light )
    • T Shirt ( Who Is the Sky? )
    • (Nothing but) Flowers ( Naked )
    • This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody) ( Speaking in Tongues )
    • What Is the Reason for It? ( Who Is the Sky? )
    • Like Humans Do ( Look into the Eyeball )
    • Don’t Be Like That ( Who Is the Sky? )
    • Independence Day ( Rei Momo )
    • Slippery People ( Speaking in Tongues )
    • I Met the Buddha at a Downtown Party ( Who Is the Sky? )
    • My Apartment Is My Friend ( Who Is the Sky? )
    • Hard Times ( Paramore cover )
    • Psycho Killer ( Talking Heads: 77 )
    • Life During Wartime ( Fear of Music )
    • Once in a Lifetime ( Remain in Light )
    • Everybody’s Coming to My House ( American Utopia )
    • Burning Down the House ( Speaking in Tongues )

    Anyway, you can go find the tour show reviews out there so I’m not going to sum it up. The Fox in Atlanta is wild with its mosque design. All I’ll say is if you haven’t seen a performance – it’s good – definitely worth the effort. Seeing the show is just a reminder of possibilities.

    1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_first_music_videos_aired_on_MTV
    2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_in_a_Lifetime_(Talking_Heads_song)
    3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Out_in_Beverly_Hills
    4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Making_Sense
    5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Lies_Love
    6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Music_Works
    7. http://davidbyrne.com/radio
    8. Who Is the Sky? – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Is_the_Sky%3F

  • Man from Plains

    All this talk of politics has affected my netflix lineup. Last night we watched the documentary “Man from Plains“2 about Jimmy Carter3 and his most recent book. I’ve got to say that Jonathan Demme4 is one of the better filmmakers of our time. Ever since Stop Making Sense5, a video concert of the Talking Heads was released I’ve been a fan. What I like about Demme is the unbiased and personal approach. I’ve always said of good photographers and painters whom work with portraiture that the best approach is to be as transparent as possible so as to not influence the subject in any manner. This film does just that as it documents Carter’s travels to promote his most recent and controversial book entitled Palestine Peace Not Apartheid6.

    The film gives an honest perspective on the man and his principles as Demme was obviously given good access the former president during the filming and what impressed me most was exactly how candid and emotional Carter was during the filming. He is obviously a very intelligent man in the way he handles conversation and which may also explain why he is a physicist by trade. What is controversial about the book is that Carter is trying to explain that perhaps the Palastinians have been wronged which is very bold and politically incorrect these days. But Carter does it with eloquence and good rhetoric in the face of staunch adversaries.

    After the film, I followed up with some research on Carter and his policies. What amazed me is how strong his opinions about peace and energy conservation. He actually reduced the dependence on foreign oil by half during tenure as president. He installed solar panels (which were later removed) on the white house! It’s amazing how we continue to repeat ourselves in history as I think my third grade teacher began the first history lesson i remember with that exact phrase. President Carter had some interesting approaches to energy policy that may hold in todays atmosphere.

    Don’t get me wrong…I’m not a political or economic expert, but I can tell you a good deal about the Laffer Curve7 and supply side, trickle down Reaganomics including the fact that Author Laffer and Wanninski, credited with coining the term did so over a meeting in 1974 with Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld present…so I’ll let you do your own research8. But I am a good with the study of human character and I can tell you that I am compelled to believe that Jimmy Carter is a good man with honest motives or at least the film did an excellent job of concealing anything otherwise.

    April 20, 1979, White House photo of Carter and rabbit from the Carter Library
    April 20, 1979, White House photo of Carter and rabbit from the Carter Library [1]

    I can whole heartedly recommend that you see the film for yourself. The photo above is of Carter fishing when a swimming rabbit “attacked” his boat.. lucky the secret service was there to capture it on film.

    23/12/06 – The rabbit incident came up in a conversation likely due to conflict in Gaza9. I replaced the missing photo and added the references. I didn’t replace any of the original links, correct any of the grammatical, or fix the spelling errors.

    25/01/09 – I referenced this essay in a recent conversation with friends since he passed away at age 100. He was the longest-lived president in U.S. history. I read quite a bit about him recently and I watched the service on C-Span 10 this morning. The Carter Center published a tribute site 11 that’s worth your time. I left a condolence message. The more I learn… the more I like.

    Jimmy Carter is an inspiration for a life well lived. I told my friends I’m gonna pick up some tools in his honor and to handle some carpentry work for myself and I might even go so far as start working on the solar thing. I’ve referenced the Crisis of Confidence speech12 a number of times recently and I suggest a revisit. I first picked up on it in the film 20th Century Women and rewatching it had profound affect. I sympathize with Jimmy Carter’s tough mind, soft heart mentality and I hope that his work to advance human rights and alleviate human suffering is an inspiration for generations to come14.

    1. Jimmy Carter rabbit incident – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter_rabbit_incident
    2. Man From Plains – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_from_Plains
    3. Jimmy Carter – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter
    4. Jonathan Demme – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Demme
    5. Stop Making Sense – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Making_Sense
    6. Palestine Peace Not Apartheid – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine:_Peace_Not_Apartheid
    7. Laffer Curve – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve
    8. Reaganomics – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaganomics
    9. Israel – Hamas War – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Israel–Hamas_war
    10. President Jimmy Carter Funeral Service at National Cathedral – https://www.c-span.org/event/public-affairs-event/president-jimmy-carter-funeral-service-at-national-cathedral/429876
    11. Jimmy Carter Tribute – https://www.jimmycartertribute.org
    12. President Carter Address on Crisis of Confidence – https://www.c-span.org/program/american-history-tv/president-carter-address-on-crisis-of-confidence/154404
    13. 20th Century Women – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th_Century_Women
    14. Carter Center – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carter_Center

  • The Purple Party

    I normally like to brag about how little spam and unsolicited text messages I receive, but unfortunately, this hasn’t been the case in the last couple of weeks. Almost all of them are text messages soliciting participation in the primary elections so evidently, my number has made it into the database coffers of the aggressive political marketing folks. The Republican primary is this Saturday and for whatever reason, both the Haley and Trump crew seem to think that I’m all in.  The thing is… I’m pretty bored of politics on both sides of the aisle and the problem seems to be sides of the aisle.

    I’m pretty sure I’m the only one thinking this and I’ve had some lively conversations about it in the last couple of years so I’ve meant to write about it for some time. I can go ahead and get it out of the way before our upcoming elections. I like to poke at people’s perceptions and prejudices. After the Super Bowl recently I joked with an acquaintance that I didn’t know what Taylor Swift had to do with Football or why she ‘hated’ her so much now. I let it be after a couple of days of poking and I mostly just try to stay out of it. I’ve got friends on either side of the aisle. Even though I try to poke at them equally, it’s easier being a sideline coach than putting your opinion out there.

    So here goes… I’m a member of The Purple Party ~ a moderate who thinks that bi-partisanship is the answer. I lean a bit progressive in the middle but I can tolerate and empathize with a variety of viewpoints. If I were a politician, I’d target the middle and I’d likely lose mainly because the wedge issues seem to drive voters. I think the backbone of this country is teachers, nurses, and light blue-collar workers… not necessarily the blue-collar plumber Joe who quit the Republican Party1, and not necessarily the so-called college-educated white-collar elites. I don’t mind fiscal conservatism, but I also don’t mind social progressivism. I have a social theory about us all being on the same human team and raising the bottom quartile for the sake of the team’s performance. It’s just a hunch since I have almost zero experience or background in history, social, or political science. 

    Self-identified moderates currently make up about a third of the American voting public.  They also make up about one-third of the Democratic Party, one-fifth of the Republican Party, and about half of independent voters.  The only thing lacking is some ideology and a name. Although Truman and Eisenhower were both centrist, there was never an official group. A decent poll from 2022 found that a little over 42% of respondents would vote for a candidate from a new political party that’s “in the middle between Democrats and Republicans.”2  The Purple Party would cater to the middle with some decent regulations on the finance industry, monopolies, the environment, and the cost of education and healthcare. The Purple Party would not regulate morality unless it had pragmatic effects on society. The Purple Party would focus on a budget that did not revolve around a tax-and-spend approach. The centrist Democrats can have the blue dog3 because I think the Purple Party’s mascot should be an owl. 

    Given my lack of decent moderate candidates, I vote Democrat these days mainly because the Republican party seems to be squarely under the control of ole’ dumpy and I just can’t see a very healthy outcome with more divisiveness4,5. Although your information may be telling you otherwise, Biden is largely considered a centrist. I’d vote for either party who’s got a decent moderate candidate with some experience. Although I might stand out as a bit left of center in my deep red territory, that’s not the case6. Centrist viewpoints just don’t make for good headlines in our attention economy. In my conversations with others, I generally like to blame the information age, globalization, competition for resources, and economic pressures for the polarization and ‘us’ and them’ attitudes. I can’t point fingers because I think we’re all to blame7. Now I have something tangible to forward along and I’m just going to give it my best to fast forward right through all of the rhetoric surrounding the upcoming November election.

    1. Joe the Plumber – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_the_Plumber
    2. More Than 40% Of Americans Would Vote For A New Centrist Party, Poll Finds – Forbes – https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2022/10/27/more-than-40-of-americans-would-vote-for-a-new-centrist-party-poll-finds/?sh=3e0b55956286
    3. Blue Dog Coalition – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Dog_Coalition
    4. Make America Great Again – https://davidwindham.com/make-america-great-again/
    5. People of Trump – https://davidwindham.com/people-of-trump/
    6. Illiberalism – https://davidwindham.com/illiberalism/
    7. We’re All Guilty – https://davidwindham.com/were-all-guilty/ 

  • Charlietown

    We spent the first week of the year in Charleston, South Carolina.  It’s always nice for us to spend time there because we’ve got friends and family there and it’s where my wife and I met twenty years ago 1. Technically speaking we spent most of our trip out on Folly Beach with a little side time on Edisto, John’s Island, Sullivan’s Island, Mt. Pleasant, and downtown Charleston. I think I started calling it “Charlietown” about the same time I left perhaps as a way to make it seem more casual. I’ve had some conversations with folks recently about it so I’m jotting my opinion out for posterity.  

    I lived in Charleston for about 18 years which is almost as long as I lived in Columbia, where I grew up. Given my memories before age 8 or so are pretty sparse, it seemed like much longer. I’m going on 16 years in the Piedmont which means I’ve almost equally spread myself between the three and at some point, I’d like to do my last umpteen up in the Blue Ridge to round it out. I’ve lived elsewhere around the country for brief stints but the vast majority has been in South Carolina. I’ve been visiting Charleston since I was very young. My father lived in Charleston as a kid and then again as an adult for another fifteen years. His brother graduated from Charleston High School and his other brother lived in Charleston for years. Here I am a couple weeks ago in the same spot at White Pointe Garden with a 45 year difference.

    Charleston is too overcrowded now. That’s it… that’s my general summary when discussing it with other folks. They should have put up a “Sorry Folks, We’re Closed” sign twenty years ago. Perhaps I’m just being nostalgic, but I try to be objective about the population growth. I was still there when it started to cross the tipping point. A lot of lifelong Lowcountry folks like to cite Hurricane Hugo2 as the impetus and I moved in right afterward for college so I could have been part of the problem more than I’d like to admit especially given I was supporting one of the largest and most aggressive property owners in the city. I spent a year prior in Savannah which gave me a good perspective on the two somewhat similar cities. When I first moved in, Charleston was starting to experience a bit of a renaissance of sorts. Charleston Place Hotel3, which opened just a couple of years before Hugo had already started the process, and then Prince Charles visited twice in 1990. 

    When King Charles III visited, he did so because of his interest in historic preservation and affordable housing efforts after the damage from Hurricane Hugo. He spoke to a group of executives explaining “that capitalism needed to become more humane, wielded in more sustainable and environmentally friendly ways”4.  The King and the mayor at the time, Joe Riley planted a new tree for one that had fallen in front of a house on Cannon Street.

    I lived on Cannon Street for a couple of years and house-sat for a family on Orange Street5 close to Riley’s house where I’d always pass him in the street and speak. I just tried to count the number of places I lived downtown and got eight, but I also lived in the old village of Mt Pleasant for a couple of years, out on Folly Beach, and up the highway in McClellanville. My father also lived on the Isle of Palms and in Mount Pleasant for about fifteen years. One of the houses I rented downtown on Vanderhorst Street got sold to an out-of-town buyer, whom I ran into at a sailing event at the marina where he explained to me that it was a better investment than New York.  The last house we had downtown was a carriage house on Franklin Street. We used to talk a good bit to the third-generation owner who rented out the home and his struggles to pay the taxes and upkeep the house. Two years after we left, he sold it which I’m sure is a relatively all-too-common occurrence. 

    We came into Charleston last week via the back roads down to Edisto, ironically to see a new house construction, and up through John’s Island, but we left out I-26 and that’s where the majority of the evidence is. Multi-tenant housing buildings line the upper peninsula and new developments stretch at least halfway to I-95. I read a couple of editorial pieces on the development just to get a barometer of whether or not I’m just being curmudgeonly on it. Even when I lived there, it just constantly got busier and busier. The beaches and downtown got to where you had to avoid the holidays and weekends. Some of the more colorful aspects of the culture, which I’d argue are oft the most celebrated, have been pushed into a slim minority losing its authenticity like something rebranded that’s just slightly off. like when Charleston single-row style houses are constructed inland in a neighborhood with Plantation in the name and full-sized palm trees hauled in. 

    I first got my first whiff of this future in the late 90’s when Daniel Island and a bunch of new developments were started in Mount Pleasant. This was capped off by the new bridge in 2005 and all of the publicity on Charleston being a top travel destination.  As this happens to other regional cities like Asheville and Greenville, it makes me wonder exactly what is a decent recipe for growth. I’ve also lived in really small economically distressed towns as well and can see the need for balance. Perhaps I’ve just become accustomed to fewer people at a slower pace but it’s now happening around the area I live because South Carolina has people coming in. According to a 2023 report, South Carolina is the top state and Charleston is the highest-ranked city nationally for inbound migration. Although it makes me want to capitalize on it, now I’m just primarily interested in preserving my interests, which happen to revolve mostly around peace and quiet. 

    When I think about places to live, one of the most important considerations is a sense of community. I think it’s an often overlooked aspect that has a major effect on quality of life. It revolves around having a well-rounded community of various types of people and services like healthcare, education, agriculture, industry, and business. It’s easy to fall privy to the false promises of places like The Villages in Florida or even Hilton Head Island in South Carolina but staying there any length of time will dissolve those facades. I’m sure there are bright folks from varying backgrounds in urban planning and architecture trying to wrangle these issues. I’ve always thought that Charleston could get rid of the cars on the peninsula. The billionaire-backed California Forever released its plans for a pre-planned walkable and affordable community that could eventually have half a million residents. Charleston doesn’t have the advantage of being pre-planned but that’s where it’s charm lies.  It’s easy to imagine yourself car-free in an urban environment and taking in the amenities and culture of a city but speak with anyone who’s lived there long enough and you’ll likely hear conflicting stories. Just this morning, The Post and Courier’s front page was dominated by articles about the pains of growth. There’s just something nice about running into people you know and I think I’d find it pretty hard to live in a city that’s primarily a tourist destination or a college. I used to work at an Inn in Charleston and I loved to remind the guests of the more sordid history because they tended to romanticize the past. Perhaps I’m just doing the same for what I knew of Charleston.

    I’m just not sure about the future changes to the quality of life for South Carolinians and I’m equally as unsure about any long-term solutions for maintaining a nice balance. I suppose the market is trying to level out the growth with pricing but that hasn’t seemed to slow down the migration.  Joe Riley cited his studies of European cities in his efforts to revitalize Charleston, but some of the most beautiful places in Italy and France are now trying to incentivize the revitalization of old properties. And even now, one of the more prominent writers on Charleston’s architecture and historic preservation, Robert Behre is writing editorials about saving College Lodge8,9, a former motor inn converted into a dorm. I think King Charles III’s speech there years ago on sustainable development needs to be brought up at every single zoning request for some new developer. 

    ( 24/02/04) After I had written out the essay, I had some reservations about publishing it because of how critical I can be and the complexity of the issues. I had some follow-up conversations with my better half about the essay and how it relates to our small hometown and even down to the scale of our neighborhood. I just wanted to add that I think population growth and change can be healthy as long as there is some decent long term planning. Charleston has the challenges of both the population growth and sea level changes.

    1. Our 16th Anniversary – https://davidwindham.com/our-16th-anniversary/
    2. Hurricane Hugo – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Hugo 
    3. Charleston Place – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charleston_Place
    4. As King Charles III looks forward, take a look back at his 1990 visit to Charleston – The Post and Courier ( 2022 ) – https://www.postandcourier.com/news/as-king-charles-iii-looks-forward-take-a-look-back-at-his-1990-visit-to/article_35924d7e-3061-11ed-ba13-fb2f7cef8d78.html
    5. 8 Orange Street, Charleston, SC 29401 – Zillow – https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/8-Orange-St-Charleston-SC-29401/10904508_zpid/ 
    6. How Mayor Joe Riley Shaped Charleston – Architect ( 2015 ) – https://www.architectmagazine.com/design/how-mayor-joe-riley-shaped-charleston_o
    7. 2023 Allied US Moving Migration Report – https://www.allied.com/migration-map 
    8. Commentary: College Lodge offers a chance to preserve disappearing 20th-century history – The Post and Courier ( 2024 ) – https://www.postandcourier.com/opinion/commentary/charleston-sc-mid-20th-century-architecture-disappearing/article_c55783dc-ae93-11ee-93c9-d3b85310a59a.html 
    9. Editorial: Think College of Charleston’s College Lodge is ugly? That’s beside the point. – The Post and Courier ( 2024 ) – https://www.postandcourier.com/opinion/editorials/college-of-charleston-cant-demolish-college-lodge-yet/article_c65d7eaa-b472-11ee-ab6a-3320d54c224f.html 

  • Twenty Twenty-three

    I’ve written up a couple of years in review essays and since I like the process, here I am doing it again. I like the title because it implies some sort of 20/20 hindsight which is most likely not the case. My 2022 review was fairly chin-up given some of the circumstances. Thinking about it now, for me 2023 was pretty, pretty, pretty good. I took some trips, coached some tennis, got a new dog, and tried to enjoy my work 2. Writing these out seems to be a good way to reflect and shake out some overarching themes. 

    While riding in the car yesterday, I told my wife how much I’m starting to enjoy self-deprecation. It’s so easy being your own public relations agent that we all seem to do it. I texted my friends joking about my lame eve plans and how I wouldn’t likely make it till midnight and could barely knock out a split of champagne. I left the champagne unopened in the fridge because I’m now easily downed by a half bottle of wine. No worries, I opened it for breakfast this morning. I think part of the key for self-deprecation is that I’ve noticed in my interactions with others that I’ve stopped worrying about myself and I’ve started thinking more about them. I think it takes a good bit of effort to reach this stage, but it’s definitely the way to be. Stop thinking about yourself. 

    I hit the big five-o last year and seem to be rolling into my fifties fairly nicely. A couple of days ago, a friend of mine texted a group of us that his father had passed which is the type of reminder I think we all need every so often. Personally, I’ve prioritized maintenance mode for my body and my attitude on this has shifted dramatically since my brother passed. I feel like we’re all still struggling with a type of infantile object permanence. Nothing is really permanent, not even our memories, and accepting it is part of what makes life fun. I’ve certainly stopped thinking that there is an imaginary finish line or goal and started looking at it all as just a process. Albeit a bit abstract, my first year in review essay in 2019 was on the money for having this attitude. Be here now. 

    I always scan through my photos about his time of year and I think that “whoa, look at how young we looked” is a relatively common experience for other people. A really interesting concept to me is the idea of change blindness… if you introduce small changes to something that we regularly see, like ourselves in the mirror, they mostly go unnoticed. Except of course that balding spot you can’t really see on the back of your head. I first saw mine in one of those security cameras at a store and had to raise my hand to make sure it was me I was looking at. I think this same sort of change blindness is also in play on a larger scale in relation to a sort of collective negativity bias. There was some recent press about a series of surveys that determined that 77% of Americans thought crime was going up while it actually decreased across the board by pretty good margins. My best explanation is that it’s a consequence of the information age and ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ sorta attention economy. 

    The situation in Gaza and Ukraine, or the hideous state of American politics don’t help, but my opinion of them thrown into the void won’t make a ripple. I won’t even mention that we had the hottest global temperature on record or the second and third-largest banking collapses in history.  Even though some of the data shows improvement, I don’t necessarily think things are getting any better, but I also don’t think they’re getting worse. I just think they’re changing. I’ve made a real effort to stop applying my own bias to stop framing things as good or bad. I mostly try to disengage so that I can focus on what I’m able to control.

    I’m already ahead of my taxes this year since we had to make some small changes related to the better half taking a new position. I was able to do some additional charitable work which is always a good reminder of how fun work can be without the deadlines and negotiations. I had some good glimpses of why I enjoy computers this last year with AI. Most of all, I’ve stopped thinking about work and money in terms of stuff or competition. I’ve started thinking about it in terms of time and since I know that my time is invaluable, I tried to prioritize just trying to enjoy my work. 

    I’ve got some challenges ahead this year. My first contract of the year is going to be a doozy in that it’ll require a heavy amount of learning and work. I think I’m gonna try to learn to get the most out of my brain without the morning coffee. I’m also wearing my body down, mostly from the heat and sun, trying to keep up with the kids on my tennis teams so I think I’m gonna go ahead and try to line up some younger assistants to help pull some of the weight. My parents are getting on up there and instead of dreading the inevitable, I’m just trying to enjoy them now. The better half has a pretty heavy load with her dissertation, so I’m gonna see if I can double down on the cooking and cleaning so I’m sure I’ll be adding recipes here soon. 

    I’ve got a couple of cool things coming up. We’re headed down to Charleston for the rest of the week. Our twentieth anniversary is this fall. Ginny will be defending her dissertation and we’ll get her a new car and take a trip to celebrate. We’re also going to be renovating our upstairs bathroom which means that I’ll be building out a new workspace in our den so that Ginny can take my office and hers can become a walk-in dressing room. I’m going to gear my new workspace a little less of an office and a bit more towards a studio by adding in some old fashion atelier tools and some new-fangled multi-media tools6. I’d like to re-learn the piano and some new audio/video production stuff for fun. Although it’s fun to have those carrots out there in front of me, I try to remember to take it day by day. 

    2023 in a sentence… I tried to stop thinking about myself, learned to live more in the now, focused on my locus of control, learned to enjoy my work, and just let it all happen. So let’s all just try to ignore the bullshit, cherish our time, enjoy our work, let it roll, and make the best of 2024. 

    Best wishes to y’all out there and I hope you have a happy new year. 

    Right on,

    David

    1. 2022 in Review – https://davidwindham.com/2022-in-review/
    2. 2023 – https://davidwindham.com/2023/ 
    3. 2019 in Review – https://davidwindham.com/2019-2/ 
    4. Age 50 – https://davidwindham.com/age-50/ 
    5. The Value of Time – https://davidwindham.com/the-value-of-time/ 
    6. Notes/House/Studio – https://davidwindham.com/til/notes/house/studio 

  • Halo Collar

    I’ve been spending a lot of time with our new dog Iris1,2. Enough so that it’s become my first priority cutting in my work, tennis, and other chores.  Iris is eight months old now and she’s a handful. I’m pretty committed to training and spending time with her. She’s sitting on the couch next to me as I type this up. It was cold out this morning which made me think about how thankful I am for our Halo dog collar. I stood inside the den eating cereal watching her roam the back yard for a good spot to do the doo. And since a lot of folks ask about it, I figured I’d just write about it here and send them a link. 

    It’s not my first rodeo training training a dog. I’ve had three now and can’t say it gets any easier.  While she’s young, I still want her to be able to run wild because that’ll make her happy. I have no clue why some people seem to think that having big dogs in small yards or indoors is acceptable. Dogs are just domesticated descendants of wolves and wild canines, who for instance, have a territorial range that averages over 100 miles. My last two dogs had free roam because I was in a remote location but unfortunately, our current yard is just over an acre in a neighborhood. I walk her the loop around the hood and let her fetch in the yard and pond. She’s at the age now where she’s accepted we’re the lead dogs in the pack, but she’s still testing it every so often. I got somewhat comfortable with her off-leash out in the yard, but after seeing her go after a cyclist or golf cart several times, I knew I’d have to add a fence to be a good neighbor and for her safety.  

    We ordered the Halo Collar3 to give it a go because we really like the idea of taking the fence with us when we travel. I’ve been using it for about four months now and there will be no need for a fence. And no, there aren’t any promotional strings attached here even though they did email me asking for a positive review in a support ticket and I am using my referral link in the reference below. The best I can do is an honest write-up here for anyone who might stumble upon it.

    The Halo Collar is a satellite GPS powered collar that allows you to create a custom fences. It has three levels of encouragement and three levels of prevention feedback. There are various audio cues for encouragement and prevention. When your dog gets near a ‘fence’ boundary or beacon, it gives warnings and when it retreats it gives encouragement. The collar also has static vibrations and electric shock when they cross the  boundary.  We spent the first couple of weeks two training alongside the instruction videos.  I think Iris and I both got bored of them after a while even though they’re well done. She responded pretty quickly to the encouragement feedback because well… she loves food and treats. That was the easy part. She mostly picked up on the beacon training before I was ready to let her roll outside. The beacon is like a small radius fence line. I tested the electric shock on myself first just holding it in my hand and I started her on the lowest setting because I’m more of a positive reinforcement sorta person and I didn’t want to create an adverse reaction to wearing the collar.  She already knew the boundaries of our property because we’ve been leash training her within them and do not allow her into the road unless she knows we’re going for a walk.

    Setting up fences is easy. You just walk the collar along the board and click to add fence posts. The GPS is accurate to within a couple of feet. ( we have version 3 if that means anything ). Most of the initial time she spent outside with the collar was closely monitored watching and calling her when she got a whiff from the distance and started easing off of our property. Then she got away the first time chasing a walker who had passed by down the road, ignoring the various beeps and whistles and just shaking her head every time she got shocked like it was a mild irritation. So I got her back onto the property and cranked up the electric feedback to 3 ( 1-15 setting ). That was all fine and dandy until she started running with a neighboring dog along a fence line and took off to the other side of the property again… just shaking her head when the emergency feedback happened. I turned the feedback up to 5 ( 1/3 power ) for the next time it happened, because I knew it would.  The last time she ran off, it was because she started swimming in the pond, and for whatever reason, whenever she gets muddy she gets excited. She got a whiff of a deer trail along the back of the pond and just took off into the woods not even stopping or shaking her head for the shocks. They shocks are not constant, they’ll hit three at a time and then break for a couple of minutes before they continue in threes. I looked back at the app afterward, and she had 24 shocks and had been out of the fence line for about 16 minutes which means it’s about a two-minute break between sets. 

    I crunk it up again to 1/2 power ( 8/15 ) afterward and have left it there.  We had about five or so outdoor sessions prior to the last escape so I know she knows, the deterrent and/or reward for coming back just wasn’t strong enough to keep her from running. I heard a story of an acquaintance whose dog had another electric fence product who would just move close enough to the fence line and sit there long enough to let the battery run out so it could run loose. I know Iris wants to chase those deer and we have a lot of them around our house so it isn’t going to be easy.  Aside from other dog walkers, golf carts, and bicycles, we also have a pond full of turtles, dragonflies, and fish she also wants to catch. The main thing is keeping her out of the two roads which border our house. Although the collar is for her safety, I’ve seen other folks strap up their dogs to a shock collar with a remote and just buzz them for bad behavior.  When I mentioned shocking our dog to others, I always have to explain how it works and tell them how I tested it on myself first so they might understand my sympathy.

    The Halo collar works, but only after you’ve trained your dog to pay close attention to it with rewards and punishment. She now responds almost perfectly to the border warnings and has only crossed a couple times in excitement to visit other dogs walking by and quickly returned.  I’ve had family dogs that would just dig out under our fence and would be lost for hours while we drove around the neighborhood calling for them. At least now I can see on a map exactly where she is. There is a much larger range than an in ground wireless fence where once they’ve crossed they’re free. I charge it nightly and have yet to have any glitches with upgrades or the app. I’ve set up fences around some common areas we travel to and she still responds to the border warnings albeit a bit tepid at first because she doesn’t know where they are. Another feature I really like is the remote signals feature. I have one set to whistle, so I can just tap a button on my phone to send the whistle to her collar and she’ll come running back to the back deck or front door. I put it on her about four to five times a day so she can nose around and hang out in the yard. I still mostly keep tabs on her whereabouts, but I’m now comfortable enough to do other things while she’s out.

    Iris now knows she’s headed out as soon as I offer to put on the collar. She gets excited likely because I usually pair the time outside with chunking the frisbee or ball.  I’m just thankful I didn’t have to fence in the yard and don’t have to suit up early in the morning to head out into the cold. Overall, it’s another one of those how’d I live without it things. The piece of mind far exceeds the cost and it’s just one more thing that makes living with a dog more rewarding. 

    1. Iris – David A. Windham – https://davidwindham.com/iris
    2. Dogs/Iris – TIL – David A. Windham – https://davidwindham.com/til/notes/dogs/iris
    3. Halo Collar – https://www.halocollar.com

  • Lake Lure

    We took a trip up to Lake Lure last week1. The weather was about perfect… a bit cooler than the scorching temps we’ve had down in the Piedmont.  Getting out onto and into the water in summer is almost a ritual for me at this point.  We rented a nice house on Lake Adger2 just about ten miles south of Lake Lure and we had a boat rental. We just spent a couple of days trolling around the area. We went partly because we’ve been looking at property in the area and the best way to get to know somewhere is to stay there.  The lakes were nice and quiet because all the other folks usually travel over Labor Day weekend. There couldn’t have been more than fifteen other boats out Friday morning on Lake Lure. The best time to travel is when other people aren’t.

    We have some friends who just got back from Lake Como3 in Italy and we joked with them that we had a much better experience because we saved about twenty-five grand and the commute was much easier. It’s only an hour and forty-five minute haul up the road from us and we’re lucky to have such beautiful getaways within a short drive. It’s also reasonably priced… we had a nice house with million-dollar views for around $200 a night. Granted the history is much shorter, but we had lunch at a local winery which surprisingly had some decent wines. We went to some local stores for fun. There’s a bit of good ole’ fashion tacky American tourist shite lingering around, but that’s certainly in Italy too. Lake Lure is mostly nice and I can see a lot of potential. Given its shorter history, Lake Lure still has the same kinda of small-town old-world charm with the boathouses lining the lake. 

    Lake Lure and Lake Adger were both privately built in the 1920s for hydroelectric power. Lure feeds and is fed by the Broad River4 and Adger the Green River5 which merges into the Broad further downstream. I grew up where the Saluda6 and Broad meet. I’ve moved downstream as far as I could go and now I prefer to spend time back upstream. Lake Lure, Adger, Jocassee, and the Saluda Reservoirs are about as far upstream as you can go in the Carolinas before you’re into the hills. The headwaters are always the cleanest and least developed mainly because of the constraints of the landscape. Aside from the dams, the legacy of various textile and other industries in the Carolinas has really spoiled the natural beauty of many of our watersheds. They get relatively overdeveloped and overused where they’re accessible. Where they aren’t, like the blackwater swamps of the Pee-Dee, are generally the most lovely. As a kid, I used to do a bit of the Lynches and Pee Dee Rivers where we kept a chainsaw in the boat to clear fallen trees. I also used to paddle a bit of the WambawSwamp7 at the end of the Santee River8, which is the terminus for the same water from Lake Lure. 

    Sometimes, the only place to really escape the summer crowds on the water is offshore.  My budget isn’t exactly deep water friendly and even the Charleston harbor and Intercoastal waterways get swamped with people on busy weekends. Sailing in cold weather is about the only way to avoid it which is why my wife and I crewed a sailboat. I’m mostly a landlubber though and don’t enjoy the big water as much… likely because it just feels unfamiliar.  I don’t really enjoy fishing, especially in deep water in a small boat. I like skiing alright, but not as much as just drifting along in decent company. I grew up on Lake Murray9 and even then, in the late 80’s, the best time to be out on the water was anytime but the weekends and mostly on the upper end of the lake that was less developed. That’s not the case now as the development has stretched all the way up into the Saluda River.  

    Lake Greenwood10 is also fed by the Saluda River and is very close to our home.  We hardly ever get out on it though because it tends to get packed with the motorboat crowd zooming from one spot to the next. Much like Lake Murray, there is a lot of new development going on.  We owned a lot out there for years but sold it because we had no intent on building. The whole ‘lake life’ thing is just the sound of jet skis, motorboats, and drunk folks on boats blasting music behind your house. There is something nice about how every inch of space along Lake Lure has mostly been developed and they’re now in the stage of trying to make it sustainable with boating regulations and building restrictions. Lake Adger has no jet ski and low-power motor restrictions. It’s hard to find a time and place to enjoy that people aren’t ruining with their nonsense. Lake Jocassee is one of those places just because the shoreline isn’t developable and we tend to visit there most often. And although I should ruin it by advertising, Lake Lure after Labor Day is also just that place.

    1. Lake Lure – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Lure,_North_Carolina 
    2. Lake Adger – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Adger 
    3. Lake Como – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Como 
    4. Broad River – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broad_River_(Carolinas)
    5. Green River – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_River_(North_Carolina) 
    6. Saluda River – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saluda_River
    7. Wambaw Swamp – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wambaw_Swamp 
    8. Santee River – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santee_River
    9. Lake Murray – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Murray_(South_Carolina) 
    10. Lake Greenwood – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Greenwood_(South_Carolina) 
    11. Lake Jocassee – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Jocassee 
    12. Lake Jocassse – https://davidwindham.com/jocassee/

  • Iris

    Iris of Zoey & Adger House of Zekën Woozer
    Iris of Zoey & Adger ( House of Zekën Woozer ) 

    We decided to adopt a new puppy last year and we picked up Iris last weekend. Her full name is Iris of Zoey & Adger House of Zekën Woozer from her parents and to imply a dynasty from our former dogs. I’m not sure how the name Iris came about, but it could have something to do with the Iris’ that started blooming in our front yard and the fact that I saw that her sister from another litter is named Daffodil. In mythology, Iris is goddess associated with communication, messages, the rainbow, and new endeavors. She is the personification of a rainbow linking the heavens and earth… but right now our Iris is just chewing up anything she can get a hold of.

    The first thing I ever published on this website was a picture of our dogs2. I’ve since published several others3,4  and our last dog Zeke passed at the end of 2021 at 19 years old5.  I’ve had dogs most of my life. My mom has a pug and terrier mix named Emmit and my dad has a Collie named Lucy. My grandmother on my father’s side raised and bred Boston Bull Terriers. My grandfather had one that played golf with him everyday named Duke. Growing up, my family had Airedale Terrier, black Cocker Spaniel, white German Shepard, and a black Pug named Macs6. It’s likely the reason that I’ve always liked dogs. 

    Our first dogs just kinda came to us, and although I regularly checked the local humane society pages, we decided to pick a Golden from a breeder7. Although partly based on the mom and dad, we also wanted a pup that had been raised around a large family.  It’s important to have a good temperament because we will be training her so that she can be certified to work with kids with disabilities in the schools. My wife will have a day every so often when she can take a break from adminstration and just take the pup to visit the kids.

    Woozie ( Woozer Honey Boozer )
    Woozie ( Honey Boozer )

    We previously had a rescued Golden mix name Woozie that was quite the character. Something about her personality that reminded me of the dad of Iris… a bit more red or a bit more wild perhaps. Dad is a hoss named Adger and Mom is Zoey, who has a big smile. I’ve gone to wearing a fanny pack full of kibble and carrying a clicker with me everywhere. I’ve been doing my due diligence on training, service animals, and researching the effects on students.  I’m learning quite a bit so perhaps she’s training me. It should make for an interesting essay somewhere down the line comparing artificial and canine intelligence. At just under ten weeks she’s already getting some of my commands and signals down pat. She’s out and about exploring, meeting other dogs and people, watching tennis, and riding in the car.

    Just one week in and I’ve already noticed the postitive impact Iris is having on our lives. Instead of spending our waking hours scrolling through emails and whatnot, we’re spending them outside listening to the birds chirping or watching the sunset while playing with Iris. I’m spending much less time at my desk, so I’m having to make the time here more valuable. Even writing up this post was only made possible because I went out and ran her early this morning. I just want her to be happy. And if she’s happy, she’ll make other people happy too. I think we all know it’s just something about how dogs can make people smile.

    1. Iris ( mythology ) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iris_(mythology) 
    2. Boozie & Zeke – https://davidwindham.com/boozie/ 
    3. Boozie, Zeke, & Munch – https://davidwindham.com/dogs/ 
    4. Our Dogs – https://davidwindham.com/dogs-3/
    5. Zeke – https://davidwindham.com/zeke/
    6. Anthorpomorphizing Machines – https://davidwindham.com/anthropomorphizing-machines/
    7. TIL / Notes / Dogs – https://davidwindham.com/til/notes/dogs/

    23.05.27 – @ 10 weeks

    23.05.31 – @ 11 weeks. She’s gonna be a big girl… we’ve been calling her “little miss big booty”.

     23.06.08 – @ 12 weeks. She’s learned to eat books and attack the sprinklers.

    23.06.10 – @13 weeks. Took her first running dive into the pond yesterday afternoon.

    23.06.18 – @14 weeks. Learning to listen when she wants.

    23.07.03 – @15 weeks. Drooling for treats.

    23.08.01 – @17 & 18 weeks. Chewing up everything and outruns me.

    23.08.05 – @19 weeks. Tall enough to reach whatever she wants off the countertops.

    23.08.12 – @20 weeks. Almost calm enough to sit with me at my desk without destroying something.

    23.08.20 – @21 weeks. Ready to roam… or chase dragonflies.

    23.09.10 – @ 6 months

    23.10.08 – @ 7 months

    23.10.17 – I’m gonna stop on the photo above for this essay. Iris enjoys a good belly rub. I’ll upload future photos @ photo.davidwindham.com . She’s doing great.. loves people, going for walks, rides, swims chasing squirrels, chewing up everything, playing with the cat, and just hanging out the couch. I’ve set her loose in a classroom. We’ve still got a little bit of training to go before I can get her to stop jumping and service certified, but I’m sure that’ll be in a future post.

  • Artificial Intelligence ( Part 3 )

    I’ve been doing the deep dive on Artificial Intelligence and I’ve already written several essays1,2. It started with an essay entitled A Second Brain3 about personal knowledge bases.  I started taking some online courses to help and asking questions to those much more informed. And what I’ve learned thus far is that I have a LOT more to learn. I’m still a bit fuzzy on vector dimensions, weights, how neural networks are built, and why linear regressions are used in machine learning. I don’t really want to delve into any of the technical here mostly because I don’t completely understand them, but I would like to add to my essays on AI.  

    I’ve found that I really learn best with hands-on experience in reverse engineering. About a week ago I started learning how to integrate LangChain into OpenAI’s GPT-44. I published a simple demo forked from another project that uses a tool to extract info from a pdf into a vector database. I’ve since started using and testing other large langugage models. And I’ve gotten up to speed on a development environment supporting running various transformers and models locally. 

    This morning I published a personal AI Assistant @ https://davidwindham.com/til/ai/5 which has access to all of the documents in my ‘Today I Learned’ repo. It wasn’t very technically difficult given that the code to ingest the repo was already written and I’m just using the OpenAI API for the language model. Although there will be a ton of service as software offerings for doing so, I’m now on to the more difficult task of learning to customize the vector databases and weight-train the models. 

    I’ve had a lot of discussions about AI recently and I started off, as I usually do, rather unimpressed.  The second essay I wrote changed my mind and now I’m on to how can it be applied. Larger clients may have the need to apply semantic search and answer sort of applications using AI, but the majority of my work still revolves around supporting mostly small-scale clients’ who could benefit most by using it internally to train new staff or maintain documentation. The 20 to 30 two-way interactions I have on a daily basis generally revolve around support or service questions via email which could be serviced by AI, but I’m still mostly focused on using it as a personal second brain. Perhaps I’ll try training a model on my emails and text messages for fun. 

    “Garbage In, Garbage Out” is a term colloquially used to describe that nonsense input data will produce nonsense output. I regularly use the expression for both technical and non-technical explanations. My wife sent me the screenshot today on the right of my AI bot responding before we met for lunch:

    It reminded me of the importance of the organization and quality of the source documents. I don’t want an AI to do everything. I just want it to do some things very accurately. Perhaps I’ll go in and improve my list of favorite foods at some point to improve that result. Here are some results that are a bit better organized.

    I think this is going to be the issue moving forward with various AI platforms and tools. It won’t matter that your spreadsheet can give you a natural language response to the thousands of rows of sales data because that data isn’t entirely accurate or organized. It’s what folks are now finding out now about the sources of ‘Artificial Intelligence’. My sometimes incoherent rambling on this website is in the dataset powering some models. I think there will be a huge number of professional use case scenarios. I’m certainly not gloomy in my outlook, but considering the amount of misinformation that folks seem eager to swallow up and share, it’s just going to make it even more confusing. 

    Five years from now, it’ll just be part of everyday life. My fridge will take a photograph of its contents, use AI to determine what they are, use AI to compare it against the previous stock, and use AI to message me a shopping list using natural language. If I haven’t updated my favorite foods or grocery lists by then, it’ll only be suggesting pickles, vinegar, and okra. The more I wrap my head around it, this scene from the film Her6 seems to be not only completely plausible, but somewhat likely.

    Her (6) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_(film)
    1. Artificial Intelligence – https://davidwindham.com/artificial-intelligence/
    2. Artificial Intelligence ( Part 2 )  – https://davidwindham.com/artificial-intelligence-2/
    3. A Second Brain – https://davidwindham.com/a-second-brain/ 
    4. LangChain & OpenAI – https://davidwindham.com/til/posts/openai-langchain
    5. Today I Learned: AI – https://davidwindham.com/til/ai/
    6. Her – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_(film)

  • Portland

    We recently traveled to Portland to visit family. I’d previously visited the city alongside Eugene and Salem some years ago and was excited to see them again. Since I had driven the McKenzie River Highway across the eastern part of the state to Idaho, we focused on the western Pacific coast traveling through the Tillamook State Forest 1. During our trip we had a chance to explore a good swath of the Oregon Coast Highway and we took a day trip to visit some of the early wineries in the Willamette Valley 2. We went downtown for walking, dining and shopping mainly in the Pearl district. We toured around the rest by car. We stayed in Beaverton and toured around there a bit taking a look at the neighborhoods, businesses, Intel, and Nike. We visited the Japanese Gardens and Aboretum in Washington Park 3. They were nice and quiet. Oregon is undoubtably a very beautiful state with a diverse geography and Portland is quite a unique place. 

    Instead of the typical travelogue, what really spurred this essay was the fact that we had had the Portland Art Museum on our agenda, but we never made it.  On my tours, I made it a point to hit the east side neighborhoods stopping in for lunch and using the city’s homeless encampment data dashboard for a grittier tour of the city 4. While circling the block to try and find parking downtown, one of Portland’s finest tried to wave us down and then punched our car while yelling obscenities at us. I was so ticked off, I just headed back over to the suburbs of Beaverton and went bowling instead. It’s a shame because I really enjoy visiting art museums. 

    Portland has become a flashpoint. Most of it was brought on by the coverage of the federal intervention during the 2020 protests, but Portland has a long history of both far-right and left-wing groups 5. Antifa as most people might have heard about it in the U.S. was largely a reference to the first use of the word in the U.S. by the Rose City Antifa mainly in response to rise of the alt-right groups who had been gaining momentum in the area 6. During the first presidential debate with Biden, Trump bragged about sending in U.S. Marshals and started his whole skit which crescendoed with Antifa being reponsible for the Capital Riots. I am not going ad hominem on this because I think there is a deeper story. 

    While driving through the Tillamook State Forest, I asked if anyone had seen the movie Sometimes a Great Notion based on the book by Ken Kesey 7,8. In it, Paul Newman plays a gyppo logger who straps Henry Fonda’s severed arm giving the finger to the front of his logging boat while union busting. It’s really a story about the rugged obstinance that still exists in the Pacific northwest and likely a remnant of the pioneer past. Here’s the ending scene:

    Hank Pander died the weekend we returned from Portland 9. He won the 1961 Prix de Rome Silver Medal and created a significant volume of work. He considered himself an American outsider having moved to Portland from Amsterdam and having lived through the Nazi occupation of Holland during his childhood.  I’ve included two of his paintings below. He painted several large format pieces on the 2020 Portland Protests 10. I’ve included a painting below from 2021 entitled Lament ( Siege of Caffa ) 11. The subject is about the Black Plague, the most fatal pandemic in history which created social, religious, and economic turmoil changing the course of European history. The bird mask and stick are associated with doctors who lined the mask with herbs to sanitize the air and used the stick to avoid contact to the disease. The Mongols used catapults to launch plague-infested corpses of the dead soldiers over the fortified walls of Caffa in what is considered one of the first acts of biological warfare. 2021 was the year in which Covid cases in the U.S. tripled and the US Capital Riots took place. 

    Hank Pander - 2021 "Lament (Siege of Caffa)” - Oil on Linen 60x81
    Hank Pander – 2021 “Lament (Siege of Caffa)” – Oil on Linen 60×81

    The images of rioting in Portland became synonomous with the social upheaval of the 2020 elections. There are numerous reasons, but here is mine. Portland is a frontier town and those towns like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle have a long history of social strife which I believe is related to them being some of the last of the modern frontier. They are also full of modern day explorers, some of whom unfortunately end up drug-addled and homeless. Gus Van Sant went to high school in Portland and one of his first films, Drugstore Cowboy tackled drug addiction 11. Social welfare and homelessness are a problem in Portland. In recent years, the pressure of competition for resources have driven housing costs and I believe that competition for resources is the primary catalyst for creating a boiler pot of extremism on both sides. The people of Portland are not just Portlandia. They’re more akin to the pioneer decendents of the Oregon Trail and the obstinant gyppo loggers in Sometimes a Great Notion. The competition for resources drives the extremes and is sometimes a catalyst for great art. The existing social strife alongside the effects of Covid just served to illustrate a darker side of human condition. 

    On the flight out to Portland, my wife and I played a modern version of the game Oregon Trail 12,13 which I had grown up playing on floppy discs and monochrome monitors. Portland started its life as a pioneer destination of desputed territory of the British and still perfectly represents the frontier expansion of the United States. The game is all about surviving the grueling emigrant wagon trail to the American west. In my opinion, the reality of frontier wagon trail life still persists in some areas of the U.S. We died in the game from exhaustion and dysentary and had to restart it to finish on the flight home. Maybe next go round, I’ll have a chance to visit the art museum and see some of Hank Pander’s paintings. 

    1. Tillamook County, Oregon – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tillamook_County,_Oregon
    2. Williamette Valley, Oregon – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willamette_Valley 
    3. Washington Park – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Park_(Portland,_Oregon) 
    4. Portland Homeless Map – https://www.portland.gov/homelessnessimpactreduction/news/2022/12/23/city-announces-new-homeless-encampment-data-dashboard 
    5. 2020 Portland Protest – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killings_of_Aaron_Danielson_and_Michael_Reinoehl
    6. Rose City Antifa – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_City_Antifa
    7. Sometimes a Great Notion – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sometimes_a_Great_Notion
    8. Gyppo logger – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyppo_logger
    9. Legendary Artist Hand Pander Has Died – https://www.wweek.com/arts/2023/04/07/legendary-oregon-artist-henk-pander-has-died/ 
    10. Hank Pander ( paintings ) – https://henkpander.format.com/paintings#5
    11. Siege of Coffa – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Caffa
    12. Gus Van Sant – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gus_Van_Sant 
    13. The Oregon Trail – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Trail 
    14. The Oregon Trail ( game ) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oregon_Trail_(series)

  • Artificial Intelligence ( Part 2 )  

    I previously wrote a quick essay about artificial intelligence1 in which I took a fairly skeptical viewpoint on the usage of the term and I was partially wrong.  It happens…  

    Zoolander – “in the computer?”

    Although I make some decent points in the first essay, I made some updates to it and I wanted to follow up on it with some additional comments. Based on the potential, this will likely become an ongoing topic. The main change in my viewpoint came from using the Khanmigo2 bot available from Khan Academy. It clearly shows how powerful natural language processing can be for acquiring knowledge. I’ve always had the viewpoint that AI is essentially just a fake term for describing how programming is used to do something like play chess or search a database. My main focus was not on how we use these tools, but on the tools themselves. Even though I hinted at this when I started using the term a ‘second brain’3 to describe a personal knowledge management system, I wasn’t fully convinced of using the term artificial intelligence.

    Aside from testing Khanmigo, I learned to use the OpenAI ChatGPT-4 API against my own documents this morning. Here I am asking it some questions:

    I had previously only used AI with CoPilot for code completion and just toying around with LLMs ( Large Language Models ) for fun.  Now I’m paying for them. The best analogy I can use to describe the ability to train models is to compare it to automotive repair. All modern cars already use OBD (onboard diagnostics ) and there are tools that can read these codes. Although there are some standards, each manufacturer can specify additional codes. The average automobile owner has neither the OBD scanner tool to read the codes nor the manufacturer’s code reference.  Since automobiles have circuits like computers, the obvious first use of AI was for programming code. That’s where AI, using natural language processing and machine learning against large language models steps in. Now imagine if you could simply press a button and ask your car what is wrong and how to fix it without intermediary tools and steps. AI will be able to do this for almost all professional fields in the coming years since we use language for knowledge. 

    I think my prior hangup with using the term intelligence is that it infers a capacity for awareness and not just knowledge.  OpenAI’s ChatGPT is already passing the majority of legal, medical, and business exit exams. My wife is asking me to review her college student essays because she believes some are using AI to write them.  I’ve never questioned the value of assisted learning using a knowledge base or other programming tools, but now that I’ve had the chance to apply the same AI tools to my own documents, I can clearly see a path forward for AI-assisted technologies in almost every field of practice.  It’s not necessarily coming for your jobs, but it will change how you do them. You can either adapt or be left in the dust.  

    While other people will fear what they don’t understand4,5,6,7, I’m all in. 

    The most practical application for me will be feeding databases and files into training models so that I can improve the typical little help bot feature to be able to process more robust natural language queries. I don’t think I’ll be building or training the models for machine learning, but in the tradition of John Henry8, I’ll still try give it my best to ‘out-intelligence’ them. 

    John Henry said to his captain, 

    “A man is nothing but a man, 

    But before I let your steam drill beat me down, 

    I’d die with a hammer in my hand, Lord, Lord, 

    I’d die with a hammer in my hand.”

    23/04/26 – I saw a press piece recently citing a paper that had studied the sources used in AI and guess what? The AI is me… 0.00002% or 24,000 tokens. ( https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Documenting-the-English-Colossal-Clean-Crawled-Dodge-Sap/40c3327a6ddb0603b6892344509c7f428ab43d81 )

    23/05/09 – Artificial Intelligence ( Part 3 ) @ https://davidwindham.com/artificial-intelligence-part-3/

    1. Artificial Intelligence – https://davidwindham.com/artificial-intelligence/
    2. Khanmigo – https://www.khanacademy.org/khan-labs 
    3. A Second Brain – https://davidwindham.com/a-second-brain/ 
    4. Keep your AI claims in check – https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2023/02/keep-your-ai-claims-check 
    5. CAIDP FTC Compaint – https://www.caidp.org/cases/openai/ 
    6. Safe Uncertainty Fallacy – Astral Codex Ten – https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mr-tries-the-safe-uncertainty-fallacy 
    7. Schillance Laws of Semantic AI – https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/semantic-kernel/howto/schillacelaws 
    8. John Henry – https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42897/john-henry 

  • Woozie

    I migrated the server this site sits on last week and said goodbye to one of my longest-running servers alongside of my favorite provider. And although this likely means very little to some of you, I take a good bit of pride in my approach to maintaining servers. I named the new server Woozie after a former pet like I always do1. I enjoy sys-admin’ing.  I like the security aspects, monitoring the logs, automating various processes, and seeing how small a memory footprint I can run. Or perhaps it’s just the egomaniac power of being the root user. I’ve set up a bunch of servers over the years and every time I spin up a new server, I always learn something new and get a little better at it. 

    The internet is like a giant neighborhood and I’m just trying to keep my yard tidy.  I got the basics rolling to migrate and watched the server logs closely. There were 27 reboots, hundreds of lines of configuration changes and 82,145 requests served last week. The webserver is doing 10,000 requests at about 500 per second, 2.5 milsec per, in about 20 seconds ( see video below ). 

    Linode2, my provider on this machine was acquired by Akamai3 last year for $900 million. I was and still am, as of now, an avid Linode supporter. It was just something about the little old bank building in Philidelphia that made them feel like an underdog. Akamai is in Cambridge Mass, the closest thing to an east coast silicon valley, sitting right up under MIT just like Google and Microsoft. The transition has been smooth thus far and I can only hope that they’ll give me the ability to easily plug into their existing edge network with some build tools4.

    Back when I first started making websites, I used an assortment of low-level hosting providers before working my way up the food chain. I’ve since worked on variously flavored machines across the spectrum of providers. I prefer to just admin the servers hourly so I don’t feel like a petty middleman hosting dealer. I have a distaste for constantly revisiting documentation so the cloud infrastructure at AWS and Google can be tiresome for most projects. I still like root access even for noSQL, flat files, or an external API data source. I like the ability to monitor all of the server and end-user traffic. There are definitely benefits to serverless edge networks and decoupled computing instances, but I’ve found that serving up an assortment of sites with mostly regional appeal doesn’t warrant the effort, complexity, or price tag. But let’s be clear on this since the term serverless is making the rounds… there are still mostly Linux servers underneath them all, you’re just not in control of them. Cloud systems can still be private and function like the big providers using orchestration tools like Kubernetes6. My service provider for this migration offers a managed Kubernetes product that’s relatively easy to use. Companies that once were trying to get you in their cloud are now offering racks-as-a-service. The key to using orchestration tools is having standardization between deployments. Even Chick-fil-A restaurants now have on-site computers Kubernetes7.

    I don’t use middleware to admin servers unless I have to on the provider side. I strip it down to the bare minimum so that it’s easier to keep running for a long time. I’ve got a couple web UIs to quickly scan logs and search databases. I remove all password access to users, obfuscate the default ports, lockdown the others with iptables, and run blocks at the webserver level. Aside from some of the default Linux packages, I use a couple languages, a couple databases, webservers, and some tools to restart other processes. I learned a lot new stuff about logrotate.d and cron as I tried to automate some new tasks. The deprecated server had been running at Linode for almost ten years. Not necessarily on the same hardware because I’m sure that the data center moves them around as necessary. It started off running Ubuntu Server v14.04 back in 2014 and I ran it up until v18.04 which is running into an End of Life this April. I upgraded it to v20.04 and could have kept it going much longer, but I was getting tired of cleaning out the cruft and customizing outdated packages. Plus, I just wanted a clean slate on the configuration on a new development server. Simple is the key to my approach. If I don’t need it, I remove or block it.

    I’ve documented the entire server setup @ https://davidwindham.com/til/docs/computers/woozie8. 

    1. Anthropomorphizing Machines – https://davidwindham.com/anthropomorphizing-machines/
    2. Linode – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linode
    3. Akamai – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akamai_Technologies
    4. Linode Betas – https://www.linode.com/blog/linode/new-betas-coming-to-green-light/
    5. Ubuntu – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu 
    6. Kubernetes – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubernetes 
    7. Chick-fil-A – Enterprise Restaurant Compute – https://medium.com/chick-fil-atech/enterprise-restaurant-compute-f5e2fd63d20f 
    8. DAW | TIL – Woozie – https://davidwindham.com/til/docs/computers/woozie/

    ** See Also: https://davidwindham.com/woozer/