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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

  • how to create a website in under a minute..

    or hundreds of websites in an hour. I use it as a mockup tool with clients to teach them to use WordPress.. and then customize their site layout and content. I’ve noticed that the city paper and post and courier here in Charleston also uses WPMU… try this from Photo Matt

    Update 4/8/2020 – Sometimes I go back and clean up old posts based on the amount of traffic they receive. Since the original link is now dead because I no longer use the Windham Agency domain, I figured I’d explain what I was doing. I used to use a WordPress signup form to create client websites on the fly and map them to sub-domains until they were ready to be mapped to the client domain. This would allow a client to have a website up and running in just a couple minutes and give them the sandbox would could help teach them how to use WordPress. This worked out for a year or so, but what I found is that clients would inevitably want more and more features which would require custom plugins or code. This became unsustainable for a Multi-Site installation because some clients would drag down others. Now, after fifteen plus years of doing it, I’ve still found that it’s helpful to get a demo sub-domain site up and running day. I generally use a core set of plugins for most of the sites I build and maintain which keeps everything simple. The only time I’ve used WordPress Multi-Site in production is for a publisher who may need multiple domains, sub-domains, designs, access, and/or authors. At the time, I’m sure I was excited to discover how easy it was to spin up websites in under a minute.

  • how to buy and sell artwork… and use ‘search’ commands.

    someone asked me recently about investing in artwork..
    i said “investing? what… just buy what you like and sell what you thought you liked”

    Dali established three major artistic themes, which would form the core of his work for the rest of his career: enigmas, Gala, and melted clocks. The images were produced using what he called the “paranoiac critical” method, which Dali explained as a “spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on critical and systematic objectivation of delirious associations and interpretations.”
    The paranoiac-critical method was simple. The artist tricks himself into going insane, while somewhere deep within remembering that the reason for the insanity is to create a great work of art. Dali chose to do it the hard way — by actually going mad, rather than simulating madness through chemical means. “I don’t take drugs. I am drugs,” he once explained.
    A theologian could have a field day wondering about God’s paranoiac-critical approach to creating the world. The psychiatrist may wonder what might be the difference between pretending to be completely insane while secretly knowing you aren’t, and actually being completely insane and secretly holding the delusional belief that you aren’t. (Dali himself once explained this by writing, “There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad.”)
    The cultural observer simply contents himself with noting that this “method” provided Dali with a good excuse to do whatever he felt like, all in the name of art.


    and to search Google..
    cache:Show the cached snapshot of a page
    link:List pages which link to a page
    related:List pages which Google consider to be related to another
    info: Find one specific URL in the search database
    define: Show Google’s glossary definition for a term
    stocks:Show American stockmarket information for a given ticker symbol
    site:Restrict a search to a single site
    allintitle:Restrict a search so that all the keywords must appear in the title
    intitle:Restrict a search so that some of the keywords must appear in the title
    allintext: Restrict a search so that all of the keywords must appear in the body text
    allinurl: Restrict a search so that all of the keywords must appear in the page address
    inurl:Restrict a search so that some keywords must appear in the page address
    OR List pages which have at least some of the keywords
    + Insist that the search engine includes a given keyword in the search results
    – Insist that the search engine omits pages which match a given keyword in the search results
    ~ Enhance a search to include synonyms for a given keyword
    * Include a wildcard match in your search results
    [#]…[#] Search a range of numbers as a keyword
    daterange: Restrict a search to any timeframe
    “” Restrict a search so that the keywords must appear consecutively in a phrase
    date: Restrict a search to a recent timeframe
    safesearch: Restrict a search to exclude adult-content
    filetype: Restrict a search to a given type of file

    http://www.google.com/help/basics.html

  • Elingsh

    Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by itslef but the wrod as a wlohe.

    Retreived from http://web.archive.org/web/20070307073659/http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~pjm21/papers/LCP.pdf
    Shillcock, R., & Monaghan, P. (2004). Reading, Sublexical Units And Scrambled Words: Capturing The Human Data. Connectionist Models of Cognition and Perception II. doi:10.1142/9789812702784_0023

  • Luuk Bode

    Luuk Bode

    I’m digging on the artwork from http://www.luukbode.com/

  • Welcome to Facebook

    Well… It looks like we are all about to be online instead of just the niche web crowd. I see that my old high school friends have all joined the website Facebook. When I first logged int, this was my welcome:

    Allison Farrell: Dave- get on those photos big boy- I just took digital pics of each photo, used iphoto to upload directly to facebook- literally took 30 minutes. So no excuses- screw scanning them in. Cheat. Macs are perfect for a reason, you know.

    April 3, 2008 at 1:29 pm

    Chapin: The 1990’s

    I’ll try to get the rest up soon- how is it I ended up with all this evidence? I really hope none of you are hoping to run for president. These are the “nice” ones I could justify putting up here- considering all the, yea, what do you call it…fun? we had. Let me know if you want anything deleted- with good reason (not bad hair) I will.

    April 2, 2008 at 9:46 pm

    Allison Farrell: Tell me if you remember…climbing up my balcony on Montague, me being in my nose, the dart in Scott’s head, my hospital room, what you gave me as a get well gift…and the list goes on. Flashbacks I tell you…literally.More will come to me…

    December 1, 2007 at 12:28 am

    Travas Hunter: I’ll be arriving on Su, 11/18 and leaving on Tu, 11/20 as far as I know. I may ride with a friend and stay a bit longer… I’ll know more after the meeting this afternoon. I have a few obligations upon arrival until maybe 3pm Sat. Maybe we can meet up Sat night? Send me your phone # and I’ll call you when I’m in the area. Look forward to catching up!! It’s been too long, Dave.

    -Travrth0111@ecu.edu
    (530) 828-2446
    November 8, 2007 at 1:41 pm

  • My Neighbors 55lb Catfish Caught in the Wambaw

    Dirty Dan Wheeler


    That’s the famous, eccentric, allusive, one and only… Dirty Dan Wheeler.

    Update 7/22/2020 – I ran across this post today in my analytics and I was thinking about Dan. A lot of folks called him Dirty. I lived next door to Dirty Dan Wheeler… which in swamp terms is about a mile down a dirt road. He had dropped by my house to show off this catfish he had caught back in the brackish water swamp near where we lived. I moved from McClellenaville back in 2007 or so to take a gig back inland. I know that he had fallen ill around the last I was logging into Facebook because I was friends with his two boys. I have no clue where he is now or if he’s still alive. Dan had an old piece of property out in the swamp of McClellenville. He called it the Moss Swamp Horseshoe Club because he kept some horse shoe pits out back. He had great big parties and like to dress up in tie dye pajamas and sing Mick Jagger and Delbert McClinton songs in a band. He also like to drink beer all day. On occasion, I would catch him day drunk watching westerns with a pair of revolvers on his waist. Quite the piece of work. I liked him. He did plumbing and insisted that ford vans were the way to go. I think he had over 300,000 miles on his. He was from Columbia, SC. Rabid Gamecock fan. Told me once that Vietnam had fucked him up and that the state had repoed his property in Columbia for taxes while he was in the shit in Vietnam. He had some deer skulls and whatnot attached to his front posts and said he like to hang dead animals and tell the property tax man he lived off the land. That old property was something else… the mosquitoes were terrible. It was a swamp. It was littered with snakes. I had a black snake and copperhead fall out of a magnolia in my driveway. I used to paddle the creeks in a kayak alone bumping into alligators on occasion. Ran into a black bear one night in my driveway. Alligators regularly crossed the road. The McClellanville crowd were tough as nails… mostly fisherman and shrimpers. I remember them taking me swimming in the black water swamps and going offshore in a 14ft skiff half drunk some time past midnight ‘rescuing’ another boat who had lost power. Our address was on an old dirt road which originally connected Charleston to Boston on which George Washington travelled and terminates at the Santee Delta near Hampton Plantation. It’s now on the Register of National Historic Places. Archibald Rutledge lived at Hampton. I read two of his books when I lived there. I went to all of Dirty Dan’s parties and on occasion I’d join him drinking beer and watching old westerns out at the Moss Swamp Horseshoe Club.

    * I recorded Dan one night back when I was broadcasting. I trimmed it down to just Dirty’s clips:

    Here’s what Google StreetView gives for the Moss Swamp Horseshoe club now… and good news… the sign is still there: (https://www.google.com/maps/place/33%C2%B008’35.8%22N+79%C2%B029’12.9%22W/@33.1432881,-79.4874692,251m)

    and here’s another fishing photo I found of Dirty

    1. Wambaw Creek – https://www.sctrails.net/trails/trail/wambaw-creek
    2. McClellanville, South Carolina – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McClellanville,_South_Carolina
    3. Old Georgetown Road – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Georgetown_Road_(Charleston_County,_South_Carolina)
    4. Hampton Plantation – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampton_Plantation
    5. Achibald Rutledge – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archibald_Rutledge

  • Climate Change

    fires2

    These articles on the California wildfires have caught my attention recently ( http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/24/us/24calif.html ). Those fires in California look more serious than ever. I think the New York Times just updated the evacuations number to 500,000. The photos say to me, be very glad I’m not evacuating my home in San Diego. I believe that Global Warming… ehem Global Climate Change, as Karl Rove has instructed us to call it, is very real. Why are folks so aggressively fighting the science and research? I recent saw the film An Inconvenient Truth. It’s on point with a powerful message that I believe should a least be heard. Evidently the filmmaker was in a room with Karl Rove not to long ago and it got ugly e.g. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/23/washington/23rove.html Until some serious consideration is put into global warming, we’ll be enduring all kinds of folks ignoring the issue until their homes that are about to go up in flames.

    Update 9/15/2020: Climate Change has been a topic of a lot of discussion recently and after reading the news this morning, I wondered if I’d ever made a note about it. I found this article from 2007 with the tagline of “These articles on the California wildfires have caught my attention recently” and a text file entitled climate change in my personal project folder on my office computer. In the spirit of my previous post on Non-Linear Publishing3, I’ve just been adding updates to posts I had previously written instead of piling on more linear information.

    Right now we’ve got a record number of hurricanes, one poised to hit the gulf coast for the second time this year, and extensive fires on the west coast. I read this morning that the northern hemisphere had the hottest summer on record4. Meanwhile our reality television president is hawking ideas of coming record colds and a denying the science. I saw recently that my former hometown, Charleston is suing fossil fuel companies in an effort to recoup some of the expenses of having to deal with rising sea levels5. Needless to say, I’m in agreement with them after having read some of the research tucked away by the fossil fuel industry. I’ve got a basic grip on the science and quite honestly, I’m a bit leery of the implications of what effects climate change will have on folks. It’s serious stuff for a lot of people that has vast affects on everything. As it is now, it’s mostly first world problems for me keeping the garden watered and scheduling my tennis matches around low humidity. I have, however, been ruminating on some long term solutions that revolve around the fact that I accept climate change as a scientific reality.

    As much as I’d like to do a deep delve into the challenges presented by climate change, I’ll end up making this post all about me if you can imagine that. I bought a one way flight to Maui some years ago and stayed for a while. The thing I enjoyed most about it was the perfect weather. 70 to 80 highs, 60 lows and enough rain to have a lush landscape. It’d rain for an hour in the middle of a sunny day. I just recently wrote that “my goal is to have a life where my only real concern is the weather”. We’ve debated moving to Hawaii, but there are some logistical and financial concerns for us. We’ve debated getting two houses… one at the beach and one in the mountains near skiing. I’d live in them off season and do short term rentals to cover the costs. We had picked out Boone NC6 and Hilton Head Island SC7 as the two locations because they both have beautiful weather for half the year. Issue there is that if the rentals dry up, we couldn’t afford to maintain two homes even if we did have the whole thing under a business umbrella. Plus that idea is not very ecologically sensitive and I’m not sure how we’d feel about having to pack up like gypsies twice a year. We’re lucky that we live in the piedmont8 of South Carolina which is basically a humid subtropical climate. The summers are pretty oppressive though and we usually try to escape to some cooler temperatures. We both have family relatively close, so we’ll be here for the quite some time. We are planning on migrating a little bit north at some point and we’re making the financial, career, and architectural plans9 to do so.

    For everyone else out there dealing with very real climate issues of flooding, fires, severe weather, and hurricanes… vote the skeptics out and take your own actions. Install solar, use renewables, weatherize your home, go electric with your transportation10, support climate conscious companies, recycle, reuse, up-cycle, downsize, go urban, and just consume less overall. Everyone’s future depends on it. Just as I’ve found myself revisiting this post from over ten years ago, I hope we won’t have to look back in ten or twenty years and think “why didn’t we do something”?

    1. New York Times – California Fires Out of Control as More Than 500,000 Flee – https://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/24/us/24calif.html
    2. An Inconvenient Truth – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Inconvenient_Truth
    3. Non-linear Publishing – https://davidwindham.com/non-linear-publishing/
    4. Northern Hemisphere summer was hottest on record, scientists say – https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/northern-hemisphere-summer-was-hottest-record-scientists-say-n1240049
    5. City of Charleston lawsuit against fossil fuel companies – https://www.postandcourier.com/city-of-charleston-lawsuit-against-fossil-fuel-companies/pdf_f87d668c-f2a8-11ea-83b4-1b2c82407b39.html
    6. Boone, North Carolina – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boone,_North_Carolina
    7. Hilton Head Island, South Carolina – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilton_Head_Island,_South_Carolina
    8. Piedmont Region U.S. – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piedmont_(United_States)
    9. Architecture – https://davidwindham.com/architecture/
    10. It’s Electric – https://davidwindham.com/its-electric/
    11. Meat Less – https://davidwindham.com/meat-less/

  • Internet Troll

    troll

    I think the term ‘Troll’ is appropriate for how some folks communicate online. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_Internet ) Someone told me recently to “quit hiding behind that computer screen” so as to prompt me to come see them. It didn’t work, but I did like the expression because it hinted at a deeper issue with online communications. Having managed a number of online commenting sections and forums, I’ve noticed that inevitably there will be trolls and for the most part is because of the anonymity provided from being behind a computer screen. They harass and flame other users over various opinionated subjects. Here’s a list of controversial issues on Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_controversial_issues.

    I’m starting to believe that it’s essentially and information war out there. I think that in the near future we may just see paid operatives trying to promote and demote whatever is on their agendas. One of the most fascinating articles I’ve ever read was on a 14 year old manipulating stock market prices via spam and fake online accounts. It’s just a matter of time before that practice is moved into other political and business ventures. Time will tell, but I’m pretty sure this is going to get out of control and our behavior online is going to start having consequences on real lives. Just managing the comments section of news publishers has been a learning experience that has left me questioning online behavior.

    As for a solution, I think that using cryptology to identify real people is going to happen sometime as a method of culling online behavior. I know one solution we’ve used in the past works. In an online forum or commenting section, one of the worst things to do is block the user as it generally just gets them more agitated and they’ll register new accounts to do more trolling. One thing that does work is to allow the user to continue posting while setting their posts so that only they and admins can view the postings. It’s a pretty clever way to shut them down without continuing the cycle of blocking and registering new accounts. They may figure out that their postings are visible, but it seems that most continue on without noticing. Be nice out there internet peoples.

  • Social Networking and Categorizing

    internet

    Yesterday, my feed reader spat out this interesting tidbit where some folks out of Palo Alto made a map of every IP address available online at http://thewholeinternet.wordtothewise.com/.

    I’ve been doing a social networking experiment with social networking online. Yesterday, I took one of my email addresses and signed up for every social network out there and created free profiles or blogs and then linked them all back here. No, it’s not some elaborate link baiting scheme. It’s just a test to see what actually drives referals from social networks. It immediately drove my search rankings. Most of the networks out there are somewhat useless unless your own real social network participates. I think that my best advice to most people who want to market themselves is to take up a hobby and attend some public events. Nothing works like meeting people in person and for the most part no one takes anything very seriously online. Most of them want to do it anonymously so they can be fun but lack any real substance. I am more interested in how folks are categorizing information online.

    This video was the inspiration for my little link experiment and to start editing Wikipedia pages. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Windhamdavid ) The video attempts to compare the how information is categorized online. The phrase that inspired my little link publishing bonanza was “There is no shelf, the links alone are enough” is highlighted several times throughout the video. I think the author of the video is making a great point about how information will be organized online.

    Because this website is a ‘virtual shelf’, I can lead engines to and from other sites which in a way helps organize the the information online. However, because I’m quite bit unacademic and half hearted in my publishing efforts, I’m not sure the word organizing is appropriate. It might be closer to disorganizing. As software makes it easier to publish online and the more ‘social networking’ sites proliferate, the more that common users will dominate how the information on the internet is organized. I’m pretty sure that the it’s going to be a giant mess across most of the internet.

     

    Ran across an update to the original every IP address available online at the top of this article. I also noticed the the original link is now dead which emphasizes the ‘mess’ I concluded the post on. Here is an updated article:

    Simonite, T. (2013). What Happened When One Man Pinged the Whole Internet. Retrieved September 09, 2016, from https://www.technologyreview.com/s/514066/what-happened-when-one-man-pinged-the-whole-internet/

  • Rotten Neighbor

    Rotten Neighbor


    This image was captured from the website http://www.rottenneighbor.com/. I just ran though some areas I’m familiar with to see if there were any reviews and there it is. “Strange, partially-clad men leering around staring at young women. Heavy drinkers. NASCAR fans. Baby-shakers. All around not a very nice place. Avoid the whole neighborhood if you can.” I think this sounds about right for that area of Columbia, South Carolina. Even though I think it’s really useful and entertaining, I can see that this will not last long because of the liability and the fact that it has no way to commercialize. It does make me wonder what will happen when we’re all able to review everything including our own neighbors.