Random Thoughts

If you are truly lucky you’re awake when your dog starts barking at midnight. Awake so that you are not so far into sleep to wonder if it is a dream and if you should rouse yourself.

And when you do wander the house with him you can feel pretty good about what you find or don’t find lurking in the dark.

But there is still that sense from childhood when you remember the feeling that something might be out there just far enough away to hide itself from your furry friend but close enough to find a way inside.

So you thank him for his vigilance and tell him to keep watch while you try to sleep because morning will come too soon.

I could write about the holidays of ’23 as the time when the Jews of the world bonded because of rampant antisemitism and the massive amounts of gaslighting we have been experiencing.

Or I could go a different direction and tell you I am going nuts trying to keep my inbox relatively clean but am losing the battle.

I get too many newsletters that I actually want to read and too many that hold no interest but lack proper settings to adjust the frequency with which they come.

And by proper settings I mean I can’t adjust them solely by wishing them to be fixed.

That aggravates me because it means I have to take time to open and look for the unsubscribe button so that I can reach the field that adjust frequency.

Consequently I open them and find there is something there that interests me enough to think it might be worth keeping it a little while longer just to see if I am correct.

So the inbox fills far more rapidly but unlike snow or rain it doesn’t melt or evaporate, it just clogs my feed.

There was a time when I would update 2-3 times a day every day but it was before the content shock of 10 million online sources.

Some people thanked me for entertaining them and some people asked if I could slow down because they found it overwhelming.

I told the latter to stop reading everything and or to feel ok to take a break, wasn’t going to hurt my feelings. I write first for me and then for everyone else.

Now I sit in a place in which I may produce one or a couple of posts a month with the odd time in which I pump out multiple posts in a week.

And for some reason I have received email from multiple people to let me know about broken URLS.

They always say they work for company XYZ and want to make sure my readers aren’t hurt by not finding the correct link.

And they are always tied to posts that are more than 10 years old.

Kind of odd to see such things but they seem legitimate.

Most of the time I simply delete the section with the broken link or the entire post because there doesn’t seem to be a solid reason for keeping it.

They weren’t particularly good posts and sometimes less is more.

Tends to happen more when I receive multiple emails pushing me to update, especially when they adopt a certain tone.

Rolling through the weeks like a juggernaut whose forward momentum cannot be slowed or stopped we reach the place where the so-called rubber meets the road.

It is time to make decisions in a few areas about what direction the path forward takes. Been saying this in multiple ways for years now but there will be movement from discussing possibilities.

Now it turns to action and the consequences of those moves will play out as they will. Can’t straddle the fence forever, enough is enough.

I think I have received about a half dozen warnings via email over the past week or so.

They are all tied into the blog and tell me that certain plug-ins aren’t active anymore and if I don’t make adjustments I won’t be able to track information or take advantage of XYZ.

I get tired of being warned because the language in said warnings chaps my hide. Could be that I am irked about other things and thin-skinned now or that their marketing language is weak.

A softer message would probably go over better with me. I see value in being notified that some changes are impacting the functionality of the blog.

But I also recognize some of those changes are intentional so sending me email after email declaration of the sky falling isn’t useful.

Reminds me of a couple of people who wrote me to ask me to update links on posts that are more than 10 years old.

Something about the manner in which I was approached ruffled my feathers so I took the posts down.

Maybe it is just me.

Maybe I am getting cranky and ornery in my old age or maybe it is something else.

Don’t you just love decisive stances where we take a position of maybe.