love birds.

Birds are lovely, adorable animals. They’re enjoyable to feed or even just to look at. Birdwatching isn’t just some reactional activity of old generations (elderly people); anyone out there should be able to enjoy that and it doesn’t cost anything. Today we watched a wren hiding in the trees and singing. Later another bird walked towards our door, so we treated it while it was carefully watching no other bird noticed (or competed for the seeds).

But we don’t really want the birds inside the home, not just for sanitary reasons or damages. We seldom let them indoors, sometimes for shelter from horrible weather, sometimes by accident, and sometimes not (neither). The Sick Bird walked into our home once and it was – for a change – with full consent because she was vulnerable.

Birds are in general not domesticated and it would be cruel to put any kind of bird inside a cage. It’s not in their nature and massive cages in zoos are still cages. We need more wildlife, not zoos. As for pets, it depends on the animal.

The Web is moving fast, just like software. A century is off the scale for computing (nothing lasts this long) and a decade is also a long time. Several decades is exceptional, so I’m quite proud to have come this far. For sure, based on my situation, there’s at least another decade left.

year ago Rianne became fully vegetarian (we had both been gradually stepping in that direction for about 3 years already) and last month we got to meet some adorable highland cows and sheep at the outskirts of Manchester.

Rianne feeding the sheep

That calf is truly adorable and he was bullied by the sheep

On Wednesday we went for a long walk in nature (about a mile from home) and passed by the construction site (less than half a mile from us) where there would soon be a new facility for sports and entertainment, right alongside the famous Manchester City Stadium. Mock-ups below.

Looking from our home’s direction

Looking towards our home

ECADES ago somebody told me that changing employers very often is a sign of weakness. Several times later I’d hear the same thing, which follows common sense. Loyalty to an employer or devotion to some particular path shows both a careful choice (of employer) and persistence rather than adventurism. The same goes for housing or residency. Some people move from place to place very often, having to relearn locations of things, spending a lot of time on paperwork, having to meet new people (and losing touch with old friends and colleagues).

When it comes to my current employer, this past week marked 10 years of me working there. There were better times and worse time, both for myself and for the employer.

For the first time in my life I can say that I’ve worked in the same company for over a decade. For just over a year (or about 2 years) I’ve been able to say that I’m the most “senior” (in terms of duration) regular employee there, sans the founder/CEO, who established the company way back in 1998. In a sense, this also means that when I joined the company (with about 20 people in it back then) I was the “latest recruit” and all those people whom I joined are now gone, except the CEO. It’s an interesting situation to be in.

Will I work another 10 years in the same company? It’s hard to tell. The thing I do like about it is that it respects my freedom of expression (it tells off Microsoft when they try to cause issues by phoning the CEO!) and software freedom in general. I realise that many people are forced to use Windows, at least sometimes, and not everyone is permitted to work from home all the time. I’ve worked from home for 14 years now.

witter is not a site that I like. Honestly, I don’t! In fact, I think it is getting worse over time. In 2016 it shadowbanned me a lot of times and I receive plenty of abuse there. I now identify as living in the North Pole to avoid messages like “you’re English, so…” (method of shooting the messenger). I only very reluctantly joined Twitter after I had begun participating in identi.ca for the purpose of posting Free software news. Prior to that I preferred just blogging, relying on people who subscribe to RSS feeds to find my writings. At the time there was also Digg.com, which I’m proud to say I was ranked 17^th on (they had millions of users at the time). Having taken a quick look at my Twitter account last night, I noticed that a milestone is approached and will have been reached by weeks’s end. I am nowhere near the most prolific users (like 38 million tweets for this Japanese account; see the out-of-date chart below), but quantity was never my goal and besides, as many people know, I primarily post in Diaspora these days, with posts being exported from there to Twitter. I vastly favour these Freedom/Free software-centric communities (like identi.ca at the time and nowadays GNU Social, Diaspora etc.) and I humbly think that all this social control media phenomenon is a waste of human productivity and a threat to real, in-depth, fact-checked journalism. But no single person can tell the world how to use the Internet and how to communicate; if social control media is what’s “normal” and “necessary” now (adapting to the so-called ‘market’), then so be it.

DON’T profess to know exactly what attracts people to this personal site, but the site is very broad, with over 100,000 Web pages that I have produced over the years. Although I hardly update this Web site anymore, it continues to serve many hits and uses up almost 40 gigabytes of bandwidth per month. It is still a lot less than what Tux Machines and Techrights are serving, especially via Varnish. In the next post I will provide a site performance (bandwidth) tip for Drupal. When sites get very large this becomes imperative for keeping costs down.

Tobkes.othellomaster.com (subsite alone)

Medivasc.com looks like this

My mother and I this month