I haven’t figured out how to optimize replies on other sites with Micro.blog. And maybe this really is what I want. A blog post based on a comment I made. Yeah, that’s it. This post was inspired by my comment.

As I said at qqMedium in reply to “Why You Should Never Cold Call a Millennial (And What To Try Instead):”

Reason 1: You could lose composure on a call

Reason 2: Receiving a call is time-consuming

Reason 3: Callers are inconsiderate

Uh. These reasons are universal. I’m a young baby boomer. Please don’t call me, either!

Update

Kudos Filip Poutintsev for these additional reasons:

1. The call always comes in a bad time
2. The call takes all your attention
3. You can only talk to one person at a time
4. On the phone you have to react instantly
5. There’s no time to check facts
6. Over half of what you said or heard on the phone will be instantly forgotten
7. I just don’t like phone calls
8. Writing is easier than talking
9. You have to prepare for the call
10. The 9th Circle of Hell: Video Calls

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Boy, do I have egg on my face. A big goose egg. 0. Zero. Twenty days ago I got it in my head that “0” is pronounced “zed” in British English. I held that mistaken belief for twenty days, even though I’ve known all along that the British pronounce the 26th letter of the alphabet “zed.”

Though I’m publishing this post after midnight on March 22nd, I fixed my Twitter profile—and my blog—on the 21st. I’m mortified that the Internet Archive will forever contain this mistake. Oh, well. Moving on.

It would have been appropriate for this to be the first blog post I’ve written at tbc.micro.blog since I enabled cross-posting, but that happened 10 days ago. (I syndicate at twitter.com/tbc0, medium.com/@tbc0, and facebook.com/timchambersusa.) I gave up on Medium when they started charging real money for crap writing. (No, it’s not all crap. I’m generalizing.) I syndicate there only because I can. I’ve already pretty much given up posting on Facebook. I intend to blog more and Twitter less from now on.

But back to the goose egg. As a computer scientist, I would never pronounce “0” “nil,” because they mean two different things in my profession. “Zero” is so formal. And why should the number signifying nothing get two syllables, anyway? For monosyllables, I kind of like zilch. Naught has a British ring to it. Having said all that, as an autodidactic philosopher, I’m most fond of this. When it comes to pronouncing my unique four-character identifier on the internet, tbc0, say “tee bee see.” The “0” is silent.

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Shame on me for not making this blog a priority since I upgraded to premium. I’ve been Twittering a lot. Also distracted by Nextdoor. I’ll say this today. I greatly enjoyed the hike around my neighborhood. You need a Strava account to see my route.

I don’t believe in luck. Studying quantum mechanics ruined it for me. (Not that I understand the math. Yet.) Well, QM and coming to believe the core doctrines of Christianity. No room for luck. God is Love.

That’s as I said today in a “just for fun” discussion; TechWell Hub. (Slack account required but requests are promptly accepted).

Milestone: my first post after upgrading to the paid micro.blog service.

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I Twittered a lot today. twitter.com/tbc0

This ad worked! Lovely and talented wife and I worked late. Missed Shrove Tuesday at church. Settled for IHOP.

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I’m mourning the death of a man I met through church some years ago. Kyle Forti was in a helicopter crash in Kenya. I saw the story on NBC news. I enjoyed the conversations we had Saturdays at men’s breakfast. God rest his soul and comfort his mourners. He leaves behind a wife and son.

More meta writing.

• Promoted POSSE on Twitter.
• Extended my μblog trial.
• Earned my custom domain pin.

On hashtags, cf. conversation with Manton et al.

Just wanted to note that I understand where he’s coming from. I’m also impressed with myself that I remembered the word folksonomy. I’m still waiting for the semantic web. This stuff isn’t easy to get right.

My ninth image is a photo I took at Monument Lake in Colorado. Kudos Google Assistant for the color enhancement.

As envisioned and visualized in subway-map style by Richard Watson. Much to study in this infographic. Follow the trend lines for society, work, the economy, money, food, technology, retail, the environment, media, transportation, politics, energy, education, health, security, and values.

Source: toptrends.nowandnext.com/2017/05/08/map/, and here’s a short link to it: j.mp/2EmXgqC.

XKCD #1732: Earth Temperature Timeline. And a hat tip to the explain xkcd wiki. This is a big chart, and I, for one, appreciate that the crowd has developed an explanation. Read it.

The topic of this post is infographics, not climate change, but while we’re on that subject I’ll admit I have at least two climate change deniers in my family. I’m to the left of them. But I also roll my eyes at those at the opposite end of the extreme scale of reactions to climate change. I’ll lament the demise of Climate Debate Daily. I guess it’s been a few years since I visited it. Three Christmas Eves ago, The hosts announced they were closing down the site. (It will live on at archive.org.) They sought “the strongest and most persuasive essays and articles supporting both sides of the debate.” But they closed on a pessimistic note. “Has the website been a success? It is hard to be sure, but our impression, based on reader feedback, is that it hasn’t. Few, if any, minds have been changed, in either direction. Confirmation bias is a powerful force, and we think that many people – no matter what their beliefs – simply read what they agree with and ignore or dismiss what they don’t. For the record, none of the three editors of the website have been in the least bit persuaded by the climate sceptics’ arguments despite the many hundreds of hours we have spent reading them. We note that after the website started its life on January 1, 2008, new global temperature records were set in 2010, 2014, 2015, and 2016, and that a new record for the Arctic sea ice area minimum was set in 2012 (and almost matched in 2016). These, however, are not the sorts of facts that will change minds!” Maybe I’ll add a climate change category in the future.

The Conversation Prism 5.0 by Brian Solis and JESS3. Colorful. Dense. Social Media brands in the creators’ taxonomy Less than a couple years old. (4.0 came out about 2013.) Do you think the color wheel is too much? I’m not seeing the descriptive categories mapping to it very well. Overall it does what an infographic should. It prompts me to think.

Source: conversationprism.com

Dan Carlson maintains a page comparing sizes of starships and other objects from many science fiction stories (small, medium, large, and huge): Starship Size Comparison. I like the large one best because it features the Star Trek Doomsday Machine. Visit his page to read his explanation about why he doesn’t compare anything to the Star Wars Death Stars.

I’m not feeling it tonight. Third check in the box for my Photo Challenge pin. My feelings don’t diminish this thought-provoking infographic, though. A Perspective on Time found at Visual.ly.

This infographic shows American political parties between 1820 and 1860. Now I have to admit my poor record keeping. I don’t know its origin. However, Marty Duren blogged about it, and he says it came from learnnc.org. I can’t find the exact URL.

Rats! Didn’t even have a single streak after writing a flurry of posts on my first day here (g0220a). Starting over to earn my Photo Challenge and Daily Blogger pins.

Here’s my second infographic. History of Science Fiction aka historyofsf. Source: Ward Shelley

qqMeta: In this post I introduced two of my writing conventions. First, my 6-character tags, e.g. g0220a (meta-tag qqtags). This post is g0222c (tbcg0222c in internet namespace). I’ll talk about them in later posts. Second, my convention for citing sources is to redirect through Bitly and to ensure URLs are available at web.archive.org. I curate a list of all my Bitly URLs. If the service ended, or if I stopped agreeing to their terms, I would provide a lookup myself. (XKCD is an exception. I use live links and merely cite by reference number because XKCD is such a part of internet culture that I can’t imaging one ever not being able to find an XKCD comic as long as its number is cited.)

Oh, and I guess qq is a third convention I just introduced. I’ll write more about that later, too. I do want to tip my hat to my friend d3matt. Years ago I discovered that he, too, has a habit of prefixing words with qq. Great minds think alike.

I’ll also write at some point about the importance (IMHO) of unique symbols (case-insensitive) on the internet. I don’t have to call d3matt by his name. Too long. TBC is too common, so I claimed tbc0 as mine. The shorter the better. Even RMS and ESR don’t own their initials. Haha. And the CEO where I work is RTD, but I refer to him as qqRTD.

I want to earn my Photo Challenge pin. 7 days of “photos.” I hope the photos don’t have to be JPG. I love infographics. I have some cached. Here’s the first to kick things off. XKCD #1810. Chat Systems. And with this I will earn my Photoblog pin.

Following @nathanrhale after finding A prayer before meditation.

“In the end, our stories is all we is.” — Jake in Kee Sloan’s novel Jabbok. God, I’m enjoying this book! (That’s a #prayer.)

I though I’d heard of micro.blog before. Now I remember! I first heard about it from @ayjay. I believe it was April 19, 2018. Pleased now to be following him here, especially since tonight I see that twitter.com/ayjay is 404.

Found @Burk via @tchambers. Following because his avatar is a caricature. I’m partial to caricature avatars.

Ok, @tchambers, it didn’t take much for you to convince me to try this platform. Kudos! My first impression is wow. (I realize you may not even know who I am. It’s ok. We share the same name. That’s enough to get us started.)