<?xml version="1.0"?><rss version="2.0"><channel>
<title>gopher.black</title>
<link>
gopher://gopher.black/</link>
<description>Tomasino's Gopher Hole</description>
<item>
<title>Birthdays</title>
<link>
gopher://gopher.black/1/phlog/20240425-birthdays/</link>
<pubdate>Thu, 25 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000</pubdate>
<description><![CDATA[<pre>
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birthdays
April 25th, 2024
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Today is my wife's birthday. We're heading into the city to find
tacos, some vinyl, and see some art installations for Design
March. Is Design March[0] a thing in other places? I'm really not
sure if it's a local-only or if it's world-wide. It's pretty neat:
art installations in March all over the city. Except it's April,
almost May, but they didn't change the name. No idea why.
[0] Design March
https://visitreykjavik.is/see-and-do/reykjavik-festival-city/design-march
My friends Lejla and Natalia built an installation called
InStability[1] which is about the earthquakes and detection systems
in the Reykjanes penninusla where we live. The piece is a giant
tactile map of the penninsula. You can touch the land anywhere
with your finger to create an earthquake there. As you do so
you'll see all of the earthquake detection sensors around the
country light up as your shockwaves move across the surface. It's
really cool and immersive, and I got to help a little bit!
[1] InStability
https://www.honnunarmidstod.is/en/honnunarmars/dagskra/2024/o-stodugleiki-reykjanes-rumskar-102
Assembly required a lot of textile work, and I'm apparently the
local sewer. Over the course of a few nights we stitched a lot of
capacitive and pressure-sensitive fabrics together in patches.
I can't wait to see the final product on display later today.
Today is also the first day of summer in Iceland, so it's a school
holiday. We'll go see some parades and there will probably be
pop-up concerts. I have a holiday vacation day today, so it's
going to be Fun Family Time™.
Here we go!
</pre>]]></description>
</item>
<item>
<title>The Endless Sick</title>
<link>
gopher://gopher.black/1/phlog/20240325-the-endless-sick/</link>
<pubdate>Mon, 25 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000</pubdate>
<description><![CDATA[<pre>
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The endless sick
March 25th, 2024
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Ugh, I'm so tired of being sick. I took a trip to the US for
a weekend and brought back the flu. It raged for a few days and
then settled into my lungs. Now it's nearly a month later and I'm
still working up all the crap inside me.
Cough Cough Cough
I felt like an extra big dummy on Wednesday, though. I was talking
to someone about the shakuhachi [0] and I sent them a link to some
practice I had recorded a couple years ago [1]. The name of the
recording was Breathing Exercises 2. And that's when it hit me!
I used shakuhachi practice to strengthen my lungs and recover
after covid. Why haven't I been doing it after this stupid flu?
Complete idiot, this guy right here.
[0] shakuhachi
gopher://gopher.black/1/explorations/shakuhachi
[1] Breathing Exercises 2
https://soundcloud.com/jamestomasino/breathing-exercises-2
Well, I've been good about putting in practice every day since
then and while I'm still coughing my chest has started feeling
more in control. The amount of phlegm I'm working up in
increasing. Hopefully I'll feel good again in time for whatever
next trip I need to take so I can get sick again.
</pre>]]></description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Home Alone</title>
<link>
gopher://gopher.black/1/phlog/20240216-home-alone/</link>
<pubdate>Fri, 16 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000</pubdate>
<description><![CDATA[<pre>
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Home Alone
February 16th, 2024
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My wife and son are off to visit my mother-in-law in the states.
I am home alone for the next week. It's been so long since I've
been solo, I wonder if I'll forget how to do it.
I started by making the environment feel more like my choice. I've
pulled all the blinds closed and turned off all the lights. It's
dark and cozy. I won't keep it this way, but for tonight we're
going full hermit mode.
I think I'll cook something slow, maybe with lentils. Something
stew-like, warm, cozy. And in a few I'm going to put on a movie on
my projector. And then another. And maybe another.
Cozy-hermit-solo-mode Activate!
</pre>]]></description>
</item>
<item>
<title>New Hire</title>
<link>
gopher://gopher.black/1/phlog/20240208-new-hire/</link>
<pubdate>Thu, 08 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000</pubdate>
<description><![CDATA[<pre>
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new hire
February 08th, 2024
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This week I hired a second guy for my team. The company is now
about 30 full time employees so it was time to have a second
person in the tech department. I got really lucky. I've got some
really awesome guys that help us out with contract work but
they're happy with that setup. They have full time gigs that leave
them some room to dabble, so freelance brings in a sweet bonus. If
they came on full time they'd be eating their own bonus money. No
me gusta.
Lucky for me I got a note from a fabulous person I used to work
with way back when I lived in Atlanta. He was stuck between jobs
and struggling and was looking for some contract help. I was more
than happy to do that. Once we started working together I realized
he was looking for a full time position still, had a fantastic set
of skills that could help us, and I already knew he was grade-A
awesome. We worked the numbers and stars aligned and he started
full time with us this past Monday.
Already it's been wonderful and he's still just beginning to come
up to speed on all the various ins and outs of our architecture
for all our different clients. He's inquisitive and approachable
and all the rest of the company is excited to work with him. I'm
overjoyed.
We last worked together in 2008. Now we're on the team again after
all this time. I guess if there's a lesson to share with you all
about this it's that you should strive to always be awesome
humans. Maybe it'll land you a job 16 years later!
</pre>]]></description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Re The State Of Gopher</title>
<link>
gopher://gopher.black/1/phlog/20240205-re-the-state-of-gopher/</link>
<pubdate>Mon, 05 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000</pubdate>
<description><![CDATA[<pre>
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re: The state of gopher
February 05th, 2024
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IanJ of gopher.icu wrote a quick rant on things that bother him
about the current state of gopher[0]. In short, line length,
misuse of type i, and escape codes for things like color
deccoration. We run into this sort of gopher purism a lot in the
bitreich community. It's not new, and it's also a perfectly fine
opinion. I just don't share it.
[0] The state of gopher
gopher://gopher.icu/0/phlog/Computing/The-state-of-gopher.md
Lets talk about the three mentioned things in turn:
First: Lines should be 70 charactes or fewer.
This is indeed in the spec, and it was the impetus for my choosing
sixty-seven as the line length I use here on gopher.black. But in
general a line length of 80 or fewer characters won't cause
problems for anyone on a desktop and a line length of 67 is still
far too wide to be useful on mobile. So what are we to do?
Some people forgo wrapping at all, assuming clients are capable of
wrapping if they're sosphisticated. Others pick a comfortable
middle-ground (often 80) and stick with it half out of convenience
and half because it's good enough. Still others who use gopher on
mobile choose to go crazy and use very narrow posts that fit those
screens.
To the spec it's wrong, but the spec doesn't have feelings. The
spec doesn't use gopher. If someone is on their phone and very
narrow lines make their use case better then that's absolutely the
right call. At the end of the day it just isn't very important.
Second: misuse of type-i
From a historical perspective type i wasn't even in the spec, but
it was already in widespread use in gopherspace within the first
year of its launch. Clients adjusted, use adjusted. RFC-1436[1]
never learned to time travel, though, and remains sadly silent on
the topic.
[1] RFC-1436
gopher://gopher.black/0/archive/rfc/1436.txt
Why use type i gophermaps for things like this phlog? It makes it
easy to link to things, like the RFC above. I could drop in
a gopher URL instead, but wait... those didn't exist when RFC-1436
came out either. So should I instead list a selector, server, and
port? Oh, I better indicate a type as well. No, that's silly. Even
though the URL scheme came later it's a useful convention. It
makes it easier for other people. See where I'm going?
So why NOT use type i in this way? Well, two reasons. First, it's
harder to lay out. Working in gophermaps is nasty business.
I wrote a tool[2] to do it for me. Without that I wouldn't do it.
It's easy to screw up and awful to edit later. Easier just to
write plain text, and plain text is sufficient.
[2] Burrow
https://github.com/jamestomasino/burrow
And the second reason? Very old clients like the original UMN
gopher client don't work well with them.
Thankfully very few people use that client anynmore because it's
pretty janky and has barely been maintained. Last I heard it was
in search of a new maintainer, actually. And these days we have
a wealth of new clients that are simply fantastic. We have the
near-ubiquitous lynx which does a fair job, though notably is
converting to HTML under the hood. But the bitreich community
mentioned earlier has led to the creation of at least two gopher
clients I know of that match that gopher purist philosophy. We
also have VF-1, a lovely python client that inspired a fork for
offline browsing of the whole small internet, and another fork for
gemini. Bombadillo is fun, and there's my most recent favorite,
phetch. Lots of options all with better features and better
handling of gopherspace.
For me, the benifits of being able to link within the documents
outweighs the negatives. The format is subverted with my tooling,
and I don't feel the need to lower my gopher content to an ancient
client when there's so many easy alternatives available.
Third: escape codes
Here's I'll agree partially. gopherspace shouldn't assume terminal
environments. Remember the phone users earlier? Generally speaking
it's safer not to do so. But that being said, some places in
gopher space are not just gopher holes. They're not just phlogs.
They are art installations. They are pushing the boundaries of
what's possible and what's decent because that's what art does.
I am of course thinking primarily of cat's baud.baby[3] here, but
there are some other gems around as well. They blow my mind when
I see what can be created in this long forgotten corner of the
internet.
[3] baud.baby
gopher://baud.baby/1/
But it's only visible in certain ways! Yeah, that's true. You
might stumble on there and go, "AHH! What a mess!" and miss out on
the awesome. That'd be too bad. If that's the case you should grab
phetch and try again. It's worth it. Maybe not for all of gopher,
but for this particular thing. Keep doing what you're doing, cat.
Gopher is a pretty cool thing. It's got limits that make it
awesome because it forces us to focus on content most of the time.
Those limits aren't the point, though. The place it leads us to
are the point. If we disagree on some of the details getting
there, so be it. After all, this is in UTF-8, not Latin-1 as the
spec calls for which lets me do some great things, like share
music for the shakuhachi[4].
[4] Shakuhachi Music Guide
gopher://gopher.black/1/explorations/shakuhachi
</pre>]]></description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Renunciation</title>
<link>
gopher://gopher.black/1/phlog/20240203-renunciation/</link>
<pubdate>Sat, 03 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000</pubdate>
<description><![CDATA[<pre>
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Renunciation
February 03rd, 2024
----------------------------------------
On Feb 2, 2024 I formally renounced my US citizenship at the US
Embassy in Reykjavik Iceland.
It's been a while coming. In fact, I knew this was something
I wanted to strongly consider before we left the country. I had
rough plans for ~5 years abroad, and it happened at 4.7 years.
Pretty accurate!
I started the formal process back in October when I notified the
embassy of my intentions. There were some back and forth emails
and I eventually received an appointment date. I had to fill out
a lot of repetitive forms, have a phone call that repeated what
was on the forms, and finally have the in-person appointment where
it was all repeated again.
Once the forms and signing were done I got to stand up in front of
a flag I was literally telling these people I don't care about and
I got to say a formal oath of un-American-ing. Or something. It
was very bazaar. Like, who was the oath for exactly? They didn't
record it or anything. It was so performative.
Speaking of performative, the consular officer I met with was
pretty creepy, in that Stepford Wives sort of way. She had
a really fake pleasant thing going on, and offered up small talk
that was not really small talk. She kept asking questions, "just
out of curiosity," which were obviously designed to probe me about
my reasoning. Which was strange, since they literally ask about
the reasoning.
Why do they do that? Well, there's one very special provision in
the middle of all the lists. It says something to the effect of,
"If the Attorney General decides you are doing this for tax
avoidance you can be banned from entering the US." I think the
questions were to see if that was my reasoning.
Thankfully, that's not my reason! My reason is that America is
a shitbag. It was founded on racism, has been responsible for
countless atrocities even before its founding, continues to impose
horrible ethics upon the world at the end of a gun, and
indoctrinates its people in a cult of self delusion. But yeah,
getting taxed as an expat is pretty annoying too. Not that I avoid
it, it's just annoying.
So yeah, I'm done! It's both official and not official. It's
official in all the ways that count outside the US. It's not
official yet in the US as that requires them to do some absurd
amount of paperwork or something and it'll take months. Right now
I don't have my passport because they took it, but it technically
is still issued and valid. So in a few months when I fly through
the US with my Italian passport and an ESTA, I risk a border
patrol agent deciding that's interesting enough to make my day
horrible. I don't really have any recourse, but then again that
could have happened for no reason at all. That's how America rolls
for anyone with a badge. ACAB, bitches.
Oh! It cost me $2,300 to renounce. That's a nice little extra
bullshit on top, isn't it? Whatever. It's done. I'm free. No, not
like in America, actually free.
I'm an Italian citizen, though I've never lived in Italy and
haven't spent a total of a full month in the country in my life.
I'd like to spend more time there eventually. We've been
discussing that in the 6-8 year timeframe it would be great to buy
a flat in Italy to spend our winters. Wit will be out of school by
then so it shouldn't create schedule problems. I work remotely, so
as long as we find some place with decent internet it will be
great. And lets face it, Iceland is amazing, but it sucks monkey
butt in January and February.
So yeah, I'll get around to brushing up on my Italian and we'll
look into splitting up the year. Who knows, maybe when I'm ready
to retire I'll like that more than Iceland (I doubt it). Then
again, I really love it here. I have about 2 and a half more years
before I can apply for citizenship here. That will bring my
passport count back up to two!
Plans, plans, plans. Sometimes they work out.
</pre>]]></description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Citizenship</title>
<link>
gopher://gopher.black/1/phlog/20240130-citizenship/</link>
<pubdate>Tue, 30 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000</pubdate>
<description><![CDATA[<pre>
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Citizenship
January 30th, 2024
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Tomorrow I have a call with the US Embassy in Iceland. It's an
informal interview in preparation for my renunciation of
citizenship. Friday is the big in-person meeting where I'll make
it official. No more US citizenship for me! In a few days I'll be
Italian and only Italian (at least for now). I'd like to get
Icelandic citizenship when I qualify in a few years.
</pre>]]></description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Doing A Whole Lot Of Nothing</title>
<link>
gopher://gopher.black/1/phlog/20240111-doing-a-whole-lot-of-nothing/</link>
<pubdate>Thu, 11 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000</pubdate>
<description><![CDATA[<pre>
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Doing a whole lot of nothing
January 11th, 2024
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Today I've finally lightened up on meetings at work. Monday
through Wednesday were just packed full of phone calls. So today
I was excited to not have a ton of things interrupting my day. But
lo and behold, I have been stricken by the not-give-a-shits.
So I will not be accomplishing anything today. In fact, I'm gonna
get away from the computer and go read a bit. Tonight I'll go to
my hackerspace meetup, and then see a film. Tomorrow can be for
work again.
</pre>]]></description>
</item>
<item>
<title>I Just Wanna Read</title>
<link>
gopher://gopher.black/1/phlog/20240108-i-just-wanna-read/</link>
<pubdate>Mon, 08 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000</pubdate>
<description><![CDATA[<pre>
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I just wanna read
January 08th, 2024
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WHaaaaa!!
(That's me crying)
I don't wanna today. Gimme coffee, a nice warm blanket, and
a mountain of books. I just want to read.
I just started on Being Arab and it's fascinating! I'm listening
to Jin Yong's 3rd part of the Legend of the Condor Heroes as well.
I love it so much.
Once those are done I have hundreds and hundreds more. All the
entertainment. All the adventures. But no... I need to get on
conference calls like a sucker. Booooooo.
</pre>]]></description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Resolution</title>
<link>
gopher://gopher.black/1/phlog/20240102-resolution/</link>
<pubdate>Tue, 02 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000</pubdate>
<description><![CDATA[<pre>
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Resolution
January 02nd, 2024
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Be it resolved:
The dance-craze of 2024 will be known as "The Tomasino".
2023 Resolution
gopher://gopher.black/1/phlog/20221231-resolution
2022 Resolution
gopher://gopher.black/1/phlog/20211230-resolution
2021 Resolution
gopher://gopher.black/1/phlog/20201231-resolution
2020 Resolution
gopher://gopher.black/1/phlog/20200101-resolution
2019 Resolution
gopher://gopher.black/1/phlog/20181225-resolutions
2018 Resolution
gopher://gopher.black/1/phlog/20180101-resolution
</pre>]]></description>
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