Que sera, sera, whatever will be, will be, but first I need more coffee.

Author: Christopher Merle (Page 1 of 53)

I made these boots to honor the memory of those who came before.

I Am Still Here

As a web developer, I probably ought to update my site more often. At least to let people know I still exit and still in business. My bad. This past year has been very busy and full of ups and downs, family, health, travel, work with existing clients.

The featured image of this post is of my parents, Darryl and Linda, whitewater rafting. I wish I could remember when and where it took place, but based on their age in the picture and guessing the most likely place it happened in the late 1980’s and in Colorado. My father is wearing the White Sox baseball cap in the upper right and my mother is to his left. Note—He was a diehard Cubs fan, so I’m guessing if he’d lost the cap, he wouldn’t have felt so put out if it had been a Cubs hat. He did like the Sox a little too. I lost both my parents within the last two years. I lost my mother Linda in September of 2022 and my father Darryl in June of 2024. They had been married for 59 years. My mom made it to 81 and my dad almost made it to 83. So I am blessed that I had them for as long as I did in my life.

I won’t promised to update this more often or say how frequently. My last major project was to import all of my LiveJournal entries. I’d been cleaning up or removing bad links. Whether or not this hurts my employment prospects,  I don’t know and to be honest, I don’t care. We are all more online and if you can dig back far enough you’ll discover I’ve changed my views over time like any grown up would. It remains to be seen if I’ll stay on the WordPress platform, but it’s a good one and has a large community and that’s what most of my clients use. If that changes, I’ll let everyone know, but I’ll keep supporting my existing clients using WordPress for as long as they’d like to use me.

Verified

So the other day I shared on Facebook a few of these hilarious fake tweets by fake verified accounts using the new blue check verified service offered by Twitter. It was an utter disaster. Several companies stocks were tanked by these tweets.  Facebook was not amused and decided that I was sharing false information. I was not I was providing examples of false information and labeled it as such. I got a 24 hour ban.

 

WARNING! All of these tweets in this gallery contain false information and are posted by imposter accounts that Twitter verified because they paid the $8 price tag. Some of them are funnier than others.

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1001 Days

I’ve used Duolingo for 1001 days. I started my Duolingo odyssey to brush up on my high school German and college Russian in prep for a Baltic cruise that would start in Germany and stop in St Petersburg. Then the pandemic happened and our cruise was canceled.

I kept going. I eventually added Spanish, Ukrainian, and Scottish Gaelic. I had some Spanish in high school. It’s a useful language to know in Tucson. I started Ukrainian because of Russia’s invasion and I wanted to see how closely related and mutually intelligible they were. And to show my support for Ukraine. I learned Scottish Gaelic on my own 18 years ago and started a self-studies group in Tulsa. I decided to brush up on it too and see how good Duolingo is for it.

I chose 1001 days as a milestone as a nod to 1001 Arabian Nights. I’m not fluent in any of the languages and I’m not ready to converse in any of them, but my German comprehension is much better.

Of course Duolingo celebrates 1000 days as a milestone.

Four Corners

A few years ago we went to the Durango Celtic Festival and since we drove through the Navajo Nation to get there, we stopped at the Four Corners monument where the four corners of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah meet. Later I found out this wasn’t the actual spot where the borders met. It was a few hundred yards north or something.

One of the signs we saw was warning people not to scatter the ashes of loved ones because it was disrespectful of Navajos to do so. I also imagine if they’d allowed it, there’d be a huge pile of ashes that’d have to get swept up every so often. I could think of better places to have my ashes dispersed if I choose to be cremated. Yes, the four corners are within the boundaries of the Navajo Nation.

LiveJournal (and Dreamwidth) Import

I finally imported my LiveJournal entries into my WordPress blog. I stopped posting on LiveJournal when they changed their terms & conditions. I migrated to Dreamwidth and imported all my entries there. There might be an easy way to import from Dreamwidth, but decided to go straight to the source. I have far fewer entries on Dreamwidth, so at worst I’ll be copying them and creating them manually. I’m in the process of going through those entries and putting them in the LiveJournal category. I added Dreamwidth as a sub-category. My username on both accounts was entp2007, so that’s my tag.

I’ll try to fix missing pictures and videos in those posts.

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