This past year has been almost a daily re-hash of wake, coffee, work, exercise, eat and sleep. Rinse and repeat. So, it’s with a bit of excitement that I find myself all of a sudden involved with several new projects that have grabbed my attention.

In addition to adding a humidifier to my guitar room, I’ve subscribed to online guitar lessons from ActiveMelody. With hundreds (or thousands) of online lessons to choose from, I found this one addressing the kind of guitar playing I’m interested in. I am always hesitant to purchase online anything, but as one person on the site’s forum put it, a year’s subscription costs only a little more than a couple of in-person lessons. A good point, given that I spent a year with in-person lessons that cost much more than I paid for a year of tabs, downloadable jam tracks, and video lessons I can access whenever I wish. I am enjoying it so far!

The other project that has me all a-twitter began as the germ of an idea when I discovered that my favorite guitar forum might be lapsing into disuse. It’s a long story I won’t go into now, but this site has a “sister” site and the idea is to just have everyone move into one. The problem I (and some others) have, is that I don’t like the sister site!

So I got the idea of seeing how difficult it might be to create an alternate forum. I already have a domain and a site (this one), and checking with my ISP, found that I had plenty of storage and bandwidth, and that I could run a forum — perhaps as a subdomain to this (but more on that later. Maybe.).

I began researching forum software. There’s a lot of it available, both commercial and free. Side note: I believe forums are one of the oldest concepts enabled by the Internet. We used to have “bulletin board systems” (BBS) before the Internet. A forum is just a newer form of BBS. Since I participate in a number of forums (fora?) I started looking into what software they were using. A lot of cream rose to the top in short order. Here are some that I found.

• xenForo.  This is a commercial product.  $160 for a license if you self-host it. $55 every year thereafter.  A lot of sites I visit have moved to this platform.
• phpBB.  Many software packages proclaim they are #1, but in this case, phpBB may be correct.  The software has been around since 2000, and it’s 100% free!
• Discourse.  This is very modern software, “designed for the next 10 years of the Internet.” Their business model suggests paying them to host your forum, but the software is free.  Being modern, it automatically reformats for smart devices as well as browsers.
• vBulletin.  Another popular commercial package.$249 to purchase, or a monthly hosting place from $15 per month and up.

I looked at some others, but these were the standouts.  There are plenty of review sites, and I found this one lists all of the above, with comments.  Wikipedia has a table comparing forum software capabilities. Not wanting to shell out dollars for a proof-of-concept, I decided to see what some of the free packages offer.  I downloaded DIscourse and installed it on my Linux server, and then I fetched phpBB and installed it on my Mac.  Yes, that’s right, I put a software forum on my Mac!

At first, I was hesitant to install on my Mac, because with all the needed components, I thought it might chew up too much disk space.  Wow, was I mistaken!

Based on php, the scripting language designed for the web, it wasn’t necessary to install, because Macs already ship with it.  I just made sure it was up to date.  Years ago I found a free web server alternative to Apache (which is bundled with every Mac, but I find difficult to set up) called Abyss Web Server from a company called Aprelium.  I’ve used in for years, and it’s solid and feature-filled.  All I needed was a database, so I downloaded SQLite3 and created an empty database.  The install was a snap, and I began to build a forum.  I downloaded and installed a theme I liked, a language pack for American English (British English is the default) and even poked a hole through my router so that a couple of people I invited could look at it.

Well, that was a fun couple of days.  Now to my ISP…

In conversing with one of their staff (maybe the only one — she’s been with the company since before I became a customer — and that was 25 years ago!) she informed me I could install phpBB without a problem, and that she created a sub-domain so that I could add the forum without clobbering this site.  It’s done.  Now, my next step is to take what I’ve learned locally and start thinking globally!

YES!

I started writing this blog post on an online forum, and then felt it might better fit here.

It occurred to me this morning, as sometimes thoughts like this do, during my shower that we (the royal “we”) are once again being manipulated like cattle in the pens heading for the slaughter.  How?  

Ever since the coronavirus lockdowns started, I have internally rebelled at the term, “social distancing.”  Who came up with that term, why, and what does it mean?  In fact, the advice we hear to ostensibly help protect us against contracting the virus, is to physically distance ourselves from one another by six feet. So why not just say so?

Perhaps this is mental manipulation.  Because the more physically distant we become from one another, the more our innate need to socialize (man is a social being) reaches out and finds… social media.

A New Yorker cartoon published on July 5, 1993 – the same year the Internet became public – is captioned, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

The implications of this cartoon – the most widely reproduced New Yorker cartoon, according to Wikipedia – are that behind the firewall of one’s computer, one can pretend to be anyone or anything.  Enter “social media.”  I am not a sociologist, although I did some study decades ago in college, but to almost anyone with a semblance of a brain, examples of people pretending to be things they are not run rampant on the Internet. 

So why not us?  My inherent trust in people (which has gotten me in trouble before) wants to believe that everyone reading this is exactly who and what they say they are.  But if I say I’m a 6-foot-5, 250-lb. former Navy SEAL with extensive experience in black ops and multiple contacts within the intelligence community, who’s to say I’m wrong? (I’m not, by the way).  

Judging someone by their looks is almost as bad as judging someone by their intentions.  You can only judge someone by their actions.  It isn’t a stretch of the imagination to take a look at the giants of the tech industry and believe that they weren’t the guys in school the girls were all chasing after.  Facebook, in fact, was created by “geeks” to rate the attractiveness of coeds at Harvard.  It’s probably safe to say that Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey and others of their ilk weren’t like Yankee Doodle Dandy, and “with the girls be handy.” The image of the four-eyed geek sitting in his mother’s basement, pens in a pocket protector, gazing at a computer screen is known to everyone, I daresay. 

I was one of them.  I wasn’t “handy” with the girls, but I was good with technology, and made a career of it.  A good career, in fact.  It has allowed me to survive the ups and downs of economic swings, and yes, I got married and had a family.  So even geeks can succeed, depending on how you measure success. 

Being good with technology means being able to manipulate things. Computers, cars, cameras, vacuum cleaners, thermostats, light timers, video recorders (remember those?).  It does NOT mean manipulating people. But I think we have reached a point in our disintegrating culture and civilization where the manipulators are using “social distancing” to push us to “social media” where content and concepts are being filtered to present us with a single view of the world.  Churches, restaurants and bars – places where people gather to talk, exchange ideas and “socialize” are being withheld from us, for reasons that appear to make no sense. The sociopaths have found a way to herd us like cattle.  And the drug of “social media,” where nobody knows we’re a dog, blinds us to that. 

If you work in an organization that uses email as a major form of communication, you’ve no doubt been the recipient of the global “blast” farewell message. You know the kind. Generically, the email goes out to everyone in the company/organization/division/group/whatever, and announces the sender is leaving for greener pastures.

But wait, that’s not enough. The person writing the email typically says something to the effect, “I’ve made some lifelong friends here, and this has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my career.”

There are even templates and guidance on writing such an email. The authors of these pieces of wisdom suggest that you are being considerate, thanking people you may not have had an opportunity to say good-bye to in person.

What I don’t understand is, the general tone of these emails suggests that the employment they’re leaving has been the pinnacle of their career, the company the best on earth, and the people the most wonderful creatures ever. So, if things are so great, why are they leaving?

If and when I leave my current employment (retirement looms only a short way down the road), I have no intention of writing a sophomoric “love letter” to the entire company. As the cartoon to the right suggests, when that day comes, I’ll just pack up and walk out the door. Done.