1. Google is getting more aggressive about compressing its various properties and mediating them all through google+ - a remarkably ugly and limited platform designed chiefly to compile information about its users and harvest as much free, user-generated content as possible. Most of my pictures and many videos have disappeared from the blog because I've broken links in an effort to sort out privacy (and copyright) issues, and keep google+ from posting images and information willy-nilly.
2. Over the past year, New Brunswick has discovered social media and - in our uniquely vindictive and small town way - begun punishing people who say or do things we don't agree with.
3. My paid work has shifted greatly, in ways I need to think about. I'd like to share some of the changes, but I need to think about that as well (see note 2).
4. After 6 years of blogging, I really do need to re-arrange the furniture and re-purpose the conversation. Don't worry: everything has been saved so that the interesting stuff can be re-visited. But I can't promise that all the old content will always be online (see note 1).
5. Just as kind of an aside, sometime over the next 6 to 12 months the carbon content of the atmosphere will top 400 ppm - something scientists told us must never happen. The last time this happened was about 3 million years ago. Humans were around then, but we weren't walking up-right, much less trying to grow our own food. Meanwhile, my mayor, my premier and my prime minister are all working hard to get more carbon out of the ground and into the atmosphere. After all those years avoiding nuclear winter and staving off various plagues, who'd have guessed that it would be Canadian ingenuity that set the species back 3 million years?
Shit... I hope nobody reads this....
