Hey everyone! As always, it's been a while.

Let me start by saying I'm doing fine, and I hope you are as well. Certainly
"surviving, not thriving" but I'm optimistic for the second half of 2022.

On the tech subject, I've recently gotten into mainframes which, in a
community like SDF, isn't anything too unusual, but for someone like me
who, quite honestly, can't code for shit, this is all way above my rather
basic level of understanding. It all seems so alien to what I'm used to
in even basic operation, let alone in programming. I'd love to write some
actual COBOL programs and run them on the TK4- emulated mainframe system,
but before I can do that I need to even learn how to operate the damn thing!

Best I can do is log in and maybe make some new data and then never be able
to mess with it again! I know, I know, RTFM, but still.

In more productive news, I've become a member of the board of directors
for PhreakNet, the telephone enthusiast project I've spent much of the past
two years (in its modern form and in the progenitor project, NPSTN) working
with. THe URL is portal.phreaknet.org, for those interested.

It is an Asterisk based VoIP network focusing on re-creating much of the
look and feel (or should I say, sound and feel) of the old phone network.
I've spent the vast majority of my free time over the past few years on my
contribution to this overall project, something which I call "Wolf River
Telephone."

The idea is as if my local area of Memphis was run not by the Bell System, but
by an independant company taking advantage of many sources of equipment, but
otherwise heavily following Bell System standards.

This contrasts with what PhreakNet founder Naveen Albert (a person who I
greatly admire the skill set of and consider a great friend) has done in his
work with the network, which quite faithfully recreates the phone network
in New York City as Evan Doorbell recorded it in the 70's and early 80's.

This results in he and I having two separate yet still very appropriate
styles to our parts of the network which, compbined with the other members
particular server settings, creates a wonderful experience that both
Naveen and I consider as much of an art project as it is an actual
communications network.

I've been neglecting my personal website heavily, but I intend to continue
easing my way into regular writing. I can't say too much more about that here
as I've already discussed it plenty on xadara.com itself.

It would suffice to say I just need more inspiration, and I need to try
to focus more on writing, much in the way I have this document. Of course,
making a quick document in notepad to go on a gopherspace is a different
experience from a proper WordPress site -- much more casual, filled with
all the typos and spelling errors I inevitably will make becuase, hell, I'm
not going to bother to proofread this -- it's raw, pure geek emotional
expression, with the only thing I have to focus on being to hit the return key
every 80 characters to maintain formatting.

Shit, I should see if I can write some kind of super basic text editor that 
automatically formats text for 80 columns. That would be cool, speed things
up quite a bit.

Of course, since I use typewriters often, having to make a carriage return
every line is second nature, but with a physical machine it's so much more fun
to do. Hell, I've considered starting a typewritten blog that's just scans of
typed pages, but with the intimate nature of me using a typewriter I feel
maybe I would do better to save typing for personal and private communications
or journal entries. That's just me of course, I've no problem with others
sharing their thoughts in such a way.

Right, this has been likely the longest pholog entry I've done yet, and
I've honestly just typed stream of consiousness. I figure if you're reading
this then you can understand and appreciate that more so than the average
person online these days.  This is fucking GOPHER, you already have to be
a particular type of person to even be able to see this, let alone to actually
actively navigate to this particular text file.

Right, I'm done for now. Catch everyone next time, which hopefully
will be sooner than later.

1:44 PM 6/4/2022