Chaos Server

In those first few years of home ownership, I really got a kick out of mowing the lawn every week, clipping back the trees and plans, and making sure the weeds were taken care of. Then the kids came onto the scene and where did all my free time go? We noticed that the sidewalk in front of our house was much blacker and dirtier from the water drainage the side walk in front of the neighbors houses. On inspection, the neighbors have these nice drains that pump the water out from the backyard onto sidewalk, whereas our water seemed to just bubble up through the dirt. I mean, that seems like a reasonable explanation for why there was so much dirt on our sidewalk. Then I got to wondering, when I moved to "minimum viable yard care" - did somehow I have drains where dirt erosion just covered them up? The answer was, yes and yes. There were two. Guess it would have been better to uncover before these record winter rainfalls.

There was this fun little movement a couple of years ago called #followateen - with the idea being that old fogies like me would follow a random teenager on Twitter to understand what the kids these days are up to. I jumped on board and started following this random HS Junior. Six years later? Holy moly, this kid is graduating from college this year, but sadly his Twitter account got hacked last week. He has been retweeting also sorts of promotional content - much of it is in Russian and Chinese. Fun times, but I think the adventure has ended. It was a good run. What did I learn from my six years following a teen? I watched his account slowly become less and less active over that time - I assume it was because Twitter got replaced for these kids by Snapchat and other closed-network ephemeral messaging systems. My generation came online and passed down the warning, "everything you do online will be seen by your parents, your employer, and your children. Post safely." The y...