Category Archives: Weblogs

Mit 66 Jahren

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Garret turns 66 years old today.

Happy Birthday, Garret!

Here’s a birthday song for you: Life Begins at Sixty-Six

It’s the English version of a famous song by Austrian composer and musician Udo Jürgens called Mit 66 Jahren. The lyrics are in German, of course, but here’s a translation:

“You’ll be amazed when I retire!
As soon as the stress is over, I’ll just go, oh-ho, oh-ho, oh-ho.
Then I’ll casually blow-dry the hair I have left.
I suck in my stomach and act like a ‘hot guy,’ oh-ho, oh-ho, oh-ho.
And when people look at me indignantly and sternly,
Then I say: “My dears, you’re looking at it way too narrowly!”

I’m buying myself a motorcycle and a leather suit
And tearing around with 110 horsepower, oh-ho, oh-ho, oh-ho.
I sing songs in the city park that amaze everyone,
And I play guitar with a crazy sound, o-ho, o-ho, o-ho.
And with the other friends from the pensioners’ association,
I’ll start a band, and we’ll jam all day long.

And in the evenings, I head out with Grandma,
Because we’re going to rock out at a club, o-ho, o-ho, o-ho.
In the summer, I tie flowers around my lofty brow
And hitchhike to San Francisco to cure my rheumatism, o-ho, o-ho, o-ho.
And my grandson Waldemar proudly announces:
“That crazy old man, that’s my grandpa!”

At 66, life begins!
At 66, you have fun.
At 66, you really get into shape!
At 66, life is far from over!

Chris de Burgh performed the English version on Udo Jürgens’s 80th birthday.

Weblogger meets Weblogger

This afternoon I had the pleasure of meeting David of Read This Blog! fame and his wife Diane. They are currently on a river cruise in Germany and stopped in Speyer, close to where André and I live.

I took them on a little excursion to the Palatinate Forest and along the Deutsche Weinstraße. The weather was perfect, and we had a nice view from the Kalmit:

(Photo courtesy of David Singer.)

The last time David and I met was on May 17, 2000 in Amsterdam at a Scripting News Dinner. Who would have thought that bloggers from that era would still meet each other decades later!

Return of the blog

Garret is back in the blogging-saddle over on dangerousmeta!

“Blogs have been largely relegated in the face of the instant-satisfaction social media. Those that are being linked on commercial news services regurgitate universal knowledge, inspirational quotes, and ‘best practices’ boilerplate. In addition, we are now tracked, tabulated, diced, sliced and served to corporate interests on a golden platter. I don’t need to tell you why or how – we all know we’ve signed our souls away for the terrifyingly bad user interfaces of services like Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram and others. Did I say bad? I mean purposely bad, to encourage you to do what they want, while making it truly difficult to do what you want.
[…]
[W]e all need a kick in the ass to stop with the easy-to-consume poison Kool-Aid, and start caring about this. Others of my blog generation have made the move, it’s past time for me to do so.

I call “time” for the renaissance of the independent self-hosted weblog. I don’t care what you use, or how you use it, but get the hell off the commercial social services and get an independent weblog.

Own your information. Control your information. “

Welcome back Garret. We’ve missed you!

Ye olde weblogge

Ask MetaFilter: Any old-school bloggers still posting? User y6y6y6 is “looking for folks blogging pre-2002 that are still going”. Update: You can find all the weblogs in this list.

Obviously, I’m still blogging, but so are many other people. Re-found some old favorites in the comments of this thread, especially some whose feeds stopped updating in my very old version of Netnewswire (3.2.15, in case you were wondering.)

Speaking of which, Netnewswire 5.0 is now available! It’s open source and free, and it requires MacOS 10.14.4 or newer. (Which means I will have to update my operating system.) An iOS version is also on the way.