Weekly Ephemera #33

• On Tuesday I had a prostate biopsy.  It went a lot quicker than I expected and the aftereffects were not nearly as bad as I'd anticipated.  Having said this I really don't want to do that again.  Results should be out this week.  I have a follow up to discuss them on Thursday.
• We were supposed to have our first snow early Saturday morning.  They were forecasting 2 - 4 inches (5 - 10 cm).  When we got up Saturday morning we were disappointed to see zero inches.  Not even any snow flakes.  I guess we will have to wait a little longer for the first snow this year.
• I walked once this week.  It was very short - only 5.6 miles (8.9 km) - but it was a start.  I was going to walk on Friday but we had on and off rain and it was a cold rain so decided to stay inside.
• I am an avid Twitter doomscroller and I was disappointed when a billionaire with few redeeming values bought the social network this week.  I decided to look at other social network options and chose to experiment with Mastodon.  Mastodon is decentralized, not owned by any company, and gives the users some more control.  It is still a work in progress and there is a learning curve to overcome but I think it shows some promise.  At this stage it helps to be a computer geek.  I'm sure that will change as more people join.
  
  There are several different mastodon servers out there and I chose to join twit.social which is run by the folks at This Week in Tech (TWiT).  I've been watching their podcasts for a while now and I've been a fan of the head TWiT, Leo Laporte, since his TechTV days. They've been running the mastodon instance for a while now so I made an account there.
  
  I'm finding a lot of people I followed on Twitter are moving/have moved to mastodon.  If you have a mastodon account and would like to follow me, you can find me at @HomersTravels (twit.social/@HomersTravels).  [Note:  you do not need a twit.social account, just an account on any mastodon server]
• If you live in the US  don't forget to turn all you non-connected clocks back an hour as daylight saving time has ended.
• Tuesday is election day here.  If you've voted ... Thank You.  If you haven't but intend to ... Thank You.  If you do not intend to vote ... you are dead to me.  Yes, it's that important.