As a semi-regular at Fairport’s Cropredy Convention who likes to get up earlier then the others I share my tent with, I’ve done my fair share of early morning geocaching in this neck of
the woods.
Of course: over the years this practice has exhausted most of tree caches local to Cropredy and my morning walks have begun to take me further and further afield. But this is certainly
the first time I’ve walked to the next county in search of a cache!
Coming across the fields from Williamscot via Prescote Farm treated me to gorgeous rolling hills free fields of freshly-harvested corn getting picked at by families of deer, while the
red kites above went looking for their breakfasts.
The final hill up to the GZ required a bit of a push for my legs which were dancing until late last night, but soon I was close and the cache was quickly found in the second place I
looked.
My little tribe and I have, in some form of another, been attending Cropredy for decades: intermittently in the past, but lately with more regularity every year. For me, it’s coincided
with the growth of our family: I’ve been attending with my partner and her husband approximately since our eldest child, now 11, was born.
As our group’s early riser, I’ve a longstanding tradition of getting up while everybody else lies in, to take a walk and perhaps find a geocache or two. Of course I soon ran out of
caches in Cropredy itself and my morning walks now take me much further afield!
Last year I was very ill and had to be sent home from Cropredy before I had the opportunity to log this cache, but I’m back again this year and taking a moment at the Oak to reflect on
those we’ve all loved and lost.
Answers to follow as soon as signal permits. TFTC.
My family and I have made a tradition of our regular attendance of Fairport’s Cropredy Convention. There I – being the earliest riser of us – have in turn made a tradition of getting up
early to find a nearby geocache on any morning that I’m up before the kids.
This practice has already eliminated all of the caches in Cropredy itself, and so now my morning walks take me further afield. This morning I opted to follow the footpath over the
fields to Great Bourton to investigate the two multicaches commencing in the churchyard.
Having determined the coordinates for both and (unsuccessfully) attempting the other cache first, I was optimistic for a smiley face here. The GZ was easy to find – I’d stopped here to
check my map on the way out! – and I was soon searching in earnest.
In the low-angled light of the morning sun, the shade of the thick leafy canopy made for challenging conditions, so I flicked my torch on and pointed it in the direction of the host
object… and there, clear as day despite its camouflage, was the cache. Easy as pie! SL.
I was briefly tempted to re-try the cache I failed to find earlier, under the assumption that the container would look similar to this and the same technique might bear fruit. But I
didn’t feel like doubling back twice more while my stomach was rumbling, so I carried on towards Cropredy to see whether any others if my party were yet ready for some grub.
My family and I have made a tradition of our regular attendance of Fairport’s Cropredy Convention. There I – being the earliest riser of us – have in turn made a tradition of getting up
early to find a nearby geocache on any morning that I’m up before the kids.
This practice has already eliminated all of the caches in Cropredy itself, and so now my morning walks take me further afield. This morning I opted to follow the footpath over the
fields to Great Bourton to investigate the two multicaches commencing in the churchyard.
Solving for both was easy enough, and I opted to seek this one first, given that the other could become part of my route back to my tent. As others have observed, finding the right
footpath was slightly tricky: it looks a bit like a communal driveway, to begin with… and then, for the moment at least, looks as though it might become a building site!
But I pressed on towards the target coordinates and soon spotted a likely host. I searched for a bit without luck, then hit up the hint: looks like I need to go deeper, I figured, and
pushed into the foliage.
But after 20 minutes or so of searching all around the conceivable spots, I was still struggling. Plus I’d narrowly avoided kneeling in something truly gross and couldn’t face another
round of crawling about under a hedge. And further, I realised I’d soon need some breakfast so I gave up on this one and made a move for the second. Maybe another year!
“For years, starting in the late ‘70s, I was taking pictures of hitchhikers. A hitchhiker is someone you may know for an hour, or a day, or, every so often, a little longer, yet,
when you leave them, they’re gone. If I took a picture, I reasoned, I’d have a memory. I kept a small portfolio of photos in the car to help explain why I wanted to take their
picture. This helped a lot. It also led me to look for hitchhikers, so that I could get more pictures.
“I almost always had a camera… I finally settled on the Olympus XA – a wonderful little pocket camera. (I’ve taken a picture of the moon rising with this camera.) One time I asked a
chap if I could take a photo, and he said, “You took my picture a few years ago.” I showed him the album and he picked himself out. “That’s me,” he said, pointing…”
…
Not that hitch-hiking is remotely as much a thing today as it was 50 years ago, but even if it were then it wouldn’t be so revolutionary to, say, take a photo of everybody you give a
ride to. We’re all carrying cameras all the time, and the price of taking a snap is basically nothing.
But for Doug Biggert, who died in 2023, began doing this with an analogue camera as he drove around California from 1973 onwards? That’s quite something. Little wonder he had
to explain his project to his passengers (helped, later on, by carrying a copy of the photo album he’d collected so-far that he could show them).
A really interesting gallery with a similarly-compelling story. Also: man – look at the wear-and-tear on his VW Bug!
I can’t begin to fathom the courage it takes to get on-stage in front of an ultra-conservative crowd (well, barely a crowd…) in a right-leaning US state to protest their
event by singing a song about a trans boy. But that’s exactly what Hamrick did. After
catching spectators off-guard, perhaps, by taking the perhaps-“masculine-telegraphing” step of drawing attention to part of his army uniform, the singer swiftly switched outfit to show
off a “Keep Canyon County Queer” t-shirt, slip on a jacket with various Pride-related patches, and then immediately launched into Boy, a song lamenting the persecution of
a trans child by their family and community.
Needless to say, this was the first, last, and only song Daniel Hamrick got to play at Hetero Awesome Fest. But man, what a beautiful protest!
(There are other videos online that aren’t nabbed from the official event feed and so don’t cut-out abruptly.)
I still get that powerful feeling that anything is possible when I open a web browser — it’s not as strong as it was 20 years ago, but it’s still there.
As cynical as you can get at the state of the Web right now… as much as it doesn’t command the level of inspirational raw potential of “anything is possible” that it might have once…
it’s still pretty damn magical, and we should lean into that.
A freaking excellent longread by Eevee (Evelyn Woods), lamenting the direction of popular technological progress and general enshittification of creator culture. It’s ultimately
uplifting, I feel, but it’s full of bitterness until it gets there. I’ve pulled out a couple of highlights to try to get you interested, but you should just go and read the entire thing:
…
And so the entire Web sort of congealed around a tiny handful of gigantic platforms that everyone on the fucking planet is on at once. Sometimes there is some sort of
partitioning, like Reddit. Sometimes there is not, like Twitter.
That’s… fine, I guess. Things centralize. It happens. You don’t get tubgirl spam raids so much any more, at least.
But the centralization poses a problem. See, the Web is free to look at (by default), but costs money to host. There are free hosts, yes, but those are for static
things getting like a thousand visitors a day, not interactive platforms serving a hundred million. That starts to cost a bit. Picture logs being shoveled into a steam
engine’s firebox, except it’s bundles of cash being shoveled into… the… uh… website hole.
…
I don’t want to help someone who opens with “I don’t know how to do this so I asked ChatGPT and it gave me these 200 lines but it doesn’t work”. I don’t want to know how much code
wasn’t actually written by anyone. I don’t want to hear how many of my colleagues think Whatever is equivalent to their own output.
…
I glimpsed someone on Twitter a few days ago, also scoffing at the idea that anyone would decide not to use the Whatever machine. I can’t remember exactly what they said,
but it was something like: “I created a whole album, complete with album art, in 3.5 hours. Why wouldn’t I use the make it easier machine?”
This is kind of darkly fascinating to me, because it gives rise to such an obvious question: if anyone can do that, then why listen to your music? It takes a
significant chunk of 3.5 hours just to listen to an album, so how much manual work was even done here? Apparently I can just go generate an endless stream of stuff of the
same quality! Why would I want your particular brand of Whatever?
Nobody seems to appreciate that if you can make a computer do something entirely on its own, then that becomes the baseline.
…
Do things. Make things. And then put them on your website so I can see them.
Clearly this all ties in to stuff that I’ve been thinking, lately. Expect more
posts and reposts in this vein, I guess?
Do you remember when your domestic ISP – Internet Service Provider – used to be an Internet Services Provider? They
were only sometimes actually called that, but what I mean is: when ISPs provided more than one Internet service? Not just connectivity, but… more.
One of the first ISPs I subscribed to had a “standard services” list longer than most modern ISPs complete services list!
ISPs twenty years ago
It used to just be expected that your ISP would provide you with not only an Internet connection, but also some or all of:
I don’t remember which of my early ISPs gave me a free license for HoTMetaL Pro, but I was very appreciative of it at the time.
ISPs today
The ISP I hinted at above doesn’t exist any more, after being bought out and bought out and bought out by a series of owners. But I checked the Website of the current owner to see what
their “standard services” are, and discovered that they are:
Optional 4G backup connectivity (for an extra fee)
A voucher for 3 months access to a streaming service3
The connection is faster, which is something, but we’re still talking about the “baseline” for home Internet access then-versus-now. Which feels a bit galling, considering that (a)
you’re clearly, objectively, getting fewer services, and (b) you’re paying more for them – a cheap basic home Internet subscription today, after accounting
for inflation, seems to cost about 25% more than it did in 2000.4
Are we getting a bum deal?
Not every BBS nor ISP would ever come to support the blazing speeds of a 33.6kbps modem… but when you heard the distinctive scream of its negotiation at close to the Shannon Limit of
the piece of copper dangling outside your house… it felt like you were living in the future.
Would you even want those services?
Some of them were great conveniences at the time, but perhaps not-so-much now: a caching server, FTP site, or IRC node in the building right at the end of my
dial-up connection? That’s a speed boost that was welcome over a slow connection to an unencrypted service, but is redundant and ineffectual today. And if you’re still using a
fax-to-email service for any purpose, then I think you have bigger problems than your ISP’s feature list!
Some of them were things I wouldn’t have recommend that you depend on, even then: tying your email and Web hosting to your connectivity provider traded
one set of problems for another. A particular joy of an email address, as opposed to a postal address (or, back in the day, a phone number), is that it isn’t tied to where
you live. You can move to a different town or even to a different country and still have the same email address, and that’s a great thing! But it’s not something you can
guarantee if your email address is tied to the company you dial-up to from the family computer at home. A similar issue applies to Web hosting, although for a true traditional “personal
home page”: a little information about yourself, and your bookmarks, it would be fine.
But some of them were things that were actually useful and I miss: honestly, it’s a pain to have to use a third-party service for newsgroup
access, which used to be so-commonplace that you’d turn your nose up at an ISP that didn’t offer it as standard. A static IP being non-standard on fixed connections is a sad reminder
that the ‘net continues to become less-participatory, more-centralised, and just generally more watered-down and shit: instead of your connection making you “part of” the Internet,
nowadays it lets you “connect to” the Internet, which is a very different experience.5
A page like this used to be absolutely standard on the Website6
of any ISP worth its salt.
Yeah, sure, you can set up a static site (unencumbered by any opinionated stack) for free on Github Pages, Neocities, or wherever, but the barrier to entry has been raised
by just enough that, doubtless, there are literally millions of people who would have taken that first step… but didn’t.
And that makes me sad.
Footnotes
1 ISP-provided shared FTP servers would also frequently provide locally-available copies
of Internet software essentials for a variety of platforms. This wasn’t just a time-saver – downloading Netscape Navigator from your ISP rather than from half-way across the world was
much faster! – it was also a way to discover new software, curated by people like you: a smidgen of the feel of a well-managed BBS, from the comfort of your local ISP!
2 ISP-provided routers are, in my experience, pretty crap 50% of the time… although
they’ve been improving over the last decade as consumers have started demanding that their WiFi works well, rather than just works.
3 These streaming services vouchers are probably just a loss-leader for the streaming
service, who know that you’ll likely renew at full price afterwards.
4 Okay, in 2000 you’d have also have had to pay per-minute for the price of the
dial-up call… but that money went to BT (or perhaps Mercury or KCOM), not to your ISP. But my point still stands: in a world where technology has in general gotten cheaper
and backhaul capacity has become underutilised, why has the basic domestic Internet connection gotten less feature-rich and more-expensive? And often with worse
customer service, to boot.
5 The problem of your connection not making you “part of” the Internet is multiplied if
you suffer behind carrier-grade NAT, of course. But it feels like if we actually cared enough to commit to rolling out IPv6 everywhere we could obviate the need for that particular
turd entirely. And yet… I’ll bet that the ISPs who currently use it will continue to do so, even as the offer IPv6 addresses as-standard, because they buy into their own idea that
it’s what their customers want.
6 I think we can all be glad that we no longer write “Web Site” as two separate words, but
you’ll note that I still usually correctly capitalise Web (it’s a proper noun: it’s the Web, innit!).
Some time in the last 25 years, ISPs stopped saying they made you “part of” the Internet, just that they’d help you “connect to” the Internet.
Most people don’t need a static IP, sure. But when ISPs stopped offering FTP and WWW hosting as a standard feature (shit though it often was), they became part of the tragic process by
which the Internet became centralised, and commoditised, and corporate, and just generally watered-down.
The amount of effort to “put something online” didn’t increase by a lot, but it increased by enough that millions probably missed-out on the opportunity to create
their first homepage.
In my first few weeks at my new employer, my code contributions have added 218 lines of code, deleted 2,663. Only one of my PRs has resulted in
a net increase in the size of their codebases (by two lines).
I need to pick up the pace if I’m going to reach the ultimate goal of deleting ALL of the code within my lifetime. (That’s the ultimate aim, right?)
RFC 2119 establishes language around requirement levels. Terms like “MUST”, “MUST NOT”, “SHOULD”, and “SHOULD NOT” are helpful when coordinating with engineers. I reference it a lot
for work, as I create a lot of accessible component
specifications.
Because of this familiarity—and because I’m an ass—I fired back in Discord:
I want to hire a voice actor to read 2119 in the most over the top, passive-aggressive way possible
wait, this is an achievable goal oh no
It turns out you can just pay people to do things.
I found a voice actor and hired them with the task of “Reading this very dry technical document in the most over-the-top sarcastic, passive-aggressive, condescending way possible.
Like, if you think it’s too much, take that feeling, ignore it, and crank things up one more notch.”
…
RFC 2119 is one of few RFCs I can identify by number alone, too. That and RFCs 1945 and 1866, for some reason, and RFC 2822 (and I guess, by proxy, 822) because I’ve had to implement its shitty date format more times than I’d like to count.
![Stylish (for circa 2000) webpage for HoTMetaL Pro 6.0, advertising its 'unrivaled [sic] editing, site management and publishing tools'.](/_q23u/2025/08/hotmetal-pro-6-640x396.jpg)
