2025 Welcome Post

10:13 Tuesday, 2 September 2025
Words: 967

It's probably time I did an update for anyone who happens along here for the first time, because things are different now.

I'm Dave Rogers, 68, a retired navy commander, father of three, grandfather of five. I'm a 1979 graduate of the United States Naval Academy, with a BS in ocean engineering. I spent 22 years on active duty as a Surface Warfare Officer with half of my career on sea duty in frigates, destoyers, cruisers and a battle group staff.

After retiring form the navy in 2001, I became a government contractor, supporting Naval Sea Systems Command in combat systems, communications, computer networks and intelligence systems. I did that for about 11 years and then "actually" retired in 2013. I learned that my time was more valuable to me than any amount my employer could pay me, and I haven't "worked" a day since. Though I have kept pretty busy.

I met my second wife, Mitzi, in 2014 and we married in 2017 in Troy, New York. Most of my immediate family live in New York, spread from Buffalo to Albany. I kind of grew up here, after my father retired from the navy as an E-6. We moved here into a house my parents built on a couple of acres they bought from my grandfather, a dairy farmer in Madison County.

For more than half of my life I called Florida home. As of this year, I no longer do. It's not the state I moved to in 1985, and the decision to leave wasn't hard, though it has offered challenges and continues to do so. There are aspects of Florida that I love, but all of those are under threat; and there are aspects of Florida I that could no longer tolerate.

Today I live in Schuyler County, in the Finger Lakes region of New York. It's a remarkable place, and I feel very fortunate to be able to live here. This summer has brought back so many memories of what it was like to live here as a kid. While the Finger Lakes are known for their wineries, it's also a big dairy region. "Smell that country air! Just don't step in it."

The marmot is my blog. I've been blogging since 1999, though there was a significant interruption during the Facebook days. I started out on Dave Winer's editthispage.com, moved to Apple's homepage service for quite a while until they shut it down (the bastards), spent some time on Tumblr, finally purchasing (renting) my own domain here at nice-marmot.net.

The marmot started in 2013, in part because Facebook was becoming unsatisfactory as a platform for the kinds of things I liked to do. I stayed on Facebook, but I wanted a place of my own. I left Facebook permanently in 2021, after a run for elected office in Florida in 2020, during COVID. My "campaign" consisted mostly of modest Facebook ad buys, targeting the people some thought would be most receptive to my campaign. While I did get some positive interactions, what my ads mostly generated was extreme vitriol from people I'd never met who nevertheless felt entitled to abuse me. Well, that's what social media does to people.

Unfortunately, I hadn't really learned my lesson, because I then became active on Twitter. I had some "success" on Twitter, garnering more than 1000 followers toward the end. How many of them were bots, I'll never know. But I had interactions with some high-profile local figures, some of whom became followers. That kind of experience can be a little intoxicating, though the emphasis should probably be on the "toxic" part. So I deleted my account in 2023, I think. I should check, I'm sure I blogged about it. (I did. Here's the link.)

Since then, I tried Mastodon and discovered the same sort experience on my part, and I left Mastodon. The only "social media" account I'm still on is Flickr, and that's pretty harmless as there's almost zero interaction.

So, here we are. New place, same blog. The marmot is more of a personal journal than anything else. I used to do long posts about issues and ideas. Not so much anymore. I don't think I have as much desire to be seen as "smart" or "clever" or "thoughtful." (Of course, I am all those things. Right?) It never seems to matter very much, anyway.

I do bitch about things from time to time. Especially Apple, which has become just a profound disappointment.

I think mostly this'll be about how we navigate through Act III of our lives. How we make our way gracefully to the exits. Though I do expect there will be no shortage of ungraceful posts, fecklessly complaining about this or that. But also how we can try to be helpful, to make a contribution of some kind. To make a little meaning with the opportunity we have left. We'll see. Probably more aspirational than anything else.

I'm still into photography, and my new surroundings are far more inspiring than the previous ones were. I'm still into retro-computing. Getting settled here has consumed a great deal of my time, and there's still some settling to do. We're living in a small, 960 square foot house, which limits the amount of stuff I can play with. I've still got a bunch of radios of various vintage, though some of them are in storage.

I hope to get into a little bit of woodworking. Current plan is to build some birdhouses and work my way up from there.

But that's it. That's kind of what the marmot's about and a small bit about who I am.

Thanks for dropping by. Shoot me an email if you want. Always happy to learn someone reads this stuff!

2021 Welcome Message

23:21 Tuesday, 29 June 2021
Words: 360

Well, 2021 is half over, but a lot has changed since the 2019 welcome, I thought I'd better bring this up to date.

I'm still living in St Johns County, the highest median-income county in the state of Florida, which makes it something of a "bubble." I'm no longer on the Soil and Water Conservation District Board of Supervisors, as I had to resign that position in order to run for state representative in district 17 in 2020. That was quite an experience. Unsurprisingly, I lost. I still work with the Democratic Party, but now on candidate recruitment and support.

My wife, Mitzi, has gone back to work. We live now in an over-55 community in a planned development known as Nocatee. She loves it here, and it does have its virtues. We installed about 7KW of solar arrays on the roof, and we have two Tesla Powerwalls in the garage, and for the most part we're 100% self-powered. If we get a couple of days of solid overcast, we'll draw power from FPL, but for the vast majority of the time we're producing more power than we use.

I quit Facebook for good at the beginning of this year. The campaign experience was so corrosive that I'm convinced that Facebook is mentally toxic at any level of exposure. I don't miss it. I'm still on Instagram, though less so these days. It's about the only way I keep up with a few people, and it's not as toxic as Facebook. Yet.

Twitter seems to have consumed much of my online efforts, for better or worse. It has its own downsides, chief among them its addictive nature. You become dependent on the little dopamine hits when someone interacts with one of your tweets. Writing in the marmot is far less interactive. I may look into changing that.

Photography remains my principal hobby, though I've recently renewed an old interest in radio and electronics. It remains to be seen how far that will go, but I'll probably write about it here from time to time.

So that's about it. Thanks for dropping by. I wish you good health.

Welcome to Nice Marmot 2019

15:10 Sunday, 20 January 2019
Words: 1035

This is a revised "about" post, since much of the premise of the original from 2013(!) has been largely overtaken by events. So, without further ado, here's what's up with the Marmot.

As before, my name is Dave Rogers, I'm a retired Navy commander, and I've been blogging, on and off (mostly on) since 1999. All of my early efforts have been lost to the ephemeral nature of internet startups, Apple's changing strategies and priorities, and something that caused me to become disenchanted with Tumblr, which I can't recall, and delete that whole effort.

For the most part, the content has remained relatively consistent, chiefly me ranting into the void to no discernible effect about whatever issue that happens to have my attention at the moment. And the "cheese sandwich" topic, which are just sort of the mundane recordings of the happenings in my everyday life. My first blog was an editthispage.com effort called Time's Shadow, begun in December 1999 when Dave Winer of Scripting.com kind of democratized blogging for the masses. It was chiefly short posts, mostly focused on links to other items on the web. I think there's a link in the previous about to a wayback machine snapshot of the blog before they disallowed scraping it.

After editthispage.com shut down, I transitioned to hosting at Apple's homepage.mac.com and changed the name of the blog to Groundhog Day, in honor of my favorite motion picture. Apple shuttered web page hosting many years ago, and those posts are no longer on the internet. I do have all of them though, in Tinderbox files that I keep thinking someday I will republish.

I was on Tumblr for a while at Day of the Groundhog. I liked the interface, and the ability to publish photos by email. I really don't recall why I left Tumblr, but I decided that what I really needed, if I didn't want to keep getting kicked off someone's platform, was my own domain and web hosting. So I registered nice-marmot in a reference to both Groundhog Day and The Big Lebowski, another favorite, and I've been here ever since.

I took a year off Facebook. I thought I deleted my account — because I specifically recall going through the trouble of doing so at the time, only to find when I decided to log in on a whim that everything was still there, exactly as I had left it!

Facebook is still problematic for a multitude of reasons, many of which are well known and understood; but it remains one of the most ubiquitous platforms for reaching one's "social network," or, perhaps more importantly, remaining informed or misinformed about certain issues. So, I'm still on Facebook, probably too much. Most of my account is locked to "friends only," though I have been doing more public posting of late. My low profile seems to have escaped the attention of most of the trolls for my public posts, some of which are shared from time to time by other friends.

I'm also on Twitter, which I find useful for keeping up with current events in a number of topics, especially local issues.

For much of my online existence, I've felt very free to express myself in whatever way I chose, often intemperately. At some point, probably early in the Groundhog Day effort, shortly after the beginning of the Iraq War, I began writing posts that I would park in a topic called "The Cooler," in my Tinderbox file, with the idea that I would let them sit there and decide later if I still felt like publishing them. Too often the internet is such a frictionless environment that we may post something in the heat of the moment that we regret later. The Iraq War cost me a couple of online "friends," but such is life.

Much has changed now, I'm married and my wife is active as a volunteer in a couple of significant non-profits, and I've managed to attain an elected office as a member of the St. Johns County Soil and Water Conservation District, so I've had the experience recently of self-censoring, and being more temperate in my commentary. I'm sure anyone bored enough, or motivated to seek embarrassing material, could pore through the archives and find examples that might be considered "inappropriate," for one reason or another. That's not an invitation, it just me acknowledging that if I wish to be taken somewhat seriously, I probably have to be somewhat circumspect in how I wish to present my thoughts and opinions.

There is no advertising here. I don't track anyone. There are no comments, because all of my experience with comments systems have been largely negative. Trolls are everywhere it seems. While it would be wonderful to develop a "community" around the Marmot, I don't wish to devote time or energy to moderating comments, while I do wish to continue discussing controversial topics. I will entertain e-mail at dave underscore rogers at mac dot com. There used to be a trackback facility, wherein one could find links to one's posts in other blogs and sort of carry on the discussion across blogs. I'm not sure what the state of that infrastructure may be, but it's not implemented here at this time.

I do offer an RSS feed, you'll find the link at the home page. If you have a blog and offer a feed, shoot me a link and I'll add it to my feed reader. In the Golden Age of blogs, that was kind of the ideal, a decentralized network of individual blogs, often hosted by some service, a la "small pieces loosely joined" for anyone who remembers Dave Weinberger, who I largely disagreed with about almost everything regarding the web.

The web triumphalists I think have largely seen their utopian dreams consumed by Facebook. To which, "I told you so," is a hollow victory.

Anyway, we tend toward the "glass half empty" view of things here. Things are generally worse than they appear, so if you're looking for cheery news you may be disappointed. I suppose I like to think of myself as the canary in the coal mine.

Some Assembly Required

01:42 Sunday, 3 November 2013
Words: 869

Nice Marmot is created using Tinderbox by Eastgate Systems.

Tinderbox, "The Tool For Notes," is a Mac application actively developed and maintained for more than a decade by Mark Bernstein of Eastgate Systems.

Groundhog Day, the second iteration of my blogging efforts, was maintained in a series of Tinderbox files for about six years. I relied upon a customized set of templates offered by Eastgate Systems, and thus was able to overcome much of the initial learning curve with Tinderbox. The downside was that as the application evolved, and as my wishes for Groundhog Day became somewhat more sophisticated, I was less able to take advantage of the power of Tinderbox. I lacked the understanding of how the thing was put together.

When Apple ceased its hosting service, I decided for the sake of convenience that I would stop maintaining my own content management system, and use one of the online blogging platforms. I chose Tumblr because it was free, had a fairly nice writing environment, and a varied and interesting community. (I didn't learn about the porn until later.)

Unfortunately, as with all "free" efforts, the provider has to find a way to make money somehow. So then it becomes an advertising platform, competing with all the myriad other advertising platforms out there. In order to differentiate themselves and compete with the other platforms, each one has to rely on some unique aspect of their service, usually beloved by users, and whore it out to advertisers. Google's the best at it, and creepiest, though Facebook has closed the gap and made it a real horse race. That's where Tumblr is going. It's not pretty.

Add to that the fact that your writing, photographs, links, all reside within their content management system. It's a roach motel, it goes in, but you can't get it back out. I was able to get most of my content from Facebook, and all of it from Instagram, but nothing from Tumblr.

Before Snowden, the creepiness factor of Google, Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram, and even Tumblr, was giving me serious reservations about participating on those platforms. Even before the Snowden revelations, I had written many times in Tumblr that if Google didn't exist, the NSA would have to invent it.

I decided to get out.

Still wanting to have a voice, I chose to buy a domain name (It's really more of lease, bastards.), rent some server space, and have my own web site. I learned many new, and largely useless outside of this narrow application, things. It was a bit challenging, but not too hard. Which is to say, you could do it too.

I looked at a number of Mac desktop applications for creating web sites. I started with iWeb because I was somewhat familiar with it from back during the homepage.mac.com days. I had my dad writing a blog using it. (Sailor Jack's still kickin'. Though not as much or as hard as he used to.) I also looked at Sandvox, and a similar app though the name escapes me just now, and it seems I've deleted it from my hard drive.

In any event, they all had a kind of busy feel to them. Their output (at least in terms of the file structure uploaded to the server) resembled something the cat threw up. I wanted something clean and efficient, much like I had when I used Tinderbox to create Groundhog Day.

It seemed there was nothing for it but to roll up my sleeves and dig into Tinderbox again. I read everything I could find on the web. I have Mark Bernstein's book, The Tinderbox Way. And then I just started trying things. Trial and error. The October archive is nothing but a series of test posts, and you would be surprised what it took just to get there.

Now I'm here. I can write what I want, it all stays on my HD, and I have a pretty good idea what's going on, both on my HD and on my little bit of server space. I can slice and dice the posts pretty much any way I want. There's a great deal more that I want to do that I haven't figured out yet, but I'll get there.

No promises, but I'll try to document, either here or likely elsewhere, some of the things I've learned about Tinderbox. There are a lot of useful resources on the web, but I don't think anyone has written a very clear account of how to get up and running online with Tinderbox.

Strictly as an outliner, or a "notes processor," on your desktop, you can be productive in very little time. To be proficient or skillful would require much more effort, but you can be productive in very short order on the desktop alone. But add html export to that, and the level of complexity spikes. Very powerful, but very tricky until you begin to figure it out.

I'm not quite there yet, but I'm far enough along to do this. And for now, this is almost enough. I'll get better, and Nice Marmot will too.

So consider this an endorsement of Tinderbox. It's hard, but it's worth the effort.

Welcome to Nice Marmot

01:12 Sunday, 3 November 2013
Words: 474

My name is Dave Rogers, Nice Marmot is my blog. It's my reaction to what I perceive is an unhealthy, unwelcome and entirely too ubiquitous and intrusive expansion of "social media" into the internet and our daily lives.

Human beings are social creatures. Many successful and wonderful businesses have been created supporting and exploiting that characteristic. There's nothing inherently wrong with exploiting our social nature; but it begins to feel wrong when that exploitation is being powered by staggeringly enormous computational resources, and access to truly unprecedented amounts of information about our personal lives.

An idealistic view of this situation is that all that power will be used make our lives better.

I'm not an idealist. Call me a cynic if you will, but I don't think the good that will come from all this will outweigh the bad.

I can't stop it, but I can choose to limit my participation in it.

So I've deleted my traditional social media accounts with the exception, for the time being, of Twitter. Twitter hasn't gotten "creepy" yet. But they're working very hard on how to get there.

I also still have an active account on Flickr, though I'm not certain whether that will remain the case.

As a human being, I'm a social creature too. I wish to share my thoughts and interests with my friends, meet new ones, and participate in the online "conversation." But I don't want some corporation peering over my shoulder, reading my address book, noting where I'm at, what I'm doing, what I'm shopping for. I can't prevent all of that, but I can make it harder for them, while not denying myself the rewards of an online presence.

Prior to Apple ending its web hosting offering, homepage.mac.com, I maintained a weblog called Groundhog Day for many years. I first started blogging in December 1999 on a Dave Winer platform called editthispage.com. That blog was called Time's Shadow. After .mac shut down, I confined most of my online efforts to Facebook and Tumblr, where I had a blog called Day of the Groundhog. I deleted that account as well.

So I have a long history of ranting into the void to no discernible effect. I enjoy it. I intend to keep doing it for some time to come. I've recently "retired" from the working life. I'm a retired naval officer, and I have a pension I can live on if I'm careful. I'll never be rich, but I have the luxury of owning my own time. I'll "spend" some of it here.

I hope that readers may find what I offer interesting, useful, funny, thought-provoking or infuriating. Anything but boring. I'll work on it anyway.

If you care to contact me, you can reach me at dave underscore rogers at mac dot com.

Thanks for stopping by.