One change per day; a simple goal worth pursuing.

NATO Is Ukraine’s Future and Always Will Be - WSJ Opinion

It should be a very simple calculation for Mr. Putin: Get out now while the getting is good, because Europe and the U.S. are committed to raising the Ukrainian military to a NATO standard even without it being a NATO member.

Mr. Putin has learned his military is no match for a properly equipped NATO force. His Ukraine misadventure is rapidly degrading his ability to compete in the long run. Mr. Putin will continue to pretend his war isn’t a disastrous miscalculation for which his country will be paying for generations to come. The peanut gallery should not be fooled.

Apple Intelligence Siri Overhaul Could Get Delayed - MacRumors

Apple is running into engineering problems and software bugs that could push back the launch of the new functionality.

Literally the only Apple Intelligence feature users actually need.

Joann Fabrics Announces Plans To Make Mishmash Store Out Of Shuttered Locations’ Scraps - The Onion

Friday afternoon slowdown

DOGE Staffer Arrives at Internal Revenue Service Headquarters - WSJ

Kliger has asked for meetings with senior officials and was interested in the agency’s head count, according to an IRS employee. The IRS has about 100,000 workers after a recent expansion. It is in the middle of the busiest portion of its year in preparation for the mid-April individual income tax filing deadline. 

Well, well, well… how the turntables…

Few things in life are as unpleasant as folding laundry with dry hands.

🧺

Quiet time. 📰

Gabbard and Kennedy. Oof.

As I was upgrading Catholic Husband, I came across a post that I wrote in January 2017 called On Hiatus. I had completely forgotten that I took all of 2017 off.

Since restarting in November of that year, I’ve written over a third of my entire blog.

Rest is a good thing.

Honda, Nissan End Merger Talks, Leaving Nissan to Seek Other Partners - WSJ

Honda had initially agreed to a merger structure in which the two automakers would sit side-by-side under a single holding company. The companies said Thursday that Honda—whose market value is about five times Nissan’s—later sought to make Nissan a subsidiary.

I hated this deal.

FAA Wants Permanent Helicopter Restrictions at Reagan Airport - WSJ

The path the American Airlines regional jet took toward Runway 33 required it to turn toward the right and then bank left to line up for its landing. That route crosses over a lane for helicopters at a relatively low altitude.

This is the core problem and nothing else. You’ve got a 200’ altitude restriction on helicopters, but the traffic on short final is going to be bumping into that.

The intersection off of Runway 33 is the problem. So move the routes for greater separation or close 33 permanently.

Snowfall in the woods ❄️

Usually when the house is quiet, the four children are up to no good.

Occasionally it’s because they all found a book to read and the 4 year made herself a butter sandwich.

📚🍞🧈

I set up a scanner in my client’s office so that they could send me copies of physical documents.

I now realize that all I did was set up a modern fax machine.

📠

Hello again, Dropbox.

📦

Apple Completes Pixelmator Acquisition - MacRumors

Apple could eventually integrate these apps into iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, but for now they remain separate and available from the App Store.

I would be absolutely devastated if Apple folded it into the OS and killed the standalone app. Pixelmator is far too valuable, and important, to get swallowed up and relegated to tiny updates at the margin only once every twelve months.

Hamas Gets Biden-Appointed Judge To Overturn Trump’s Order To Release Hostages - Babylon Bee

On Monday, Trump issued a stern ultimatum to Hamas to release all remaining hostages by noon on Saturday or face dire consequences, but sources confirmed that Hamas leaders obtained a ruling from a judge appointed by the previous administration to effectively tie Trump’s hands.

lol, this is a clever one.

All lawsuits against the Executive branch get a lot of attention when filed, but I think on average less than 1 in 10 succeeds. It’s incredible that our government and its three branches have functioned so successfully for this long.

That’s funny, I could’ve sworn there was a bird feeder here earlier?!

The Magnificent 7 Are So Last Year. Cash Cows Are the New Kings. - WSJ

Plenty of investors, including Joel Greenblatt of “Magic Formula” fame, and even Buffett himself, ignore the academic straitjacket plaguing some value indexes.

Yeah, owning every publicly traded company in the market so you never have to pick winners and losers is so naive.

Nutrition Win: Pope Francis Has Announced That Communion Wafers Will Now Contain 19 Grams Of Protein - Clickhole

This is going to go a long way to help Catholics reach their RDA!

I started publishing on my other blog, Catholic Husband, in 2013. Since then, I’ve published regularly and have ended up with a collection of over 1,000 blog posts. 2013 was the golden age of blogging, and I spent considerable time designing the website in Rapidweaver.

Running your website requires many choices, the most important of which is the platform on which you build. Users who build their online identity on Facebook, Twitter, or even MySpace found themselves at the mercy of the platform rules. The content is locked away forever and almost impossible to unlock. A similar problem can arise when building your site.

We can never know who will be the winners and losers in the future. I chose to run all of Catholic Husband through Rapidweaver and its built-in blog plugin. It was a good choice at the time, but as the years passed, fewer Rapidweaver users used the blog plug-in. The product kept improving, but the blog plug-in ended up frozen in time. Updates slowed to a trickle, with the last major improvement coming in 2018. Realmac Software, the developer of Rapidweaver, doesn’t even use their own blogging solution for the company blog.

Recently, I wanted to change the design of the site in Rapidweaver, but I had to use pre-built themes for them to work on the blog. Themes were everything in 2013 and 2014, but in the last few years, everyone has moved to frameworks and modular design. I couldn’t make any of the themes still available work the way that I wanted.

So this left me at an impasse. Web technologies change constantly, and improvements were out there, ready to be had. All the while, Catholic Husband was locked away. What kept me locked in to Rapidweaver was the difficulty of exporting all those posts, the challenge of redirecting old links (Rapidweaver doesn’t use a standard nomenclature for the blog plug-in), and the belief that a fix was coming.

In the end, I concluded that I might be the most prolific active user of the Rapidweaver blog plug-in, and updates weren’t coming. I also came to terms with the reality that coming up with redirect rules for over 1,000 posts was more work than it was worth.

Catholic Husband is a substantial part of my writing portfolio, and I wanted to break it free. I spun up a blog on Micro.blog, tweaked the design using CSS, and updated the catholichusband.com DNS records to point to its new home.

Over three days last week, I re-posted all 1,015 blog posts, giving them not just a new home, but a new portable URL using a standard naming convention. It was a lot of work, and it was tedious, but now it is done.

My writing now has a new, modern home. I have access to the latest standards and technologies, the site is incredibly fast, and there’s even a built-in search function that Catholic Husband for the first time. To top it all off, there’s a native subscribe capability that lets readers get updates via email without having to rely on the unreliability of Mailchimp.

This was a project worth my time and effort. Catholic Husband is free, and ready to move forward on the modern web as a growing collection of my thoughts and experiences, in a way that’s built to last.