As the reader can see, the ongoing theme for the last few months
are the ongoing rains in northern California.  At this writing,
we are still experiencing continued rains which, thankfully, has
put a serious dent in the many years drought.  So much so that the
state government has declared the drought officially over. No
complaints here.

Now that the weather is slowly starting to open up, it is time to
clear the jungle out of the garden.  I went out back to discover
a nocturnal visitor completely overturned the compost bin and
rifled through the contents.  The fact that I had a cinder block
placed on top of the lid of the bin led me to conclude that the
offender was either a large cat or a bear.  These critters have no
respect for property boundaries. <grin>

http://tinyurl.com/lowyoav

Anyway, whoever it is seems to enjoy mango stones. Time to build
a compost bin...yet another project.

In some of my previous posts, I may have discussed the merits of
the Gopher protocol.  While perusing the command line bulletin
board at SDF (http://sdf.org), I came across a post by wrstone
which provided some interesting insight as to the role Gopher
plays in current times.

Essentially he addressed the issue of what he termed
survivability, "No data format has thus survived any test of time
rather than plain text.  Databases come and go, but text always
remains."  He adds, "It defeats censorship bots.  The HTML URLs
produced by the proxy are (at present) immune to bots.  It makes
for nasty URLs, but that's what URL-shortening is for.  It's also
very under-the-radar.  This is important to me."

Evidence is strong that the NSA is literally capturing every bit
of internet traffic relegating privacy to the dustbin of history.
Now that Trump has signed off on legislation repealing FCC rules
prohibiting ISP's from recording and selling a user's online
activity, it is now wise to stay under-the-radar. There is no
targeted advertising in Gopherspace and (at present) Uncle Sam is
probably not giving much weight to Gopher.  Time will tell, but
in light of recent leaks about CIA Vault 7 and NSA snooping,
Gopher may grow beyond a small cult following.  Being somewhat of
a minimalist, I appreciate the Gopher protocol's elegant
simplicity.