With my friends joining me, I have claimed an island in the middle of the Arkansas river as my own and renamed it “Mojo Island.” After verifying GPS coordinates, I placed a container full of treasure and a log for those intrepid explorers who follow me. From the geocache description:
This geocache is rated as a  5/5. Not everyone may be able to attempt this cache. It will require walking down rocks, wading, or possibly swimming in river water currents (not suggested) You may have to use a canoe or kayak to access Mojo’s island. Either way, you need to understand that you assume the risk. Myself, nor Geocaching.com/Groundspeak can be held responsible for your decision to attempt to retrieve this cache. You are looking for a container on the island itself. It could have a tendency to leak, especially in high water, so if you cannot sign it then a photo of you and the container will qualify as a smiley in your log. Due to the nature of the terrain and difficulty level, photographic proof is required in addition to the signing of the log. Please send images to me directly instead of in the geocache log. Good luck and stay safe out there as there are potentially sharp rocks along the shorelines.Â
– Geo Mojo, host of Mojo’s Island
I’ll be headed back to Mojo island as soon as I have found a more suitable container, more treasure to add to it and even a human skeleton that I will chain to a tree as a waypoint for future explorers to discover.
Anyone else notice the continuing trend of athleisure wear? I’m not one for jumping on to band wagons but I am for utility, comfort and looking good while doing it.
One of the many things I want to do this year is to get outdoors, explore more trails, hunt for geocaches, and grab fresh air because these four walls close in on me while working from home.
I grabbed the new Nike All Conditions Gear trail shoes and dry-fit shirt in anticipation of getting outside more. Just like Apple, Nike is a luxury item with excellent quality materials that last. Leisure, luxury and the outdoors, apparently is something more of us can do with during these pandemic years.
I have just completed driving the entirety of Route 66. It is almost 2,500 miles from Chicago, Illinois to Santa Monica, California. Double this for the return trip, of course.
Living one block away from Route 66 here in Tulsa, Oklahoma, we started our journey to California and back in February 2019 for one week. After a few months, we were able to again, start from the center here in Tulsa and complete the final leg to Chicago and back.
The United States is a beautiful country and I am extremely grateful to have experienced this journey. I’ll provide a photo tour after I’m done processing all the images and notes.
Cyberspace- A long time ago, before we allowed ourselves to bottlenecked into a few social platforms, fed into massive surveillance machines, mined for our attention, and controlled by algorithms, there was an idea about internet freedom. Cyberspace.
We allowed cyberspace to become dominated by a few large companies. It was unregulated, free. We created things and shared ideas and we didn’t need anyone to do it for us. We just did it.
Web 2.0- We became lazy and enticed by centralized/connected web applications. Back in 2005, I became hooked into the Google platform thanks to Gmail. Flickr was new and exciting way to share photos. In 2006, I was one of the first users of TWTTR (now Twitter) and I even had a MySpace account and then Facebook. We then coined the phrase “social media” and it was good. The internet became a cesspool of ads, trolls, marketing and algorithms after that.
Social Media- No Google, no Facebook, no Twitter. Thanks to the massive digital footprints I’ve left behind, you can still find some references to my usage but I am off of social media. The Flickr account I subscribe to is not social. It is an online repository and cloud backup to my photo archives. I have an Outlook account from Microsoft but that is residual and for using their services (which I am weaning off of.) No more. Most of us rely on those corporate platforms that decide what they think you need to know. Facebook news feeds anyone? Google search, anyone? Controlled by algorithms designed to keep you hooked and sedentary inside their apps.
I’ve spent the past year winding the clock backwards and starting over again. I have fully reclaimed my little hub here in Cyberspace. My domains are secured again. The website is self-hosted. Email domains are mine.
Since the early 2000’s most of us have used and since then forgotten two brilliant tools to consume information; E-mail and RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds.
With E-mail and RSS we control what we want to focus our attention on. For either information or for pleasure. I’ve slowly re-introduced E-mail subscriptions to informative websites I trust. They use it as communicating ideas, just like we did in cyberspace a long time ago. They won’t sell my information and they won’t spam me. When/if they do I’ll simply unsubscribe.
Since I first discovered RSS back in the early 2000’s, I was hooked. I’ve relied on it almost daily as an information resource. Here’s why: every website or blog has a feed attached to it. Once you set up or subscribe to these feeds in a feed aggregator like Feedly (free), you could read articles from your favorite websites without visiting them all. No ads, no tracking, no algorithms and in one central location.
I am in control of what I see. No one else. Now, that does not mean I won’t visit the web, far from it. I still use it for research purposes like everyone else but those websites are prevented from tracking me thanks to ad and content blockers. I use a secure browser called Firefox Focus which blocks them. I use Duck Duck Go to perform searches on the web. They don’t track or sell you anything. Pretty soon I will purchase a VPN (Virtual Private Network) that masks my internet provider’s information.
There is a lot of cyberspace out there still. The corporate platforms and strict governments haven’t completely taken over it, even if they do fancy themselves as masters of the universal internet.
I do not advertise and will never have advertisements here. I will never spam or sell anyone’s information. Ever. If you’d like to add my website to your feed aggregator it is [http://chrisdenbow.website/rss].
Date a girl who travels. Date a girl who would rather save up for out of town trips, or day trips than buy new shoes or clothes. She may not look fashionable, but behind that tanned and freckle face from all the days out in the sun, lies a mind that can take you places and an open heart that will take you for what you are, not for what you can be.
I’ve never been what you’d call musically inclined but there have been a lot of influences lately and I decided to try my hand, literally, at this gorgeous ukulele.
After some initial tuning mistakes that are now corrected, I played a total of two chords tonight. Looking forward to a jam session with my very patient muse this weekend.
I first mentioned I was migrating off of Google way back in April. Well, it has taken me just that long to do it. Every photo, video and document I shared with them has been downloaded finally.
I deleted my 10 year old Google account this morning after liberating all my stuff. That stuff is mostly sitting on an external hard drive to be sorted and archived but that is for a much later day.
Until then, I will work to close out my other Google account that I created last November. Shouldn’t be so bad. One year’s worth shouldn’t take nearly as long as ten.
Anyway, up yours, Google. I will not willingly volunteer my data to you for you to spy on anymore.
