I am not a robot. And even if I were, I would not be yours.

How did we arrive at a web that is increasingly hostile to actual humans? Efficiency. There is something to be said for slowing down to enjoy life, or to take time to do something right. Efficiency is not king; far from it. Lately, I find efficiency is often the reason I feel so busy.

Thanks to reCAPTCHA, many services and sites demand you do Google's bidding. What do you gain from it? Not much, really. I've encountered so many reCAPTCHAs during last week's delete shenanigans, I wanted to scream. It wasn't just tick-the-box, it was improve-our-shitty-AI-image-classification ad nauseum. On the other hand, this could indicate success at avoiding too much of Google's insipid crapulence. Small win?

Have you ever tried deleting an online account? I have. I have updated several I want to keep after changing email addresses, and several others I've deleted over the last week. And on requesting deletion, I have encountered varying levels of resistence.

Take Adobe, for instance. I had the username and password for the account, but I was coerced to accept a change in terms in order to sign in just to delete the account. Despite the prevelence of email in business, they have no obvious email address. So I tweeted them. After some discussion, they finally agreed to delete my account.

Today is the end of the first week of the year (assuming you count weeks according to the ISO). I've done quite a bit in the world of baz.bar, from setting up FreeBSD on an old eMachine and a couple of Orange Pis, to moving from Scrapazon Web Services to RackNerd, and setting up Kerberos, LDAP, Nextcloud, Postfix, and Dovecot.

I also upgraded OpenWRT, which basically meant setting most services up from scratch again, because the built-in backup is not nearly as robust as one would think. In fact, I had to install packages again, because the upgrade apparently erases them. Note to self: I should probably backup as much of the router data as I can to Nextcloud.

So, I did a thing. More importantly, I did a first thing. I registered my first so-called premium domain. It was so premium, that no one else had gotten to it before I did. Welcome to my new site. Yes, yes, of course: More will be coming Real Soon Now™. (Yes, thank you, I do remember Usenet. It was great.)

I did another thing after said first thing, but this 'nother thing was not a first thing. Email is fun, and setting up email servers is even funner. I prefer Postfix¹, myself, so that's what I set up. As I planned on using this for my (new) regular email, I decided to get a cheap VPS. I found RackNerd on LowEndBox, and it fit the bill quite nicely at $23/year, much cheaper than what I am currently paying Trashazon-dot-trashicom.