Flood Gates Opened
As of Saturday, May 1, 2021, individual counties in Nevada are permitted to oversee mitigation measures individually and occupancy caps have been mostly lifted to 80% if they’re actually being enforced. Despite the uptick in case positivity over recent weeks, the city built on the inability of people to do math (a paraphase of various similar quotes by Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller) is counting on tourists visiting, spending money, and leaving, getting their tests at their points of origin. Interesting times ahead.
By the way, while you can still use the old “What Happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas” marketing slogan, there was a pre-pandemic (only just) marketing update for this destination oasis in the desert, “What Happens Here, Only Happens Here.” And you can slap a #OnlyVegas tag on it if you must. Read all about it on the LVCVA Desination Marketing page
Local YouTube
If you’re going to venture into the Vegas Fun Zone, you should try to be safe following the existing mitigation measure mandates, though that often falls on deaf ears. In the mean time, if you’re going to risk it, why not check out my two current favorite local lifestyle YouTube channels? This is straight sharing of channel links, no other affiliation, I don’t know either of these creators (though I could run into them out and about, as might you… you never know).
Not Leaving Las Vegas
I have found myself letting Steven’s livestreams (live or time-shifted) play while I’m working and it’s always interesting to see the spots I know along with some of the changes and crowd and whatnot, from the comfort of home.
He also has a website, which is not linked from the YouTube page, at https://www.notleavinglasvegas.com/ .
Norma Geli
This one is interesting for a two main reasons. First, Norma is one of many people around town who are keeping up on what is still open, what is coming back to life, and so on, so that’s been interesting to check out recently. Second, and maybe better, Norma has a genuine presentation, not overly produced so her videos look human, and her opinions sound like they might be real (I say this because it doesn’t appear obvious whether there are paid mentions; I assume so, more disclosure would be good).
Norma is found on Instagram and probably elsewhere, a search exercise I’ll leave to the reader.
The Case for Del.icio.us
This may be from before your time, but way back when the internets actually were a series of tubes, there was a very creative river of ideation flowing through them, and keeping track of where the cool stuff was benefited from sharing of URLs pointing to them. It wasn’t great, and when Yahoo bought del.icio.us they fairly quickly mapped it to delicious.com and then unceremoniously killed it, but sharing things, or even keeping track of things, sort of goes hand-in-hand with URLs, and the world of social media has really done a number on that idea.
I have removed most social media applications from my mobile device, and of course I access them via my browsers (Firefox, Chromium, others) on my computers, and now more often on my mobile device also. Most things work, and when you use a web browser to view Instagram pictures, for example, you can very easily save links to pics. How novel is that? (Instagram has rather famously broken the internet, because Instagram hates the internet)
It gets worse when you’re thinking about YouTube and other video content from a myriad of delivery platforms (LBRY, Bitchute, Vimeo, many more), and once you get into podcasts, forget it. RSS was a great idea, but so was del.icio.us, and great ideas need to evolve. Right off the bat, you can’t share an RSS feed in quite the same way you would a link to a plain old human-readable HTML document (for example), so it’s difficult to make the case for del.icio.us when we’re using RSS feeds to distribute podcasts.
What if the world began to notice that the sitemap.xml file that is now at least a de facto standard for machines (ie robots) scraping new and updated links is a distilled RSS feed, while Schema.org has created a broad and extensible infrastructure for tagging human-readable content with a machine-friendly attribute schema (or you can publish that info as a javascript data structure) and there are even some schema defined for feed data (they might need some massaging if people started using them for real).
So… what if a modern take on del.icio.us (a published, structured bookmark folksonomy, add any other buzzwords you feel might fit… for what it’s worth, I was not a big fan of del.icio.us itself at the time, though the concept is something we need today, IMHO) would take full advantage of schema.org (or similar, because I thought microformats were cool, for example) markup in human-readable documents and enable easy sharing and even discovery of human-readable media links without the need to shift mental and software gears to deal with RSS feeds?
To be continued… and no, not going with a goofy name like del.icio.us…
FinTech 2021
The continuing saga…
I opened an account at a credit union that I could walk to, located inside a grocery store (and other places), when I moved to Las Vegas from Sunnyvale, California way back in 2013. In 2017 I opened a business account for my LLC here in Nevada at the same place, mostly for conveniences geographic and digital. That is, I could walk there, get groceries, do any banking I needed to do (not so often), and head home, and then transferring between accounts and using one mobile application or one web access point seemed completely reasonable.
I’m writing about this, so you already know how this story is turning out. I have been talking about this in general and now as we enter May I have configured Brex and Novo for outflows and inflows, respectively, and I’m navigating the ACH process to manage transferring between these two and my existing credit union and other services, avoiding where possible getting Plaid involved. My fingers are crossed that the move to modern online banking will be a net positive, and that the business account moves will lead to some learnings ahead of personal account moves.
Watch this space for updates, especially if you’ve been toying with or wading into the modernization of our banking experiences.
How Funny
Stand-up comedy is a good thing, sometimes a great thing, and YouTube was a great place to find performances of all kinds; only more true after 2020, and here are some of my finds!
Bengt Washburn is an unexpected genius. The DryBar is a great channel which will likely appear here often, and this is another case of the YouTube algo autoplaying me in a good direction for a change. Since he has a bit about you not knowing him after a couple of decades in comedy, I’ll let the “unexpected” qualifier stand.
Roy Wood Jr is brilliant. Sure, you can see him on The Daily Show and he has done some good work there, but his stand-up is just amazing. He’s the host of This is Not Happening in this case, so there’s a little bonus with him introducing himself, and there are a couple of segments easily spotted with the gold jacket (and other TiNH clips in other clothing). An unusual show, not always a win, but usually funny in general.
Rex Havens is another YouTube algo find, another DryBar win, and another unexpected bit of brilliance here. In this case it’s classic judging the book by its cover, he looks like he’s going to be an angry hard ass perhaps, but no, good times and a great set.
Websites and Projects and Podcasts, Oh My!
I’ve been super busy getting my core code in better and more re-usable shape with nearly-constant distractions about anything from sorting out banking weirdness to trying to get some exercise to trying to get some sleep… I don’t want to throw a whole bunch of links at your, faithful reader, so if anything works out for once, I’ll have a landing page with all sorts of link goodness on it and I’ll add that to a footer or basically cut down on the completely shameless self-promotion. I mean, you’re reading my newsletter, that’s self enough for most.
This week has to be sprint week, for sure, open up the May 10 issue for updates!