Entropy being what it is...

I got back from my home town yesterday evening.
The purpose of my visit was primarily for the funeral of my grandmother.
Jean was in her 90's, so "she had a good life" as so many people said while I was there.
The service was pretty much what you'd expect for a small affair, not that I'd know much about attending funerals. This is only the second funeral that I've attended.
I have been to other funerals in the past, but I was a pallbearer, which I don't believe really counts.

One of the things I still don't understand about death is that it has a tendency to bring out the worst in people, especially when there is money involved.
I had heard from other family members, who had told me about certain on-goings in the lead up to the funeral and frankly it sickened me. I'm not going in to specifics here, but I'm sure you get the idea.

Moreover, my visit was an opportunity to catch up with other family members, as I get back so infrequently. Further to my refereeing both before and after the funeral, I attempted to mend a few other rifts within the family unit.
I successfully managed to build a bridge between my other grandparents and my sister.
Again, much silliness abounds - after my parents split up, people took sides, it got messy and then years seem to go by without a word spoken.
This seemed to go well, we sat; drank tea and idly chatted. I deemed this to be a success. I'm hopeful, this will lead on to reuniting my sister and father, but I'm pretty sure this will be a much harder nut to crack. So, next time maybe.
The one thing that will stick with me, besides seeing my mother reading aloud something she'd written for the occasion and trying desperately to keep her composure, is the dull thud of roses landing on a coffin once placed in a hole in the ground.

The Obituary.

Edit: With thanks to Sally Paulson for proofreading and generally being awesome.

The beginning

Last weekend I kicked the bad habit that was Facebook.

Without mention of poor user experience and the constant battle between chronological and so called “top feeds”.

These top feeds are basically targeted adverts and promoted posts.

I realised it just wasn't me, despite the friends I had. Many of these friends were also active on other sites.

I read this article a few weeks back:

https://amp.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-mercer-breitbart-war-on-media-steve-bannon-donald-trump-nigel-farage

Whilst unsurprising that this sort of data can so easily be accumulated and indeed used for political purpose, it still scared me somewhat.

Further I read,

https://www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2017/03/07/cambridge_analytica_dystopianism/

And I started to think about all the cloud systems I used every day without thinking.

I have bought into the Google ecosystem in a relatively big way.

I've had a Gmail account since i-dont-know-when, a Google+ account since shortly after it started and I was an early adopter if the niantic game Ingress.

So I deactivated my Facebook account.

I couldn't delete it, so the content is still there should I wish to go back.

I thought about the alternatives. I already use Google+ and Twitter.

Then I started thinking further about what was lacking from my social media experience.

It was then that I started looking up blogs.

A quick Google found that a reasonable Solution would be blogger.

A couple of days later, I was having a conversation with a friend who had also used blogger.

We discussed URL forwarding and google hosting. So that's what did.

The next day I created a couple of cNames on my domain and pointed blogger to them, hey presto I had a blog subdomain.

I then spent an hour or so familiarising myself with the interface and getting to grips with the theme engine. I then had something that vaguely looked blog-shaped.

I figured I could tweak the design as I went.

It seems to have taken me ages so finish this first piece and I'm disappointed at myself at how quickly I lose energy to finish a project.

Still i am persevering and eventually things will get done.

I anticipate writing further articles surrounding different topics, mostly gravitating toward the tech side of things and my ongoing effort to “off-cloud”.

I'm not sure we're this will go, but I'll be interested to see where it ends up.

If you're reading this two years in the future and there isn't anything more, I'm truly sorry