Second Thoughts – Vine Maple Farm

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March 31, 2026March 31, 2026

Good Things

This is Easter Week, the most sombre and introspective, yet the most hopeful week of the Christian year, which seems to correspond to the year in the news. I posted a hopeful wish for a pessimistic week on my Second Thoughts Substack

February 12, 2026February 12, 2026

Voting

This week, I wrote on my Substack, Second Thoughts, about voting: not who is elected or what is voted for or against, but about voting as an event in our lives and communities.

Second most popular is a post called A Man, a Cigar, and a Plymouth, a story that I pieced together about my great-grandfather. I don't know when it happened, but it probably did. I read Saul Bellow when I was a teenager on the farm and I sometimes wonder if reading Herzog, set mostly at the University of Chicago contributed to my decision to leave the farm for Chicago. At Chicago, I studied Chinese history. This inspired me to write We Sow What We Reap: China and the Opium Wars. China is now a supplier of the American opioid epidemic, just as the U.S. and Britain were suppliers of the 19th century Chinese opioid epidemic.

Over at Marv Waschke on Computing I talk about computing, the subject which dominated most of my adult professional life.

I’ve added a Computer Questions to my computing site. I hope to help folks with the kind of questions my grandson Christopher and I used to answer at free sessions at the Ferndale Public Library before covid intruded.

We’ve been living in an era of free services. This may be ending, almost certainly changing. I’ve been thinking about how free services work. I posted Free Digital Services: TANSTAAFL? Not Exactly on Marv Waschke On Computing. I plan to post more in the future.

Ransomware is booming during the pandemic, although most of the activity affects businesses and large organizations rather than individual users. Still, you should be careful. See how here.

For safe working at home, you have to know how to set the password on your home network router, an often neglected step. Check out this post on Marv Waschke on Computing.

Bitcoin’s profligate waste of resources offends my architectural sensibilities, but blockchain has real potential. I explain in Blockchain Made Simple.