Mike Stone @mike@fosstodon.org

Just had a bit of excitement. My wife was out in our garage (which is a complete disaster area) looking for something, and I was upstairs browsing #Fosstodon, when I heard a horror movie style scream come from the garage. My wife comes ripping into the house like she's being chased. She says there's a scorpion in our garage that was 2 or 3 inches long. I put on shoes cuz scorpion, duh. I quickly found our perpetrator. Not a scorpion. This isn't the actual lizard, but looks close.

OK, finished a project that I've been working on for a couple weeks for my day job. I've officially been productive today. Now I can spend the day on #Fosstodon and not feel (too) guilty about it.

I've been around as long as there's been a #Fosstodon, but I thought since there's so many new people around I'd do another #introduction.

I'm half the admin team of Fosstodon along with @kev. He and I have been doing this for just shy of 5 years. I work in IT generalist type job that's usually scripting/process automation and data transportation. I'm a father of a good sized brood and happily married to a woman much smarter than I am. In my spare time I blink and it's gone.

Welcome everyone!

It's great to see so many new names and faces over the last week. If you're new here or just feeling like a refresher, please do read our Code of Conduct for #Fosstodon as we are not just an open source version of Twitter, and the rules ARE different here.

https://hub.fosstodon.org/coc

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask myself, @kev, or any one of our moderation team. We're all happy to help.

Once again, welcome to Fosstodon!

Recently my friend and cofounder of #Fosstodon posted a blog post about how he's no longer using #Linux on the desktop. The reaction from the community was a good one, so I figured that I could safely announce something myself that wouldn't illicit too much hate.

So, here goes....

I cut off a large part of my beard....

Please don't hate me.

Browsing the #Fosstodon timeline, watching my son play video games, on my second glass of wine. An interesting vintage called Educated Guess. I thought it was close to appropriate since there doesn't seem to be one called Uneducated Guess.

I think @cfenollosa makes some really good points here, and I couldn't agree more about his thoughts regarding the local timeline. I'm incredibly proud of the community that we've built up here on #Fosstodon.

https://cfenollosa.com/blog/you-may-be-using-mastodon-wrong.html

Is #Fosstodon behaving for everybody today? I've heard that notifications aren't loading correctly? Has anybody experienced this problem?

Weird. Keybase.io has added the ability to verify your Mastodon identity, but they specifically list out 6 instances and it looks like you're out of luck if you're not on one of those.

Oh, and in case you're wondering, #Fosstodon is NOT one of the 6, so I guess we'll have to wait for them to figure out that's not a good way to do that.

I want to take a second to thank all the people who donate time and currency to help us keep the lights on here at #Fosstodon. We literally couldn't do it without you unless @kev sold one of his kidneys on the black market. Thank you all so much.

I want to take a quick second here to thank all of our veterans around the world for their service and their sacrifices. I'd love to tag each and every one, but unfortunately I don't know who all the vets here are. A special thank you to @kev who not only served, but makes #Fosstodon possible for all of us. I also want to thank my dad, even though he's not reading this.

Still hanging out on #Fosstodon on the Undernet if anybody is interested in joining.

For some reason I'm hanging out in #Fosstodon on the Undernet today. If you're bored....