I had high hopes for Flattr. Back when I signed up I quoted Dave Slusher as saying:

It makes little sense to sign up as a listener when there is nothing to flattr. As a creator, it makes little sense to invest in a platform with few users. Let's cut through that, and push on both fronts simultaneously with a mutual leap of faith.

So I did, and for a while all was good. But Flattr seemed to go into a bit of a decline and the relaunch, a month or so ago, was a bit of a botch as well. Many things didn't work, and still don't, despite the developers' assurances. And their "reasons" -- so many bugs, there are just the two of us, we have no time -- strike me as unprofessional and feed my feeling of gloom and doom. Given that they take a cut of each member's flattrs, my guess is that they're depriving themselves of income.

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There was a bit of noise about dead air recently on ADN that reminded me of one of the best bits of the recent Hearsay 2015 audio festival in Ireland. Dead air, in case you didn't know, is silence, usually on broadcast radio, but the term has been adopted for podcasts, which is radio to all intents and purposes. It is far more prevalent in podcasts because people can be very lazy about going back and doing even cursory editing to get rid of those long pauses while someone thinks of something witty to say.

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One of my social-media friends, Chris Krycho, wrote a piece reviewing his 2015 and looking forward to his 2016 that was an interesting read and that inspired this post of mine. Any number of people will tell you that it is a good idea to set yourself some goals and review them from time to time, but I'm crediting Chris with tipping me over the edge. And because I want to get this out sooner rather than later¹ and an arbitrary news peg is better than none, I'm pushing to post this before the end of the day, so it may be a little notesy.

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Sat at the airport for around four hours -- it seemed preferable to wandering around town in the rain with a suitcase -- I'm taking a pause from reading The Economist to think about what else I could be doing. The fact is, when I travel I don't often make good use of the downtime involved. Well, I make use of it, but not productive use. So, I'll read more of a magazine than I might otherwise and listen to more podcasts, but there's always the nagging guilt that I could be doing something else.

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One of the trickier aspects of home fermentation is the need to keep things anaerobic. The bacteria that do the work are perfectly happy without oxygen. Most spoiler moulds and bacteria need a bit of oxygen. So the usual advice is to ensure that all the stuff you're pickling is submerged beneath the liquid in which it is being pickled. Easy enough in a nice, straight-sided pickling crock, where a plate with a weight on top does the job smoothly. Posh crocks may have a fitted lid or even an air-lock. But they're expensive and second-hand ones are hard to find.

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