The Topics This Post Will Cover:

• Best Laid Plans Don’t Always Work out
• HF21 About to Arrive
• Steembot Tracker Issues Warning
• Steem News Returns
• Are You A Medium Author?
• Some of My Curation Notes

Best Laid Plans Don’t Always Work out

Ever have one of those days when you're in the space between asleep and fully awake your and your mind is forming plans for the day? It’s laying out what you’re going to accomplish so by the time you fully wake up the plan is fully formed? You're ready to get to work. Well, just as soon as coffee is on.

I had one of those mornings Tuesday morning. I love starting my day with that mindset. Direction, purpose and goals for the day. Just as soon as I have that ever precious coffee. Coffee on, Hobo fed, I sat down at the laptop to find the screen with lines across and unreadable. Well, OH F*!

I had set my tablet on the keyboard the previous evening. I had fallen asleep before removing it and closing the lid. Ms Hobo apparently closed the lid during the night and then likely laid on it pressing the edge of the tablet against the screen until it broke some connection inside. One screen, done like dinner.

Yes, Hobo will live through this.

I could spend some money to have the screen repaired but, since some other quirks had been happening with this system, I decided to put the funds together to replace it with a new one. Hopefully that will be toward the end of this coming week.

In the meantime a friend has loaned me an older system he had around the house. An older and SLOWer system. I’ve spent a few days figuring out what to install that will run enough to get some work done and of course the limits of the system in relation to how I’m used to working.

I routinely had multiple browsers open, upteen tabs, my writing software, graphics or video software, recording software, discord etc open on my other system and for the most part was able to work as I wanted. Not to mention my second screen.

On this system, discord, writing software and one browser with no more than 4 or 5 tabs open is about the limit. One screen, as the system will not properly recognize the second screen except as a clone of the laptop. Definitely slows down the work flow.

BUT, a system is better than none and now to get some catching up done.

HF21 About to Arrive

For better or worse, HF21 arrives on Tuesday morning. There are enough top 20 witnesses running the code to trigger the HF to go into effect at 11am EDT. If the testnet has been successful at finding bugs this will happen with narry a flicker on the blockchain.

An effort has been made to avoid the issues of HF20 with the testnet. I for one, would like to give a shoutout to all those who participated in the testnet and the efforts to make this change as smooth as possible.

It’s no secret I am not a fan of this HF. I am a fan of the SPS. That I need to be clear on. The Steem Proposal System is an important addition to our growing ecosystem and will enable projects being funded through community support.

I’m not a fan the authors took the hit to fund it but, could have been cool with that had authors not taken a second hit by having their rewards cut as well. According to @therealwolf’s math in his post about @smartsteem post HF21 when all is said and done the authors are taking a 43% cut and curators are getting a 172% increase.

This lopsided give and take is supposed to be in aid of more of the larger stakeholders taking time to curate good content and upvote it. Call me a cynic folks, I will believe it when I see it. This is something I will be very glad to be wrong on, but I’m not holding my breath.

Here’s the bottom line though. Come Tuesday, the changes will be made and each person’s behaviour after that will decide the outcome for better or worse. I’ll continue to produce content and hope one or two people find some value in reading it. Maybe they might even toss a vote or two my way.

I’ll continue doing what I do, Steem is not going away. The only question is will it be better than it was before the HF? Actions always speaks louder than words in my world.

Steembot Tracker Issues Warning

@aggroed and @yabapmatt are both top 20 Witnesses and they are both owners of the Steembot Tracker website. It’s a site where bidbots are listed and you can use it to place bids rather than blindly sending a bid directly to your bot of choice.

There are some bidbot owners who really don’t care what types of posts are being bid on as long as they can make a profit. Not all, but some. Both @aggroed and @yabapmatt have issued posts giving fair warning to these rogue bot owners they need to clean up their acts.

• Steem Bot Tracker - Doing Our Part for #newsteem
• Dear Bidbots: Thoughts after the hardfork

Their posts are pretty vague on exactly what they will be expecting but one thing is clear, bot owners who are seen as irresponsible will not be listed on the tracker.

@themarkymark points out in the comments there is a blacklist available of those who have been bad actors. It’s available for bot owners to integrate and it has also been made available as an extension for your browser. I use it. When I come across a post and the extension tells me the person is on the blacklist, I don’t curate it.

I see in the comments on those two posts some of the larger stakeholders indicating their support and willingness to participate in the effort. I also heard @theycallmedan say he was going to be working on the shit posts botted up onto the trending page after HF21.

If those are examples of how the free downvotes get used, I can get behind the idea. I just hope if it happens, it will be a sustained effort and those who go after the smaller accounts to be idiots will find themselves neutered.

Steem News Returns

I see that @pennsif has returned with his daily post of Steem News. This is great to see, he does a great job. Be sure to check it out each day and don’t forget to upvote it. It takes time to put posts like that together, upvoting it is the least we can do.

Are You A Medium Author?

Are you also a writer on Medium.com? I have been crossposting some of my content over there for about a year. I’ve created a publication called Steem World in which I’m going to be putting articles about what is happening on the Steem platform. If you are a writer over there, you can be a contributor. Leave me a comment or hit me up on Discord.

You don’t have to be a paid member to write on Medium. If you are part of the Medium Partner Program you will receive any income the posts receive as they are published on your account.

Some of My Curation Notes

I’ve been involved in curating content on Steem since shortly after I arrived. I don’t mean just seeing if I can vote early, I mean actually reading and evaluating the content I’m consuming.

For almost a year I published the Steemit Ramble with a compilation of posts I had curated and comments on them in an effort to bring some extra attention to content creators on the platform.

From there came The Ramble discord and Pimp Your Post Thursday which is post promotion shows held on Thursdays.

When I curate I look at several factors before deciding to vote on the post.

• Is the Headline effective or is it clickbait?
• Does the content keep my attention?
• Is the content original and not spun or stolen?
• Has care been given to the formatting? White space is important along with short paragraphs, left-aligned.
• Have graphics or photos been attributed?
• Are the tags properly used. If you misuse or spam tags, I will not upvote. Don’t care how good your content is. I curate for a couple of tribes, the abuse of tags is real. I will not reward it.

That’s it for now. I’m thinking I will try to regularly do posts of ‘odds n ends’ of information that I gather as I explore this ecosystem.

One last thought — you can see HF21 as a bunch of lemons or you can figure out how to make nice lemonade to survive and thrive.