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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

  • Home Improvements, Virtual Style

    Every now and then I remember to check under the hood of this thing. I mean, sure, I make sure everything’s patched & current, I check every day on the backup logs, that sort of thing. Based on a sudden urge to find out if I could add a Mastodon feed to the sidebar, however, I ended up cleaning out some legacy cruft.

    No, seriously: The widgets I replaced were marked “Legacy” this and “Legacy” that.

    And then I ran into the fact that the new(ish) non-Legacy version of the Categories widget… lacks a title option. You know, the bit that says “Categories” at the top? The fix for that turns out to be putting the categories widget into a Widget Group and putting the title on that.

    A group of one. Nice design work there, WP folks!

    Anyway, I got that sorted out, added the RSS sidebar widget for my “fediverse” presence, and even got really under the hood and cleared out some old software versions on the server itself. Not bad for an hour’s random effort based on a silly whim.

  • Silly Reasons To Keep At It

    Look, we have to motivate ourselves in the ways that work for us, don’t we? Like, I want to watch the new season of The Dragon Prince, so that’s a reason to keep going. I want to play the new Fire Emblem game due to release in January, and I want to hear the new Mono Inc album which is due to arrive on the same day. (That’ll be a pretty cool day, it’s true.)

    If it keeps me going that many more months longer, that’s what counts, right? Right.

  • Out With The Old, In With The Somewhat Less Old

    If we know each other in person, and maybe even if not, you’ve probably heard me joke about the “Thousand Dollar Alarm Clock.” Heck, I even wrote about it some years ago, as evidenced by the link there. The poor thing’s not quite as old as my kids… but it dates from before the turn of the millennium, so there’s that. I have used it as my alarm clock almost exclusively since the turn of the millennium, come to think on it.

    And then this morning I found the hard way that I’d forgotten to account for the fact that its ancient Windows CE 2.1 operating system couldn’t adjust for a Daylight Savings Time regression (“fall back!”) that had changed dates over a decade ago. Usually I remember that it has the wrong date and adjust it the night before so my alarm goes off on time. (And then re-adjust on the “correct” date. Sigh.) Not last night, though.

    (more…)

  • Satisfactory: Rocky Start, 2.5 Updates Later

    Post tagged:

    I got this done, start to finish, in the span of about a week. This included taking yesterday off from work (as an ostensible mental health day, which I definitely needed) to hunker down & finish adding clips, editing footage down to a somewhat-reasonable 39 minutes, and recording my voice-over.

    This meant listening to my recorded voice bits repeatedly until everything was trimmed down and slotted into place. It was every bit as cringe-inducing as you suspect.

    At any rate, here you go:

    All things being equal? I’m actually proud of this one. I took the fact that the game loaded in with a reset/default player avatar and used that to create a kind of narrative path for the video to follow. During the edit, I discovered a couple of other fun things to do along the way.

    It could be better, but I could’ve done much worse, too. Go, me.

  • A Diligent Worker I Am

    I took today off as a mental-health and personal-projects day, in advance of starting my on-call rotation tomorrow. I needed the break. Technically I need a longer break but I was so busy and stressed out and off-balance this month that I didn’t think to actually apply for time off until… yesterday.

    Oh well.

    I still got up with the alarm, though. Being on a pill-taking regimen sort of requires sticking to the daily routine; if I sleep through the alarm, my phone’s pill-taking reminder goes off a while later anyway. So I went through the regular start-of-day shuffle: shave, shower, etc.

    While in the shower, the solution to a nagging work problem came to me. Because I am who I am, as soon as I got to my computer I confirmed the validity of the idea, then loaded up my work email and sent a message to my boss about the solution.

    I get brownie points for that, right? Good. Thanks.

  • So Long, Augtober

    We were getting 80F+ temperatures in the middle of October. Not just once, but repeatedly. Today, however, the rains finally arrived and “Augtober” can be nailed into its coffin and buried in the deepest pit we can find.

    If “endless summer” is what we have to look forward to in the Pacific Northwest going forward, I want to know where I can go to escape from it.

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