Honestly surprised to see it was three years ago that I last tried. I thought it was at most two years ago.
Had a great poker weekend with the guys two weekends ago. It was the same weekend as that big Nor’easter so we spent a lot of it inside playing cards, cribbage, and of course, poker. Lots of food (beef ribs smoked for 12+ hours are my new favorite) along with lots of various bourbons and tequilas.
Speaking of poker, we’re going to try and get a weekly online game going again. It saved our mental bacon during the pandemic, and the weekly game was literally the highlight of most of those weeks.
Officiating a wedding for a long-time friend and her fiancee this coming weekend. Bought a new suit and everything.
Less than a month before mid-terms. 🌊
I’ve mostly stopped reading news and instead skim headlines. It’s all horrible and depressing. Can’t believe that orange turd hasn’t been removed.
Thought I was going to be able to successfully move away from Wordpress and to Statamic full time, but the one freelance client I have still on Wordpress who I thought was retiring is revamping and wants her online store back. Wordpress, and Woocommerce are already setup up, and I don’t want to recreate the store in Statamic. (plus, Woocommerce is free 🤷♂️)
I’m also “retiring” from freelance. I have a couple of sites I manage and will continue to do so, as they’re mostly hands off, but no new work. Just don’t have the heart for it anymore.
Shortly after my daughter graduated college, we bought her a new Macbook Air M4. It was light years ahead of the computer we bought her before college, a Macbook Air from early 2015. That one had the Intel Core i5 with 8gb of ram.
I decided to keep her old Air just to have around to play with. And after a couple of months, I ended up purchasing my own Macbook Air M4 (which I’m currently using to write this up!) and essentially mothballed the old Air.
About a year ago I decided I want to install Linux on it. I dug it out, booted it up, and… firmware lock.
Wait, what?
I never put a firmware lock on the Air. In fact, I’ve never put a firmware lock on any computer I’ve owned in the last 30+ years.
After lots of digging into old forums and reddit posts (where I was accused of stealing the Air), I realized I wasn’t going to be able to fix this on my own. At least not without some serious deep techie know-how. I was pointed to a tutorial on how to reflash EFI ROM, but that included access to a Raspberry PI, a breadboard, low resistance resistors, jumper wires…you get the idea. That solution was way beyond my skills (although part of me is tempted. After all, worse I can do is brick my already bricked Air). Despairing of ever figuring that out, I dug into my Apple purchase history and found the Air listed under my hardware purchases on getsupport.apple.com.
After a year’s worth of half-hearted attempts to fix this, I finally made an appointment at the Apple Genius Bar last night. And the short of it is… they can’t/won’t help me because the computer is “OBS”. Obsolete.
Which is annoying. The specs are still decent for a mid-grade Linux machine. Aside from a few stickers, the aluminum unibody is still in great shape. And it would’ve been fun to tinker with.
But because Apple can’t be bothered to unlock an older machine, it’s gonna be dropped in the recycling bin at Best Buy.
So annoying. And frustrating. Thanks for not helping me keep old tech out of the landfill Apple. (¬_¬)
Because of Juneteenth, Father’s Day weekend was a three-day affair. Each day was productive in its own way: Friday I worked on some freelance work, Saturday spent most of the day with my mom doing some stuff for her around the house and Sunday, Father’s Day, the whole family went to see a minor league baseball game. It was perfect weather for baseball, and is there anything better than an afternoon with the family (even my oldest who claimed he spent more time in the sun on Sunday than in the past five years) having hot dogs, beers, and watching baseball?
The freelance work I did Friday mostly involved wrapping up a Wordpress to Statamic conversion for marylandliteraryreview.com. When I originally built MLR some 8 years ago, I needed a few plugins to get the site to behave as I wanted. Most of the main issue was getting the archives to behave the same way for every issue. And knowing what I know now, I’m sure I could’ve built it differently. But I built it in a rather convoluted way that required me to follow a 24-step checklist, with some of those items being nested 4 levels deep. Obviously not an optimal build, nor a very efficient use of time.
The new version involves me creating a new issue, and then associating the various works with that issue. And that’s about all to it. All the archiving happens automagically, the various genres now all have their own dedicated pages, the seo is LOADS better, and did I mention how easy it is to update now? The most recent issue is the first one in Statamic itself and I can confidently say I will no longer dread when it’s time to put out the issue.
I’ll still dread poets and their insistence on weird spacings, and indents. But that’s another story.
My brother set out this year to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. For the uninitiated, the trail runs from Campo, California, near the California/Mexico border, to Manning Park, British Columbia, on the Canadian/US border. That’s a distance of approximately 2,650 miles. He had taken a sabbatical from him job and planned on hiking for 5 months.
He had a Garmin GPS tracker that we all watched him on (“we” being his family, obviously), and it was fun to track his progress through the California desert. The photos he shared were all amazing, and at points he was above the clouds, hiking along at nearly 11,000 ft in places.
Unforunately his trip had to be cut short, as he developed “Anterior tibialis tendonitis plus pitting edema”. Essentially he was experiencing inflammation of the tendon at the front of his ankle and experiencing swelling from fluid buildup in the area. The doctor told him it would be best to heal for at least a month. So after discussing it with his wife, he decided he was done for this year.
The good news is we got to see him a lot sooner than expected. It was nice having him visit, even if only for just 5 days. We spent the time eating crappy food and talking about his adventures. Even if his hike was cut early, he still managed to hike 400+ miles. Not too shabby for someone in their early 50s!
I’ve had Rosie truck in the shop three times now for the same issue: putting the transmission in gear suddenly feels like it’s shifting through goop. It’s almost like it’s sticky. The first time I took it in, they said it was just a matter of cleaning the linkage and some sensor. The second time I took it in, they told me the linkage was bent, so they straightened it, and cleaned everything again.
The third, and most recent time, they replaced bushings (and cleaned) and the transmission has been shifting well for about a month or so. It seems that every couple of months the shifting starts getting sluggish, and I’m hoping the bushings fixed it, as my garage (who are awesome btw; after the first visit, I haven’t been charged. I even tried to get them to take money this last time) has told me they’ve gone as far as they can and if the issue starts to happen again, that I need to take it to a specialty transmission shop.
One might wonder why I would put this much money into a 20-year old truck with 185,000 miles. Well, for one, it’s a Toyota. They last. And two, I simply love my truck.
But that didn’t stop the wife from asking if I wanted to go test drive a new Tacoma I found at a local dealership. While I love my truck, I had been preparing for the worst and had been looking at new ones in case the garage gave me bad news. We were heading out of town and would be driving right by the dealership in question. I said we could go look but it wouldn’t make sense to test drive, as we were also in the process of buying her a new car. Buying two new cars at once? Ridiculous! She said it couldn’t hurt to just take it for a test drive at least.
She was wrong. It did.
I test drove the new 2026 Tacoma and man, was that a nice truck. All the bells and whistles. Beautiful Heritage Blue color. Nice ride. And man, I wanted that truck.
But of course, it wouldn’t have made sense to buy two new cars at the same time. As the wife commutes daily, while I work from home, it simply didn’t make sense for me to have a new truck while Rosie truck seems to be working. For the moment. So we bought the wife a new hybrid SUV.
I would like to put some money into Rosie truck though. She suffered mightly during a hail storm two years ago and due to some mis-communication between the wife and I (And I simply not knowing), we never submitted a claim. And along with the dents, the paint is fading and the clear coat has failed in several places.
I’d like to get the dents removed and the paint redone, but I’m sure that’s $15K-$20K. I haven’t received an estimate. In the back of my head, I’d like to do some of the body work myself, but I know that’s a lot of work. Doubly (triply?) so, given I don’t have any experience.
But everyone has to start at the beginning when learning, right?
It would help if I had a decent garage. And someone with the know how to hold my hand. I’m lacking in both. It might just make more sense to get that estimate.
And prepare for more money to fly out the window one way or the other.
Stuck in a rut again. The routine is oblique, the days blend.
Been playing a lot of Cyberpunk. Mostly I run around blowing up cars and cops, waiting for the MaxTac troops to show. Then I get up on a building and throw down my grenades and blow them up with my maxed-out O’Five.
I should look for a mod that dresses up the MaxTac troops in little ICE uniforms.
Revamped my travel site, and now working to get the details from my trips overseas uploaded.
Poker weekend with the boys is coming up in two weeks. Definitely looking forward to that. Always good to hang with that group.
Got a nice bonus from work. As it’s treated like income, I got about half of it. w00t.
If you ever happen to read my “Now” page, you might have seen in the “And so on…” section that I mentioned shelving the micro.blog experiment for the time being and moving my travel site over to Statamic.
The micro.blog shelving is now permanent, as I canceled my account this morning. If it’s able to do what I want to do, I’m not smart enough to make it happen. Maybe I’ll revisit that project down the road. I like what Manton Reece and team are doing, and I’ll be keeping tabs on them.
As for the other “And so on…” I not only moved my travel site over the Statamic, I redid the whole front end as well. Now Scenic My Way has had not only a tune up, but a fresh coat of paint as well. I posted an abbreviated write-up and added a few of the 400+ pictures I took when I went to Edinburgh. I still have to upload photos and post about my trips to London, Amsterdamn, and Munich. Munich was a disaster, but I’m still going to post the pictures I took.
After washing my Airpods a second time, they started acting a bit wonky. Shocker, I know. The volume would suddenly get loud then soft in one pod, or the ANC would cut in and out.
I bit the bullet and went and bought a new set of the AirPods 3 Pro. And discovered that if I want to take advantage of all the features, I have to upgrade the iOS on my iPhone 12 to iOS26. I’m currently on 18, and after seeing my wife’s phone after she upgraded, I have no desire to be on 26. I didn’t like Windows Vista’s Aero Glass, and I don’t like Apple’s Liquid Glass.
My old Airpods would show each individual AirPod’s battery status on my phone. Instead of showing the each AirPod, now my phone shows the icon for what looks to be the AirPods Max headphone 🎧. So I can’t tell if one of the AirPods didn’t get seated in its case and isn’t fully charged now.
Apple’s updates as of late have become a bit annoying for me. I inadvertently upgraded to Sequoia on my laptop, and discovered more annoyances; the rounded corners are waaay too rounded. If you want to resize a window you have to grab outside of the corner. The Preview app has signatures busted in places. For some odd reason, my wife’s phone is telling her that my AirPods were left behind at the gym. While they were sitting next to me on the table.
It hasn’t been the best of years, especially this last half. But I’m hopeful for 2026, for reasons unknown. I just prefer to be an optimist, I suppose.
The wife and I both took an extra day off to acclimate from the time change. Which was good, as we were both up by 4am. We were completely unpacked, and had all our laundry done, folded, and put away by 6. We decided to go to an early breakfast and then grocery shopping. And after shopping we decided we were going to keep up the good exercise we got in Europe and joined the local rec center, for access to their gym equipment, indoor track, and perhaps pickleball in the future.
When I woke up that morning, I felt like I had razor burn on my neck. Checking in the mirror, there was definitely a small, dime-sized rash, and what looked like small whiteheads. Which was puzzling. The wife suggested it might have been friction burn from the strap of my duffle bag I was carrying cross-body style through the airport, and I thought she might be right.
After walking out of the rec center, and once back in the car, I realized that razor burn feeling was much stronger. And, worryingly, much larger. I checked the mirror, and sure enough, that rash was now easily the size of a quarter and disappeared below the neckline of my shirt. I pulled it aside and discovered it went down my neck to my shoulder. What’s more, those little whiteheads were now full blown blisters, some the size of peas.
Great.
The wife was convinced I’d picked up Ebola somehow (she tends to worry), so we immediately went straight to Urgent Care. After a short wait and even shorter examination, the doc asked if I’d ever had the Shingles vaccine. Which I have. But apparently the vaccination was no match for the stress of the vacation, as I had a full-blown eruption going down my neck and shoulder now.
We picked up my prescriptions (topical cream and if that didn’t work, steroids), and then decided to lay low the rest of the day.
And naturally, on top of that, I got one of my patented “End of year colds that always turns into bronchitis”. So we signed up for the gym, and I immediately got sick.
Thankfully, the topical cream worked wonderfully and I was all cleared up within a few short days. And the bronchitis never materialized.
You know what DID materialize? Malware. On ALL my websites (I host about a dozen sites for friends and family). So I’ve been working on cleaning that mess up for the past week. A pox on all malware creators.
Essentially, I got hit with a biological virus and a digital one in the same week. Go me.
