I received my new MacBook Air on Friday, and finished migrating my configuration to it a few hours later. This 2025 model replaces the 2020 version I’ve been using happily as my primary ‘browsing’ computer. And so far at least I’m happy with the upgrade.
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It has been an… interesting? … year so far. What is going on to the south of us here in Canada is beyond weird- every day makes me feel more and more like I’m living in the world portrayed in the movie Idiocracy. Coming off an end of 2024 that saw the passing of two of our loved ones, it has been a bit much.
But February and March have also been a couple of months wherein my wife and I started to think about fun things we want to have and do in our retirement. We have plans! And some of those plans are actually in progress!
And then I saw a post over on Lou Plummer’s blog that listed the things that make him happy, and that is a bit of inspiration to add to my energy reserve. So what’s on my happiness list?
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I’ve been doing something akin to ‘blogging’ on the Internet for quite a few years. I don’t have an exact date that I started and the definition of ‘blogging’ is kind of tenuous. But my notes indicate that I began sharing my thoughts and opinions on the web sometime around 1998 or 1999.
Every once in a while, though, I get some reminder of the durability of this strange pastime of mine. Today I noticed I had an ‘achievement’ from WordPress in my notifications that got me thinking.
I’ve got a few ‘plans’ over the next couple of years where having a cargo trailer would be a benefit. I am at the point where I’m pricing out options and starting to read/watch videos on towing.
This video is extremely helpful and very educational…
But I think I’ve figured out a few other things as well about my wants.
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The world is topsy turvy at the moment. There are a lot of things being done by Trump and Musk that sicken me and frankly should outrage any American worthy of being called a citizen. But if there is one thing I have to pick that angers me the most it is how the U.S. is now treating the Ukraine and Russia.
Apparently the Ukraine is to blame for Russia illegally invading them, destroying Ukrainian cities, and killing tens of thousands of innocents. If I understand correctly, they are guilty of not surrendering their home and land to the Putin dictatorship. Oh, and Putin isn’t the dictator: Zelensky is.
Why is the leader of the U.S. parroting Russian propaganda lies? And how can any ‘peace’ negotiated by this toddler possibly be considered ‘fair’?
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Short version: Telus installed an upgraded network device. First it broke our landline phone, then our inbound network connectivity thereby disconnecting my blogs. I spent hours on the phone with Telus support, and fixed one of those problems myself despite their ‘help’. The phone still didn’t work, then a really good Telus technician came and solved all the problems..
Longer version… continue reading.
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I will be bringing brought down my blog server on Saturday to re-organize my server rack in order to fit in a new rack-mounted UPS.
I am not setting a specific time, but hopefully no more than two or three hours sometime in the afternoon. I’ll update this post when the outage is complete. The outage started at 1:00 PM pacific time and completed at approximately 1:50 PM. More details can be found in the rest of this post.
The little server in my basement that runs all my blogs has been down since February 8th. I finally got it back up and running today and, after correcting a few hiccups, the blogs are back up as of February 12th at 10:15 PM Pacific.
What went wrong? And why did it take so long to repair? Well… that’s a bit of an interesting story, but only if you are technically minded. The short, non-technical answer: there was a problem with the storage, and I fixed it by replacing the failing part.
Read on for the longer and more complicated answer…
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The world right now seems to be a bit of a mess from my perch here in Canada, what with the ongoing MAGAt dumpster fire south of the border. It sometimes seems like there is no justice, no type of consequence even for the most deliberately toxic behaviours.
But sometimes, not as often as I’d like, there is a small glimmer of justice. Someone occasionally pays a price for their cruelty, arrogance, and corrupt behaviour. This is one of those times…
https://www.thedailybeast.com/elon-musks-far-right-politics-are-tanking-tesla-sales
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I have been completing a few technology upgrades around the house this year. The latest activity is replacing my aging NetGear Orbi quasi-mesh (3rd node was a low-end TP-Link WiFi hub) with something a bit more capable.
The change-over went very smoothly but produced a few ‘old man’ moments as I considered the hardware itself. Size isn’t everything, but sometimes bigger is… if not better, at least necessary.
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