I’m on a motorcycle trip that I will detail later on my Geek on a Harley blog. I’m heading to Edmonton and the highway through Jasper has re-opened recently. I found out last night before starting on today’s ride that limited services have become available in the townsite, so I decided to stop for fuel there.
I have a few observations from my brief visit to the site of July’s tragic forest fire.
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I spent much of my working life with a perpetual ‘to do’ list. Things were added, things were removed, but the list persisted. This was a supplement to an even bigger ‘to do’ list in the form of a project plan, but the concept was always the same. No matter how carefully I planned, new tasks always found their way onto these lists making any concept of ‘done’ rather elusive.
I’m retired now, and yet the To Do list lives on. I’ve had a household list of some kind for a decade or so, but now in my ‘golden years’ (where’s the gold?) I find the list is filling and emptying far more frequently. Yet some tasks are evergreen and never seem to make their way off the list…
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We had some visitors for the past several days. Irene’s cousin Anne and Anne’s husband Lester spent a couple of days with us as they travelled east through the province on their way to Alberta.
We had a really nice visit. I’m not exactly a social animal, but once I get going I probably can talk the ears off of a brass monkey. We had some good chats about a number of things we can’t really control: economics, politics, artificial intelligence, social media, and health. Good meals were prepared and eaten and a few drinks were consumed. And we had some lovely evenings sitting on the porch chatting as the light of the day dissipated.
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I’ve made a couple of small changes to my site’s branding. These aren’t big things: I have larger changes planned in the next few months. But they address a couple of things that were bothering me, and hopefully won’t make much of a difference to the folks who visit.
I have updated the title of my site and the ‘favicon’ it uses.
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I went into some detail early in 2024 regarding Irene’s cancer diagnosis and how the treatment had progressed to that point. Back then we were still figuring out our ‘new normal’, and although the outcomes were positive it was still a very uncomfortable situation.
Not much has changed medically since January but I thought it was appropriate to give an update on how our life with cancer is progressing.
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I have thought about what I learned from my very first participation in the Blaugust event. And I’ve tried to understand the stats related to my blog during the month. But I haven’t listed the Blaugust achievements I ‘earned’.
Achievements are not something I pursue in computer games, and I’ve carried that attitude to Blaugust as well. But it is perhaps a bit fun to at least spend a moment to consider them, so here goes.
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This year was my first time participating in the Blaugust event. I accomplished my primary purpose of posting more frequently and I learned several things that will definitely help me be a better blogger.
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Blaugust 2024 was my very first blogging event of any kind. As August comes to an end so too does the Blaugust festival, and the topic of this final week is ‘Lessons Learned’. I obviously learned a lot since I’m a complete neophyte to such events.
I suppose that the most obvious thing I learned from Blaugust was that participating in such an event can be fun! But what else did I learn in the process? A bit of introspection is in order…
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I run my blogs on a little web server in my basement. This is great because it means I control exactly how my web server is configured. It is also horrible because I control exactly how my web server is configured.
In simple terms, I screwed up. Some years back I configured Fedora to perform automatic updates after updating it to the then-current Fedora Core version 34. I thought automatic updates would keep the OS current. This was not correct.
Worse yet, my server wasn’t even actually running the Fedora core version 34 kernel: it was running FC kernel version 27. Fixing this took me far longer than it should have.
But I did finally fix it. This post explains a bit of how I resolved the issue, but for those in a rush: follow the instructions in the Fedora core documentation, including the ‘optional’ guidance to upgrade the GRUB boot loader. That bit about updating GRUB is not really optional for some releases.
If you are not in a hurry and want some details on how things can go wrong, then read on! The stooges would be proud of me…
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It is the third week of Blaugust2024 now. Unlike some folks involved in the event like Blockade85, I have little interest in posting daily. I don’t see this as a ‘competition’ with myself or others. There is nothing to win, and posting daily won’t suddenly make me an object of respect and adoration.
I’ve already exceeded my original goal for being involved in the Blaugust event: to post at least once per week. In fact, I’ve more than doubled my ‘stretch’ goal of posting eight times. So what keeps me coming back to continue writing here?
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