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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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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. So here’s to a Happy 2026. 🍾🎉
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…
Our anniversary fell on Thanksgiving this year, and rather than celebrate the two together, we opted to skip Thanksgiving and celebrate our anniversary in Germany, at the invitation from a friend who lives there. We should’ve known better. We have never had successful anniversary vacations. The wife and I have tried several times to plan things to celebrate the day, but something always seems to…
Sometime back in the spring, my brother messaged me and told me that Fields of the Nephilim , a gothic rock band from the late 80s/early 90s, was going to be playing a show in London at the end of October. He said we should go, and, at the time, I scoffed, mentally rolled my eyes, and said “Sure, why not travel 3500+ miles to see a concert”. But that idea of traveling to the UK, a country I’ve…
Just a quick update. I’m still working on the 30 Days to Learn Laravel course on Laracasts . I’ve completed all but the last two lessons. I’ve really gotten lost in the the Test Driven Development part. It’s just not making any sense. I get frustrated, and give up, and then a week later come back to it, start the lesson from the begining and try again. I’m not a programmer, so a lot of this isn’t…
I’m wrapping up a week long stay at a friend’s house down in the Northern Neck part of Virginia. I’m house/dog sitting, and their house sits on one of the creeks that feeds into a river that feeds into the Rappohannok River, which feeds into Chesapeake Bay. It’s over three hours from my house in the ‘burbs and life definitely is slower and quieter down here. It’s been a nice change of pace. While…
I never answer the “Scam Likely” calls. Same with “Charity Call” or “No Caller ID” as well. Typically. Friday I received three back-to-back calls from a “No Caller ID number. On the third time, I figured I’d pick up, as typically the scam and charity calls just go to the next number in their list. When I picked it up, a person who identified himself as “Deputy Jerome Brown” asked for me. He said…
In my most recent entry , I’d mentioned that I was working my way through the PHP For Beginners course on Laracasts . I completed the entirety of the course this past weekend, and enjoyed every bit of it. I might not have understood every bit of it, but I’m not worried about that. The more I work with it, the better I’ll get at grasping some of the concepts that eluded me.’ I’d also stated that I…
As stated in the post about moving to Statamic , I’ve been diving into learning PHP via Laracasts . After years of scraping the surface of PHP, mostly via WordPress, I ve decided to throw myself in the deep end. Hope someone is around to throw me a life preserver! I’ve been going through the PHP for Beginners course to start, because I’d like to look at the code and have at least some idea of…
The subtitle of this entry could be “fighting with Statamic, getting thrown to the ground, getting up, dusting myself off, getting kicked in the teeth, spitting out blood, advacing with fists up, and finally getting a knock-out blow in”. In truth, I’m pretty sure that my issues in getting Statamic to work the way I want is 95% my fault. It was one of those scenarios where I had it working, made a…
The title of the this post would’ve made more sense had I managed to get my blog moved from Grav CMS over to Statamic sooner. Before the Statamic website refresh. Before Buckshot Thunderstride (the fantasic elk above) was removed from the homepage in favor of the new design (which is gorgeous). I started the process of moving the blog away from Grav CMS some months ago... but I got lazy. Copying…
Going into the new year, I ve been thinking about resolutions and accomplishments. I have a list of things I d like to achieve this year, and I thought I would write them down here so I can revisit at the end of the year. Health/Body Exercise more. Not necessarily to lose weight (though lord knows I have a lot of weight I could lose), but just to be more mobile. Less sitting in front of the…
I ve been wanting to write for the past two months. I ve been wanting to keep a cheerful outlook (as tough as that is), and everything I ve written about has been full of gloom and doom. As a result, I have ended up deleting several posts. So, with that said, let me just say, I hope you have a happy, healthy, and positive year. Peace.
The spark of creativity has fizzled. Which is fine, as I ve come to accept that it comes and goes. It does leave several projects I had in progress or wanted to work on up in the air. These included a new backend for this site (considering going to Statamic ), and a completely new website dedicated to electronic music. Instead of productive creativity, my brain is currently absorbed by slither.io…
Driving around the DMV has gotten worse. People are not paying attention, feel more entitled, or too absorbed in their phones. Every time I m out now, I witness something ridiculous; people running red lights, not stopping at stop signs, swerving all over the roads. Every. Time. Been playing bachelor this Fourth of July weekend, as the wife has gone back to AZ to visit family and friends. Her mom…
Another work related one, and given that s all I ve seemingly been doing lately ( as per my last post ), then that s what you re going to get. Ran into this bit of code today: .p-noborder > .p-tabview .p-tabview-panels { border: 0 !important; } .p-noborder > .p-tabview .p-tabview-panels { border: 0 !important; } Exact same code, and right next to each other in the file. According to GitLens , one…
I didn t want June to slip by without a post, but when realizing I hadn t written in some time, I also realized I didn t really have much to say. The biggest thing is work. We had a huge project at work whose deadline came and went (We all waved at it as it went zooming by), and I ve been dealing with the mop up (re: bugs) for the past six weeks. Starting towards the end of April, project…
I ve recently found myself exploring options other than Goodreads for tracking books I want to read and have read. While I do enjoy some of the features the Goodreads app on my phone has, mainly being able to scan a barcode and have it added to my "To Read" list, I really don t visit bookstores nearly as much as I used to, and instead rely on algorithms and reviews on book sites to tell me what my…
After my recent post about getting out and engaging more, I found myself coordinating a team lunch for some co-workers in the area. As a few of the people were going to meet in the office beforehand, I decided to go in, even if it meant driving past where we were all meeting for lunch, and then backtracking. It was a bit surreal to be back in the office itself. And, I realized with a bit of a…
Like many people, I have found myself a little less outgoing since Covid. Prior to 2020, I was involved in community theater, went camping often, and was at my local pub at least once a week. Several times, I organized happy hours for friends, and was much more outgoing. After things opened back up and life started getting back to normal, I found I was just as happy staying at home and watching TV…
My dad preferred to use the term "Frugal" as opposed to being "Cheap". After my parent s divorce, his frugality escalated, with him not wanting to shell out for things he deemed "unneccesary". When I was in high school he didn t want to pay for a yearbook, nor a class ring. Getting him to help with money for band trips was a chore. He also took to buying the store brands of everything he could.…
Both the Mrs. and I have this cough that just won t go away. As a result, NYE was spent at home, with her in bed early and me watching football. Truth to tell, this isn t much different from our normal NYE celebrations; it s probably our least favorite holiday, and we tend to stay at home regardless. Overall, the holdays were low-key. Sarah came up Christmas Eve, and we did our gift dice game…
Yesterday was my birthday, and it was one of the better ones in a long time. It was just the Mrs. and I for the day, and we went up to Frederick to play pinball at Spinners and then spent the rest of the day in downtown Frederick itself, doing some last minute Christmas shopping. We had a lovely lunch at The Orchard , and later in the evening, when it was dark, we went to see the boats along…
One of the things that surprised me most about my successful attempt at NaNoWriMo this year was how... not hard it was. I won t say it was easy, but it was a lot easier than I expected. I think there were only two or three nights where I struggled to meet my goal. And yes, some nights I fell short. Not often enough to make it reaching the goal of 50,000 words a serious struggle, however. My story…
I actually did it. 50,000 words. Well, as of this writing, 50,171. And I still have two days left. I plan on continuing the story. There is still a bunch left to write. And it s been fun. I want to see how it ends. I ll probably do a full write-up of the process later, but right now, I m going to word work (I left the typo in, as I found it amusing) on some website stuff I ve been putting off.
NaNoWriMo has progressed a lot better than I had expected, to be frank. I m halfway through the 50,000 words, sitting at 25,062. A whole day early even. Go me! It s been a bit of a revelation. During prior attempts at writing stories, I would usually have a basic idea of the story I wanted to write, typically a beginning, a middle, and maybe an end. Not this time, baby. I have been completely…
One thousand, nine hundred and fifty one words tonight. It s more real if I type it completely out. I was worried about not having a completely planned out story. I had a couple of characters and a couple of plot points. But nothing like a linear story line. And then I realized I don t necessarily need a complete story right now. I can write each chapter from a character s point of view, and then…
1,707 words for my first day. Not the rocket launch I d hoped, but not the failure to launch either. Rather than go with the previous story I had in place, I opted for something completely new to me. No outline, only the basic idea of a structure, pretty bare bones overall. It will be quite the effort to come up with 50,000 words by the end of the month based on what I have in my head so far. But…
Having decided to go all-in on NaNoWriMo this year, I hopped onto the website to setup an account to help keep track of my progress, find some support in the community, and maybe even attended a local writing session. When I signed up with my email, I was a bit surprised to find that my email had already been used. Apparently I ve already signed up. Once I recovered my password, I started the…
Looking over the past few entires, it seems I’m in the habit of starting things, and then not following through. My “Social Media Roundup Sundays” fizzled out almost as soon as it started. Shortly after that first post, I decided social media does me more harm than good right now (I get so worked up over anything political), so I opted to just step away. Unfortunately I had to reactivate my…
For most of my adult years, I ve leaned towards Sci-Fi and Fantasy for my genre of choice when it comes to books. I love the imaginative worlds brought forth to light, the science and the magic of it all. And I m all for being creative when it comes to naming characters, but I always scowl a bit when an author tries to get a bit too clever when coming up with a name. I m currently reading A Day of…
Twitter: After reading about the latest indictments of Trump, it’s very hard to stop myself from jumping into the feeds of people I know who voted for him and say “How’s that working out for you?” (7/28) Well, as far as rebrandings go, I think Twitter s X is about the bottom of the barrel in terms of innovation, design, messaging, etc. (7/24) Instagram: Trying to get the photo off Instasgram and…
When collecting the past posts from my previous blogs, I noticed a huge gap, between 2009 and 2016. It doesn t take a genius to realize that s when I started posting heavily on social media. It was mostly Facebook then, but there were a scattering of Twitter posts throughout those years as well. I joined both Facebook and Twitter in 2008, and the posting to the respective platforms ramped up from…
It s like this. I can t settle. I have an idea for a website I want to build, based around a community. Similar to Goodreads, which is built on top of Ruby on Rails . So I figured I d build my website on RoR. But I don t actually know RoR, so I decide I ll learn it. And after a month and a bit of progress, I realize that learning RoR is hard. I m not grasping some concepts that I feel like should…
I need to learn Javascipt. I ve mentioned this many times before . So, what do I decide to do when I find myself with a lot of downtime at work? Try to learn Ruby on Rails , of course. This is definitely outside of my wheelhouse. RoR is a full-stack framework, designed to power the backend of your application. I have in mind a website, sort of a mashup between Scribophile , and Goodreads , geared…
We had a nice, quiet Christmas; both kids were here, my mom, and our friend Gina. I made everyone breakfast, and then we did our gift exchange. Rather than buy presents for specific people, we each buy two gifts to bring to the table. Then we roll dice, and depending on the number, pass them left, right, across the table, etc. The randomness is fun, and some hilarity is bound to happen. For…
Life has an annoying habit of getting in the way. Along with some personal family issues, I had two freelance clients decide that they wanted updates this week. That does put a crimp into the creativity time when it s needed to complete work for clients. I ended up completing that work early last night, and jumped back into my piece of music I ve been building on with @LNADoesAudioStuff s 12 Days…
I feel like I was just here. And checking the date from the previous post you can see that I m posting this on the same day. ( Editors Note: leaving dates as same caused the order of the posts to be wonky. Changed date of previous entry to be the day before. Meh ) This post should be a quickie; I m working on Day 6, which are vocals. I started with the Emvoice One plugin, and after some trial and…
So, tomorrow, when Day 5 takes place, I m going to challenge myself to complete that day s challenge. On time!! That was written three days ago . So we can see how well that little challenge of mine went. I can make the usual excuses (work, chores around the house) and the not-so-usual excuses (holiday shopping, holiday parties), which are all true. But I could have found a half-hour here and…
Day four s challenge, the astute among you will notice, is Synths. And I spent a surprisingly long time on trying to get a sound that I was ok with. It didn t have to be perfect, but I wanted it to at least fit in with what I have so far. I m a bit late in starting this challenge according to Liina s schedule: Step 4 was supposed to happen on the 6th of December, but here it is on the 7th (and, as…
Last entry ended with me asking for some good vibes to be sent my way, as my audio had completely disappeared. Well, you all (all two of you maybe? Probably my wife and my mom) must ve had the good mojo flowing, as once I came back to it, I not only managed to get by audio back, but it appears I now know what to do when I want to record audio from the computer while monitoring on headphones as…
Today was all bout that bass (bass, bass, bass, bass), and I ended up with three different instruments filling the role. I have a glide bass utilizing Bitwig s Phase 4 instrument, a sub using Serum , and a plucky bass with some delay, also using Serum. Nothing too special here. The glide and sub are sharing the same notes, while the pluck is doing some on-and-off beat stabs. It s also sitting an…
Day 1 of the 12 Days of Creativity starts off with the foundation of pretty much all EDM, drums. As I don t know what sort of piece I m creating yet, I m going with a typical four-on-the-floor type of beat, at 128bpm. One of the (many) challenges I ve had when creating is getting lost in the myriad of sounds I ve curated over the years. I ve yet to really organize my drum hits, and if you were to…
I follow many YouTube channels from creative types, mostly in the electronic music space. Easily one of my top five favorites -- LNA Does Audio Stuff -- is holding a "Creativity Challenge" for the month of December. From the Challenge site : 12 Days of creativity is a production challenge, designed to help, guide, and inspire music makers to finish their songs. The intent is to challenge producers…