19 Dec 2022
I was going to use the obvious phrase “the elephant in the room” for this title but then everyone would assume I was making a bad mastodon pun. This is not about mastodon. This is about cancer. The tiger is a better metaphor for the thing I’ve been pretending isn’t happening.
Hello, I have cancer. Throat cancer, specifically. It is not that bad as far as cancer goes and my doctors tell me that once I get through the chemo and radiation there is a very high chance I will be 100% cured. Not like “in remission” cured but actually cured cured. It’s good news! But the chemo and radiation for the next seven weeks are probably going to be tough. I start today.
I did not restart this blog to turn it into a cancer diary, because unless you actually have cancer, cancer diaries can be super boring. But I am going to talk about it, because I think stuff through and settle my mind by writing about it.
I was going to seperate the cancer posts from my normal blog posts but it looks like that will be complicated and I don’t have the spoons for that. The cancer posts after this one will have content warnings in the titles, you may skip if you wish. I do hope to continue writing about other more normal things, such as cats. Because you cannot not have cats, even in times of darkness.
Yeah, the timing of the pandemic AND the holidays AND twitter collapse AND restarting a blog AND getting cancer is a bit much. I wish things were all different and that it hadn’t happened right now. But as a wise man said in a book once, that’s not for us to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.
So far I’m trying my best.
10 Dec 2022
I was going to allow myself one and only one post about the tech details for this blog that interests no one but other nerdy bloggers. And then I wrote 1000 words about it before the voice in my head that was yelling “SHORT POSTS. YOU WERE GOING TO DO SHORT POSTS” made me feel so guilty I stopped. Here is the shorter attempt.
The before times
For years this blog was in self-hosted Wordpress, which I had found increasingly slow, complicated, and unwieldy. I’m sure there were lots of ways I could have made it faster, simpler, and uh, wieldy, if I had wanted to really work at it. But I got to the point where the maintenance felt like a chore and I wanted to try something else that was just simpler.
The middle times
I have had so many incomplete “get the blog into something simpler” attempts, including delusionally thinking I was going to write my own blog platform, and also a couple passes of delusionally thinking I knew enough CSS to do my own design by hand from scratch.
I started using Jekyll, the static site generator that powers github pages, during one of those attempts. At the time it was the most popular and best-supported SSG. It’s since become less popular (everyone loves Hugo now), but I didn’t want to start over over again with yet another language and framework and templating system and and and, so Jekyll it is.
After I realized my own CSS was not going to cut it I settled on the Lanyon theme. It has some minor changes (I’m capable enough at CSS to poke at an existing design) but I mostly used it as-is.
Sadly I never made far enough in any of these blog reboots to actually stop running Wordpress.
Today
Finally I made it far enough into a blog reboot to where I am no longer running Wordpress.
The site is still Jekyll, and still Lanyon. It is definitely much simpler and more comfortable for me to maintain and to understand.
I use git locally and push to github as a backup, but I don’t deploy anything out of github or have any kind of CI/CD system. I have an old-school web host that runs apache, and I just build the site and then copy the files to that host with scp like I am a caveman straight out of 1997.
07 Dec 2022
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a despairing twitter user in possession of a moribund blog must be in need of a blog reboot.
I have tried a bunch of times to restart this blog over the years, from writing more regularly, to design changes, to killing the whole thing altogether and starting over from scratch. All of these have been really hard things for me to get headway on, for various reasons. It did not help that twitter was right there, did not make me install any frameworks or learn new programming languages, and was really addictive. But, as you know, twitter. (deepest of sighs).
With the imminent-loss-of-twitter incentive I’ve gotten farther into the process this time. I’m trying really hard not to get mired in details and to just put something workable up. There’s still an awful lot of work left to do, but it’s up and there’s some text on it, which is a start.
My primary goal for the blog this time around is to not be so insanely perfectionist about it. One huge advantage of twitter for me was that everything about it (the character limits, the pacing) very neatly sidestepped my insane need to over-write and over-edit everything to death. So I’m hoping to spend less time on the Enormous Serious Thing It Took Me A Week to Write and more on just, well, short easy things that kind of look a lot like tweets. (Note: I’ve done four drafts of this post and it’s twice as long as it should be so maybe not succeeding so well yet.)
Also there will be lots of cat and garden and coffee photos, because of course there will.
07 Dec 2022
A new blog is forthcoming.
26 Dec 2012
Belkin WeMo: Control home electronics from your smart phone
L: OMG I want this!
E: Now you never need to look up from your smart phone to interact with the environment.
L: I was thinking it would be helpful for things like “did I forget to turn off the espresso machine again…”
E: Yeah…
L: Also, it is a $50 gadget that can replace a perfectly good $2.99 lamp timer! Who wouldn’t want that!
E: You can integrate it with your social media. Annoy your facebook friends with “Eric turned on the lamp! Eric turned off the lamp!” updates. It’s better than Farmville!
24 Dec 2012
I was making really nice latte hearts and leaves for a little while there, but then I forgot how and now I’m back to pouring multi-tentacled monster fetuses.
28 Oct 2012
I have a big yard. So big, in fact, that after 15 years living here I am still finding fruit trees lurking in the underbrush.
Up in the area we call “the meadow” there are a handful of really old pear trees. We get small pears every other year or so, but the fruit disappears before it gets ripe. I assume that squirrels are getting to them. I don’t especially like pears so I’ve never really kept on top of it.
This year I discovered a little tree right at the edge of the meadow that had little round fruits on it. I thought they were crab apples. I had tasted one a month or so ago, and again today, and it was so tart and tannic that I had to spit it out.
Yesterday I harvested all of the remaining fruits from the tree, and brought them home.
Here’s where I get confused. Those aren’t apples. Apples have a shoulder — the indent between the stem and the fruit on all apples. They’re also especially green for crab apples, which tend to be red or at least have a red “blush” when they turn ripe. These fruits are entirely green, with heavy russeting (a thick brown skin) and long stems with no shoulder.
I spent a good portion of the day googling, and I’m still not 100% sure what kind of fruit these are. They aren’t apples, and they aren’t quince (an exceptionally tart apple-like fruit). I think they may be old european wild pears. The wild pear was commonly used as a rootstock for domestic pears at the turn of the century, and it is not unusual (especially for old trees) for the grafted top of a pear to die off and the rootstock take over.
Sadly this means that these pears are probably inedible. Although they would probably make excellent pear cider. I used to make big batches of (hard) apple cider every year, so cider pears would not be unwelcome.
I put the mystery pears into the fridge; some pears need chilling to ripen. We’ll see if these soften up and turn sweeter.
23 Sep 2012
Putting tomatoes into jars. Lots of tomatoes. Lots of jars.
06 Sep 2012
Guess what I’m doing next weekend?
05 Sep 2012
