The Mandelbear's Musings

Strange week. No disasters, and some success -- mainly my short concert at FK-NO 3 (the third virtual FilKONtario) -- but also some computer weirdness, fighting with WordPress (I may need a bigger hammer), a completely flipped schedule, and an unexpectedly large amount of ?emotional? something-or-other.

I didn't practice nearly as much as I should have for my concert set, but it was (barely) enough. The set was 15 minutes, which I figured (correctly) would be about all I'd be capable of. I'm pretty sure most of the emotional weirdness came from the setlist:

1. Wheelin'
2. The River
3. Eyes Like the Morning

I mentioned in my introduction that "Eyes Like the Morning" probably doesn't need a trigger warning for anyone but me. (I could have been wrong about that. Feel free to correct me in the comments.) On top of that, I've had For Amy (CW: major character death) as my top earworm for the week, which doesn't help.

Oh, yeah -- some of the week's weirdness was due to the fact that in the process for setting up my lair for N's new fosterling, m's friend k, to quarantine in for the week, I somehow managed to leave my main laptop, Sable, behind on my desk. Oops! Fortunately I have spares, because I seem to be the household's default destination for unloved laptops. I hauled out Raven, which normally lives in the bedroom. After which I discovered that the passwords file hadn't been synced in at least a couple of months. (No, I have no idea how that came about. Distraction?) Fortunately one can set WordPress passwords from the command line, and I'd already set up SSH to the server.

Also around computers, one of my older Thinkpads, Sherman, has been acting strangely -- quite possibly either a corrupted hard drive. Bad memory is also a possibility, though it passed the test I ran on it. Meanwhile smartd on Raven has also been complaining, which implies that its rotating rust drive is dying, so I'm in the process of setting up a new SSD for it. Terabyte SSDs are cheap!

I've been making modest progress toward modernizing the markup in GoingSideways.blog so that I can take advantage of the recent editing improvements in WordPress editing. Because the WPBakery page builder is a miserable editing environment for me, and the way it does layout (with "shortcodes", and if you don't know what that implies be thankful) makes it difficult to switch to some more modern editing environment. I think I have everything updated except the home page at this point. I may need a bigger hammer for that.

And oh, right -- there was also the dentist appointment Thursday, getting a crown replaced. (I think it was a replacement, anyway.) The technology for that process has improved amazingly since the last century, but making the new crown on the spot means an extra 45 minutes or so sitting around reading my phone. (Beats driving an hour and a half each way to the follow-up appointment for getting the lab-made crown installed, so I'm not complaining at all.)

( Notes & links, as usual )