Category: blogging

Lunch Break

Ready for a lunch break post?

I still can’t get to the editor on a Vivaldi non-private browser window on my work laptop. It works in a private window and it works on Vivaldi on every other computer in my personal computing universe. What up?

I’ve had a couple of good nights sleep lately, but I still feel tired. I think the Covid is finally wearing my out. I put all new parts onto my breathing machine last night, which was nice, and I slept like the dead for over seven hours, which was nice, but I’m still tired today.

Did I mention the Bruins advanced to the second round? I think I need to start watching the Penguins/Islanders series. I don’t like either team, but the Bruins looked like world beaters in the first round so I’m cautiously optimistic about all possible opponents.

Music, right? I want to do car music tomorrow morning, but I don’t have anything written. There are two songs from this month that are ready for lyrics, and three more from the past couple of months too. I have to write ’em before I sings ’em though. I’m hoping that tonight before bed I’ll be able to sneak some writing in. I’m doing a challenge to record at least one song every month and I have one for this month that’s ready to mix. I just don’t know if it’s as good as some of the other things I’ve worked on this month. We’ll see.

Also music: The recording nook right now has the Vox AC15 plugged into the normal channel and the pedals are a Klon Klone, a Rat klone, and a Muff klone. I think I need to swap out the Rat for something else, and I’m not 100% sure I like the AC15 on it’s own. Maybe it’s time for the Bassbreaker 15 to come back. What I really want is my Deluxe Reverb, but it’s still at the band’s rehearsal room at our bass players house. What to do, what to do. Tone, am I right?

The kids are at their dad’s for the next couple of days. I miss them already. Harry went to school this morning and Bellana just left a minute ago. I am sad. I want them here 24/7 because I am greedy and selfish. Crud.

I should do some sunrise pics soon. I don’t know what my nana-sitting schedule is like off the top of my head, but there is a holiday weekend coming up. There’s also a wedding anniversary for someone coming up too. I wonder who?

Okay, fat boy, back to work.

The CPAP Helped

I went to bed a little before midnight last night with my alarm set for 6:00. I woke up before it went off and couldn’t fall back to sleep. I had the CPAP machine on the whole time. I figured it would help, but I was still a 6.5 foot tall guy sleeping on a two seater couch and looking like a full sized person living on dollhouse furniture. How do my sleep numbers look?

Five hours and 25 minutes of sleep.
83% of that being restful! Holy Crap, that percentage is gigantic for me!
32% Heart Rate Dip! Holy Crap, that percentage is gigantic for me!

So I guess using the machine was a good move, for last night at least. The only downside is that I had to wait an hour before I could pack it up because that’s how long it takes to upload all of the data to the server. I can deal with that.

For some reason, I cannot get to the wordpress.com editor on my Vivaldi browser on my work laptop. I can do it if I open a private window and re-log in, but I can’t get to it from the main window. Weird. Maybe I’ll try logging out and logging back in again.

Sunday night television… one of the infuriating things about hate watching Fear the Walking Dead is that every once in a while they put out an episode that doesn’t suck ass. Last night’s was okay, assuming you ignore the idiotic coincidence of that character meeting that other character out of the blue. For the most part it wasn’t so bad. I almost wish it had been terrible. It’s like Lucy and Charlie Brown and the football. Uh.. uh.. we’re getting good again… here it comes… we’re getting good agai… Nope. Back to the same old awful.

Okay, it’s Monday morning. I have to finish packing up the stuff I had out last night that I don’t need during work, get my mother her 8:00am pills, and punch into work.

Have a good one, folks. May your Monday not blow chunks.

The Spammers Found Me

I wrote something a couple of weeks ago about getting a whole bunch of followers on this page who all had the same profile picture. Spammers on wordpress.com… why?

I noticed the other day that all of those accounts had been removed from my followers list. Busted. Justice served.

Over the last two days I have gained a whole new crop of followers. They all have the same picture again. At least this batch has a different picture than the last batch.

I guess we’re back to the lawless frontier again. Yippee ki yay, pilgrim.

Are We Down?

I just tried to upload a couple of cat pics and the images failed. I replaced them with Flickr links and tried to upload the post and that failed too

Is WordPress.com down? Will this post fail too? In the grande scheme of things, does it matter?

Sunday Morning Thoughts

I’m up and showered and ready to face the day and all that. I went to sleep at about quarter to one am. I woke up a couple of times before waking up for good at about quarter to five am. My AppleWatch tells me I failed to reach four hours of sleep. I tried to go back to sleep but couldn’t do it. Early to bed tonight, I guess.

Two WordPress.com items of note:

  1. I have recently gained a handful of new followers here. That’s nice, right? They all have the same profile image. Well… that’s not good. It doesn’t appear to be porn spam, which is nice, but it does appear to be spam of some kind, which isn’t good.
  2. What’s up with stats? WordPress.com has a stats page that keeps all sorts of information, including page view counts and unique visitors, sorted by days, weeks, months, and years. There is also a page called insights which is supposed to be like a summary page. I noticed last month that the view counts on the insight page were off. Not just for that month, but for a whole bunch of random months over the life of this account. I found this off putting because the analyst side of my programmer/analyst brain likes digging through the stats. I was hoping it was just a bug in the calculation and WordPress.com would fix it. Nope. It seems to have gotten worse. Yesterday I checked the stats just before midnight. I had a healthy number of views for the day (thank, folks!) and given that it was the first of the month the day and month counts matched. I went to insight, which defaults to monthly counts, and it gave me a big goose egg of a zero. Huh? Sometimes it takes a few seconds to update, but it never did. I checked the stats again just before starting to write this post and I had one view for the day. I checked insight and it showed one view for the month. It basically skipped yesterday. What the hell, bro?

What else is going on? The Bruins won yesterday, They are a point away from clinching a playoff spot (I think) with five or six games left to go (I think). Color me cautiously optimistic. The Red Sox lost last night. They play in Texas again this afternoon. I thought the Rangers avoided day games at home, but I guess it’s still early enough in the spring that they won’t bake the players and the fans in the afternoon heat. Speaking of fans, the stadium was full for last night’s game. I guess Covid’s over, right? Texas says so. I hope they have contact tracing available for the thousands of folks who went to the game as an outbreak is pretty much inevitable.

Dad called a few minutes ago. He’s hooked up to an IV. Antibiotics, I’m sure. He said he thought he was going to have physical therapy this morning, but how can he do that when they have him plugged in? The hospital has limited visiting hours and you have to make an appointment ahead of time and you can only make one appointment per week. I’m going Wednesday. I haven’t seen him since January. I’m looking forward to a visit. Once again let me put my vaccination to work.

Happy Sunday, everyone. Can’t wait to go home and see Jen and Harry. Until then, I’m trying to make the best of it by writing really long, boring, uninformative blog posts. Cheerio, all.

WordPress Birthday

Apparently today is this blog account’s fourth birthday.

The content stretches back to 2006 and includes a MySpace blog, two blogger blogs, two WordPress.com blogs, and a medium blog, but this particular account turns four today.

Happy birthday. You’re old enough for preschool now. Should I change the theme again to celebrate?

Two More Random Things

It’s one of those days, kids.

  • I’m on my lunch break. I just ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a little snack pack of Pringles. Mmm, mmm, good. Often during lunch I will peruse Google News, or the Twitter, and catch up on any interesting stories of the day. I can’t do that today. Why? Our plan to watch the season (series?) finale of WandaVision is to do so after work while we eat dinner. That means for the next 4-5 hours I have to be in full on, hyper vigilant, spoiler avoidance mode. The Twitter and The Google News are both riddled with WandaVision spoilers right now and that’s why I am writing this post and not reading up on the world. No Spoilers!
  • Take a look at the top of the page. Go on, I’ll wait. See it? I changed the title of the page and the little headline blurby thingie. The last time I did that I brought back my original Blogger title. This time I am bringing back my first wordpress.com title. Why? Because I am really old and I’m out of ideas. My brain is creatively empty. Hell, just listen to my RPM album. Empty. The headline blurby thing is also for a previous blog though I cannot recall exactly when, where, or what it was. It was something about the cat taking over the world so this is close enough.

I wonder what stupid, pointless, unoriginal thing I’ll write next?

NO SPOILERS!

Third Layout of the Day

I changed the layout again. That makes three distinct layouts just from today. Oh well. I didn’t dislike the last one, I just prefer to not have to click on a post to read the whole thing. For this one, I can’t decide if I want to go with a dark background or a white background. When it’s white it feels kinda like a newspaper. Maybe if I make it a little grayer that would be better. We’ll see.

Just noticed that it’s forcing the title to be all capital letters. Not sure yet, but that might be a deal breaker. Hmmmm

New Layout

I said I was going to change this site’s theme and here I go doing it. I changed it during my lunch break. I’m not sure I like it. I usually don’t go for the layouts that link to posts rather than showing them in full, but I’m going to try it for a while and see if it grows on me.

If you see it change back to the previous theme then you’ll know I didn’t like it. If it changes to a new theme then… I don’t know what it means… whatever. I’m sleepy, leave me alone.

More Stuff

Not to be left out of the birthday fun, my nephew is 10 today. Double digits. He’s a mini-me. He’s lucky in two ways. If you’re going to have the misfortune of looking like me, it’s good that you didn’t lose your curly hair the way I did, and also it’s extra lucky that you’re skinny while I was already well on my way to being a fat ass by the time I was 10. He is keeping all the good stuff that I had when I was little. He’s also hysterically funny and he’s not afraid of his own shadow. Two things I didn’t have at 10. So basically, if you eliminate all the stuff that I was bad at when I was 10 you have my nephew. He’s awesome and I love him and I hate that I haven’t been able to visit in forever. I am so sick of the pandemic. It’s killing me.

My father showed some improvement on Tuesday. On Wednesday he seemed to take a bit of a step back but was still better than he had been. Today the word is he seems to have improved a little bit again. We have tentative plans for next steps starting next week. It’s all scary.

We should have the bedroom done tomorrow night… assuming we don’t come up with any new ideas. The mattress is going to be the killer. We have plans in place though. The kitchen stuff starts coming next week. Next weekend is going to be another crazy furniture assemble-fest.

I made a works in progress playlist for RPM. Still not 100% invested yet. Maybe if I can get some guitar parts down it will trigger me. Maybe.

https://hearthis.at/roberjames1971/set/rpm2021-works-in-progress/

I haven’t played with blog themes yet. I browsed a little before bed last night. We’ll have to book some time soon. I have so many reminders in my phone right now. I have to schedule everything with myself or I forget everything.

I’m tired and sad and I want everything to go back to normal and I want it now.