Thoughts

I just released a minor update to my Tinylytics for Micro.blog plugin that refactors some logic, squishes a couple small bugs and updates display labels. Look for v3.1.1 in your plugins area soon. If you want to see what changed specifically, check out the pull request on Github.

Our Holiday tradition… A pot of homemade Christmas chili.

A bowl of homemade chili with cheese, a dollop of sour cream and jalapenos on a holiday placemat. A spoon sits to the left of the bowl.

Yep… I had to get in on it too. My bass-playing Funko Box alter ego.

Jim Mitchell as a bass-playing Funko character

Super excited to share that I’ve got a full functioning WordPress plugin for Tinylytics committed to its dev repository. If you have a WordPress site too, and want to give it a spin, hit me up.

Got a basic POC WordPress plugin for Tinylytics working in my dev environment this morning. Might put a little more effort into it over the next few weeks, but I’m really looking to unplug until after the first of the year. Progress though, and that’s all that counts.

Mission accomplished. 🎉 All projects have been successfully deployed to production environments ahead of the end of year code freeze on Monday. A total grind over the last three months to get here, but it’s paid off. Encouraged to know there is not one thing on the agenda for tomorrow.

I’ve been coveting a particular domain name for almost 25 years. After asking a few times over the last six, I’ve finally gotten the current owner to agree to sell it to me. The waiting to finalize the deal is killing me. I really, really, really want this domain…

Dragging a crap-ton of RSS feeds from an OPML file import into a folder all at once?

I don’t know why this just came to my mind, but I would absolutely love to have a Six Million Dollar Man metal lunchbox to bring my lunches to work in…

Uh oh… My mind has latched on to a Micro.blog theme idea this morning and won’t let go of it, even after sketching a thumbnail. So much for getting anything done today. 🐿️

Giving Arq Backup a try for my laptop using Amazon S3 for storage thanks to both @vincent and @manton. The hardest part was setting up the bucket on Amazon and provisioning access. Creating the backup plan in Arq was drop-dead simple. I may stick with this as a long-term solution if it works out well.

By the time our hot water adventure is over tomorrow (oh I hope), it will be eight days and $1300 dollars 🪟💸, with that cost going to bring the new hot water heater up to code and the cost of a motel room so my household could take showers. Thankfully my home warranty covers the new hardware cost.

I’m giving Obsidian a spin for notes again. I looked at it briefly once before. I’ve only scratched the surface, but I get the hype. I think what turned me off last time was syncing, but I wasn’t aware it could sync via iCloud. That’s enough for me. Anyone have good pointers?

Well, the hot water heater saga looks grim. Home warranty company has to approve repair next steps. They and repair company won’t be open until next Monday. The soonest a repair looks plausible is Tuesday. Maybe even Wednesday. This is going to be a very long and somewhat smelly weekend.

There’s nothing quite like waking up to the hot water heater being on the fritz the day before a major US holiday. If there’s one thing high on my list of “Oh, hell no” items, it has to be taking a cold shower. 🥶

My transition to the “dark side” is complete. I tried switching to light mode on my workstation and it damn near blinded me… Does that make me one of the cool kids now?

There’s an 80’s music festival going on downtown this weekend. Whoever’s onstage right now is really getting the crowd going. Every five minutes there’s a loud roar. It’s pretty awesome to hear. Kind of wish we had gotten tickets.

Put in some good work on Tinylytics for Micro.blog this afternoon. A couple of cool new features are coming: The ability to link to your public stats if you’ve enabled them and the option to show a web ring avatar for other sites who’ve enabled that in their Tinylytics settings. Check out the footer of this page to see them in action. I’ll let things bake in for a few days while I update documentation.

I killed off my WordPress site over at jimmitchellmedia.net today, setting up a domain forward to my main jimmitchell.org domain. It’s time to consolidate my online persona into one bucket and make Micro.blog my web house.

I’m glad we canceled our weekend plans. A serious bug in the deployment from earlier this week was found late yesterday and I’m spending my PTO day working with the team to resolve it. The good news is it looks like we’ve found the fix. Some of the day might be salvageable. 🤞🏻

I was about to put a note in my (soon to come) Microcasts topics folder about a thing that just happened, but it turns out I already added it as episode #003. Maybe I should bump it up to episode #002… But then the topic for that episode is one that chaps my hide too.

How is it I’ve never heard about this until now?

Since 2015, several data centers have been submerged underwater in both the Pacific Ocean and Atlantic Ocean. The first underwater data center was deployed by Microsoft into the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of California, through an experiment called Project Natick, with Phase 1 being a vessel carrying 1 rack, containing 24 servers.

🔗 Underwater Data Centers: Servers Beneath the Surface

I’m hoping with the rainy weekend predicted for SoCal, I can get caught up on Tinylytics for Micro.blog plugin work. We were planning to take the RV out, but who wants to sit in a small box in the rain? I’d rather sit in a bigger box with better amenities.

Today will be a very long day… Awake at 1:30am, thinking (worrying) about what I need to get done in preparation for an after-hours system deployment that will take until at least 10pm. Such is the glamorous life of an IT manager. It’s a given that far too many cups of coffee will be consumed today.

Yes, I’m on a bit of a posting tear today, but this one’s too good not to share. My favorite rule is #6, which I’ve only recently truly learned…

“There” is no better than “here”. When your “there” has become a “here”, you will simply obtain a “there” that will look better to you than your present “here”.

🔗 The Ten Rules of Being Human (via kottke.org)

I’ve moved back to NetNewsWire as my default RSS app after listening to the hilariously entertaining @HemisphericViewsDuel of the Defaults” podcast episode 097 by @canion, @Burk, and @martinfeld. I wasn’t aware NNW had the iCloud option for feed sync now. I like it way better. Thanks guys.

I’m slowly becoming a fan of dark mode on my workstation. As a design artist from the late ‘80s/early ‘90s, WYSIWYG for print media is burned into my psyche. I’ve been running in dark mode for a week and am actually enjoying it - enough so to even add the needed CSS to my Micro.blog theme.

I added a projects page to my site today which links to different things I’m putting effort into, including “Project Yeard.”

Challenge accepted, @vincent

WP Tinylytics

Ahhh… Fall has finally come to Southern California. The Santa Ana’s are blowing hot, the air is full of dust & pollen, and my lips are starting to chap. Time to take down the umbrellas, bring anything that’s not tied down inside, shut all the windows, and take an allergy pill.