For the Mainers that love pond hockey, it’s a good start to the year. It’s been really quite cold up here. Not a bunch of snow, but cold. The dog and I continue our 2-1/2 mile daily walks, but next week when the lows will be below 0° F, and the highs a couple of days in the single digits (not counting wind chill), we may do somewhat abbreviated outings.
We can stay warm, though – our pellet stove does well for us. A couple of bucks worth of pellets a day keeps the main floor at an even 70° plus or minus. The picture above was taken moment after lighting up again last weekend after I cleaned the stove. That’s a bit of a process. I shut it down, dump the ash collector, take some bits apart and vacuum the whole thing. The final step after reassembly is to clean the glass. Then it’s good for another 2-3 weeks, depending on how fast the ash collector fills.
That’s all there is right now, more when there’s more to report.
I’ve tried, and mostly failed, to post more this year, but I’ll keep at it. Frankly, there’s more to occupy my attention and time up here in the hinterlands. Late Spring into Early Fall is all about work, yard work, and fishing. The rest of the time, it’s work, yard work, snow management (when that happens), heating management (all the time, split wood to re-split and re-stack, 40# bags of pellets to move around, etc). I’m not grumpy about this, we have a good life up here in Maine, we’re both more relaxed and … happier.
2/3 of a cord of firewood, re-split for our Jotul stove, moved into the basement and stacked.More of the firewood, stocked right by the Jotul stove in the basement.
Dog Walks
WInter dog walks make life more challenging. I have to layer up for the temperatures I expect, offset by the speed and energy we can put into the walk. For example, today, I didn’t have to put on my snow/ice cleats, because that all melted yesterday, leaving only small patches to navigate on our normal 2.5 – 3 mile route. It was 38° F out, and I knew I would be pretty cold at the start of our walk. But I just put on a zipper sweatshirt over t-shirt and jeans, and … yup, by a half mile into the walk, I had the sweatshirt tied around my waist to keep from breaking too much of a sweat. It’s a balancing act, when it’s cold out. I might could have gotten away with shorts today, but …
It was colder last week – we had 6″ of snow on Christmas Eve. Our walk on Christmas day was fun for Georgia – so hard to find scents to track when everything’s covered up.
Georgia on a walk in the snow on Christmas Day, 2024.
Technology
Not a lot new going on, hardware-wise. I’ve been living with an Apple full size keyboard with numeric keypad for my regular work the last few years, and my wrists are a bit tired of it. So I was shopping the other day, and came across a Logitech ergonomic “ERGO K860” keyboard on the shelf and decided to give it a spin. Already glad I did, it’s much less stressful on my wrists and forearms. It’s wireless (Bluetooth LE or a dongle), and with a touch of a button can be shared with up to three systems – I’ve got it configured for the Mac and for the Windows box, both via bluetooth. So far, recommended.
As noted in a previous post, I upgraded the FreeBSD boxes (at home, and in Maryland) to 14.1 in late November, and everything seems solid and stable. Next up, upgrading to 14.2 sometime in the coming month.
Marcia’s big holiday gift this year was a bunch of stuff from Accuquilt. She previously had one of their tiny setups, now she’s got one of the bigger ones, and a bunch of the die sets that should make a chunk of the scut work of getting fabric ready to assemble into quilt blocks a much easier process. My gift was a new Apple watch, since the old one suffered from two problems – no more updates to the software, and battery life was becoming terrible. We both avoided the temptation of a new phone this year.
I did repurpose a very old Intel-based Mac Mini (16G RAM, 4 core i5) to be a ProxMox server for a variety of home lab purposes. Right now, I’ve got six VMs running on it – one FreeBSD, one Ubuntu, and four Red Hat. Not a barn burner, but it meets the need. Previously I was using 1 year eval-licensed vSphere from one of my professional organization memberships, but since Broadcom purchased VMware … everything is changed. Oh, well. I find ProxMox (https://www.proxmox.com/en/) very interesting and capable.
Entertainment
The Chronicles of St. Marys – a series of books by Jody Taylor. Seriously Recommended.
QI – ITV show available on BritBox (and some on YouTube)
Great British Bakeoff – Older shows available on the Roku channel, the last several series are on Netflix
The Mandalorian – We’re trying to get into this one.
On YouTube, the best of the channels I follow, in no particular order:
The Charismatic Voice – opera singer and vocal coach listens/comments on rock and metal.
Inheritance Machining – home machine shop, intricate work, good fun.
Michygoss – Michele rescues dogs, mills logs, and builds cabins, forts, sheds, etc.
M539 Restorations – buys and lovingly restores BMW automobiles.
Sarah -n- Tuned – mix of car builds and reviews.
Bad Obsession Motorsport – Project Binky (when they can be bothered to put up a video).
Winding Down
Marcia asked me today, “Why are you still wearing the orange sweatshirts for walking the dog? Deer season is over…?”
“It’ll be easier to find the body before spring if I slip and fall on the ice.”
Y’all, if you’re in a place where you can or will celebrate a Thanksgiving holiday tomorrow, please enjoy it! Family? Friends? Pets? Alone? All or any of those are a reason to give thanks each and every day, regardless of a specific date on the (Hallmark(tm)) calendar. So even without a holiday, have the best day you can.
For us, we’re going to be starting the day with blueberry scones (so Marcia tells me). We’re baking a large, unpardoned turkey for the main course, and there will be some mashed potatoes, gravy, homemade cranberry sauce (just cranberries, water, sugar, and some orange zest), and possibly a salad or something else green to take up space better served by one of the other menu entries.
OS updates
I’m pretty good about keeping my home and internet facing servers updated. I use FreeBSD for the main home server and for the system that presents this site and Marcia’s sites to the world. I keep them lock-stepped, and always update the home server first, so that if there’s a glitch in the updates, I can solve it here where I can attach a screen and keyboard to debug boot issues. That’s a pattern that’s served me well in past years, and did again yesterday.
I updated the home server from Freebsd 13.3 to 14.1. Didn’t come back online to network connectivity after the first phase of the upgrade and the first reboot. Turns out I forgot that I really should have been updating the loader.efi on a regular basis (like, after every version update) so that changes to the OS aren’t stumbled over. The core of the error looked like this: “Startup error in /boot/lua/loader.lua: LUA ERROR: /boot/lua/core.lua:68: attempt to concatenate a nil value” … fortunately addressed by the following forum post:
From the boot error OK prompt, I could just type “boot” and the system would do so, which is a good thing to know. Then I did some research, identified the partitions that contained the EFI data I needed to mount and copy the loader.efi to, and for each available partition, mounted it, copied the file, and unmounted. Thereafter I had no problem with booting.
> gpart list | grep -Ew '(Name|efi)'
...
> mount_msdosfs /dev/ada0p1 /boot/efi
> cp /boot/loader.efi /boot/efi/efi/boot/BOOTx64.efi
> umount /boot/efi
# rinse and repeat in mirrored boot environments
By following this process for the remote server (from which your are getting this content), I had zero problems with the update. Thus my new OS update pattern will be to do these steps immediately before, and immediately after the update.
Fall Winding Down
We’re a few short weeks from the end of Fall, and we’re also getting close to the days when our daily high temperatures will also be below freezing. Most of our overnight lows already are there – I woke this morning to freezing fog and a skim coat of ice on the board walk leading to our front door. The other part of this season that’s almost done is deer season, firearms. We’ve got a few days left for that, which is why on our walks, I’m in an orange hat and/or sweat jacket, and Georgia is sporting her fall line wear.
Georgia in her orange fall hunting season vest
That’s about all I have to report at the moment. More as time and events permit.
Yeah, so Friday the 13th falls on a Wednesday this month. That happens.
Automotive Safety
Every time I receive an email, or see an advertisement for a car touting the safety features, it makes me want to go out, buy an old Lamborghini, and drive like a hoon with four outstanding ASBOs.
We got a survey about Subarus recently. We really like our Outback, but the Driver Monitoring System (which can be temporarily disabled, but not permanently) drives me bonkers. I said as much, noting that it would probably keep me from buying another Subi…. but then I bet ALL the freaking cars watch the driver now, don’t they?
Photogenic
Nice raking sunlight just before sunset, our view to the south-east…
Just FYI, I took another 9 truck loads of leaves to the city composting heap on Friday. This was the big batch. In another week I’ll clear leaves one more time, and call it a Fall for those purposes.
But before the leaves and the firewood, it was September when the boat saw it’s last few outings for the year, and the final fish was caught. As Fall approached, the acorns were falling like mad. Felt like it was going to fill the boat… I exaggerate, of course:
Fallen acorns in the bottom of the boat.
Three weekends in a row, I cleaned out acorns from the boat before going out for a few hours. The second to last fishing weekend, on September 22, I caught this bass, 18″ long, 3#10:
Holding up a large mouth bass.
The following weekend, I went fishing one last time, to little effect. Then we took the boat out of the water and put it into storage until Spring. Meantime the leaves started falling, and I started getting sunrises like this, right around the time I was starting work each morning:
Orange/red clouds at sunrise, the view east out of my home office.
That’s all for now, I’m trying to relax before the upcoming work week.
Today was the first proper frost of Fall 2024. We had some spotty frosted areas on Monday, but this mornings temperature out on the deck was 28°F, and all the grass and fields were frosted white. This also means that all of the leaves on our trees, and the trees across the road that have been waiting for the “drop” signal, should do so in the next few days.
Two weeks ago I took two loads of leaves to the city compost site. On Sunday, I took a further six truck beds full – picture is the accumulated pile from Sunday before I started hauling off:
Pile of leaves behind the collector/mower
Late last month, we got our annual two cords of firewood dropped in the back of the house. It took me 5 hours over a couple of days to get it all stacked into the lower garage:
In real life, earthquakes aside (USGS event link), it’s been a pretty full dance card kind of summer. Work continues apace. Marcia and I get out fishing when we can. Georgia Aileen and I get out for a daily 2.5 – 3.0 mile walk: our current pace is around four miles an hour, which is a pretty brisk walk. The front yard continues to delight, with flowers of some sort or another in nearly continuous bloom.
These lilies started blooming in the last day or so
We got our money out of the mower that came with the house, and not one cent more. That old mower, a Cub Cadet GT 2544, would take me 3.5 hours to mow the whole yard at the best of times. Biggest part of the problem there was the high center of gravity and relatively narrow wheelbase – that made picking my angles for up and down the slopes in our yard an interesting proposition.
So last month we shelled out for a new Cub Cadet ZTS1 50 mower. Now I can mow the whole yard in about an hour and a quarter. Woo! And … Hoo! Compared to paying for a bi-weekly lawn service, my ROI should be about 3 years. That’s a win, too.
Tomorrow is our 26th anniversary, Marcia and I. It’s been joyous, occasionally challenging, and all wonderful. Yay, us!
Catching up
Georgia has been standing in the water a lot – this is her normal routine at the 3/4 mark on our daily walk.
Georgia standing in the reservoir
Spring has been springing – lots of stuff has been coming into bloom. The lilies are coming up, the roses are pending, the lilac smells wonderful…
Small cherry tree in bloom in our front yard
Time to go fishing – We put the boat in the water a couple of weeks ago, and have made it out fishing a couple of times already. On Sunday last, we both caught some bass…
Small mouth bass, caught then released
And that’s the highlights of the last few weeks. It’s been busy.
Georgia Aileen, the american bully rescue mutt, is whuffling and twitching on her bed here in my office/foyer. It’s a good life, I think, being the dog that owns Marcia and I.
I pre-ordered Robin Sloan’s next book, Moonstruck, this evening. I *think* I have everything he’s written, and I enjoy the hell out of his premises, his characters, and his writing style.
Looking back in email searching for something else, I came across something I wrote to Jerry Pournelle back in December 2011:
Congress is a bunch of loons whose only concern is where the money is coming from for the next election. Yeah, there are occasional principled and knowledgeable folks there, but follow the money. Who goes to jail and who doesn’t?
The record companies are said to rob their artists blind … and no one cares one whit. Their old business model has gone the way of the buggy whips, and their response? Artists sue for not getting paid, and the companies sue the fans of the artists. My only real thought on your comments below is that suing your customers is a great way to ensure that when you’re done, you don’t have any customers.
Use guilt? Sure. Market the hell out of yourself online and in the social media scene. There’s plenty of folks making a living doing just that. This includes former nobodies like Pomplamoose and Zoe Keating and Robin Sloan, and well-established authors like Gaiman and Scalzi.
And it’s pertinent to this conversation that it’s TRIVAL to get a copy of nearly anything today. So, on a purely technical basis, I need never pay for content again. I pay for books and music to support the artists and creators who do the work I love.
Those who won’t pay, mostly never would. You can make it so difficult to use a DRM copy that you make legitimate customers run screaming, and it won’t stop the “piracy” for a moment. And while we’re at it, let’s not keep helping the bastards by framing the argument in terms of assault by ship on the high seas.
It’s silly to argue that every unpaid copy is a lost sale, but that’s what the BSA and the MafiAA would have our legislators believe. But for our bought and paid representatives, it’s polite to at least pretend to believe in the people who fund your next campaign. And that “pretend” is what gets turned into sausage. Errr, law.
There was a .signature quote from another email I glanced at:
My favorite yoga pose is the one where I stand upright, watching the class through the window while eating a cheeseburger. — @shazzz_lee
Finally, I broke the shorts streak this week – it was cold and raining today, so back on with the jeans for walking the dog … but she still went and walked into the reservoir when we got to that point in the journey. Yay, dogs.
So … we were in California last week. Sadly not for fun, but to lay my mother to rest. She passed in late February after a short battle with leukemia. It wasn’t expected, because the meds were moving her blood work in the right direction, but in the end, we think her heart gave out. She was wonderful, caring, sharp as a tack, and interested in just about everything. I’m missing her terribly. While it was lovely to see all the family, everyone in town to console each other, I wish it had been for just about any other reason.
There. That’s enough of that for here.
Shorts Week
So, still in the 30’s and occasional high 20’s (F) overnights, but I’ve set the jeans aside – it’s shorts weather every day now, including the dog walks (as long as it’s mid 40’s and up when we start the walk – I warm up quickly at our pace). At about the 3/4 point on the walk, we get to the reservoir, and Georgia walks right in:
Georgia standing in the water
And spring is springing – the first crocuses are pitching up their flowers. Then first the yellow, then the white daffodils started opening. Spring flower season in our front yard is fun.
Crocuses blooming in the front yard at our house
That’s all I’ve got for y’all today. Back again soon, I hope.
