Captain’s Log

On my way to an appointment, I was making a left turn when someone going straight decided to cut me off and take to the turn lane at throttle, causing me to slow down. A few moments later a car comes zooming out from the outer side of street and plows straight into him. It almost looked like they were aiming to swerve into the wrong side of the street after running the light or something.

Quite literally, a few short breathes could have separated me from disaster if that first person didn’t cut me off. It was maybe the only time I’ve felt like shouting “That could have been me!” at the sight of an accident and listened to my heart pounding in my chest. Plus by virtue of the car I’m driving, Yukari has anti-lock breaks and life back in Newnan taught me to just calmly slow a bit when crazy people do crazy things in turn lanes. Folks turning around the Publix did it so often that such antics don’t even affect me any more. In my old car that lacked ABS, or if I had been a hothead instead of a calm cucumber, I could have ended up joining them. Ditto if someone had been up my butt. I was able to stop abruptly but safely and then get the heck out of the line of fire instead of becoming a third party.

With how hard the past couple years have been, it’s kind of been a reoccurring prayer of mine for the lord to keep walking by my side as he always has; Not to be forsaken. I’m kind of inclined to take this incident as a sign of God’s attitude on the matter, that he’s either right beside or at least has good folks watching over me. Because the only other way I can interpret that moment would be the lord shouting, “Die, mother !@#$%^” and that alternative would be very negative compared to how unscathed I was in such a very dangerous moment. So, I’m choosing to believe the positive of these two points of view.

One of the reasons I believe God is real rather than our world is pure Chaos, is that over the years I’ve had some rather close calls and quite frankly, random numbers don’t like me that much.

Peeling ten EKG sticky pads off my hairy chest, really made me hope that the pads are really efficient at connecting the leads and that the glue’s strength isn’t their best quality.

Yesterday while doing a bunch of deep cleaning in the afternoon, I felt unsteady and a bit tingly. Rested a while and seemed to be okay. About an after after dinner, I noticed numbness towards my fingers/hands and when it worked up my forearms, I decided to check out urgent care. Time of night being what it was, they weren’t taking anyone that close to closing. Taking family advice, I went to the ER instead of waiting until morning. Given the proximity to food, I figured my blood sugar must have been up or something.

Discomfortingly, they conducted the triage relatively quickly. It’s the only time I’ve been to an ER and not had to sit around forever, and the first time I’ve ever been to one for myself rather than accompanying a patient. Higher heart rate of 120, blood pressure was something like 140/90, and sugar of 140. But well enough not to be threatening after an un-alarming set of bloodwork and a bag of saline. Things settled down from there enough not to worry them too much for immediate danger. Since the nastier side affects of a stroke didn’t manifest, their figuring is that I was dehydrated and overtaxed myself with the amount of heavy activity. Orders are to drink plenty of water and take it easy over the next three days and follow up with a primary care, who odds are will proscribe a low dosage of blood pressure medication.

I think my momma said it best: getting old sucks. But given the alternatives, I think I’d rather make it closer to 90 than 35. Getting fatter around the middle and living like a couch potato doesn’t quite help. Odds are, this is part of what I get for trying to be more active on my weekends 😅.

On the flip side with the dogs gone, I don’t have any obstacles to searching for a doctor. Aside from that great joy of figuring out which doctor to go to lol.

Time to take advantage of the new site infrastructure’s ability to segregate between broad categories and refining tags. Apologies if anyone’s links break, but I doubt that’s a big problem :P.

Here’s the general plan / process:

• Captain’s Log will remain a category, as that’s always been used like one.
• computers will become a top level category
  • Linux, Android, etc will become tags.
• games will become a top level category
  • Any category that was named for a game will become a tag.
  • E.g., “Ghost Recon” will become a tag.
• programming will be added as a category
  • Any category that was named for a programming language will become a tag.
  • E.g., “C++” will become a tag.
• Most other software related categories will become tags.
  • E.g., “Vim”, “GTK+” will likely become a tag
• Most media related categories will either
  • remain categories for media types, e.g., “Books” and “Movies”.
  • become tags for specific cases, e.g., “Star Trek”.

And I’ll figure out the other stuff later :P.

Today was not as expected of the typical Monday, time change or no. It began with, well aside from getting up with the sunrise, lots of water. Turns out that the old unused water meter over the hot water heater decided to spew water everywhere. Today was mostly not fun in that regard.

For bonus points reaching that point where I tell the dogs, either I go take a shower and make some lunch or I’ll pass out and hit the floor, of course I end up hitting the floor ^_^. The tub was so wet from the cleaning up, and neutralizing a spider, that I ended up taking a nice slip.

Ejected from the shower screaming, “Aiieeeeeeee” and hit the floor on top of the shower curtain. On the upside putting the shower curtain rod back up was less of a pain in the arse than I remember, and my rear end is still harder than the bathroom floor.

On the positive side the dogs napped really well after everything was done.

While still considered provisional, I’ve updated a few things.

1. Color scheme
   • For starters, something inspired by the green phosphor style of monochrome monitors.
   • Debating between this retro direction and more contemporary tighty-whitey typography.
2. Side bar
   • Archives added to side bar.
   • Categories added to side bar.
3. Pages
   • Privacy Policy sorted over.
   • Think I’ll stuff these in a menu at some point.

Migration from blogger is nearly complete. I think the only real content to be migrated are my static pages, and that should be wrapped up later this week. Theme related details are provisional and may be monkeyed at my leisure.

A key new awesomeness comes with this migration: HTTPS all the things! Well, at least that are hosted here!

I’ve set my feed burner’s original feed to the new source. I apologize if the migration interferes with anyones newsreader, and recommend that you migrate accordingly.

• Old RSS: https://feeds.feedburner.com/spidey01
• New RSS: https://blog.spidey01.com/feed

The old feed should continue to function fore the foreseeable future, in as much as Feed Burner does. Any bookmarks to the raw spidey01.blogspot.com address should be updated to blog.spidey01.com or spidey01.com, feel free to go HTTPS if ya do because I am.

The canonical address has been blog.spidey01.com for quite a few years, after all.

Something that I’ve had in mind for a while since the end of Google Photos being such a nice free storage system, and again since there was no luck with HTTPS: migrating away from Blogger, again.

Details are still being planned, but I expect this to occur sometime in the near future. Accessing things by blog.spidey01.com or even spidey01.com, should continue to work (and gain HTTPS). Anyone using the raw blogspot address will probably not see a lot more posts once the transition point.

FeedBurner will probably get pointed at whatever the new feed source ends up, but left as is beyond that. But no idea how that will deal with the wider migration, and FeedBurner isn’t exactly known for a lack of bugs these days.

Why am I planning on migrating platforms? Well, it’s a fairly simple set of reasons:

1. Lack of support.
   1. While Blogger was once one of the top blogging platforms, at this point I imagine that it only continues to exist because it would cause more trouble for Google’s own blogs to migrate somewhere else than maintaining the system.
   2. Google’s never been very forth coming with details here :P.
2. Tablet experience
   1. I prefer share -> post to share -> copy -> switch apps -> goto web page -> create new post -> paste.
   2. Google has done such a fine job of maintaining their own app that it no longer exists.
   3. Likewise, APIs and things for third party clients are increasingly pissed on from what I can observe.
3. HTTPS
   1. haven’t had any luck combining my custom domain with my taste in TLS, and I’m basically done dealing with what passes for Blogger’s documentation and UI :P.