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that poor poetry site
Monday, July 10 2017
I felt somewhat overwhelmed on this particular Monday. It wasn't just that my job has changed under the new leaderless structure, requiring more proactive communication between me and others in the organization. Gretchen has a big party scheduled for our house this weekend, and that's going to require me to do a bunch of chores. Alex, the guy whose keywording web app I built starting back in 2013, has been on me to modify its export to conform with a new Alamy standard. Then there's the website of a local poetry publication house that I've been needing to resurrect. I'd been hosting it on the same server that I use to do all my bitTorrenting, provided by company called Waveride that I pay 5 euros per month. Waveride is pretty chill about grey-market uses for their zero-support servers, though if there is a copyright complaint (as there apparently was against a brief torrenting of the new season of Twin Peaks), their policy is apparently to automatically wipe your server and have you start from scratch. That's fair enough, I suppose, though that poor poetry site hadn't been properly backed up, and the server is so bare-bones one has to install the entire LAMP stack via apt-get install, among other things. After over a week of procrastination, I managed to do this chore late tonight, even managing to salvage most of the site's new, slowly-accruing content from the Internet Archive. I also responded to some work-related emails that had been languishing in my inbox and proactively sent some emails my new job-description would have me send. There was also some work-related actual web development, though it didn't take place until the late afternoon, after all my meetings and errands were over.
Gretchen was feeling a little better today, but she'd taken all those laxatives and for some reason this made it so she wanted me to come with her and do most of the driving on errands she would've normally done by herself. The first of these was to pick up a check from the new tenant moving into the brick mansion's #1R. He's a nerdy linguistics professor currently living out near Lucas Avenue. He didn't have a car, and Gretchen was eager to close the deal, so that was why we drove to his house. On the drive there, Gretchen thought at the last minute that we should cut from Hurley Avenue over to Lucas via Jeffrey Lane. This took us through a hilly of suburban Hurley we'd never been through before. It involved wide, curvy streets and big ugly houses that had been built — probably for IBM employees — in the 1950s and 1960s (see 41.925402N, 74.0540143W. The guy met us out in his yard with his cute little brown mutt, the reason he'd chosen our unit (the backdoor of which opens into a fenced yard). Neville was so excited to meet a new dog that he jumped out of the window of the car and ran to meet him. Neville is great with other dogs, but not Ramona, so it was good that she didn't execute the same maneuver.
Though I was still supposed to be at work, Gretchen managed to tack a couple more errands on to the drive. One took us out to the Wall Street house, where we dropped off a water bill. And then we went to our credit union on Hurley Avenue to deposit checks. Finally, there were books to be returned to the library. For whatever reason, Gretchen's illness has caused her to do an unusual amount of reading.
In amongst all this somewhere I realized that my iPad1 had actually been jailbroken as the result of my various attempts. I'd expected it to look and boot somewhat differently (the way my old iPhone does) after jailbreaking, but the only major difference is that it now has Cydia installed on it. Cydia is an app that allows the downloading of non-Apple-approved apps, which is what any free person should want to be able to do with a device they own, especially an old one that is barely usable with modern software.
I stayed up until 2AM crossing shit off my mental to-do list. By the time I went to bed, I felt good, like I had a handle on my life.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?170710 feedback
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