Dear FutureMe,
Today would be a good day to do a quarterly inventory.
How is your personal life going?
How is your work life going?
How is your Volunteer Service life going?
Future Me
Whoops – I’m sixteen days late. I just added twelve reminders to myself, to be delivered by Future Me
I support Future Me, and am delighted when I see an email sent to the future arrive in my mailbox.
Personal Life
Ooooof. I’ve been in such a funk these last four months. It is bordering on problematic.
I still don’t have a girlfriend, and my house is messy enough that I don’t want to bring people over. Saint Valentine’s Day highlighted my awareness that I really need to change things if I don’t want to die alone. I probably will anyway, but keeping things the status quo will guarantee that.
One positive thing I have started is a sun shade for my western facing glass door. The original owner put reflective film on it to try to drive the heat of the sun back, but it isn’t effective. So I got the idea that I’d build a shade from roofing panels. There’s no way that I can transport them in my Ford C-MAX. However, my brother happened to have a need to drive down here with his long bed truck, so I asked him if he would help me. The Lowes buying experience was underwhelming, but by the end of the afternoon, we put four 3′ x 8′ sheets in the bed of his truck and brought them home.
I still need to bolt them together and to a board or rail to hang them. And I’d like to buy some Rust-Oleum to paint the holes after I drill them and put bolts in. And then I need to hang the shade. But I can already tell that without the tree, this summer would be exceedingly hot inside that room.
I did reconfigure my home alarm clock a little bit, and am delighted with it. Previously, it wasn’t very good. Today, I would rate it splendid. I should do did a blog post about it.
Another change is that my main machine and my alarm clock machine are running Fedora Workstation, KDE Spin. Most of my other websites are running Debian, away from Ubuntu.
I do need to redo my personal mail server. This is yet-another task that would be fun if I had a week to do it, but I don’t so then it just adds to my stress level.
Factorio: Space Age was a letdown. It feels too much like a grind, and the really fun part, blasting bugs with artillery, is unreachable until several planets are exploited. That just makes the grind worse. Sigh.
Work Life
If $25,000 fell out of the sky and into my lap, I would retire tomorrow.
I’m counting down: fifteen months to go.
Volunteer Service Life
This was another one that kicked my ass this quarter. I upgraded the version of PHP on the website, and the calendar plugin prompt started killing off the server. We’d get an out-of-memory error within five minutes. The event calendar is just about the second-most important feature of the website. The website became dysfunctional: what to do?
Probably the best event calendar is The Events Calendar by Modern Tribe. Problem is that it didn’t play nice with our theme. I use an older Twenty Fourteen theme, with a child theme, Fourteen Press, too. Since The Events Calendar wasn’t working, I went with Sugar Calendar. Mostly, I liked that it exports and imports JSON instead of ICS or CSV.
I have my regrets, though.
We paid $100 for it, and as mentioned in the previous quarterly inventory, finances were already so tight that we had had to cut our one employee’s hours 20%. The other regret is that support in the WordPress world is clownish. I tried to get a technical support call going, and they replied that they don’t do support sessions. They want me to create a user on the website with admin privileges and then send them the name and password so they can root around, fixing things.
WTF?
Okay, sure, I’ve got the home lab thing going, and I can copy the website here, and let them root around in the copy of the website, but … this is ridiculous and idiotic. I feel like a fool contemplating the idea.
The third regret is that they advertise that their event calendar can also do ticket sales. Well, that is only true if you set up a Stripe account with them: they don’t do the other payment systems. We’ve got three, and none of them are Stripe. I wouldn’t be surprised if Stripe kicks back a part of the commission to their service partners. So the ticket sales idea was a waste of time for us.