My journey of 30d of change started September 1, a Wednesday, and I’m blogging about the three things per day for 30 days that I’m doing for the month. My intent is to blog the day afterwards, so here is the short update for Thursday September 2nd.
Item 2.1 was a bit larger — we went to Jacob’s new school for a tour. This is a good example of the type of thing I want to do more of in my life.
We didn’t really need to do the tour, Jacob is 12yo, all good. But he does have anxiety issues, and it’s a good idea for him to see things in advance, know what to expect, even if he doesn’t absolutely need it. A simple safety valve that ensures a good start to his new school, particularly after 18m of virtual school from home. It’s going to be a big deal for him to be around other people all day again, AND to have to wear a mask, AND to be at a new school, AND in a portable, AND taking city buses to / from the school. It’s a lot of change for a single day.
When we talked to him about it, I offered him a ride for the first day, and he was like, “Nah, I’ve got it.” Mom and he had already done a dry run. Great. Except he doesn’t have his Presto card yet for the bus. And it isn’t clear where he’s going when he gets to the school. So we did a quick one-on-one visit to ensure he’s all good, met a learning support teacher, saw the likely portable he’ll be in. Just a little quick “look ahead”, and we found out too that even on the morning of the first day, parents are generally not welcome because they don’t want us taking up important social distancing space.
The reason I say that I want to do more of this type of thing is not related to Jacob. What I mean is that I want to do more of these simple top-ups, activities that aren’t necessarily required, but which can make everyone’s life a little easier, and ensures we have success for J on his big first day. J’s decided he would like a ride on Day 1, since he doesn’t yet have the bus pass from the school.
Would he be fine without a ride? Sure. Without having had the tour? Sure. But now we all know what he’s doing, where he’s going, and we’ve already dealt with a couple of minor stress points for him so he won’t have to figure it out while he’s dealing with all the other stuff going by him on Day 1. I’ll call that a win.
Item 2.2 was follow-up to yesterday’s item on my website. The host is doing the recovery and repair, I only had to upload some files, and redirect some links. The good news is they seem to have found a backup of a backup of a backup that is reasonably intact, so they may just restore the original server. In the interim, they’re trying to get my new lifeboat account going. I’ve done all my stuff, just waiting for them to fix the last bit. A little annoying, but not stressful. I haven’t lost anything.
Item 2.3 is related to the first one about Jacob, at least sort of, I guess. As I mentioned, he has had some anxiety about a couple of issues, and because of some likely upcoming surgery, we set him up with a social worker through CHEO that talks to him about some of the issues as well as coping mechanisms, calming techniques, etc. Stuff he can talk to us about, but a different voice helps. Oddly enough, while it was primarily for him, Andrea and I usually talk to her for 20-30m too, tell her what’s going on, what we’re doing, things we’ve seen, etc. I love the fact that Jacob is able to do this, in part because it reinforces to him that talking about emotions and mental health issues is normal. It’s not hidden, or secret, or scary. It also reinforces his own sense of empathy. He’s better at explaining his thoughts to us, and to others. He talked to the support teacher at the school, rather than shutting down, he asked questions of her, etc. He’s still shy, and he’ll always be an introvert, but he knows how to self-advocate better than he used to do. And so, again, it’s not 100% required but it makes his life better. I like those kind of top-ups.
I feel like I’ve been drifting for the last little while. Some of it seems almost like depression, particularly where I have little energy as well as little interest in some things that normally give me pleasure. My sleep has been messed up for the last month, I’ve got some projects to get to around the house, and I’m just, “meh”. Sure, some of it is Covid, some of it is the dead cat bounce dropoff after a post-vaccine high. I still enjoy listening to Razamanazz by Nazareth, but it’s less compelling to get my juices flowing.
I’ve been reading various blogs and books about change, motivation, and more specifically, articles around jump-starts to your lagging energy. Many of them talk about the little things to get you going, kind of the typical philosophy that a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, regardless of the evidence out there that much of that visualization on step one doesn’t work for certain personality types, including analytical introverts (i.e., me). We know it’s still only 1 step, and we can’t “trick” ourselves into thinking otherwise.
But, I still want to do SOMETHING in September, maybe harness some of the age-old “back to school” excitement in some way. Which has led me to the “3×30” idea. Basically, three things that I choose to do in a given day that is a bit out of the normal, something I am doing just because it makes some part of my life easier or moves me ahead on some project. Three items a day, thirty days in the month, ergo –> 3×30.
Yesterday was my first day, and I deliberately chose NOT to put anything big in the day. I didn’t want it to seem to myself that I had held off on something big, or that I was going to trick myself into thinking I was doing 90 big things for the month. Some of them are going to be quite small.
Item 1.1 is pretty small — I cleaned my work desk and installed a new work surface. I bought a vinyl deskpad a few weeks ago, saw some benefits to it including for example that I can use it as my mousepad. My existing mouse pad was a bit bigger than I wanted, and it didn’t work well to sit partly on one surface and partly on the desk beside. By contrast, the vinyl goes up and over the “lip”, and it’s flush with the desk. Everything fits well, all slides around nicely. Not “big”, but it is a bit different.
Item 1.2 was even smaller — I charged my Kindle. I have been actively trying to read more in the last four months, and while I did some of that on my phone, I really want to do most of it on my Kindle. After I uncovered its hidden location back in June (it was in a backpack I had checked several times expecting it to be there but it was tucked down in the bottom under two books I had never lifted fully all the way out to reveal the treasure!), I ploughed through some 50 books in June and July. I’m down a bit for August, not quite getting the re-energy boost that I normally do from reading, even though it is CLEARLY in the simple interest / mystery world. In August, I did some personal writing and have been reading some classic writers on writing (Lawrence Block, Stephen King, Syd Field, Blake Snyder, etc.). But my Kindle was getting low again, and I don’t have a great charging setup for mini-USB hubs at the moment. But I dug out a cable, hooked it to my desktop, back in business.
Item 1.3 is a bit of a cheat as it is more redoing previous steps than taking new ones. My host, WHC.CA, was the subject of some vandalism last weekend, and they have suffered fairly significant loss as a result. One result of the internal attack was that a bunch of website servers, including one that hosts three of my accounts, were reimaged and their backups wiped. For some people, it’s catastrophic. Everything they had is lost. If it had been last January, it would have been a pretty significant loss for me, and I’d be pulling out my hair. But I had that meltdown last February, my website situation is part of a more nuanced perspective now of my life, and, well, it’s easy to say all of that because I have a full offsite backup.
While my website is down, I was going to leave it a day or two more to see if the recovery process might produce better results, but in the end, I thought I would give it a small “go” myself. It’s not complicated — upload your backup, click a few buttons, good to go. Or at least it should have been. There’s a small niggling issue that the host has created what they call “lifeboat” accounts, which my backups don’t want to connect to, preferring instead to connect to the regular old account. As a result, I have to upload it manually and reconnect the database manually. Which I can do, but it’s a small pain in the patootie. And, well, I don’t have to. The hoster had the problem, not me, so if I upload to a specific directory, they’ll put it back together for me.
Which I decided to do. I turned it all over to them to fix and get going. If it doesn’t work, I can engage, but honestly, it’s more hassle than I need to take on. That’s what they’re paid to do. It might be faster for me to do it, it might be more satisfying for me to do it, but well, why take on work I don’t need to take on? I uploaded the files, stored them on the server, and said “Go to it”. They fixed it last night or this morning (I got confirmation early afternoon it is “up”) and I can see it, even if it isn’t fully public yet. That’s not on them, I had to change the internet DNS (domain name server) addresses to match the lifeboat over the regular accounts, and it usually takes about 24h for the internet to share those addresses with everyone. But fingers crossed. It seems to have worked so far. As such, I’ve given them the other two ZIP files and now I just wait for them to do the recoveries.
Three small “incremental” things to improve my life, although one is recovery more than progress I guess. Not big, just some small steps I’m taking to move the needle a bit. The big or important stuff often crowds out some of the smaller things, but some of those smaller things make a difference. Or at least I hope they do.
So last week was a mixed bag for my wound care. On Monday, my legs were itching like crazy, so I took off my compression bandages at lunch just before I had my appointment, had a full shower, and went to my appointment. My wound-care nurse was NOT happy with me. Literally, it was off for about 20 minutes, and in her view, was long enough to completely undo all the compression up to that point. Hence my brain being kicked around that this is my new normal and I’ll never be able to take them off for life. Not completely rational, perhaps, but there it is.
On Wednesday, we changed the bandages, things were looking really good for my small wound / gash on my left leg (we started treating it just in case it got worse), and we increased the compression on my right leg from 20-30 units to 30-40 units of compression. Basically? We used a wrap that squeezes the leg more when it contracts. The goal was to see if I could tolerate it.
I couldn’t. By that night, it had to come off, my leg just hurt too much with the higher compression on. So on Thursday, I called the clinic to see if I could get in. But I never heard back (they’re not sure what happened with the message as they never got it nor is that usual, even though I was coming in Friday anyway, and they felt I should have got a call…me too, to be honest). So on Friday, with only one wrap still on my good leg, I attempted the infamous “shower with garbage bag over it” technique that didn’t work worth a damn. The top seemed pretty sealed, but alas, no, when I got out, there was water pooled in the bag and my toes were soaked. Ergo, if water comes in from above, and reaches my toes, you can bet everything in between was soaked. I cut it all off so I could get the leg dry, and had it rebandaged at my appointment. It was a new nurse, and she didn’t beat me up about having removed it Thursday or Friday, all par for the course, and I was in a pretty subdued “life sucks” mood anyway, so I was likely giving off a “don’t crap on me” vibe.
On the positive side, things were still progressing, the left leg looked healed so no need for any more wound care on that, not really, just the compression bandage. And the right leg? There was still one small area that needed to still close, but the rest was “closed” with new skin having formed. From looking down on the wound from above, i.e., upside-down, the wound looked like a map of Africa and Niger was still an open wound, Algeria and Chad were states in transition, and the rest of the continent was poised for recovery. I had no idea what was happening in a little area near Madagascar, but then again, nobody ever does.
The big news? I could move to three-day care instead of every other day. So Monday, Thursday and then, exciting isn’t it? Valentine’s Day. Maybe I’ll show my leg some love, although after each appointment of scraping and peeling off dead skin or scabs, I already have the red roses covered. My wounds always look very angry with me.
Today was my new appointment, so in I went. The Rx from the doctor’s office for custom socks has still not arrived, so I had to call again. Not a giant deal, but it delays again my referral to the place that will actually do the custom socks in time so that when the wound care is over, I can just use them at home. I phoned around town to try to get proper cast covers for my bandages so I can shower more easily (we used them before for Jacob when he was doing serial casting) but ended up having to buy them online from Amazon. I ordered two, one for each leg, and they’ll be here tomorrow. Great! But then my appointment removed the bandages from my left leg entirely and so now I only need one for my right leg. Grrr…She gave me a tube sock to cover the left leg for now, open-toed, but still doing basic compression (around 10-15 units, over-the-counter grade). And my right leg? Niger is still a war zone, but Algeria and Chad show signs of transitioning to recovery. The Northern coast experienced Tropical Storm Tweezers today to get rid of skin that failed to grow, and that was a new level of fun. My wound showed me the redness of its love again.
So, definite progress, at least physically. Mentally? Not so much.
I’m coming to grips with it a bit, but we were out on the weekend as Andrea wanted to go tobogganing at our friend’s place in Manotick. They even got to try out this Finnish kick-sled that looked like a bit of fun to try. But I couldn’t do any of it. I can’t afford to fall, for one thing, or even bang my leg on something. Plus, I’m wearing bandages that make it hard to even get my regular boots on while having a thin cover on my toes (i.e. VERY cold), and I can’t even put my big warm boots on with the wraps still on. So I had to drop Jacob and Andrea, and go do something else for an hour.
When I’ve missed out on some activity in the past, even if it was semi-health related, there was always a combined “failsafe” for my mental side that the reasons were either at least partly choice (I was choosing for mental health reasons, for example, knowing I COULD do it but it was a bad idea to push myself that way right then) or temporary (my knee was sore from something else, or my back was out and needed chiro), and often a result of having done something else earlier in the week.
This time? It’s not temporary, it’s not choice, and it’s not a result of some trade-off of another activity earlier in the week. Just as with my stupid decision last summer to jump off a dock and almost permanently injure my calves and knees, there’s a degree of disability here that prevents me from doing what I want to do. I really wanted to try the kick-sled. Ironically, I didn’t even have to address the question if I was too heavy for it or might damage it, because it wasn’t even an option to consider, not while protecting my leg from future damage.
I’d like to think that I’ve worked too hard already, although that wording doesn’t feel right. It’s not hard work, it is just time and energy devoted to having my legs wrapped and then sitting. So it is more like I’ve invested too much time in the current healing process to risk a new injury that will set me back.
What will I think a month from now? Will I have some basic compression socks that look okay and I’ll think it’s no big deal? Will I adjust to it like my CPAP machine where I was thinking, “Okay, for the rest of my life, this is my nighttime”? But I know it helps, so I use it every night, no big deal. I’m better with it than without, most of the time. I do, still, occasionally sleep downstairs or take a nap without it. In the right position, I can sleep just fine without it, albeit not sustainably. So I take a break. But if I go to the cottage even for a weekend? I take the machine. I know I’ll sleep like crap without it in another bed. I do the work because the benefits are immediate and I can see them.
Will the benefits of compression socks motivate me somehow? Will I embrace it the same way? Or perhaps it is something that I’ll simply tolerate because I have no choice. Time will tell.
In the meantime, I’m down to one leg wrapped and I can take the sock off my left leg tonight. Progress of a sort.
As you can see from the last four posts, I’m using already-established headings that work well for me to handle goal-setting for the year. Unfortunately, now I come to the mother of all categories which is basically all my hobbies on a computer in a digitally-enabled life. The list is so extensive or pervasive that it normally takes up a whole separate whiteboard for me. Let’s parse it into more manageable chunks.
Computers
It likely seems odd that the whole area is about computers, and then I make the first sub-category “computers”, but generally, I’m talking about the setup of a computer — hardware and software. This area isn’t generally big or complicated, it’s a nice manageable chunk of sorts.
First and foremost, I have to do regular backups. This includes my computer, Andrea’s computer and Jacob’s computer. Sometimes those lists are pluralized for Jacob and I, but at the moment, not so much. We generally are only using one desktop each. He has a PC upstairs but never uses it, and I migrated all the components over to his gaming laptop for files. One system, one backup. Andrea has only ever had one, so no issues there. For me, I have usually had a second device, a laptop for streaming, and I’m not running that currently, so it is just my main PC. I am a bit out of date since my last backup, so time to do another. My main fear of things missing from the last backup are photos and ensuring proper storage, a recurring, nagging worry, even once backed up. What if there’s a fire? I want all the photos on off-site cloud storage, but not quite there yet.
Second, I also need to do some basic security upgrades to various devices, including Andrea’s and tweaking of Jacob’s. I’d also like us all to use the same password manager, if possible.
Third, I mentioned I don’t have a streaming PC setup downstairs, and I want to fix that situation to a more powerful setup than my basic laptop. I have an extra old PC, easy enough to upgrade and tweak to make suitable for the need. Equally, I have a few extra monitors I need to configure.
Finally, my desktop PC needs a tweak to the setup for both potentially an extra monitor (which I’m resisting) and a better webcam/microphone setup (that I really need for trivia hosting).
Website
In the same way that I feel odd having a whole section about computers with a subheading for computers again, I have this one for the website when the next few are also about my website. But, as with computers, this is more about the setup while the others are more about content.
For my website, I launched my design for PolyWogg 5.0 this past year, and overall, I’m pretty happy with it. It includes all new Featured Images, restructured layouts for consistency, and everything is in one place. But in the same way that a strength can also be a weakness, the co-location of both PolyWogg (personal) and PolyBlog (writing) content and a single theme for all of it does create some branding challenges.
For example, when I create the layout for my site, I can do pages or posts as my default content. When it is a one-off blog topic, my musings so to speak, it’s a post. If it is more part of some more static content that I’m building, they are pages. But each page, normally, has the same header image and menu as the rest of the site. I like my theme, I’m not looking to change that, it works really well for me, but as I do more writing and building of content in a few areas, the default images and menus are not always the best combo for a page that could have a different message/branding than the default.
My basic menu structure would benefit from four separate options at the present time. For general blogging, I can do my Main Menu easy enough. It’s the one that I have been doing all along — my default menu. But if I look at a second area, my photo gallery, right now it is a single vertical menu item in the horizontal menu with lots of nested pages. It makes the main menu a bit big and unwieldy (plus slows down load time a bit). So, if instead, I had a site that was JUST my photo gallery, I would change the header image of course but I would also make those vertical menu structures more horizontal, spreading the years out differently. Maybe grouped in five year chunks, maybe current year would be separate. For my PolyWogg Guides that I’ll be doing more of in the future, I already am not entirely happy with the menu structure for the HR guide and want a better one for the new Astronomy guide. As I write more in the future, that problem will exacerbate the pressure on the menu structure. And it wouldn’t hurt to have totally different branding for the header. Finally, I have been wanting to get my trivia game going, and that is a totally different look and feel than the rest of the site. I say “finally” but I could group all my reviews together too, or a site for quotes, or a site for humour. Lots of “options” where the overhead wouldn’t be worth the separation, but for the four areas that I have already identified for growth? Absolutely there might be a worthwhile investment to be made in another structure.
So I could reconsider my decision to co-locate them, separate them into multiple sub-sites or run WordPress as a multi-site option, including merging my brother’s site that I host as well as Astropontiac. But the truth is that I really don’t want separate sites though, I want it all together. And my theme is designed to allow that, sort of at least. But when I tried it previously, it was a crapfest. Nothing I did seemed to work the way it was supposed to work.
In theory, I can create four different header images (done) and four different menus (done), and go into a page say for my PolyWogg Guide to Astronomy, tell it to replace the main header image with the Guides image and the main menu with the Guides menu, and voila, I should have a separate branding option like a sub-theme within my site. Except, as I said, when I did it all previously, it didn’t do it. The header didn’t change, the menu didn’t change. Same old, same old.
So I went on the support site for the theme, typed in what I had tried previously both within the existing theme and using other plugins, and asked, “Is there a combo of a good plugin with this theme that will do what I want?”. I pressed submit, aaaaand I broke their support site. Not completely but it somehow corrupted my account with them. Nice. While they were trying to fix that so I could ask my question, I went back to playing with my theme options, doing exactly what I tried six months ago and twelve months ago and even eighteen months ago, same general settings, and BAM! This time it worked. Son of a fudgsicle.
Which means I CAN do it. I can have separate branding for any of the pages I want. Not for posts, that’s a more complicated structure that doesn’t quite make sense with what I’m doing, but pages? No problem. Yay!
Or is it a yay? I had already accepted that it couldn’t be done in my site, I was really just doing due diligence, and considering moving my blog back to ThePolyBlog.ca, and leaving just my PolyWogg guides at PolyWogg.ca. Now I don’t have to do any of THAT change, but the other changes? They’re relatively easy enough, and in fact, I’ve already created the prototype headers and basic menus. I just have to tell those pages which header and menu to display when those pages are shown, as well as include an option to get back to the main menu. I like it, I just haven’t completely wrapped my head around it. It’s a significant change to my branding, so I want to be sure that it is the way I want to go before I do it. I think so, but I need to test a few things first.
But assuming it all tests out, I now have three significant sub-designs to figure out:
Main menu (done)
The Panda Family Photo Gallery
PolyWogg Guides to…
PolyWogg Trivia
When I get that done, it will definitely warrant a PolyWogg 6.0 classification.
In addition to all that structural work, I also want to tweak my backup settings, chron setup, and optimization settings with caching. I’m not obsessed about SEO or speedtests, but I’ll do the basics. Really what I want to do though is to uninstall Piwigo sometime soon, my “alternate” gallery setup, but I’m not ready for that big step yet.
Blogging
I call this section blogging, but it goes way beyond simple blogging. Many bloggers have a goal which is to “blog regularly”, basically to deliver regular new content. That’s not my goal. I blog when I have something to say, not say something just to meet a word count. And I have lots to say. I have itches to scratch for:
Book reviews: I have almost 200 on the site, but I need to update some links so they all show in the index page, and add some reviews from the last six months that I haven’t written yet;
Movie reviews: I have about 5-6 six on the site, another 100 or so written but not uploaded yet, and another 10-15 that aren’t even written yet.
TV reviews: I have 10-12 seasons of various shows reviewed and on the site, and probably about another 500 I could do as I’ve already reviewed the individual episodes. It’s just a time issue, and relative priority. I like writing them, but they take time away from more pressing issues in life. More just a “nice to have” at some point.
I have a big giant gaping hole in my plan for recipes. I know generally what I want for them, have a decent layout, can do them generally like my reviews for structure and internal web admin. But I don’t have a great workflow for including pictures of recipes or even getting the recipes up on the site fast enough after we make the dish and decide it’s a “keeper”, so by the time I get around to writing it up, I’ve forgotten which photos go with which recipe, or even WHEN we did it. I have photos of dishes from last February and I have no idea what they are. In an ideal world, I would have taken a picture with it of the recipe title so I’ll remember in future, but I didn’t. Was that the chicken with pasta dish and an unique sauce or was it the special noodle dish with Asian seasoning? Was it one we liked or we thought was only so-so? Eleven months later, I don’t remember. And after mentioning above about branding, I need to decide if I even want this as a blog post with everything else, or I want to make it into a page that I could style like a separate subsite for different types of recipes. Or is it both? A page for the recipe, a blog for the experience of cooking it for the first time? I haven’t figured that out, but I need to at some point. For now, it is just a general “Figure out the plan for recipes”.
I have another sub-area that isn’t quite figured out either: music reviews. Unlike the book / TV / movie reviews, the music reviews have a natural structure to them. For example, if I review the year 1943 (as I already have), should that be on a separate sub-site? Should I have separate pages for discography reviews too, such as all the albums by Elton John? I know I’m going to do the yearly reviews, but beyond that? Are they posts? Is it another PolyWogg Guide? Or is it a PolyWogg Guide of enough uniqueness that it should be a separate site on its own? And if it is, should HR and Astronomy be separated too? Enquiring minds want to know! And it would be far better to decide NOW before I get too far in the initial structure. I just need to decide.
Once I get past various forms of reviews, I have a bunch of other topics itching for me to write about them. Lots of them are one-offs, and I have a folder called Bloggable in my Gmail where I’ve saved articles, etc. Things that excited me. Like the Drake equation for predicting the likelihood of finding sentient life in the universe. Or a comparison of prices at grocery stores. Certainly I have a long list of topics as preparations for retirement. I started to write a series of posts about “Who do I owe in my life“, and I want to get back to that, as well as a series of posts about “What I learned in school” for various academic outings.
I also am way behind in some other topics I started and would like to get back to at some point. My spiritual journey and 12 questions, Being Jacob’s Dad, even a bunch related to photos like different day activities on our honeymoon. Plus finalizing a draft I did of a version of “grace” to say for dinners that is a bit non-denominational.
Writing
The main focus of my writing is usually my HR guide and the need to finish the damn thing. That remains true, of course, but I also mentioned above that I want to play with how it is laid out on the website. Maybe just a stalling tactic, with the perfect being the enemy of good enough.
Early in 2020, I started posting some of my personal writing, including the start of a story about a detective I have in mind for a series of stories. It was a prototype of a series of novels, and while I like the basic structure, I find myself throwing in too much backstory that I intended for prequel novels. It’s a bit of a rookie challenge, more experienced writers know not to do it and only throw it just enough to whet the appetite while letting the reader fill in the blanks. But I realized that in my mind, those are full-fledged stories. And quite frankly, it would be easier to tell them in sequence. So, I’m going to go back and redirect my story to start where it should have began. With the main character in law school. I have several other stories to consider in there too for the same character, and some with his friends. The big ones will likely have to wait until retirement, but I might be able to start working on the first novel this year.
In addition to that “detective universe”, I have an idea for a sci-fi novel, with a bit of an Expanse feeling to it, maybe a bit like Artemis. And I am years away from feeling ready to start my ultimate series combining mythology, Gods, challenges, and quests. But it’s on my list and I could start some of the research, plotting and outlining.
Media
I don’t know what to call this category, honestly. It’s a mish-mash of things. Up first is simply media watching, with Jacob and I working our way through the Marvel Universe, Star Wars (with Andrea), and Lord of the Rings, plus a number of other series as we come to them. Just passive stuff.
More active though is getting our music streaming everywhere in the house for iTunes and/or Amazon Prime. Some of that starts with managing my music collection on my PC and doing uploads, but the goal is streaming everywhere.
And finally there is some organization and purging to be done for VHS tapes, DVDs, and CDs.
Photos
Remember back at the beginning that I said the list could be overwhelming? Well part of that was easily just all the website redesign stuff I want to do. And that by itself is daunting. But the over-the-top, drive me crazy and call me anal, item is the photo gallery on my website.
So, the explanation of what I want to do is simple. I want to upload all my photos and videos to my website as a gallery so that I can share them with friends. I don’t want to put it on Facebook, I don’t want the videos on YouTube, I don’t want to pay for SmugMug or Flickr. I want to use my OWN site. In WordPress, not Piwigo.
In theory, that’s not a lot to ask. I have the website, check. I have WordPress, check. I have a site that will let me display photos and videos, and enough space to save them, check. I have the know-how to get them up, check. So what’s the problem? The workflow is detailed and extensive, and if I want them to be consistent across the gallery, I pretty much have to do the same workflow each time properly. Except that a few things have changed since I first started, leaving inconsistencies that I probably could live with, but I don’t want to do all this work to not have it the way I want.
So the first overall step is to develop a single, universal workflow that gets me the first gallery up and running exactly as I want it to be setup. Then I just need to replicate it for an additional ~240 galleries spread across 16 years of pictures.
The tracker for the galleries and sub-galleries is long and detailed. And as I have done a few serious tests and prototypes, just before WordPress changed the way it handles certain media types, I now know that the 240 galleries may in fact grow to be about 400 galleries to make some things way easier to manage. Which means that the first thing I have to do is fully confirm the workflow for each gallery from start to finish. Some of the galleries are already up and running in the site, but I’ll need to tweak them a bit to the new layout and functions. I’m close to the final gallery layout, I just need to ensure a couple of functions work the way they are supposed to in 2-3 different configurations. But the workflow needs to be tweaked on the front end for filenaming for photos from Andrea and from Jacob, as well as scanning sources and/or importing into Mylio, plus for the back end for storage and creation of things like PhotoBooks.
The other thing I need to do is finalize the tracker for “all” the types of galleries. This includes:
standard PandA Family monthly galleries;
special galleries for trips, etc.;
monthly galleries of extra photos for blogs, recipes, etc;
an option for PolySpring sharing of photos;
special content galleries for products like reviews, PolyWogg Guides or PS Transitions; and,
a special layout and tagging option for Astro photos.
If I put the whole workflow and tracker on the whiteboard at once, it takes up a whole whiteboard. For the next round, I think I’ll just put up the area for the workflow and an area for a couple of galleries that I’m working on at any one time. My separate e-tracker can maintain the ongoing tracking.
What am I going to do in January?
So that’s my big list for the year. What am I going to include for January?
Better webcam/microphone setup
Web: Branding: Main
Web: Branding: Photo gallery
Photos: Workflow with sub-options for monthlies, specials, blogging, reviews and special products
Photos: Workflow and basic tracker to whiteboard
Photos: Full tracker in e-form.
This is an area that is important to me and I spend a lot of time on it as a result trying to get it where I want it to be. It might be anal but it is part of my choices. I choose to do this work, I choose to share the photos and videos as part of my sense of identity.
And that completes my to do list update for 2021. Now I just need to triage January’s list as I can’t possibly do them all, alas.
As I set my goals for 2021, I’m using already-established headings that work well for me. This grouping is mostly about learning, regardless of the actual sub-headings.
Learning
The first category, learning, is the catch-all when I don’t have something else broken out. Way back when I was in Grade 6, I had a teacher introduce me to origami, and I’ve been fascinated ever since. I have books, instruction sets, links for online stuff, and I never get around to doing it. My goal for the year is to find ten things that I like to fold and can learn to do well. I’m hoping to try 50 or so designs, and there’s even a paper folding penguin I listed earlier under activities with Jacob. But I’ll settle for even being able to easily fold a penguin, a panda and a frog. I just have to be able to remember how to do them for the future when I’m sitting somewhere and bored.
I did a Writers Digest tutorial, and I would be open to doing other writing sessions. Not quite sure what those would be, there’s a set that are offered by two online people that I respect and admire but they run $300 per class. A little rich for what is mostly a hobby for me still. That may shift, as you’ll see in a future blog post, but for now, it’s a hobby.
I completed my Video Games course a few years ago, and a Meta-Literacy one last year. There’s an advanced metaliteracy but I have kind of lost interest. In the end, though, they were mostly tests to see if Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) work for me, and they do. There are tons of courses on Coursera that I could do, including perhaps how to program an app. I’d love to make PolyWogg Trivia into a game app. Equally, I could consider a laundry list of “classes” from either Masterclass or The Great Courses.
I even have options in case I want to take an intro course in Psychology.
Photography
This category is both all-inclusive and greatly missing some key features. Let me explain.
If I start first with “image capture”, I do have some ideas for learning more. There is an option (in a non-COVID) world where a local photographer puts together photography shoots for budding photographers where he hires some models who are looking to build their portfolio, pays them in minimum cash and guaranteed professional shots from him, and also offers them any good shots from the amateurs. In exchange, the amateurs get great models, some guidance on the session for learning, and we pay the host. In other words, we pay to learn, he gets paid to teach and partially take photos of the models, and the models get some cash and a whack of free photos. Everybody wins. I want to do it, just for the experience really, even though it is not something that particularly interests me. I’d be willing to do photo shoots for friends for example, if they want some basic shots of their family in a park, whatever, just for free and fun, not something I’m looking to turn into a business. And in return, I get practice taking shots of people so that when I do want something really special, I’m already experienced.
I also have some links for free photography classes, some “tips” cards that I bought and want to put to use and design my own flash cards, a MOOC course to finish (National Geographic), summaries from a paid photography class through Henry’s, and I’m considering a potential new lens for wide-field astrophotography.
If I then move on to “image management”, I have my tool, Mylio, but I haven’t put all my photos into it yet. I’m still slowly integrating them as I process a given month, for example. While I have some 30K photos over 15 years, the extra challenges are old photos that are in photo albums to scan as well as managing photos that belong to my mother’s estate. I even have a few posts to do about past scans, like a birthday card collection. I’m not very good at editing though, and while I understand the basics, I’d love to learn the basics of photoshop techniques with programs like GIMP. I even have two images that I have to work with — one from my friend Roula and one of my wife Andrea on a merry-go-round. Both are great shots except for some stains in the photos that don’t look right. Someone with better expertise than me could process them in an instant…I took a few cracks over the years, but I have never quite nailed the technique.
Lastly, I have a grouping around “what do I do with my photos?”. The biggest thing is put them on my website but that’s something I track under my website commitments. It’s a huge commitment of time and energy, and it is what is “missing” under photography as it is more about the website than it is the photos. Instead, my activities are more around putting a backup copy on Amazon Prime (included in my membership), creating photobooks of special events and years (although Andrea is taking the lead on those), and putting a copy on an e-frame that I’ve never had setup properly. I’m also considering trying to make a video file for each year, the equivalent of a video photobook set to music, but I haven’t seen anything that inspires me for that yet. And I’ve considered but not yet implemented the possibility of uploading some of my pictures for sale on microstock sites. Long-term, I have to find options for storing the hard copies of some of the prints I have and disseminating old estate photo collections, but I also want to work on choosing high-quality shots that I can print on metal and put up around the house.
Astronomy
Sooooo, lots of people who know nothing about astronomy think I’m some expert. I’m not. My astro hobby is a bit of a maelstrom of potential, possibilities, impostor syndrome and failure. I have a lot of information across a spectrum of topics that lets me understand the basics of most astro topics, but not in any great depth. And while I am not entirely sure this is the best way to group this section (hence the impostor syndrome), let’s start with “understanding my own telescope”.
The first five years of ownership taught me a pretty good set of lessons in what not to do and how to avoid it in the future. I am now a regular online advisor for newbies on my type of scopes, including experiences, options, etc. My blog post about my alignment process is one of the most viewed pages on my site, second only to my HR guide. But even with my scope, I don’t have everything tweaked properly. I’ve read an after-market owner’s guide, and there are 14 telescope tweaks that I want to try to my setup to see if it improves operations. Some may do nothing at all; others may give me a slight gain in performance. I just want to try them so I know that I’ve done everything to get every last ounce of performance from my scope.
The next area is not so much about the scope itself as learning more about the history of telescopes and astronomy. I’ve started a project whereby I’m going to read all the back issues of Sky and Telescope all the way back to the 1940s. I have already read one year, and I plan to do the others, just got a little side-tracked with a basement reorg. As I go, I’ll write up reviews for my blog and the local astro newsletter.
In a similar vein to my setup for my scope, I also want to look at setup for binoculars. I bought a pair, and they work well for me, but I want to get used to using them. I want to do a deeper-dive so that I could teach someone else if I had to do so. Which is a major part of the theme for this section that I’ll come back to…the idea of teaching myself so I can teach others.
I have a cheap telescope that I got for free and some parts from binos to make some custom eyepieces. It’s part of my “creative / crafting / maker” heading that appears spread out through my list between stuff I do myself, stuff with Andrea, stuff with Jacob and potentially stuff with outside people. I would like to make a maglite to replace a green laser pen option to see how viable I can make one. I also have two old battery supplies I’d like to repair and upgrade.
But as I said, part of my interest is teaching it to others as part of my volunteering duties below. And while it is a chicken/egg situation of which came first, I realized that one thing I bring to astronomy that a lot of experts don’t is an ability to help newbies understand the basics. I’m pretty good at taking complex subjects, boiling them down to their essentials, explaining them in plain language, and onboarding people to a new subject in a way that gives them a good base for future understanding. In effect, I can frame their entry into the world of astronomy in a positive way. My blog post about alignment proves that, it is highly popular despite there being way better experts out there and I’ve done almost no promotion of the page. I wrote it, I shared the links in a couple of fora, people liked it and continue to share it, while my hit count grows. People regularly email me to say “Finally! An explanation that made sense and that ACTUALLY HELPED me”. And they’re off to the races again.
I have done that for an HR guide about federal government competitions, and now I want to do it for astronomy. I am going to write a PolyWogg Guide to Astronomy. Unlike my HR guide, where there are few natural competitors, it is the height of arrogance to think I’m going to offer something better than some of the giants in astronomy writing for amateurs learning how to work a scope and see the cosmos. And yet. I’ve already written some parts of it, and I’m taking a similar approach to my scope. Testing it out, figuring out what works, coming up with a good workflow, and then finding a way to explain that workflow in a manner that makes sense to people in context. The biggest section that I’m going to work on early, and that will reinforce some of the volunteer work, is a guide to choosing a telescope. There are tons of online resources I can use to help build that guide, some of that not even “bad”, just not the way I would explain it. I have materials from an online virtual astronomy course, and I took a course in astrophotography, I have multiple adapters for connecting a smartphone to a scope. I even have an adapter that will let me attach a point-and-shoot camera to my scope. But I also have materials from RASC itself including target lists, a new yearly Almanac, the 2020 Observer’s Handbook, and a guide to native peoples’ constellations. Plus, for the year? Jacob and I are going to do the Explore the Universe kit from RASC. I might even be able to get Andrea to join in. All grist for the learning and writing mill.
But I have other projects or activities in mind. I started working on an astrolog that can run on my phone, and it will take some time to finish and get in the right format. I’d love to make it a full app, but that’s beyond my abilities so far. For the astrophotography side, I’m hoping to take some photos of the moon, planets, DSOs, and constellations. Maybe even some sets worth sharing. In terms of milestones, people often recommend doing a Messier marathon at least once in your life — every Messier object (110 of them) in one night. At least, all the ones you can see that night. This is often combined with an “all-night session“, and that’s on my list too. It would be nice to hit the astronomy lottery and combine both with an astro-themed trip somewhere like a dark-sky site.
Volunteering
My volunteer work falls into three simple headings: astronomy, computers, and GCWCC.
For astronomy, I am a member of the Ottawa Centre of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, and I help out with the club. For the last three years, I’ve been the star party coordinator. Except this past year, I had almost nothing to do. There WAS no star party option. And while I fully intended to give it up for 2021, there’s no one stepping forward to take on the role. Which likely would be the case until we open up again, why would anyone volunteer to do something that can’t happen and if it does, where they may not be comfortable saying yes in advance? Soooo, I’m likely to suggest that I’ll keep the title / role until we get going again. For most of 2021, there won’t be much to do.
In the same vein, I stepped up to take on one of the roles in the Centre as the Ottawa representative to the National Council. Again, it isn’t an onerous role again, attending virtual meetings four times a year and conveying views back and forth, and if / when they hold an annual in-person general meeting somewhere in Canada, probably attending. I can be down with that I guess. Oh, and part of that duty is to feed into manuals, guides, handbooks, etc. for the administration of the club so I’ll likely draft some text regarding two of their publications. I also attend the bi-monthly Ottawa Centre Council meetings as well as the monthly meetings.
And there is a weird role which is they need someone to audit the Centre’s books once a year. Since I’m not an elected member of council, and thus not a voting member for spending decisions, there’s no conflict of interest for me to audit the books for the year. And they don’t need a formal accountant to do it, just someone who can exercise due diligence. Okay, I can do that, I suppose.
However, I have recently inherited a much bigger project. One of our project partners reached out to us and piggybacked / dovetailed with some ideas we already had about teaching people how to use different types of scopes. They want a video on how to use a new scope that they got, and so I’m going to produce it with some other people in the Centre. Yay us. The first one has a bit of a deadline while the others can take all year, if we want.
Continuing the astronomy theme, I am a member of the Board for Astropontiac and I maintain the website. Like RASC, there’s not much happening in a lockdown world, but my role will continue. Pretty low demands, 99% of the time.
Beyond that, I’m wrapping up my involvement last year in the Government of Canada Workplace Charitable Campaign as one of the co-coordinators for our branch of 600 people. I’m running a trivia game on January 21st, working on a report, and other than that, I’m pretty much done.
In checking my to do list, I realized that I still have administrative access to an old website that I was helping with web duties for at one point. I’m not sure they’re even using the site anymore, but I feel like I should make sure SOMEONE has admin access before I delete myself completely. I asked at one point previously and never heard back, so maybe it’s moot. But I need to close that out.
What am I going to do in January?
So that’s my big list for the year. What am I going to include for January?
Integrate photos in Mylio
Develop outline for PW Guide to Astronomy
Read and write about one year of Sky and Telescope
Plan year for Explore the Universe, Almanac, and Observer’s Handbook
RASC monthly meeting
RASC Ottawa Council meeting
RASC Ottawa auditor download
RASC Ottawa SPC confirmation
RASC Ottawa video
GCWCC trivia
GCWCC report
Do you have any plans this year for learning or volunteering?
