I headed out of town for a few days, and while I had planned to keep blogging while I was away, I didn’t have a good internet connection on my laptop. This is starting to annoy me a bit…several times I’ve been hoping to write something, or work on a project, and my laptop is just struggling to do anything with the internet. I have a good tablet, I have a good phone, but I need to figure out a different option for online access where I need to be typing stuff. I was offline essentially for 5 days, so I figured I might as well drop the TIC series, it was just too hard to write.
And yet it wasn’t just about the writing. I was also struggling in the environment I was in, a basic holding pattern, to really feel like I was making conscious choices. All I could do was hold still. I thought about tricking myself into saying the TIC “drop” or break in the chain wasn’t my fault, but I could have still kept making choices even if I didn’t write about them right away. But I didn’t feel like I was. So it definitely has to be thought of as a clean break and takes me to series f.
Now that I’m back to the house, and at my desktop again, I’m a bit out of sorts as to what in my long list of things do I want to work on. One thing that is attracting my interest is that I have a series of blog posts that I have written but which are stuck in editing limbo because I haven’t quite figured out the right layout and format for them. I solved some recent layout issues for music, although not completely, and for book reviews, although again not completely. The structure is done, just some of the editing and population still needs work. Which is fine, no issues there. Just a question of time and discipline.
My TV reviews were a bit more problematic. Or at least they seemed to be. I have only compiled 12 of them on the website, 8 seasons of Castle and 4 seasons of Continuum. To do the reviews, there are a number of variables for consistency:
Format of the page title;
Layout of the actual review itself, including two images;
Four or five headings to structure the review;
A graphical representation of my overall rating of the season;
Closing signature block;
Two links to other reviews or the show on IMDB.com; and,
A list of the episodes for that season.
I knew generally what I wanted to do, based on earlier wrestling matches with the seasons of Castle. But I was not completely thrilled with my review of Castle – Season 1 (PWTVR00001). There was something about the start of it that kept nagging at me, like I didn’t have something quite right for format or design.
But I just had a similar problem with my music reviews, and I realized for that one that it was more about flow and repetition. Could this be the same problem? It was. For some reason, I had started my review with some text that should be paragraph 2 and 3, and buried my lede for paragraph 1 farther down. A bit of editing, some rearranging, some deletions, and voila, it held together. Now that I could see what it SHOULD have said, I could figure out the rest of the headings and framework. I then replicated it 7 more times, moving 8 reviews out of “pending” and into “published”.
I had a different problem with Continuum. I had tried formatting it earlier to sort of / kind of match the Castle layouts, and for some strange reason, I was getting a really weird layout as a result. Sidebars went missing, featured images weren’t aligning properly, word wrap was doing things in weird places. All four posts / reviews were messed up. And while I would love to know what the problem was, it was easier to just copy the text to a notepad, thus stripping out stupid codes that were messing it up, pasting them into a whole new post with the proper TV review formats and structure, unfortunately redoing some links here and there, but in the end, fixing 4 more posts.
Thus completing 12 TV reviews that were pending and giving me another big strike-through on my to do list. If I want to move on to other reviews, I can. And I will in time. But for now? The previous 12 are fixed, published, and done.
Today’s schedule was brought to you by the letter S as in sh**show. I normally do chiro on Friday mornings, and since Andrea had an early morning appointment, I moved my chiro even earlier (7:30). Except I had trouble sleeping so dragging my butt out of bed to get there was not a pleasant experience.
Unfortunately, part of my back is being stubborn and refusing to release, so I take what I can get. Anyway, onward to a different appointment for Andrea and then back home. Series of meetings, staff meeting, and then out the door at noon to go to the telescope store. I know, you wouldn’t think that was work, but it kind of was. I was having them evaluate two donated scopes for our astronomy group, and so I took them in today. Two hours later, I had a wonderful time, but needed to be doing my real job. Grabbed some Tim Horton’s on the way for Jacob and I, ate quickly, and then off to a conference call at 2:30.
Then I had to double down on a whole bunch of taskings as I’m off next week from Monday to Wednesday. Yay me, boo stacking work requests so my team is busy. And then I realized that a simple project that I half-volunteered for can’t wait until I’m back, they’ll need it before then. So I had to do a ton of work to get it into a form that was shareable. Imagine 3 hours to send a doc by email with all the info together ready to be used.
Somewhere around 7:30, I realized I hadn’t heard any noise upstairs. Andrea had fallen asleep, and Jacob hadn’t eaten. I ran out and grabbed subs for us as it was too late to start thinking about home solutions with what we have in the fridge right now, and also realized that while I was binging work, Jacob basically spent the day all by himself again. FFS.
We have got to get our sh** squared away. That is not on.
So we hung out for an hour with him, played a game and then he was too tired to keep going. Not surprisingly.
For me? It was back to work. Another couple of hours and I have everything up, out, tasked, noted, planned, tweaked, filed, and my out of office is on. Somewhere around midnight. It was a long day. And I did all this so I can relax and take three days off without thinking about it. If I live long enough to enjoy it. F***.
Fifty posts ago, I started my “Today I Choose” series. The goal was a response, in part, to COVID isolation malaise. A feeling that I was in a holding pattern of sorts and wasn’t really making conscious choices about how I live my life. So I thought that perhaps I could focus on making at least one conscious proactive choice every day to move my life forward in some way. I didn’t have a specific agenda in mind, or even a clear goal from the choices, just the thought that making my choices more apparent to myself might have mutually-reinforcing effects.
Taking stock
Now that I’m at 50 posts though, I am going back to review them to see what those choices were.
Make choices
Make bread with Jacob
Complicated dinner
Contribute to groups
T-Rex
Flexible meal options
Right electrical gadgets
Blog
Learn about astronomy
Expand astro gear
Spoil my son
Safety over style
Simply read
Push myself on astronomy
Play more with Jacob
Time-shift my work
Two-week break
Upgrade my computer
Upgrade software
Reorganize data files
Treat for dinner
Play with glasses
Keep J home
New format for reading
Consolidate J’s files
Nuke old laptop
Assemble new TV stand
Start astro project
Offer astro training
Day off
New blogging workflow
Rearrange office space
Brave Ikea
Sick day
Cleanse the palate (nerdy brain stuff)
Revise gallery layout
Encourage son’s creativity (photography)
Clean up reorg space
Listen to nostalgia (music)
Musical rabbit-hole
Day off
Play a game
Purge
Search for the right tool (website)
Design a new layout (website)
Edit an old post (music)
Tackle the first part of the garage
Break rather than bend
Bend rather than break
Binge (WordPress and work)
It doesn’t take a supercomputer to analyse those 50 data points. Almost all of them are about one of four things:
Organizing my physical space
Organizing my digital space
Pushing myself on my hobbies
Managing social time for myself and with my family
There’s probably an “other” category, of course, but those are the main headings.
Organizing my physical space
I’m working on a huge reorg of our house layout, storage, functionality in different rooms. I dream that it will be done by October 1st, but I’ve slowly come to the realization that the date is probably irrelevant. I want to maintain momentum, sure, but I also don’t want to kill myself doing it. And I can’t keep up the pace I have been.
Most of it is about the physical movement of furniture or clearing out the garage and other storage spaces. Some of it is about aggressive purging. Or even just cleaning up the reorg space so it is less of a construction zone and more of a functioning room with some stuff piled against the walls. Other times it has been getting the right electrical gadget or the right table legs to make the setup work the way I want it to, rather than settling for what I have. Or choosing whole new furniture options like a new TV stand.
Organizing my digital space
I upgraded my computer and reorganized all my data files, but I’ve also been putting a lot of time into my website this year trying to get all the pieces and content where I want it to be. I have had to accept that I probably can’t get the configuration and software back-end to the level I would like it, at least not on my own, and definitely not without considering a massive nuclear option. I may have to go that route, but if I do, I’ll likely pay someone to do it.
I went even farther though. I’ve consolidated Jacob’s files, nuked my old laptop back to default settings, and even created a whole new blogging workflow for myself when it comes to photos. No stone left unturned, I guess.
Pushing myself on my hobbies
I’ve obviously been pushing myself on the website and blogging, but I’ve also done more on astronomy too. I’ve got two extra telescopes in my garage right now, although they are temporary for ownership. Helping out the local astro Centre. I’ve been pretty active in some online groups though, helping newbies with their scopes, and I even did two in-person training sessions here in town. Oh, and I even ordered some astro glasses, and started a huge project I have in mind for reviewing old astro magazines, culminating in some articles written for the local astronomy groups’ monthly newsletter.
Beyond computers and my astro fix, I’ve been trying to read more, including in different genres and formats. I need to get back into the Reading Challenge, but I haven’t been feeling it as much of late. I am however feeling a renewed interest in music, including an almost 20-year interest in the hits of yesteryear that I revised and revamped.
Managing social time for myself and with my family
I’m not sure that is exactly the right heading. Maybe it is more just “staying social in a COVID world” when it would be really easy to just hibernate. We’ve made bread, special complicated dinners, played a lot of games, building things like a T-Rex and a Lego Millennium Falcon + International Space Station. We’ve experimented with more flexible meal options, time-shifted my work at times, took a break at the cottage, took days off, etc. Spoiled him regularly to adjust for the isolation, and encouraged his creativity through photography.
And we decided to keep Jacob home from in-person school, going for the remote option instead.
So is my life “better”?
In short, I don’t know. I feel like a lot of the organizing and decluttering / purging is reminiscent of a phrase my mother used to like. “Shape up or ship out”. It’s a phrase she learned in the 1940s where if you weren’t pulling your weight at home, you would be sent overseas to fight. My father preferred the phrase “shipshape and Bristol fashion”, which originates from the seaport of Bristol in the UK. In short, it means basically “squared away”, a place for everything and everything in its place. Not that they ever had anything shaped up or squared away, but they liked the phrases.
I’ve never had everything squared away in pretty much any part of my life. Career, marriage, life, parenthood…they are all works in progress, of course. There is no “done” or “ready” state. Yet much of what I see myself trying to do is to strip away the detritus that lines certain parts of my life.
While my parents preferred other terms, for me it is more like getting my sh** together. Physically, mentally, emotionally. In a world that right now seems to want to rend those constructs and structures asunder.
And while I would be hard-pressed to say “better” was the right adjective for my current life with the “Today I choose” blogging, I am using it to remind myself that every day I have a choice. I can curl up and let the world rend my life, or I can push back. Not so much my old cry of “F*** you, universe”. More like, “Okay, universe, you do what you’re going to do. I’m going to do me. And today I choose that THIS will be part of the me I choose to create.”
Am I “there” yet? No. And I do have to remind myself there is no “there” anyway, it’s not the destination but the journey. Nevertheless, right now, I feel like I’m making progress. I don’t feel it every day, and maybe the 50 choices I made so far are not significant. Maybe I chose things that were easy. But they were still my choice.
When I embarked on this journey, I thought I’d probably do about 20 or 30 posts maybe. Doing my 50by50 goals was a lot of work to write about, and I wasn’t sure I was up to blogging every day. In an ideal world, the superficial habit formation research suggests that if you do something for 30 days straight, it moves into the habit world. I don’t feel like “conscious choice” is a habit yet. So I’m going to keep using the blog to measure my progress. To push myself. To hold myself accountable.
Today I choose to continue making choices, hoping to shape up instead of shipping out. To get my sh** squared away, shipshape and Bristol fashion.
So, yesterday I wrote about how I was overwhelmed and had, by default, chosen to break instead of bend (Today I choose to break rather than bend (TIC00048d)). A bunch of things were piling up, and when they overwhelmed me, I dropped.
Today, I’m trying to find a bit healthier way to adjust, but I have to start with a negative. For those who have dipped their toe into my posts about “today I choose”, you know that I’m numbering them, and while the numbers go in regular order, I’ve been adding a “series” letter to the end. Those basically are my Seinfeld tracking for the choices — how many days in a row I can go without breaking the chain. Well, although I did indeed make a choice yesterday, even if by default, it was not a positive choice about how I want to live my life. Which means I have to reset again, going from series “d” to series “e”. Not a big deal for anyone but me, but so far I have:
July 5th to July 12th: 8 days in a row
July 16th to August 6th: 9 days
August 7th to August 18th: 12 days
August 20th to September 7th: 18 days
I’m happy to see the chains getting longer, but whether it is making a difference or not, I haven’t been able to assess yet. Soon, I will.
Anyway, the point is that yesterday was a break, as I said, in more ways than one and today I have to restart the chain with series “e”. And with the restart, my choice fell to looking at something that was not really the cause of my break but rather what failed to mitigate it. Namely, my approach to my website.
I confess…
So, if it isn’t obvious, I love having my own blog. With 1.5M words and almost 1500 posts, I also know that I’m probably in the top 10% of all blogs anywhere for production and unique contributions by a single author: me!
I like wrestling with the words of a given topic, figuring out what I want to say, how I want to say it. Putting my stamp on things. I like the fact that I’m up to about 150-200 hits a day even if most of them are here for my HR guide or astronomy help when I’m blogging about lots of other things. I have almost 200 book reviews on the site, ones that I put time and effort into writing and nuancing. Do they get many hits? Hardly. But I love the process.
But managing the website creates some challenges. I never want to commercialize or monetize my site. It will never have advertising nor likely to have affiliate links (tried that for Amazon for a bit, but I didn’t really like it). I am not trying to turn it into a side hustle for money, I don’t want to offer training courses. Maybe, at some point, I’ll turn my writing into sales products, but that is as far as I want to go. So then the question becomes, “What am I willing to invest in the site to keep it personal?”.
I tried other blogging platforms, I like WordPress. But right now there are three things that would improve my website dramatically, and I’m not doing them. First and foremost, I can improve my search engine optimization. I played with that on the weekend, along with the next two items, and it is part of what messed up my site. I used to use YOAST SEO and forget now why I removed it, I think it was conflicting with something I wanted more, and I tried Rank Math over the last few days. Essentially it prompts you on how to structure your pages, and gives you a score for the page. For example, if one of my key words for the site is book review, then it should appear in the title of my post, I should make sure I use the verb review repeatedly including in the title, I should add it as ALT text to any pictures on the page. A lot of stuff that I have ZERO interest in doing.
Because I realized that while I don’t want Google to block me or anything, I really don’t particularly care where I rank on most things. Most people using my site come to my site for MY site, not because of a google search. I’m not serving the world, a page at a time, most people who find my site are doing so because they are looking for something VERY specific to my site, and on those searches, I rank in the top 10. So why am I trying to kill myself on SEO? It’s an enormous amount of work to switch formats over to match what they want, and some things I tweaked and the system still said “0 points” for my tweak. In short, I don’t know what I’m doing and I’m not willing to invest the time and energy for something that is merely a “nice to have”. It’s not what my site is about.
A second thing that is problematic is my use of tables in a few places. They are NOT, as they say, “mobile-friendly”. But equally, some of my other design choices are not mobile-friendly either. I should be running CDN caching, not local caching, so that a fast site like Amazon AWS can serve my graphics and videos much faster than I, all behind the scenes. But I kind of like having my site keep it local. It’s silly, it’s not efficient, the tweaks are easy to make, and I just don’t want to do it because it goes hand in hand with the third element.
Namely page optimization. In other words, my site is slow to load. The infamous “they” recommend that a load times should be under a second. Some of mine go to 3-4 seconds to load the whole page. That’s NOT because I’m wordy, it’s not about the content, not really. Some of it is the local full size images, sure, but most of it is that I’m running a lot of plugins, a lot of things load every page run, I have a lot of style sheets that are getting called, and my HTML file ends up being quite long. None of them are dreadful, but each one slows the overall page a little bit. I tried running some minify scripts over the last couple of days, combined with better remote caching, and a few other tweaks here and there. I was basically following tips / best practices on how to speed up the front end and back end of the site.
I did accomplish it, things sped up. And I hated the way it looked on the front end. Every time the page loaded, for a quarter second, it looked like some stupid DOS based HTML link page with no formatting. Ugly as sh**. And I would really love to not have it be slow, but I don’t know how to fix that, and honestly, I don’t have the time or energy right now to learn.
Let it go, let it goooooo?
So I took a bit of time today during a break from work to undo all the stuff I had done in the last couple of days to try to improve the load times. I didn’t even really remember them all, so I had to go to the tip list and work my way backward undoing certain things. I hadn’t uninstalled the OLD way of doing things, but I had installed a bunch of new stuff that I had to remove. And then reactivate the old stuff.
Hell, I even considered some nuclear options in there first, like blowing everything off and uploading the content fresh again (more like an export / import situation), and I even was considering switching photo galleries or moving everything to Flickr. It sure would make my life easier in many ways, and Flickr will now let me have videos if I want. Tempting. If Mylio’s direct upload to Flickr was working, I’d be seriously tempted to go that route. But in the end, I reset back to the way it was, no need to go nuclear.
It’s a personal site, it’s mainly for me, and if it runs a bit slow, well, f*** it. At least for now. Maybe in a year or two if I feel like it, I’ll hire someone local to upgrade and optimize the site, basically to clean out a lot of crap that is probably clogging the setup. Which sounds simple, just letting it go, but it really isn’t for me.
Is the issue significant to the site? Yes.
Do I care about the site? Absolutely. It’s my in virtual form.
Do I care enough about this issue RIGHT NOW enough to be screwing up my site? No.
If I had a magic wand, I’d do it. But I don’t, and I have to accept I’m not good enough in WP to figure it out, at least not anytime soon, maybe not ever. I could probably renovate the behind the scenes system, strip the walls back to the studs so to speak, but I’m barely keeping my head up. I can’t let it add to my stress nor can I have it failing to mitigate it. I need the f***ing thing working well enough to use, even if it gives me lousy rankings on speed or search engine optimization. I know generally WHAT needs to be done, but not enough about how.
And I just have to let it go. I want it, sure, but I can’t really have it. Kind of like my observatory problem.
The part that is hard to explain is that to accept it, and to let it go, I have to accept that it is beyond my mental abilities to figure out. I can accept that I’ll never do 4D mathematical modelling, sure, nor calculate rocket trajectories into space, but basic setup of a website with WordPress? That SHOULD be something I can figure out, and it’s just not coming together for me. So I’m setting an upper limit on what I can do. I’m setting an artificial cap on my site that it will be “this good” and no better.
I rarely do that. Maybe it’s arrogance, maybe it’s confidence, maybe it’s naivete, but I like to believe the hype that you can do almost anything you put your mind to, outside of physical realities. But this ain’t one of those situations where I can live that belief. My site is about as good as it is going to get unless I pay someone to fix it.
Which leaves me back where I always am, focusing on the content. I can DO that, at least for now. Long term? If my brain starts to deteriorate to the point I can’t even write, I will likely not be the type to rage against the dying of the light but rather more likely to find a nice hospice in Vermont to end things. That’s the true nuclear option I guess.
For now, I’m in the world of being flexible on my standards and accepting a lower quality outcome than I would like for my website. I don’t really have a choice, but I’ll pretend I’m choosing to accept it.
Today I choose to bend rather than break, and I’ve put my site back to the way it was, even fixing a stupid problem with commenting that I caused on the weekend, thanks to Matt pointing out it wasn’t working. Yay, I fixed a small problem at least!
Today has been a hard day for me. And while I would like to say that I have made the healthy choice to “bend” rather than break under the weight of a bunch of things, the truth is that it feels more like a break.
I have ongoing sinus headaches that are kicking my ass. They’re not severe, they’re not debilitating migraines, they’re not life-crushing. But they are persistent. Some of it is allergies, some of it is being in the basement, some of it is probably just poor health in general. But they’ve been sapping my energy this week. We watched the World’s Toughest Race this week, with Bear Grylls hosting, and that type of show normally inspires me to see what people can do. This week it was more like, “They can do THAT and I feel like I can barely get through the f***ing day without crying.” I’m coping with Tylenol, but I really would like it to stop for a few days and let me sleep better. Or just make it through to evening before it hits. 4:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. is kind of deadly right now. I’m ending up having to sleep through it instead. This weekend, my head was pounding 2-3 times a day but I managed to keep trucking along. Lots to do, not enough time to do it.
And on the health front, I did something really f***ing stupid about 5 or 6w ago that is going to continue to bite me in the ass for some time. I was at the cottage, Andrea, Jacob and her parents were in the lake, and I was joining them. The lake is pretty shallow, but I jumped off the dock anyway. Nothing REALLY stupid like a dive, I am too heavy to control that well enough to not seriously injure myself, but I thought a simple semi-cannonball would be fine. Nope. I landed fine, but my weight basically took me straight down into a power squat, with the backs of my thighs smacking the backs of my calves.
I didn’t think I was going to be able to get out of the water, it hurt so bad. I thought at first I had torn something big. But it was okay after about 10 minutes, and while tender for the next few days, I thought I had escaped with minor outcomes. However, over the last two weeks or so, it has been tightening up at the back of the calf, about two inches below the knee. Oddly enough, my knee is fine — it normally hurts regularly, but somehow I didn’t damage it, it is just the muscles behind the calf. I’ll give it another week or two, and if it’s not healing or if it’s getting worse, I’ll have to look into it more thoroughly than simply consulting my SIL physio. My two hours in the garage were fine until I went to leave the garage and stepped up into the house. Simple step, but I tend to lead with my right foot and push off with my left, and the left REALLY doesn’t like pushing off when my leg is tired. It lets me know REAL fast. Not anywhere as severe as just after the stupid injury, but just enough to remind me that I’m 52 and fat, I shouldn’t be jumping off anything except the couch to get active. But it is frustrating too.
I’ve been expending a lot of energy to get the house functional again, with the move to the basement, and I’m trying to psych myself into this being a good thing, but my brain is too fast to not see through what I’m doing. I know I’m lying to myself. I don’t want to spend the whole day in the basement with a heater running because it’s cold. I don’t want to spend the next 2-3 months organizing sh**. I’ve been telling myself I’ll be done by October 1st to keep the momentum going and a light on at the end of the tunnel, but if I’m realistic, and today I don’t have much choice, it’s more likely to be January 1st. And that is busting my ass with frustration. I just want to do be done. I’m focusing as much as I can on the great new space for my desks etc., but I know it’s just trying to avoid sour grapes.
The isolation is getting to me too. We managed to go to our sister-in-law’s today, which was nice to visit, but it’s not enough. Maybe I need more random social interaction. Something fun with someone other than Andrea and Jacob. I managed a long conversation by messenger with an old friend on the weekend, and it was reassuring I guess (?) to see others feeling like they are a bit tired of the same housemates being their main social interaction too as well as their dining companions at every meal. If variety is the spice of life, I’m definitely living in a white bread world. Without the white bread. Another bit of frustration on the sandwich.
One way to cope with some things like this is to go for something “big and different”. If you read my blog back in April, you saw me spiral realizing that I couldn’t build an observatory in the backyard while keeping enough room for other functions. It also doesn’t help that Andrea doesn’t really understand that spiral or know how to talk about anything like that, just not her jam. April f***ing sucked, to be honest, and I spiralled hard with no one to really talk to about what I was experiencing and no social outlet to distract myself. I mention my disappointment on not being able to do an observatory because we’re now considering a pool.
I’ve always wanted a pool, but Andrea feels they are too much work, take up too much of the backyard, we wouldn’t likely use it enough, we like going to the cottage in the summer, etc. But we were considering getting a trampoline that would tie up the backyard anyway for fewer usages than a pool, so we asked J what he was more interested in, and I’m not surprised it was a pool. So Andrea is doing research to see how she feels about the options. But I know I can’t get excited about it, we are WAY far away from anything resembling a decision that it is even feasible in our small yard let alone desirable from Andrea’s perspective. And TBH, if I get excited about it, and we can’t do it? I literally can’t go through that roller coaster again, not after the observatory. So I’ll let Andrea lean in on this one and see what we end up with for next year. There’s a consultant that a friend of a friend used to see what was possible, so maybe we’ll have them come over and give us some options. After our conversation with the inlaws today, I suspect it won’t be feasible in our yard, at least not without seriously ripping up part of our existing deck.
Between the observatory, pool, moving my office, the cold basement, all the disorganized chaos right now, I feel like I’m starting to hate our house. I have no desire to move really either, and with the constraints that we have for where we live so that Andrea and Jacob have good transit options, this is probably the best it gets. Andrea would like to maybe downsize when she retires and move closer to the river, and the prices in those areas while staying close to transit are going to seriously f**k with our financial plans. I did some basic research tonight, and we can do it, but only likely through a condo option which pretty much means giving up astronomy (no place to safely store the gear) or having a pretty tiny house for the outrageous prices in those areas. I’ve been planning to retire in 5 years, but if that is the longer-term goal for our living, there’s no way I’ll be able to do that then. I’ll likely have to stay until the 35-year mark to maximize the pension. Another giant box of uncertainty there to file away somewhere.
My normal coping mechanism, an outlet for a combination of creativity, expression and organization is my website. And today it is really pissing me off. Certain things that should work are running really slowly, and I have no idea why. With my frustrations already running high, and being really tired due to bad sleep and staying up too late, I am not thinking straight at all today.
Hell, I even tried to get a pair of headphones working today that don’t seem to work for the microphone part, and I spent almost 45 minutes to get the damn drivers downloaded only to find out it doesn’t recognize the headphones at all. I’m seriously considering some nuclear options on the website tonight, with no guarantees they’ll actually do ANYTHING to solve the speed problem I’m experiencing. I changed something in the settings to compensate and looking at the way the site is loading now? I hate it. Looks like a DOS version for about a second before the real content loads. I don’t even know which change did it so I can undo it. And too many other changes in the last day to simply do a rollback to an earlier backup. I think. At this point, I am too frustrated and tired to be sure of anything.
If I was making the right choices, I would have found ways to bend today. Instead, I let it break me. Which is a choice too. Not a good one, but a choice.
