reading again
“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” – Stephen King
“Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.” — Annie Proulx
One metric for how stressed I am, generally from work, is what I’m able to read, understand, enjoy. When I’m reading complex novels I’m generally at a very low (for me) level of stress.
Linux Mint
On a whim I installed Linux Mint onto my 2014 Macbook Air 11".
I had resisted using linux as my desktop OS for many many years: my last was a Fedora desktop back in 2008. My last non-work linux desktop was Slackware back in 1996. In part I stayed on MacOS to use commercial photo and music software that wasn’t supported on linux. And in part this was from all of the imaging and twiddly machine maintenance I had to deal with for work.
New Beginnings
New year. New career.
December felt like I was in limbo, a bit. I wanted to set up my business so I needed to revamp my site and create a placeholder portfolio. I wanted to avoid using my work laptop for anything new for Reasons, knowing I would need to wipe it eventually anyway. And the whole Lastpass breach convinced me to migrate to Bitwarden while I rotated all 600+ passwords.
Site redesign
Twitter’s implosion has highlighted the importance of a space independent of any centralized platform’s availability… I have set up a mastodon account but it’s clear that Mastodon is ephemeral, not a long-term archive for writing or photos. And since I’m working on a new portfolio/business site already, I decided to overhaul escapewindow.com.
I’ve been using GitHub pages for hosting. For content I migrated from jekyll to hugo, primarily so I don’t have to deal with ruby gems anymore.
Fur seal rescue in Hercules Bay, South Georgia
Fur seal rescue in Hercules Bay, South Georgia We took a zodiac ride around Hercules Bay on what was to be our final morning in South Georgia. Eric, our zodiac driver, heard chatter on the radio about a fur seal caught in a packing strap, so we went over to check it out. We found him? sitting on the rocks, a loop around his neck. He was cute. We took some photos, then wandered off to watch the macaroni penguins for a bit.