Day #8 – Futzing Around With Tech

I added the Moon and the Earth image yesterday, after posting my post. In case you’re reading these in reverse order and got confused. I was building it up into a whole thing, having to comb NASA’s website for royalty-free space images and having to put it all together in a photo editor program and making it look right, and psyching myself out of actually, y’know, doing it. Then I went on the Wayback Machine and found my old site design and just stole that image and put it up here.

It’s a little short and probably at a terrible resolution for modern screens and browsers but I’m satisfied with it and the continuity it brings to my home on the interwebs. I’ve finally got bamoon.com decorated how I want. This page, finally and once again, feels like home.

My hosting bill is coming due in a month or two. It’s close to a hundred bucks and I don’t get much, so I went looking for other options (man, I hope my current host isn’t reading this). Here, I don’t get email, I don’t get an SSL certificate, I’m only allowed one domain, I don’t get a lot of storage space. Turns out (it turns out!) that for $30-40 less a year, I could get IMAP email, HTTPS, multiple domains (in one case, unlimited domains!), and more! I’ll be switching. When I do, I’ll probably also move the Uncasting page from where it’s currently parked (did you know that my nephew Max and I did a podcast? We’re currently on hiatus but enjoy our back catalog!)

Futzing around with domains and DNS and email and WordPress feels productive, but this is all just a platform for my writing. And here I am, writing. It’s early in the day and I haven’t left for work yet. I’ve eaten some bacon and a bowl of steel-cut oats (with honey, crushed almonds, and a little pat of butter) and a danish. The neighbor next door is out on their porch coughing (I think they’re a smoker) and I just got a text from my friend Tracy about a bumper sticker she just saw (“I believe in Dog”, to which I replied with a gif of a flying dog)

via GIPHY

(That one, actually)

I should go to work but I’ve only got (checks the word count) 393 words at this point. Pretty close but no cigar yet.

What else can I say? Today is Taco Tuesday, where I normally meet my friends after work for tacos. I suspect Terry is going to suggest we move it to Wednesday because there’s a great new bar that has fancy tacos that isn’t open on Tuesdays, but I can’t do it tomorrow because I have another commitment: a birthday dinner / going-away party for my sister’s mother-in-law and my nephew Max, respectively. I suspect that means I’ll be taco-ing alone tonight. So be it.

At this point, I’m just stalling. Writing words just to fill up space. But I need to shut off the guilt because that’s just what this whole exercise is supposed to do: get me to turn off the inner critic and write like the wind. I can edit later (I mean, I’m not going to edit these posts; they’re just free consciousness writing without consequences (thank you for reading them, by the way. I’m not really doing these for you, but I appreciate you all the same.))