Atom No More?

 2022-06-09

Yesterday one of my library colleagues at Grinnell College posted an announcement   that Atom   would be retired (sunset) in December 2022. Ouch, I have a lot of workflows that depend on Atom!

So, today part of my mission is to begin the process of migrating workflows, both work-related and personal/at-home, from Atom to its most logical replacement, Visual Studio Code   or VS Code as it’s largely known in the development community. The other part of today’s mission was to update this blog   , something I’ve not done in far too long!

Time for a Test Page

 2021-03-07

My daughter, Mackenzie, and I have been using this blog for testing new features lately. If you’ve been following me here you’ve seen some of them pop-up on the home page. Now that we have a host of them working, I need to move some out–of-the-way so they don’t clutter things up too much. However, I don’t want to discard them, in some cases we didn’t implement them anywhere else so this is the only working copy we have.

One of Many Challenges

 2021-02-21

For 2021 I’ve signed on to be a member of the steering committee for Toledo’s 2021 Community Visioning (CV)   project coordinated by Tree’s Forever and Iowa’s Living Roadways   , Iowa State University Extension and Outreach   , and other partners. Tama is also a Community Visioning   participant in 2021.

My MQTT Weekend

 2021-01-31

Now that I’ve cleared the driveway of the latest snowfall, I am officially declaring this to be “My MQTT Weekend”. It actually started on Friday night, the weekend, not the snow. Rather than posting a lot of gibberish here, I’ll just point you to my project repo at https://github.com/SummittDweller/Motorized_MQTT_Blinds   and especially the Additional Resources   portion of the README.md file there. If/when I get this all working maybe I will post some photos, maybe.

Thanksgiving 2020

 2020-11-26

Sorry, I’ve posted and experienced too much sadness in the last two weeks, and more. Two members of our immediate family, Sully and Stitch, passed away on November 14th and 20th, respectively. Sully was our male kitty, only about 6 years old and his passing was a real shock. He was an ornery, sometimes grumpy cat, but very loveable at times. We miss him very much. Stitch was the matriarch of our cat family, about 18 years old and a gorgeous long-haired kitty. Stitch was in poor health the last year or so and not very playful so her passing was not such a shock, but it’s still hard to take. Fortunately, she passed comfortably in her sleep, nestled up on the couch between Mackenzie and Christine. We miss her too.

New Announcement Feature

 2020-09-13

Quite some time ago I added an Announcement feature to the Rootstalk   website that I helped design and maintain for Grinnell College   . Events of the past week have driven me to implement this feature as part of this blog and one other site, with some minor improvements.

The original Rootstalk   version of the feature is very simple, it works around this logic:

Last of the Clean-up? - Derecho Follow-Up for September 6

 2020-09-07

Tomorrow is Labor Day 2020, but it also will mark 4 weeks since the August 10 derecho. Thankfully, I believe today marked the end of the clean-up, at least on my own property. I was going to write this post yesterday after another 6+ hours of work outdoors, but last night we had another storm roll through, and all day the winds have been blowing upwards of 40 mph, so I put in another 6 hours or so cleaning up even more debris. The only good news here is that the city has not yet made a 2nd-pass of curbside debris pick-up, so I don’t have to haul it away, just keep adding to the “boma” at the curb.

Tama-Toledo Parks - Derecho Follow-Up for August 24

 2020-08-24

So, the Iowa Geocacher’s Organization   annual Hike-n-Seek   event is coming to Tama County and Otter Creek Lake on Friday-Sunday, September 25-27, barring any more 2020 disasters. 🍀 The weekend is slated to include September’s Friday Lunch Club (FLC) too, but the restaurant that was slated to host FLC was destroyed in the August 10 derecho.

Derecho Follow-Up - Saturday, August 22

 2020-08-22

Almost every day for the past few months I have walked with my “scurry” around Cherry Lake in Tama. We generally walk in the morning before the heat, humidity, and mosquitoes get too bad. We finally got power back on Thursday evening, August 20, so on Friday morning, August 21, 2020, we walked for the first time since the derecho of August 10. It was actually more like an obstacle course than our usual stroll, but we still managed to collect quite a bit of trash, as usual. There were about a dozen places around the lake, a trail that is about 1.33 miles long, where fallen trees required that we climb over or weave around. It’s no fun to do either, especially since the “weaving” sometimes involved venturing off-trail into the poison ivy. Makes me itch just thinking about it.

Iowa’s 2020 Hurricane

 2020-08-18

It’s been far too long, again, since I posted to this blog, but this time I have a legitimate excuse: we’ve been without power or internet, or much of anything, since about 11:45 AM on Monday, August 10, 2020. So we have now been more than 10.5 days without power. I’m only able to post this because of a portable generator I bought on August 12 (that was an adventure in itself) and the wireless hotspot that my phone has provided almost 24/7 ever since the storm hit.