Its been a while since I've written anything here. I've written plenty on various social media (G+, twitter, reddit mainly) but these places aren't under my own control and eventually whatever I write there will likely be lost as these companies grow, change, acquire and get acquired and their priorities change. Usually the longer I take a break from writing here (in my own journal so to speak) the harder it gets to write here because I have to think of some singular topic that I can write about, but as there has been so much time between posts, I've done a hundred things and writing about just one of them seems to be giving that one topic too much gravitas. Instead, I end up summarizing a bunch of things I've worked on, then none of them seem very important and certainly aren't described in the detail I'd like to provide.

Beach

I had a nice time walking on the beach yesterday with the family. Finally, in October the beach is again like it was in the early 1970s as I remember it - largely empty, some few souls here and there walking and taking it all in with enough space between them to allow some introspection. We looked for beach glass, blue in particular was being sought but none of that rare variety was found. I gave some impromptu lessons on the art of skipping rocks and practicing was the order of the day thereafter. It was a beautiful sunny day with 3 to 4 foot waves. It appears they have dumped a lot of sand directly in front of the beach hut as either side of it the water reaches nearly to the dunes.

Book of Song

I finished the 2nd edition of the Book of Song Vol II and published it on lulu. Bardic Circle has winding down and Tim let the domain name for the band expire so, I decided to buy another one which would be easier to remember and set up a page on there to point to the Books. There were so many more songs I wanted to add, but sometimes you just have to stop work and call it done. I'm happy with it, and I hope the folks we get together with will like it. This is first time I'll be using the coil bound option - its been much requested since the book will open flat on a music stand unlike the "perfect bound" versions I've made in the past. I really like the perfect bound though - they hold up pretty well and look really professional. The 200+ page book is lyrics, chords, sheet music and other reference for performance of tunes I play with my friends, its not for public sale.

Web Design

I spent some time today updating a couple Drupal sites I run. I've got a workflow that I refer to as I do it and its less harrowing than it was at first - though its still nothing near as easy as the Wordpress sites. Theres just so much potential for screwing it all up and ending up burning a weekend on piecing it all back together again that I end up kicking upgrades down the road which is really not a good practice. I suppose if I was making big money off these sites I'd have a different opinion but both of them are labors of love and done nearly for free. Actually, since the hosting costs me money its a net negative monetarily at least.

Wake on Lan

I took a few minutes to finally look at wake-on-lan for the NUC thats hooked up to the TV. Turned out it was really easy. Since it was already enabled in the BIOS, all I had to do was install ethtool and run sudo ethtool -s eth[X] wol g and after shutting the NUC down, I was able to start it up with a "magic packet" sent from my Arch laptop (after installing wol): wol [MAC address] I can see this being immensely useful if I connect up a storage device to the NUC so I won't have to leave the thing on all the time, and it will be easy to fire it up when I'm ready to back up, or grab some files I need. I can't believe I didn't look into it sooner.