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DayQuil, NyQuil, BatQuil

Today I’m working from home. After the number of times I was sneezing and sniffling at the office yesterday I figured it would be in everybody’s interest if I did my sneezing and sniffling at home. I’m all hopped up on DayQuil and coffee at the moment so I’m all jittery and have a case of medicine head. I told Siri when I took my first dose, “Remind me in four hours to take another dose of DayQuil *atchoo*“, but she stopped listening before I sneezed. I wonder if the “*atchoo*” would have ended up in the reminder?

I took NyQuil last night before bed and had a dream that I was being chased by a dirtbike gang led by Manny Machado of the Baltimore Orioles, then after I escaped to a beach resort I watched a documentary on Adam West. Did you know that Adam West used to have a classic Mini Cooper? And he didn’t become Batman until he was bitten by a flea? I didn’t.

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Me from six years ago is a liar

This week I came down with really bad allergies. At least I thought they were allergies… at first I thought “I’m getting sick”, but then I looked at Timehop for what I did that day in the past and apparently six years ago that same day I had also thought that I was coming down with strep throat but my doctor said “nope, you just have really bad allergies”, so I figured “oh, I’m not getting sick, it’s probably just really bad allergies again.”

Fast forward to today. I’m still sneezing and feeling all gross in the sinuses and nose and whatever, and it’s been raining (rain is supposed to wash the pollen out of the sky, right?), and even what pollen was in the air was apparently the second-lowest peak on record. So, now I’m not sure what to think. It’s probably a bad head cold at this point, and not allergies. Also my Timehop for six years ago today had me waking up with a fever of 100.2°F and a doctor’s verdict of bronchial infection, so six years ago me tricked current me into assuming it was just allergies.

At least this head cold / super allergies / whatever has made it difficult to smell much of anything this week. There’s been some excitement in my condo building the last few weeks. A few months ago two new tenants moved in and coincidentally there was an increase in the number of times people have smelled (cigarette|weed) smoke in the building, and increase in noise (from shitty music and out of control children). All the clues seem to point to one of those particular tenants as being the cause. It got to be so bad that one tenant posted a note up about how it’s not fair that any of the tenants should have to put up with smelling smoke in their units, complaints were raised to the owners and/or the condo board, the building management posted a notice about being respectful of your neighbors, another neighbor solicited signatures to petition the condo board to put teeth behind the clauses concerning antisocial behavior, and an email went out basically reminding the unit owners that they are responsible for their tenants and if neither they nor their tenants can behave accordingly then they really have no business having a unit in these buildings. I met up yesterday with my neighbor who had solicited signatures after my bocce league game to introduce myself (she had lived here for 18 months and we had only ever seen each other a handful of times) and commiserate about the situation; when we got around to talking about the kids making so much noise (seriously, who gives a kid a new year’s eve party horn to blat at 11 PM on a random Thursday night?!) I mentioned how I could envision those kids killing any sort of romantic mood with that noise and she agreed that nothing would kill a romantic mood faster than hearing a kazoo. But if there’s been any smoke smell it’s been difficult for me to detect with this cold.

I would have thought that your body would do better with allergies as you grew older. I mean, doesn’t it make sense to think that as you acclimate to the types of pollen and allergens where you live that your body would react better? I can’t remember feeling this awful because of springtime allergies as a kid, so why are allergies kicking my butt as an adult? That seems backwards.

Oh yeah, I joined a bocce league recently. It’s through the United Social Sports league, so it’s mainly about having fun and making new friends and then going out to the bar after the game. I didn’t know anyone else playing so I joined the league as a free agent and was assigned to a team, and my team is pretty chill. Apparently there are other teams they’ve played in the past that were really hardcore about being the bocce champions of the world or something and kept super-detailed statistics on each of their team members and basically took all the fun out of the game. I didn’t know how to play before I signed up but I read instructions online and found that it’s really similar to curling except that the bocce version of the button moves each round. Also the winning team doesn’t buy the losing team the beer ((In this particular case, the winning team gets a voucher for buy-one-get-one pitchers of Bud Light. Not my beer of choice but, hey, free beer is free beer.)), so – Italians, be more like the Canadians, eh?

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Enough for a post a day, every day, for fifteen years

I used LiveJournal for ages – 10, maybe 12 years or so? – but then it seemed that everyone stopped using it. Probably right about when Twitter came along. Twitter is fine, but I still miss doing long-form writing about what I did that day or what I’m thinking.

When I moved to my own server a few years ago I set up my own WordPress installation, migrated my old LiveJournal posts over ((The good thing about having all your writing in one place is it makes backing up all your writing easier. The bad thing about having all your writing in one place is now all your writing is in one place; I looked back on stuff I wrote when I was 18 or 19 and all I can say now is Y-I-K-E-S. Buzz, your old journal posts, woof.)), and I’d blog about something I did recently or what I was feeling that day, but nowhere near how frequently I posted back in the LJ days. Even so I now have 5,477 posts altogether. 5,477! That’s enough for a post a day, every day, for fifteen years. Impressive considering that I started writing in 2001 and that I’ve only done about 80 posts in the last few years since moving away from LiveJournal. I guess you could say I was a bit prolific in my LiveJournal days.

One of the things that I really miss about LiveJournal was subscribing to your friends’ journals and reading them all in a single place via the friends list. Yeah, there’s things like RSS, but not as many people seem to use RSS since Google cancelled Google Reader. ((I myself use Fever now for my self-hosted RSS aggregation needs.)) I also missed being able to lock down posts so just your followers, or a subset of friends, could read your writing, and that not everything you wrote was instantly visible to the whole world. I think that was one reason why I didn’t write on here as much as I hoped to; while I might not be comfortable with having everything I write either visible to the entire world and their intelligence agencies (:P), I also didn’t enjoy locking everything I wrote down for my eyes only, and even though WordPress has an option to password-protect individual posts I didn’t see that as a very good solution for what I wanted.

Anyway, to make a long story short I spent the last few days trying to recreate some of the features I missed from LiveJournal here on my blog, and used some feedback from friends to help drive some of the implementation.

So: reading posts all in one place. RSS is still an option, but not many people still seem to use RSS. Checking this website to see if there’s something new is also an option, but that means remembering to check the website. I looked into setting up an email newsletter, but it sounded like most of my friends have abandoned email – I know I get too much of it – and I couldn’t integrate it seamlessly with the blog or work with post permissions so I scrapped that idea for now, but since I still wanted some way people could be notified when a new post goes up I created a Twitter account @gf_times people can follow for notifications.

As for limiting the audience for my writing, some of my writing will still be publicly available (like this post!), but to read any of the rest you’ll have to register and sign in. Sorry, them’s the breaks. At least I might be encouraged to write more if I know there’s actually an audience interested in what I’m writing, and if I know who my audience is then you have a good chance of me opening up more of my writing to you, so make your username something I’d recognize!

I added a few other features to the site that I wished LiveJournal had and the lack thereof made returning to LJ a nonstarter for me. Things like the site being SSL/TLS encrypted! Well, my site’s been encrypted for a while, but learning how to encrypt my site and getting an A+ Qualys rating is something I’m proud of, and something that absolutely makes sense in an online-journal context. Played around with plugins and I have it so site emails are now PGP-signed (and encrypted, if you put your public key in your profile), and there’s a checkbox to encrypt your comment to me when posting. You can also enable two-factor authentication in your profile if you’d like, too.