Through The Cold And Through The Salt

Some photos and some thoughts

It's been a fun few weeks, with illustrious activities such as "staying inside because it's cold" and "having the flu". I fervently disagree that there is nothing to love about winter in New England – there's an enormous amount to love. You just have to try a little harder this time of year to find it.

While trying to find it, I got busy with a lot of projects that are mostly interesting for just me. These mainly include:

• A more fully-fledged home server & storage setup (I had done work off and on with a Raspberry Pi, which is inadequate for what I really want to do).
• Some significant hardening of the security of the infrastructure I host this website on.
• Two new Ghost instances on the same small DigitalOcean droplet, and the trials of keeping 3 instances and 3 Mailgun domains happy at the same time.

I'd like to write about these, but I may split those off into a separate set of posts, in the hopes that they're a fun exercise in technical writing that maybe one person will find interesting (me).

I went outside for the first time in a few days today, now that I'm feeling a fair bit better. We're a few days out from the sun setting after 5 pm. We're just about four weeks out from it being the third month of the year. Nothing is really that bad when you're surrounded by friends and a network of caring.

Ideally, in a few weeks time, we'll get a 50-degree weekend and I'll go on a fifty mile bike ride. My heuristic for bike riding and outdoor temperature is similar to my heuristic for shifting on a manual transmission. For shifting, I'll do first gear below 10 mph, 2nd gear below 20, 3rd below 30, etc. For cycling, I'll ride max 10 miles in the teens, 20 miles in the 20s, 30 miles in the 30s, etc.

This pattern severely falls off in the 80s, at which point the weather starts fighting you and you start needing to ride less. But you get the idea.

If you're reading this, take care! I hope you enjoyed the photos included, which is probably 75% of the reason I wrote this. Stay well.