Another week, another bavaweekly, that’s three so far for those keeping track at home. They ‘re admittedly self-indulgent and silly, but they are a welcome diversion that keeps me experimenting with the streaming stuff, which I enjoy tremendously. But let’s get to it….
Reclaim Hosting
- New semester has officially started at Reclaim, and it is getting busy. I can feel the stress creeping in, so those long mid-day walks are more important than ever.
- Wrote a couple of posts on configuring Ghost variables for the URL and email in a Docker container on Reclaim Cloud:
Setting Environmental Variables for a Ghost Docker Container in Reclaim Cloud
Configuring Email for a Ghost Docker Container on Reclaim Cloud
- Taylor, Meredith, Goutam and I also had a great impromptu professional development session migrating a Mattermost instance in Reclaim Cloud that led to a somewhat righteous rant post about edtech.
- In the Instructional technology meeting this week we floated the idea of a Reclaim Roadshow tour for a couple of weeks in US and Canada. Hopefully this virus calms down at some point so we can do that because I think it would be an amazing, fun team building experience, not to mention community outreach and visiting awesome people. One can dream!
- Pilot, Taylor and I trained Alyssa at Wesleyan on managing the Living a Good Life Mini Course in Reclaim Cloud. The take away for us after that meeting was that there is a space for us helping folks at edtech groups and beyond to manage and support their needs in the Cloud, something AWS, Digital Ocean, etc. are not really setup for in the same way. It’s always the interstices of support that we will thrive and grow, and I appreciate that.
- Reclaim Round-up newsletter is coming along, and the inaugural edition is still on schedule for the end of January. We had a fun meeting Friday setting down some timelines and making sure everything is in order, and I am kinda happy our first newsletter will be about creating a newsletter to some degree 🙂
- The one thing I missed in the weekly reflection video above was Taylor Jadin’s amazing community chat showing folks how to setup their own, DIY community site to feature work at their Domain of One’s Own and 50 people showed up and it went 20 minutes over given the interest and engagement. I can’t imagine Taylor is anything short of thrilled with the results, I know I was over the moon! If you missed it, he captured it all for posterity, very much looking forward to another one of these next week.
bavacade
- Things were very quiet on the repair front, though Tim did an amazing video on how to substitute the OG hardware in Reclaim Arcade’s Q*Bert with an FPGA board, switching power supply, and a Jamma adapter. I’m interested in this approach because you can preserve the older hardware—which is hard and expensive to continually repair. The updated hardware should provide more consistent play and hopefully last longer without the fear of regular, costly repairs. He hasn’t posted the video yet on Reclaim Arcade’s Youtube channel, but when he does I will copy it below.
- On the home arcade front, I just played a lot. I am getting better at Donkey Kong Jr and worse at Millipede. Basically remaining the same at Scramble, with some minor advancements in Phoenix.
Watching/Reading/Playing
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- Dug into some Criterion this week starting with Jean-Pierre Melville’s Magnet of Doom (1963)
- Watched documentary Brother’s Keeper (1992) -part of a broader retrospective at Criterion focusing on the films at Sundance in 1992, most of which are kinda bad, as much as I want to like them. We tried watching In the Soup, but it was not good, we opted for Life is Sweet by Mike Leigh. Brother’s Keeper is the stand-out for me.
- Finished The Shrink Next Door miniseries, and I appreciated Will Ferrell and Paul Rudd in this, but it took a few episodes to get into and it ended within a reasonable time, so for that I was a fan. Also was playing on all my Long Island wardrobe memories from the 1980s, Ralph Lipschitz indeed!
- Got out on Saturday night as a result of my daughter wanting the parents out so she could have people over, that meant a good pizza and a movie. The King’s Man was sold out (the movies were packed) so we chose Matrix Resurrected against Anto’s better judgement, and it was terrible. As much as I love Keanu, it was bad, bad, bad, a re-heated original Matrix with overtones of JJ Abrams further ruining the Star Wars franchise, but this was self-inflicted by Lana Wachowski. Also, I think my assessment is accurate not withstanding my terrible Italian comprehension, and if nothing else the lackluster effects were a testament to how impressive the original was.
- Watched a lot of Last of Us (the original) given Tommaso is now played through that one, inspired by his brother. I have to replay that one soon.
- I watched the first 8 episodes of Twilight Zone season 1. AWESOME! Just what a I needed, and got to see my all-time favorite episode “Walking Distance.” Pure magic!
I spent an inordinate amount of time watching Downes’ “Stephen Follows Directions” videos, they are compelling and really instructive for me about documentation and watching folks do their edtech work. I love these videos!
- Listening to a lot of Silver Jews thanks to the good DJs of ds106radio, and that inspired a karaoke section of the above bavaweekly video, you’ve been warned.
Personal
- Getting my regular walks in with Duke, and that has been awesome. I have been all work the last two weeks, so the exercise in the middle of the day is welcome. pus, it has been cold but clear and crisp, my weather for sure!
- Sleeping in a bit these days, which is very welcome. I am usually up at 6:30 or 7, but finding I am sleeping until 8 or 8:30, and it feel luxurious!
- Appreciating the work rhythm right now, but that means I am basically a hermit that works, walks, and watches movies, will be happy to stretch a bit here soon.
Well that’s it, and special thanks to the folks who showed up during the live stream to chat and offer support, thrilled I got the livechat plugin working with Peertube live streaming option, but more on that in my next post.
