bavaweekly 1-25-2022

It has been a pretty intense week, and given the semester is well underway that should come as no surprise, but it always does for some strange reason. I had fun with the stream this week, and was thrilled to see old friends like the great Chris Lott dropping by, as well as “regulars” like Gordon Hawley, Taylor Jadin, and Anne-Marie Scott. This was my fourth bavaweekly episode, and so far I’m really enjoying the whole process.  It forces me to stop for a brief daily reflection and then use those notes to create a mini-event once a week where I can mess around with streaming. So, the next stream will be Tuesday, February 1st, and if that happens then this little experiment has made it out of January.

I played with the format this week a bit. Rather than sharing by category, I reported by day—playing off my Shining reference to start the episode. I also played around with starting the stream a bit earlier and using a GIF and some waiting room music so folks know the streaming will start shortly. I did the same with a closing scene to thanks participants as well, both of which were inspired by an OBS chat Taylor, Pilot, and I had a couple of hours before the show. The world of OBS is starting to open up to me, and it’s amazing.

Reclaim Hosting

  • Edtech/Instructional Technology meeting on Wednesday, discussed the topic of the community chat for February 9th, which will be centered around the “State of Reclaim” and Taylor already posted an announcement for it in the Community forums.
  • We also chatted about the idea of a professional development series for the broader community around containers, Docker, and Reclaim Cloud, which might be fun, and my recent submissions of a workshop on February 8th for NYCDH is in the spirit of exploring that possibility, we’ll see if that gets accepted.

  • Watched Taylor Jadin’s livestream about setting up Foundry on Reclaim Cloud and mapping storage containers for Docker instances that don’t give you an easy way to access file system while the instance is running. Awesome stuff, the Cloud learning continues.
  • I wrote a post about upgrading my Peertube Docker instance running on Reclaim Cloud. That was cool because it further reinforced my understanding of how and why Docker and containers more broadly can make managing infrastructure that much easier.
  • We had a Domains API meeting and that was inspiring, Tim posted his thoughts on the status of that project, and it is one of the yet unrealized projects that has been with us since almost the beginning. I love that the light still shines there!
  • It’s been a week of strange infrastructure issues, like the one where the Robotron server appended the port :2082 to all accounts, which then defaulted to 2083 causing some confusion. Appears to have been a networking rather than a cPanel snafu, but that was a head scratcher.
  • We also met with a few members of Wake Forest University’s IT team supporting their instructional technologists, and they shared some great tips and scripts for securing cPanel servers against WordPress hacks. I really enjoy collaborating with smart folks in IT, and the fact they are so willing to share their insights is really generous and valuable.

bavacade

Tess at a Mall Arcade

  • Tess and I took a trip to  Carpi to visit a 1980s arcade in a mall, and unfortunately it was underwhelming. There were about 25 games total, 4 pinball and 20 video game cabinets, and there were no real classic besides Ghosts and Goblins, Marble Madness, and Bubble Bobble, but there were in decent shape at best. The Indiana Jones pinball was fun and easy, and they did have my favorite pinball Stranger Things, but all-in-all I was left wanting. Fair enough, I have been spoiled by the awesomeness that is Reclaim Arcade, but I do know the proprietor of this mall arcade has hundreds of games in his warehouse—the sheer number is impressive. But the mall arcade was a let down, although from what I can gather the warehouse in Veneto is being converted into an full blown arcade with hundreds of games, and he has a ton of good ones. Maybe that will be the arcade of record, we shall see

marquee art for bavacade

  • While I was there I did pick up a couple of marquees for the bavacade, one of a game I own (Asterock) and the other of an old school car racing game call Long Beach that is a glass marquee and has personal resonance given my roots in both Long Beach, Long Island and California.

Streaming

  • I woke up Thursday to Brian Lamb on the #ds106radio, which was a blast. And I also jumped on for a bit. I missed the 11th anniversary of the mightiest radio around, but it was in very good hands with some fun, fun programming, like Tim Clarke’s Cover to Cover Show, which is a brilliant idea:

  • I did some Karaoke practice with Chahira last week in preparation for our Karaoke event Friday afternoon as part of the LiveSciences3 social events, and it was a total blast. It was the first session I ever did where folks sang more songs in French than English, I loved it!

  • I also picked up a new Sony mirrorless Alpha 7 II, and I am loving it. I played with it most of Saturday morning before heading to the arcade to play. Also used it for this week’s bavaweekly, needed to get a Dummy battery, but it does charge in my OWC Thunderbolt 3 Dock, which is the best thing I ever bought for my computer. My setup does need a blog post.
  • Yesterday, before the bavaweekly stream, Pilot, Taylor and I got on a call and chatted OBS, which was a blast. Taylor shared his setup, which is impressive, and I tried to copy a few of his ideas for this stream, like the intro and outro scenes. I need to up my picture-in-picture game for sure. I hoet to do more of these regularly, and see if we can loop in Andy Rush.

Watching

  • A lot of Twilight Zones this week, in fact I reflected in this week’s stream how this series was effectively mass communication/educating the public around the intersection of modern literature and existentialism in a fresh, revolutionary format know as the TV series. Pretty amazing, that show is the summit of creativity in my mind. Notables episodes watched: “The Lonely” (Jack Ward is John C. Reilly for the 50s), “Time Enough at Last” (Modern Poetry meets Sartre’s “Hell is Other People” in one episode), and “Judgement Night” —the existential horror by way of Nietszche’s” eternal recurrence” mixed with some some Heideggerian “facticity”-it’s all there!

  • Also watched the re-make of The Magnificent 7, which reminded my why The Wild Bunch is one of the best films ever made. This film missed any and all of its low hanging fruit references. Also watched High Noon, and Helen Ramirez steals the show. What a great movie!
  • After a long hike Anto and I watched What about Bob? because that is out go to, but it led me down a rabbit hole of alleged on-set abuse that Dreyfus accused Bill Murray of, I was bummed to hear it cause those two were awesome together in this one. This film just keeps getting better for me.
  • After watching the Twilight Zone episode “Judgement Night” (discussed above) Antonella wanted to watch a submarine movie (I married up!) so we landed on Crimson Tide (1995) and the film ages quite well. Whereas Denzel Washington was the veteran giving The Magnificent 7 any sense of gravity it could muster, Gene Hackman is the heavy in this one and he is on top of his game. He crushes the role and you really feel all the younger actors responding to him, it is pretty amazing. Even crazier is the framing of the moment in post-Soviet Russia and the world on the brink of war, which was way too close to home these days for my tastes. Here is Gene Hackman’s awesome speech for those special, sadistic readers who made it this far 🙂

Personal

Not going to lie, it’s been mostly work and little play, which makes Jimmy a dull boy…

But Antonella and I did check out entirely on Sunday for a 7-hour hike in the “Canada of Trentino” which is an area in the Lagorai area of the region. It is pretty wild there. We entered near a town called Borgo in Valsugana, which is about an hour drive from Trento. As you can see below, the nature is stunning.

Col di San Giovanni (2251)

It was a fairly grueling hike at 7 miles and a 600 meter ascent, made worse by the two or three feet of snow we would fall into at various points. But the view we got made it all worthwhile (see photographic evidence above).

Duke in Col di San Giovanni

Duke came along for the walk, and it was really a magical day, sometimes it is good to check-out into the wilds of Trentino for some of the rejuvenating power of play with my favorites!

Peace and Love in Col di San Giovanni

Peace and love until the next bavaweekly you beautiful hippies!

The images were taken with the new Sony Alpha 7 II I picked up, and I am totally loving that camera.

This entry was posted in bavaweekly, Streaming and tagged . Bookmark the permalink.

3 Responses to bavaweekly 1-25-2022

  1. Andy Rush says:

    I like being in the loop ?

  2. Taylor Jadin says:

    Welcome aboard the Sony mirrorless bandwagon! Those pictures look great.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.