Finally got to Pebble Creek
Nine year return to Buffalo
Really great to catch up with @KatherineHulett on an actual outdoor patio in Saint Paul tonight
Quick visit with SK & Snol
Only 131 iPads (and phones) to remove this from
This here rap’s about the true confession. If you listen close you about to learn a lesson. You must know failure before success…
- T.C.’s Rap
If House of Balls can make it, there’s hope for us all, no?
Our future home?
Started my writing career early
The back said it was $156.00
More piles of stuff
So #9 and #12 become par 4s, “my” tees play 6405 yards and the non-resident rate is now $300
A North Shore Dream
With all the crazy, awful things going on in the world today, I’m not sure it’s really appropriate to daydream about material things that are so outside the realities of a worldwide pandemic. On the other hand, it does feel a little therapeutic to briefly escape from all the anxiety and think about a different, calmer life. The North Shore of Lake Superior has always been one of those escapes for me and I could easily envision spending the rest of my life on that lake:
- Design and build a not-so-big log cabin
- Stone fireplace and large picture window
- Screen porch to manage the flying bugs
- Heated floors for warm feet in the winter
- Fast internet (but no phones)
- Nice speakers to play the North Shore playlist
- Wooded lot with shoreline
- Wildflowers and hummingbirds
- Detached garage with exercise area/game room
- Guest cottages for SK and MK
- Family kayaks
- Access to the SHT and bike trails
- Golf at Superior National
- Skiing at Lutsen Mountains
- Gaming at Grand Portage
- Concerts at Papa Charlie’s
Ahh…
It’s all in the eyes
One of my better rounds
Kid two is looking to buy her first car – I’ll pay a finder’s fee for any good leads on a reliable used car around $5K
Also Fireworks Night
Free pot on Bob Marley Night with the Saints
Lowertown still-life
Family Time
Life After Zuckerberg
It’s been two and a half months since I last posted to Instagram (and about two months since I officially deleted both my Facebook and Instagram accounts). It wasn’t that hard to give up Facebook – I really only used it to sync status with a couple of games, promote posts from this site and to communicate with more distant family members. Add to that all of the other reasons people don’t like Facebook and it became a pretty easy decision. Now I just need Two Dots to continue to improve the Facebook-free experience and I’ll be fine (LEADERBOARDS).
Instagram, on the other hand, was a much tougher decision for me. From what I can tell, it launched on iOS in October of 2010 and I posted my first image on Christmas Day 2010. The original pictures were 640×640 and I used Iain Poulson’s excellent Intagrate WordPress plugin for many years to automatically pull my pics from Instagram and create image posts on this site. Facebook purchased the service in April 2012, but largely left it independent (image sizes did increase to 1080×1080 in 2015).
Instagram is the de facto social media standard for restaurants and foodies, so that’s really what I used it for in the beginning. I don’t like accounts that post the same thing across all platforms, so I’d use Facebook, Instagram and Twitter in specialized ways to help prevent overlap. Now that I’m only on Twitter, I initially tried to recreate some of that there, but I’m finding that I need to continue to prune my Twitter follow list and just move on from some things that I know I’m missing. Some examples: Instagram stories from Armon and Meredith, donut pictures from Erin and everything posted by my wife and daughters.
I finally finished merging all of the Instagram metadata they sent me in JSON format with the image files that I uploaded here. Also starting to get back to equilibrium on my main @kingsbury Twitter account (and will continue to use @7minutemiles to link to stories like this one). Really trying to get most of the politics out of my feed too – no real appetite for doomscrolling these days…
Good to be back
Dressed for success
Hey @schutz, remember that time we played Harding Park?
Free tech training rules
I was a lonely teenage broncin’ buck, with a pink carnation and a pickup truck. But I knew I was out of luck, the day the music died…
- Don McLean
Wing night in Eagan
If you need lightly used furniture for your home office in Minnesota, please go see SOS on University
Peak Badger State
Dinette breakfast sandwich
I want my two dollars
Will, power of attorney and health directives all updated, thanks to Bob Espeset
Our Queen of the Skies (December 1989)
Iconic Minnesota Golf
Summer on the Creek
Goldy looks a little rough
Forgot we took this one by the river the other day ❤️
Post-shower scruff
Welcome Lilith and Grub
Small dots always find big fun
Not at all important in the grand scheme of things, but my watch losing activity data from yesterday is upsetting
Gripin’ ❤️
MK is cleaning her room
New bag, old bag
Lookin’ good in the neighborhood
The Al Michaels seat is 🔥
The board mounts arrived
Explore the Pulley Passageway
Bike stores and golf shops apparently doing well: 3 week wait for a tune up and 2 weeks for a new golf bag
A fun return to the “new” zoo
SNOL is not a valid word
Hearing rumors that Octo has closed for good 😢
The Transition to AWS Lightsail
After nine plus years of running this site on a Mac mini in a Las Vegas data center, I decided it was time to transition to the big leagues of cloud infrastructure. This world is dominated by Amazon, Microsoft and Google, all of which have a dizzying array of available services at various price points. I messed around with Amazon Web Services (AWS EC2) last year, when they were promoting a limited free tier for nerds to experiment and evaluate. This year I decided to give Lightsail a try, which is basically an easier-to-use, fixed-priced version of AWS that gives you a virtual cloud-based server.
As you can see in the screenshot of the Lightsail console above, I created an instance with 4GB of RAM, two virtual CPUs and 80GB of storage running in Virginia Zone A. I was tempted to just pick a version of Linux and manually compile and install the various components I wanted. In the end, though, I decided to go with the Bitnami WordPress stack (version 5.3.2-3), which gave me Ubuntu Linux 16.04.6, Apache 2.4.31, MySQL 8.0.18 and PHP 7.3.14 (i.e., the LAMP stack). Throw in phpMyAdmin and certbot and you have a good preinstalled foundation on which to built and troubleshoot. I also decided to switch my DNS management from DNS Made Easy to Amazon’s Route 53, but kept domain registration and management at Hover.
I’ve owned a Tenacious D themed domain name for some time now that I use for testing and initially used that when I signed up for Lightsail (“All of a sudden, there shined a shiny demon in the middle of the road.”). Amazon and Bitnami both have great tutorial and support pages and I also need to give a shoutout to Sanjeev at MetaBlogue, who wrote two very useful posts. Also found this post from Amazon to be very helpful for setting up new certs from Let’s Encrypt (who I love). Speaking of certs, I spent some time adjusting the Apache TLS settings to get an “A” rating from Qualys on their cool SSL test site.
It took a while to transfer 15 years worth of site files from the old server to my iMac, then on to the new instance. The database files were also quite large, requiring an increase in the file upload settings in PHP. Switching from the test domain to 7minutemiles.com seemed to go smoothly at first, but I had a problem with my theme files that took longer than I wanted to troubleshoot (it was a case-sensitive URL thing). All seems well now, though, and even my stupid emoji issue from December 2018 seems to have been resolved on the new server. Lightsail offers the ability to create snapshots of the instance (yay!) and it appears that Vaultpress is successfully backing up from the new server too.
Now on to those elusive mobile theme enhancements and new data entry screens…
Primus’ Prehistoric Flip
THIS IS BY FAR THE BEST MEME
Golden Valley was green
Don’t think I ever had 60 before
Milaca GC, NO MOR
It’s like finding treasure
Hit a nice milestone yesterday 💯
Columbus, NO MOR
Saw an old friend today
