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My 🐟 Burger Friday

Pic posted February 23, 2024

Stopped in the skyway location during pre-game errands


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Think I’d go back to where I’m from, I can stumble out of here. At least in Minnesota, they don’t run and hide this time of year…

— I Remember This Place Being Bigger

Quote posted February 23, 2024


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Great start to a very long Friday 🥩 🍳

Pic posted February 23, 2024

It’s been a while since I had steak and eggs @ Minnehaha Cafe


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SWCT Color Block Set 2

Pic posted February 22, 2024

More great work from Star Wars Card Trader by Topps


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George “Fathead” Washington

Pic posted February 22, 2024

I can totally relate to this new look


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Link: Post-quantum cryptography and messaging 🤯

Linked February 22, 2024


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I am a creature of habit

Pic posted February 22, 2024

My regular breakfast order at the Minnehaha Cafe


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🫡 Dinkytown Food PSA 🚨

Posted February 22, 2024

Per Sharyn Jackson at the Star Tribune, Annie’s Parlour is back! Currently only open 4-8pm with malts, but burgers and fries are coming back (along with expanded hours)…


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Good evening. This is your pilot Prince speaking. You are flying aboard the Seduction 747…

— International Lover

Quote posted February 22, 2024


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Blasts from the past 🎰

Pic posted February 22, 2024

Can’t remember the last time I played keno or video poker – nice change up to the casino routine


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Always a bridesmaid, never a bride

Pic posted February 22, 2024

At least I finally got to pick 🎰


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I’ll take a club sandwich and a…

Pic posted February 22, 2024

Another great dinner @ Minnehaha Cafe


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This story made me smile ❤️

Pic posted February 22, 2024

Two of dad’s favorite organizations joining forces ⚾️


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A little frosty this morning ⛄️

Pic posted February 22, 2024

Warmed up nicely later, though


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Khâluna with John and Cathy

Pic posted February 20, 2024

Great evening in south Minneapolis 💜


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True Detective Night Country ✅

Pic posted February 19, 2024

Season 4 was a good one 🥶


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🫡 Page updates: about and résumé

Posted February 19, 2024

A few more things off the to do list: the about page has been re-written, added Target Center to the résumé page (and uploaded a new PDF version) and consolidated the navigation menu to Home, About, Lists and Search.

Also hibernated my LinkedIn account for now…


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Oppenheimer ✅

Pic posted February 19, 2024

Peacock trial good for something. Cillian Murphy is 💯


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NO JOKE ⛷️

Pic posted February 19, 2024

Back bowl at Schweitzer – year unknown


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Fixing admin email on 7 Minute Miles

Posted February 19, 2024

Finally spent some time to remove a blog-related item that’s been on my personal to do list for a long, long time. WordPress websites have the ability to send out emails for various tasks, but the web server needs to support sending mail. I’ve been using a plugin from Noor Alam called Gmail SMTP that uses Google’s email infrastructure to send messages and that worked great when I was hosting 7minutemiles.com email using Google Apps for Domains. When that service was no longer free, I moved my email over to Apple and knew that broke the plugin and I would need to find another solution.

Fast forward two years (oops). Had an idea of signing up for a free general Gmail account and tying that address to the old plugin. Headed over to the gmail.com signup page and found that 7minutemiles@gmail.com was available, so I grabbed that. Next, I needed to go to the Google Developers Console and follow the instructions on the plugin howto page. That was mostly straightforward and I was able to get a green SMTP connected icon on the plugin settings page. The Test Email tab, however, gave me the following error:

There has been a critical error on this website. Please check your site admin email inbox for instructions.

Since admin emails were not being sent, there was nothing in the site admin email inbox. The comments on the howto page had a great suggestion, though – check the logs. Looking at /var/log/nginx/error.log, I saw this reference to curl:

2024/02/19 05:50:47 [error] 163214#163214: *464402 FastCGI sent in stderr: "PHP message: PHP Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function curl_init() in /var/www/7minutemiles.com/wp-content/plugins/gmail-smtp/class.phpmaileroauthgoogle.php:179

Checking on my PHP config page, sure enough, curl was not installed. That was quickly fixed with this:

sudo apt install php8.2-curl

All is right in the Gmail SMTP world again: Google SMTP server + OAuth 2.0 protocol + TLS encryption…


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One tired doge

Pic posted February 19, 2024

I feel you, Hestia – late night of coding and troubleshooting


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Master of None S3 ✅

Pic posted February 18, 2024

This wasn’t really season three – this was season one of a spin-off


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Will the Cuzzo discover the secret stash?

Pic posted February 17, 2024

Two of those stuffies contain catnip…


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Saturday night on Randolph 🍕

Pic posted February 17, 2024

Actually had to wait for a table tonight


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MSHSL Dance Team State Tournament ✅

Pic posted February 17, 2024

Two full days with class A, AA & AAA: jazz and high kick


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