Journal Entry

I learned–perhaps finally understood–how apache and let's encrypt work. I had a long-standing issue with certificate renewals and I hope that the auto-renewals will work now that I have solved how apache works on my server.

Turns out that when you hack shit together, it tends to be… hacky. I hope that my knowledge will continue to grow and the lessons (re)learned today will be easily recalled if I find myself with a broken install for my various websites on my server here.

I have links to share and I need to make time to share them with you, whoever you are. I hope that they are at the very least insightful.

This is a quick post to let you know that I'm still here. I have a lot of links to share and I need to share them to get them out of my backlog. Expect a bit of a dump in the coming days.

I have to restore entries from a backup that is not entirely reliable in the date/time that the entries were posted. The good news is that I have a backup.

I have posts in the pipeline, I need to make time to polish and publish them. Stay tuned to this channel.

It's been two months since my last update. I've been busy. I guess. Or lazy. Hard to say.

I do know that I'm struglling again with motivation. I don't seem to be able to move like I used to. I'm a bit stuck behind the screen. I tend to lose myself in Youtube (mostly Shorts) or doomscrolling Reddit. I am aware of these habits and I have a bit more power to disengage with them and for this I am grateful. Else I'll lose myself.

My best friend told me recently he's lost desire to do anything but watch Youtube. I hear him loud and clear. I've been able to remove myself from social media¹, but I haven't been able to kick the Reddit habit. There's a lot of utility in Reddit and Youtube, and they are designed to keep you on that site. Much like AI chat is designed to keep you engaged and on that site. Our shorter attention spans are klilling us slowly and we don;t even notice it.

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1. I recognize that Reddit is often referred to as social media, though I don't agree with that, it's more of an unstructured message board. Now that I wrote that, social media is a collection of unstructured message boards… fuck.

I've been feeling off lately. I am not sure how long I've been feeling it and it might have a lot to do with the passing of my father. It took a while to find the right words to describe what I feel and I think I can succinctly describe it as follows:

I have the desire, and lack the motivation.

I have a list of things I want to do, yet I really struggle with the actual doing of things. I attribute this to laziness, though my partner is inclined to not belive this at all and instead tells me that she doesn't see lazy when she looks at me or what I do.

My strength is perseverance, it's also my weakness. I persevere through a lot. I have the thought that I do a lot, and that's not enough. I was talkign to friends this past weekend and the feeling is mutual amongst us. On Friday I came across a post on Reddit that resonates with me. It does a better job of describing how I feel about myself than I seemingly can.

In an effort to help myself with this, I've stopped multi-tasking most things. I'm no longer listening to podcasts while I work. I don't have the idiot box on in the background while I work on my hobbies. I don't have any media playing in the background while I do dishes, or shower. I'm cutting off the sources of noise that may be contributing to my overload. I'm not sure this will work or is sustainable. After all, I am arguably less productive with not consuming media while I do tasks. I have the thought that ultimately this will be in my favour, as I'll be inclined to give up some podcasts that no longer help me. It's a task I've been long delaying.

I will report back here and see how it's been going in a month.