General

After many many years having my domain happily hosted by GeekISP, I’ve taken the plunge and moved to hosting on Amazon Web Services. While it’s a bit more work having a whole virtual server than just using shared hosting (particularly for email, as apparently only masochists run their own email server nowadays), it’s the kind of infrastructure setup I freakishly enjoy. This web site and my email now support TLS (thanks to Let’s Encrypt), IPv6 (finally catching on in the world after well over a decade of “coming soon”), and all data more-or-less in my control (on Amazon’s systems, but encrypted in transit and at rest).

It’s finally time. After many years of being a one-car family, with kids and needing to go more and more places, it’s finally time to become a two-car family. Jessi worked very hard and finally got her license (hooray!), so then it was time for me to go car shopping, as she would primarily be driving the minivan with the kids, and I’d get a new (or at least new to me) car for my daily commute. Taking a large vehicle (and thus mediocre gas mileage) with just me in it all the way to work wasn’t making a lot of sense anyway.

I have less time for video gaming than I used to, as I have kids and all, so I’ve been really enjoying puzzle sorts of games. As much as I love sweeping RPGs with tens of hours of plot, it’s a lot easier for me to spend 10–30 minutes here and there on a puzzle or two. That’s part of why I liked Braid, which I recommended when I last posted a year ago (yipes!), and it’s the same way I’ve been really enjoying Jelly no Puzzle. I finally finished it today, and I think it’s taken me months of picking it up off and on for a few minutes at a time.

Braid is an awesome work of art and game. I know it’s a few years old at this point, but I don’t have the time for much gaming nowadays. But Braid has been on my radar basically since it came out. It made me want to buy a 360, though eventually it came out for PC, and I played the demo and loved it. A couple weeks ago, I finally bought it. It’s the perfect kind of game for me, since I can play for just a few minutes at a time, solve one puzzle, and put it on hold until I next get a few minutes.

I’ve been the moderator of Charlton’s Town Meeting for the past three years, which has been an enjoyable experience. But I was asked to moderate a meeting of a different sort on this coming Saturday: a candidate debate for the local candidates of the Town of Southbridge. As I told the Southbridge Evening News, “local politics is important,” and I look forward to being an impartial party helping the people of Southbridge choose their leaders.

I’ve been a loyal user of Opera since version 5. Back then, they were the innovators of features like tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, and excellent support for web standards. I even paid for it back then (as it was on the “shareware” model) since it was just that awesome. I’ve been using it ever since.

Sadly, over the past couple years, the quality has definitely gone down. It may have started roughly around the time Opera got a new CEO, though I’d be hesitant to place the blame completely there. It crashes much more often. It likes taking up CPU for no discernible reason. The next version, Opera 12, will be removing many features that make Opera distinctive, like built-in BitTorrent support and their awesome Opera Unite idea. Opera just doesn’t seem to be the cutting edge innovator that they used to be. (Or perhaps, they’ve been so busy trying to innovate that they lost their core focus on making an awesome browser.)

I’ve decided that I finally was sick enough of LiveJournal that I’d move the sporadic blogging I did to my own domain. LiveJournal was fun, but more and more I’m not a fan of having my data on other people’s systems (especially as I have my own), and I haven’t been a fan of the charities that LJ’s been encouraging people to donate to lately. So, now I have WordPress set up here with me having control over my own data, and perhaps it’ll encourage me to post something a little more often. Or maybe not.