Category: General
Seniority
We still subscribe to the Lawrence Journal-World newspaper. Becky uses it to see what TV channel the KU games will be on (if any) and checks for grocery ads and coupons. I don’t read it. An old high school buddy of mine who also lives in Lawrence was a prof in the journalism school for many years. He called it the Lawrence Journal-Rag. Because of the paper subscription there’s also a digital subscription, and I let them send me daily emails that tell me what the headlines are in certain categories. (I’m getting close to the point of this story). The headline categories are “News Headlines”, “Police Blotter”, and “Obituaries”. The only one I actually open every time is “Obituaries”. You see, I’ve arrived at that age when people I know have begun dying.
After you hit 65 there comes a point in nearly every conversation with someone else in the same boat when somebody remarks, “Ever notice how we always end up talking about our health?” Yes, I’ve noticed that.
When you hit 70 your contemporaries start dying off. Dear old Dad was fond of remarking, as he approached 90, that all his friends were dead. He was proud of his age. Nevertheless, it killed him not long afterward.
I know a number of people whose family live within relatively short distances, like an hour’s drive or less. There’ll be brothers and sisters in their 65+ years with maybe one or two of their parents, along with spouses and children and grandchildren, maybe some aunts, uncles and cousins. A sizeable number will gather at someone’s house for Thanksgivings and Christmases and other holidays and family events and gatherings. Those who reach tottering age and are either home bound or nursing home bound aren’t lonely; they’ll be visited by somebody in the family probably every week, certainly once or twice a month. Somebody will drive them to the family gatherings. I don’t see this in the cards for us. We can’t afford to move to California where our other family members live. They aren’t about to move to Kansas where we live. At some point in the not too distant future we won’t be able to tolerate the physical demands of flying back and forth to visit them. Then we’ll totter, alone except for each other, for however long it takes, and, finally, die alone in Kansas.
So, that’s it. Seniority. It sucks. Kinda wish it had sunk in a couple decades ago. It might’ve motivated me to do a few things differently. But I was always pretty much absorbed in the moment. There are speakers who get paid to tell us about the advantages of living in the moment and how to do it. I’m thinking they’re full of shit, and somewhat richer than me. On the other hand, if I had the money, maybe it would be worth finding out how to be happy in the moment while slobbering down your chin in the nursing home while the orderlies wait for you to kick the bucket and make room for another lonely slobbering senior.
Suddenly Spring and DST
Can’t believe spring started a week ago (oh, I know, not officially) and now it’s that damnable Daylight Saving Time. Where did that name come from, anyway? They can’t save daylight. You get the same amount of daylight in a day no matter what time you set on your clock. The crazy thing is the grass has turned green and started growing, the mornings are noisy with chirping birds, and they must be finding bugs to eat so I won’t be surprised if the mosquitoes are swarming any moment now. I suppose there could be a surprise snowstorm in the works and, if it actually happens, I would be quite surprised. This just feels too much like winter is history. Hey! Here’s a selfie from one of our walks last week. Sorry, kinda cut most of Becky out.
Here I Am On Linux
August 18, 2025
General, Life, News, Wisdom
No Comments
John Chappell
For many years I’ve entertained a notion to try Linux. For most of those years, it was all I could do to keep up my career and such competency on Windows as was necessary. Then came cell phones with their operating systems and apps, mostly Android. Last week, having supposedly retired from my career, I felt I could spare some time to get into Linux. So far, I’ve played around with Ubuntu Mint and Debian Plasma on bootable USB drives.
It was pretty easy to get both Linux systems booted up and running with internet access via wifi. I couldn’t get Debian Plasma going on my old Acer laptop, because of choices I made about UEFI and MBR/GTK when burning the .iso file to the USB drive. But Mint is working okay on it, and Plasma runs on the less old Lenovo laptop. With both, I’ve run into “insufficient space” errors while installing programs. I didn’t notice anything about this problem in all the articles and forum postings I read about “How to Install Linux”. Possibly, it’s fixable by resizing the partition Rufus set up when burning the .iso file to the USB drive. I tried some different Rufus settings in the hope of curing the problem, without success. The only thing I accomplished was to make the Plasma USB unbootable on the old Acer. That’s okay for now. It was my impression that most of the authors of the articles and posts I read considered the bootable USB approach to be for trying out different Linux repos before picking one to install on the computer’s hard drive or SSD. Quite a few, nevertheless, just used the USB approach, and quite a few others went with the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) approach. I used WSL myself, which worked fine and had some advantages, particularly in being able to quickly switch to either Windows or Linux, and to run Linux programs right from the Windows Start menu. I still ran into the “insufficient space” problem while installing Linux programs.
What I haven’t done yet is find the best way to run a working “localhost” in order to test web pages I may be working on. You see, Linux is often touted as “the choice of developers”. I think this notion is mostly intended to encompass programmers writing code in Python and C++ and other languages to develop programs and games. But I think “developer” reasonably extends to those who create (develop) websites with HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP and associated frameworks. For a couple of decades (well, it seems that long) I’ve used either Xampp or Wamp to get a Localhost Apache MySQL PHP (LAMP) server running on my PC as a “sandbox” in which to test (develop) websites and their pages and other parts before uploading them for public access on my web hosting provider. So far, I haven’t found the Linux version of either Xampp or Wamp; and it seems like it’s always during the attempt to install Wine that I incur the “Insufficient space” error. Wine supposedly enables one to run native Windows programs on Linux.
I’m sure I’ll figure it all out before it makes me any crazier than I already am. Meanwhile, I thought it might be fun to fire up Firefox on Linux and do something else I haven’t done in a long while — post something on one of my blogs. And so, here we are! One of the nice things about this particular blog is that nobody but me and searchbots, spambots, scambots, and other non-human webcrawlers visits it more’n once in a blue moon, if that. Consequently, I needn’t concern myself with the quality, craftsmanship, or literacy of what I write here, nor whether it offers anything that’s newsworthy or otherwise of interest, much less compelling interest, to anyone, even myself. Hmm, it just now occurs to me that this blog could be like a memoir or personal journal (a/k/a diary) that one or two people might find and look at after I die. I’ll have to think about this; but, not until after I solve “insufficient space” (probably by actually installing Linux on the HD/SSD) and get a LAMP running on Linux.
Verdict on Linux so far: I discern no difference between blog posting with Firefox on Linux and blog posting with Firefox on Windows. This is no surprise, of course. As for website work, none of the widely acclaimed text editors for developers (IDEs) that I’ve found and installed so far seem likely gain my favor over what I use on Windows. Probably, professional web developers would attribute this to my “tyro” skillset.
That’s all for now. There might be updates about this. Or, maybe I’ll think of something that would actually be of interest, or merit inclusion in a memoir.
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