dcn. jquinby's scribbles

“When I notice something wrong in my brother that cannot be corrected - either because it is inevitable or because it comes from some weakness of his in body or character - why do I not bear it patiently and offer my willing sympathy? As scripture says, their children will be carried on their shoulders and comforted on their laps. Could it be because there is a lack in me, a lack of that which bears all things and is patient enough to take up the burden, a lack of the will to love?”

— Blessed Isaac of Stella, Abbot

Still working through the Tolstoy collection. So far The Cossacks is my favorite, followed closely by Family Happiness and The Death of Ivan Ilych. I finished The Devil last night and am still chewing on it. Two endings are included, both terrible, and I’m not sure which is the less terrible.

Draft of one paper (Liturgy!) is done. Will sleep on it, review/edit it tomorrow, and submit Monday-ish. Most of this week's reading for the online class (Creed!) is also done; one more article to get through plus a couple of YT lectures. On deck: readings and essays for the upcoming class (Fundamentals!) at the end of the month. #wharrgarbl

Current state: I have to write a paper for a class that just ended, start the reading assignments for a course beginning in a few weeks, and keep up with the ongoing readings/reflections for an online class that commenced this week.  My head so full. 

“And suddenly he was overcome by such a strange feeling of causeless joy and of love for everything that from an old habit of his childhood he began crossing himself and thanking someone.”

— Tolstoy, The Cossacks

Facebook, said the director of diocesan media, is where the people still are.

So after this latest formation weekend, I installed FB Purity, gritted my teeth, and logged back in after a nine year hiatus. Not much seems to have changed and the plug-in seems to clear away nearly all of the most annoying UI stuff.

I intend to use it like Twitter - follow a few things I’m interested in (church stuff, duh) and mostly lurk/listen.

A little more nerd stuff - I've fallen down the Home Assistant rabbit-hole. Not really interested in the automation aspects as much as having One Place to See Everything. I've been eyeballing it for a while but figured it would have to wait until Raspberry Pis were available again at reasonable prices. Then I saw that there was a Docker image available! Our NAS will run Docker, so fifteen minutes later I had it up and running. A couple of days later I've got what few IoT things we have all discovered and dashboarded. In the process, I wanted to re-install OpenVPN but decided to give Wireguard a try. After a bit of flailing - I had ignored the 'you should reboot' installation message and wasn't actually using the updated kernel - it's up and running beautifully. It's fast, easy to add new clients, and I can set it for on-demand activation whenever I'm off the local wifi network.

Currently reading: Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy by Leo Tolstoy 📚

Found it on one of our bookshelves and we have no idea how it wound up there.

Spent most of Sunday and Monday installing a new ceiling fan. Difficulty level: 16' ceiling. This required two (2) runs to Home Depot to rent a 14' step-ladder and truck to haul it and an extended facetime call with a master electrician friend of mine for some Q&A. Managed it all without serious injury or breaking anything, so I'll call it a win.

In all of the bouncing of the room circuit, the Raspberry Pi bit the dust, or at least its sdcard did. Found a larger card and reflashed it so we’re back in the adblocking business. Oh and amidst all this, one of the garage doors went all haywire and a guy had to come out and basically re-set a bunch of things. So we start the (short) week with everything more or less working again. The sun’s out and the weekend’s snow and ice are, again, melting quickly.

We finished up season 4 of Fargo and season 6 of The Expanse, so we decided to give Peaky Blinders a try. One episode in and we're sufficiently intrigued. I do have to say that we got a good laugh by Netflix's content warning when it started: "Language, Nudity, Gore, Smoking."

We breathlessly intoned "...and smoking!" to each other as things got underway.