Long Time, No See

I’m guessing that most of you won’t be reading this for quite some time. See, apparently the strategy of ‘letting your domain lapse and re-buying it’ isn’t a good one, because ‘waiting it out’ isn’t the 30-day-or-so wait I thought it would be. Apparently, Verisign holds on to domains for quite some time after they expire, only allowing me to re-purchase it for several hundred dollars until its ‘release’. Now, to be fair, HostISO was willing to purchase the domain on my behalf and let it sit long enough to transfer, an offer for which I turned them down…but I have definitely learned that Hostgator has it right…and basically everyone else is a bad idea. Resultantly, I’m writing these as a result of a manually-edited hosts file, rather than having squared away my domain woes, which I cannot wait to resolve.

There has been so much going on, and yet I sit here, uncertain what to blog about. I guess I’ll start with the technical – one of the clients at work has put me amidst some uncharted territory. While I usually use the excellent Turnkey Linux project to perform one-off tasks and run self-hosted, browser-based software, I am finding myself in a place which requires Virtualmin, since I need to handle multiple subdomains. Since Virtualmin doesn’t play too well with TKL, I’m doing my first ever web server from scratch with Debian. It’s been quite a learning process. Similarly, while I haven’t been able to get my copy at home working the way I want, the excellent Teampass project is working well at my job, replacing our prior system that had a one-at-a-time thing going on that got in the way with obnoxious frequency. I’m also keeping an eye on Open365. It seems to fit the bill for my collaborative spreadsheet needs described a while back, but its docker-based install process is a bit smoother on paper than it ends up being in practice. I’m sure it’ll improve in the coming releases.

At the church where I do technical things, there’s lots of things coming soon, though there’s a whole lot of moving and shaking I’m hoping to get done in the summer months. I end up with an incredible number of questions regarding what I should do next, and implementation is its own set of challenges I look forward to tackling, though we’re all of a similar mindset that trying to get everything in place before our November meeting is ambitious, to say the least. I really think it is doable, but I must remember to consistently ask myself whether it’s doable because it’s what I think is best and I’m looking for God’s green light, or if it’s truly the direction in which I’m supposed to be going.

At a personal level, I’ve been dealing with a greater need for ‘adulting’; it’s becoming pretty clear that my desire to grow up at a child was woefully misplaced. I hate coming home because ‘coming home’ invariably means ‘dishes and laundry’. I miss the other life stages.