Day 9 – Old Home Week

Daily Story Project

Dammit I had an idea to write about today but I forgot what it was by the time I had a chance to sit down at my computer.

Dad needed his tax forms printed out and I hate printers. Also I don’t have a working one currently. So I drove him over to my sister’s house to get that all taken care of. It took him a while to do it, so I messed around on my laptop and chatted with my sister and my brother-in-law, took a look at the damage from the ice storm and pipe bursting, and petting the Very Good Boy Archer. Tried to figure out why my remote login to my home server worked on one subdomain but not the primary domain (still don’t know why but since I can get in one way, it’s not a huge urgent deal.)

Then dad had to go poke around and look for some things that got packed away when he had to start his controlled-homelessness run. By the time we left, it was after 5 PM and rush hour was in full bloom, making the estimated Google time to get home, across town, nearly an hour due to traffic.

Dad, navigating, sent us near his home bar, and I laughed and suggested that he’d done that on purpose; since he’s been living with me, he hasn’t gone, and it’d been a few weeks. “Your friends probably miss you,” I said. And he thought about it, and said, “well why don’t we swing in for a drink and wait out the traffic?”

You will notice, dear reader, that was not a denial.

Dad knew the bartender, several people sitting at the bar, as well as nearly everyone out on the covered patio around the fire pit. And he introduced me to every single one of them. Almost everyone there knew who I was, told me how much they loved my dad, and said that he only told them good things about me. “Your dad says very often that he’s been blessed with good kids and grandkids,” they said.

It was wild. A little intimidating, even. But it was fun to see dad hanging out with people he knew. I ate greasy bar food, and drank semi-fancy beer (Rogue Dead Guy Ale, for the record) which made me feel only slightly out of place) and listened to dad tell his stories and to other people telling him stories about their lives. Dad remembered everyone’s names. He knew what they did for a living. He knew who was married to whom. It was nice.

And every time someone new walked in, he yelled the same damned joke: “It’s about fuckin’ time you showed up! We can get this meeting started now.” Well, sometimes he started the joke and someone else finished it for him.

Everyone there said they were happy to meet me, and they all seemed sincere. I should go back sometime. I wonder what kind of reception I’d get if I walked in alone? I’m more of a loner than a charmer like my dad. It’s too bad I take more after my mom that way.

Day 8 – Here I am

Daily Story Project, fear

This whole 500 words a day writing exercise is supposed to be about just giving myself the chance every day to sit down and write something. It doesn’t have to be good. It doesn’t have to be about something. I just need to put 500 words down on the screen and post them to the blog.

That being so, why did I just complain to my bestie, Tracy, that I didn’t know what today’s post was going to be about? I know it doesn’t have to be about anything. I’m the one who set the rules up. I know this in the cockles of the soul I don’t have.

Tracy, being helpful, suggested a few things, asked me some questions about what I’ve been doing all day, even suggested I could ask ChatGPT for a prompt. Not gonna do that last one. I don’t really trust ChatGPT or the other LLMs for anything creative because every time I’ve used them they’ve lied, made things up, or gotten factual things wrong and been very certain about them when questioned. They’re not ready for general purpose use yet. But that’s not on Tracy. She was trying to help.

I’m flailing. I know I should just do this, ramble and harrumph and blather until I hit the word goal. Because last night’s post was good. It was real good. It was tight, it had an emotional basis, it took a natural event and made it personal and even profound. I loved it. Today, I wanted to try to top it.

That’s not how this works, though. I have to just do it, the writing bit, and see what happens. Inspiration is incredibly fickle; if I have to wait for inspiration I might be waiting a long long time. This project is about building a habit. About making space. About giving myself permission to be bad, or even clumsy and un-word-y-like. I don’t have to DO anything but put down at least 500 words today. Tomorrow is another chance to write, and the day after that, and the day after that. Maybe some of them will be beautiful. Maybe some of them will be hilarious. Maybe some of them will be sad. But, realistically, as Theodore Sturgeon once said, 90% of them will be crap. That’s how it works.

I need to be OK with that and I guess, today, I’m not, so it’s a snag and I’m having trouble getting past it. You can’t see this but I’m looking at the word count on screen and I’m just barely over 400 words. I have to go on, and on. I should stop using contractions just to eke out a few extra words here and there. You, dear reader, have probably stopped reading because you can tell I’m padding all this out. It is true, I very much am. I do not blame you for moving on at this point.

But you should at least know this: tomorrow I will be back, doing this again. I’m showing up. Imperfectly. Honestly. Just me.

unasked, bursting

fear, General
Picture of a street corner at sunset, with the Charles Bukowski quote in the caption overlaid
Photo credit: Brian Moon, taken 6 March 2014, Sellwood, Portland, OR

if it doesn’t come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don’t do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don’t do it.

– Charles Bukowski, “So you want to be a writer?”

    Day 7 – Turn around, bright eyes

    Daily Story Project, fear

    Obviously the big thing that happened today was the solar eclipse. I don’t know if I have 500 words about it, though. For one thing, we only got about 22% coverage here in the Portland of Oregon, and for another, it was very cloudy so I couldn’t see much of the sun at all.

    I did make a point to be outside during the event, though. Listen, I’m a practical person. I try not to give much attention to spiritualism or magic or the supernatural. But for days now I’ve been seeing people talk about Eclipse Energy and how it represents a break, a cleansing, a shift in perspective. And that all seems like unfounded disconnected thinking.

    I say that, but I do also have a horoscope app on my phone, and I know my Big Three by heart (Capricorn Sun, Scorpio Moon, Sagitarius rising) and I share daily horoscopes with my friends. I think that those Big Three do somewhat circumscribe my personality in many ways. I do have a practical side that fits with the general Capricorn vibe; see the paragraph above, even though this paragraph may, to some, undermine my argument. But my practical side is also weighted by the sharpness and intense nature described by the whole Scorpio thing; I just mask it a bit. And backing all of that, the traits of a Sagitarius rising means I’m curious, novelty-seeking, and get bored easily.

    In many ways this is also a description of the ADHD mind, at least my (technically not professionally diagnosed) ADHD mind.

    And I’ve been on a run of bad luck lately. I’m unemployed, and beginning to doubt I’ll ever find a job that’s a good fit that I can ride out the rest of my professional life with. The pressures of modern late-21st-century capitalism are getting to me. I just want shelter from the elements, healthy food and drink, and medical care when necessary, and all of those things are becoming harder and harder to find. The idea of a cleansing, a break, a magical way to shift my focus and find something better… it appeals. It appeals strongly. Doesn’t it? You feel me on this, right?

    Twenty minutes before the maximum coverage for my location, I headed outside, in comfy workout clothes and sturdy walking shoes, with Bonnie Tyler singing that every now and then she falls apart. Me, too, Bonnie. Me, too. I’d love to not fall apart. Can I soak up some Eclipse Energy and make it happen? Or maybe I just need to pull myself together and make it happen, eclipse or no eclipse.

    I stopped on my walk at 11:25 AM Pacific, and pointed my phone at the sun behind the clouds (not looking directly at it, I’m not that gullible) and sang along with Bonnie. I don’t know what to do, and I’m always in the dark. We’re living in a powder-keg and giving off sparks.

    To this atheist, this was as close to a prayer as I will allow myself to make.

    And the only one who can respond is the person making it.

    Forever’s going to start tonight.

    Battlemap for sail

    DandD, Digital Art, For Sale, Portfolio

    Digital art of the aft end of a red-sailed wooden ship, from the top down, labeled as "Her Folly - Being Captained by Laird Grenjolm de Agosta"

    Hey! I play D&D and I run games and I make battlemaps for my players in Inkarnate.

    And I had a lot of fun making this sailing ship map for my BBEG and only got about an hour of real time use out of it at the table (my players burnt it to the ground) so I thought, hey, maybe someone else needs it? If so, they can get high-res copies, both gridded for 5′ squares, and ungridded, on my Ko-Fi shop, starting today.

    How to wrestle your Synology into exposing itself to FTP

    clippings, Portfolio, Tech

    For a very long time now, possibly for the entire life of my main personal blog, Lunar Obverse been operating without any automatic backups. I know, shocking. I’m a technology professional; I have multiple backups for my computers and phones, cloud plus local for everything. Having been on the help desk when someone called in asking for help recovering lost files that weren’t backed up, I empathize with the pain of loss.

    That changed this weekend. And wow, what a painful process it was.

    This blog runs on WordPress, and the recommended program/plugin for backups is Jetpack, though there are several others. The problem with them is that they all cost money, typically a monthly charge. I’m not above paying for a necessary service when it makes sense, but a) I’m currently unemployed, and 2) I have a massive 12 TB Synology on my home network with 5+ TB of storage space empty. I also own a handful of unused domain names, and I understand file transfers and some command line stuff. Surely I can take all these disparate pieces and cobble together an automatic backup?

    Turns out I can. But it took a lot of individual steps, and lots of tweaking. I’ll try to go through them in the order it makes the most sense for someone using this article as a how-to.

    Step Zero: The Disparate Pieces

    As I said, the blog runs on WordPress. It’s hosted on Bluehost, which is fine. They give me command-line and CPanel access to the underpinnings of my site, though for the most part I didn’t need to mess with that. But I did need to find and install the BackWPup plugin. The free version lets me schedule backups, select what gets backed up, and then save or send the backup to a variety of locations, like via email, to Microsoft Azure, S3, or even Dropbox. The one I was most interested in, though, was FTP.

    Sure, that’s an antiquated and insecure means of transmitting files over the internet. Maybe rsync would be better? But FTP is simple. Right? It should be simple. I’ll start there.

    Step One: Name Games

    I had to then figure out the safest way for me to allow an external server to FTP files onto my Synology DS418. My home network is provided by Xfinity, which is my only choice, but some testing showed that they aren’t yet blocking ports to my home network. At least they’re not blocking 20, 21, 22, or the weird random ones FTP uses in passive mode. So I took one of my unused domains, and went into the DSM softare under External Access, and added the domain as a Dynamic DNS entry pointed at FreeDNS. That way, if my IP address changes, the DynDNS service will update it to match the domain name.

    This worked almost immediately. I could ping the domain and get my home WAN address. Step one completed.

    In DSM, Control Panel > File Services I enabled FTP, FTPS, and SFTP, as well as enabling anonymous FTP under Advanced settings. I also set the default home folder for anonymous FTP to the specific folder I wanted to use for backups.

    And even though I did this later in the actual process, here’s where you, the smart reader learning from my mistakes, would go in and make sure that the system internal user that would be accepting anonymous FTP requests had read/write permission to that folder. You set the folder permissions under Control Panel > Shared Folder > , Edit > Permissions. Select “System Internal Users” from the drop-down, and then assign read/write permission to the user “Anonymous FTP/Presto/WebDAV”.

    Step Two: Expose Your Network

    But I still had to open those ports necessary for FTP. My home cable modem/router supports UPnP and Synology DSM can talk to a router using UPnP to configure ports. The problem I ran in to here was that the number of ports needed exceeded the number available either on Synology or my router. So it took several tries, until I finally manually went into the router settings and opened the ports to TCP/UDP traffic myself. Testing this, again, using a website like showed that at least the FTP ports were open. The upper ones wouldn’t be open until an active connection was in progress.

    I set up port forwarding on my router to point traffic to those ports to my Synology. That worked beautifully when testing FTP on my internal network. It failed, though, when I tried to run the backup job across the WAN, on my webhost using the job I’d set up in BackWPup.

    This is one area I spent a lot of time on, because the blog backup would fail with some generic error like

    WARNING: ftp_nb_fput(): php_connect_nonb() failed: Operation now in progress (115)

    or

    WARNING: ftp_nb_fput(): Entering Passive Mode (xxx,xxx,xxx,xxx,xxx,xxx)

    or

    WARNING: ftp_nb_fput(): Can't build data connection: Connection refused

    And I started by troubleshooting the ports. I logged in to my Synology via ssh with root, and ran tcpdump. That all seemed to work. Looking at the logs, it looked like the connection wasn’t the problem; the plugin was connecting just fine. It just failed when trying to send the files over.

    I’ll spare you all the dead ends I went down and cut to the fix: I had to disable SSL-FTP in the plugin. Turns out, Synology doesn’t like that. Or, at least, I couldn’t figure out how to make that work. The files only transferred when that was off on the client end. And believe me, I tried every other setting on both ends. C’est la vie.

    Final Thoughts

    There are still some quirks of Synology’s implementation of FTP that I want to point out.

    • When I set the folder for backups on the client end, I had to include a leading / on the name. Otherwise, new folders would be created instead of Synology recognizing that the client is putting the files in an existing folder.
    • I messed up when trying to use Let’s Encrypt to create a certificate to secure FTP and SFTP and ssh connections to my Synology. Maybe that’s why explicit SSL-FTP isn’t working? But since I exceeded the number of requests I can make of Let’s Encrypt, until that resets or I figure out how to delete the several I created and deleted, I can’t fix that. That’s a long story.

    But it’s all working. I now have twice-weekly full backups of the 21 years of posts I’ve tossed up onto the internet for y’all’s entertainment. A safety net. And then, since I’ve discovered a new hammer, I used it to nail down backups for my neice’s new travel blog, April Taking Off, since I don’t want her to lose her work, and she doesn’t really have anywhere to store offsite backups. (Also you should check out her travel posts, she’s great!)

    Day 6 – Capitalism

    Daily Story Project, Politics

    Can I limit my definition and concerns about capitalism to only 500 words? Let’s find out!

    I was listening to a podcast last week that I will not name; just using this as a jumping-off point. The hosts are generally liberal or left-leaning, and the normal topic of the show is the tech industry, but because of a reader question they were talking about tech CEOs and what they could do to push back against things like anti-labor practices, wealth inequality, and resource exploitation. In other words, the hosts were talking about capitalism, especially as it’s practiced in the early 21st century here in America and the world.

    And one of the hosts said that they like capitalism. Specifically they said they like some parts of capitalism, some parts of socialism, but that neither one of them is the complete picture of how to organize society.

    And that struck me as just dumb. It’s that whole “moderate” view where you try to thread the needle so you don’t take any particular stance. And my one thought was, how does this person define capitalism? Because by my understanding, there ain’t nothing good about capitalism in the basic idea. I would love to ask this person for their definition, but that would probalby just end up in an argument, and generally I like this person and their tech and social opinions.

    Instead, here’s my baseline understanding of capitalism, and how it’s been running lately. The base idea of capitalism is that it’s good to accumulate capital. Capital is whatever tangible goods, objects, factories, or labor needed to make things people need. Capital is classically the machines and factories used to manufacture goods, but that ignores the very real labor that the workers in that factory also provide. The labor is also capital, human capital.

    Folks with the most capital are called capitalists. We generally don’t examine, at least outside of lefty circles, what or how those capitalists accumulated their capital. How did they have the money to buy or have factories built? My inclination is that most of them inherited it, and then through the process of underpaying for the labor and overpricing the output, kept accumulating profits that gave them even more capital.

    Because that’s the ethical failing, as I see it. Labor will always produce a surplus. A leftist thinks that the laborer should retain most if not all of that surplus. A capitalist, though, claims to own that surplus because they own the factory. To my mind, that’s a tautology. The factory was itself built by labor, and labor was underpaid for that construction, because the capitalist retains ownership of the property.

    Capitalists, are, definitionally, profit extractors. Rent-seekers. That’s how they accumulate capital.

    Let’s briefly touch on what capitalism is not. It’s not the concept of money, or markets, or buying and selling. All of those things existed before Adam Smith tried to define a new economic model. Capitalism is also not the idea of profit; that, too, existed previously in human history. Funnily enough, excessive profits was seen as a negative, nearly a sin, definitely a moral failing. It’s just that it was called usury (and to be quite honest, applied in a very discriminatory and racist way.)

    I’d love to bring back the accusation of usury, but I’d apply that to billionaires. Are you with me?

    Day 5 – Foods for thoughts

    Daily Story Project, Tech

    Not sure what to talk about today but it’s 10:44 PM and I haven’t written a daily post. So bear with me while I ranble for 500 words or so.

    Today was supposed to be a day for working on my blog, figuring out how to advertise and sell my skills, and getting started trying to make a little freelance income. The hard part is that, in my head, I have two skills and one of them is hard to sell on a piecemeal, client-by-client basis, and the other one is widely known as not a good way to make money these days.

    The first one is computer hardware and software troubleshooting, diagnosing, building, and maintaining, also known as Help Desk. I have done this in the context of businesses and agencies for decades where it makes sense. Staff a phone and inbox with techs, tell the employees or customers where to call, and let them meet in the middle to hash things out. Working in those jobs, I often get approached by other employees who eventual say “Hey, it’s not a work computer but I’ve been having trouble; could I ask you to take a look?” On that basis it always seems like there are people out there that want or need help and can pay. But it’s few and far between, and there’s a difference between troubleshooting a computer bought by a business and configured in a standard way, and troubleshooting a computer that someone bought for home use without knowing much about computers, software, or standards. No offense, y’all but the things a lot of people install or allow to be installed on their home computers can be downright frightening.

    So my instinct when offering computer support is to try to narrow things down a bit to just recommending computer builds, adding or removing hardware or specific software, things like that. And it just doesn’t seem to be worth it to be a freelance “computer tech.” I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong? How do JayzTwoCents, Linus Tech Tips, and Gamers Nexus do it? Hmmm, guess they’ve built a video empire, not just selling their time and experience taking on one problem at a time. Food for thought.

    And of course the other skill I have is copywriting. I can write clean straightforward friendly stories, I rarely make grammatical and spelling errors, and I have done this for my entire life. My insecurity here is that I don’t have a degree, and I don’t have a lot of bylines outside of my own blog. I can write but, as I mentioned a few days ago, I don’t seem to be able to market or generate traffic. Yet. It’s a skill I think I can learn, but there’s that little nay-saying voice in the back of my head that says nay. That is the skill I’m working on building, though. I’m taking some online classes in marketing and writing catchy ads and it’s given me a lot of food for thought on this topic, as well.

    It’s all a learning process. And at least it is costing me nothing to try right now. I’m already paying for this blog space. Stay tuned.

    Day 4 – Despicable Dodgers vs Sugar Titts

    clippings, Daily Story Project, Portfolio

    As a life-long Dodger fan I’m really disappointed in them right now. I even rooted for the Cubs today when they hosted the Dodgers in Chicago (and the Dodgers lost, which is just karma.)

    What on earth could make me so mad? The way the Dodgers treated a fan this week who managed to catch a home run ball hit by new Boy in Blue Shohei Ohtani. She was sitting in the pavilion at Dodger Stadium, a location I’ve been before; baseball game tickets are expensive these days.

    The team is promoting Ohtani as their new star, having paid a lot of money for him after losing some big hitters to free agency. And I don’t have anything against Ohtani; I think he’s a great addition to the roster and will probably do good things on the field. But on Wednesday, when Ohtani hit his seventh-inning homer padding out LA’s lead against the fucking Giants, the ball landed in the hands of Ambar Roman. And that’s when the trouble began.

    Roman reports that security staff descended on her, separated her from her husband, and made an incredibly low ball offer to buy the ball from her. She says that the pressure was unwelcome, and that they even made threats to withhold the certificate of authenticity from her if she decided to keep it and take it home with her.

    Two baseball caps signed by Ohtani. That was their offer. Auction house representative Chris Ivey, from Heritage Auctions, says that ball is worth US$100K easy. In fact, the Dodger fan store is selling a ball hit and signed by Ohtani for US$15K, and it wasn’t even a fair ball. The fact that the offer was bumped to include a bat and a ball (Ivey says is worth maybe a grand) doesn’t make this any better.

    Roman has been posting about this on social media. Her Twitter (you can’t make me call it the dumb new name, Elon) handle is, and I swear I am not making this up, Sugar Titts. Her pinned post is the video of her catching that ball, clearly a proud moment for her. When she’s asked, she repeats that it’s not about the money, but the treatment, and I believe her. It was a big moment, and she acknowledges that it’s a big moment for Ohtani as well. He hit the ball, he should get the momento.

    She didn’t even get to meet him to hand the ball off, although apparently Ohtani’s translator may have given that impression.

    Today the front office said they’d be willing to do a little more and offered Roman and her husband, Alexis Valenzuela, a private box for her birthday. At least at that point, she’ll get to meet the team, not just Shohei Ohtani. The front office says they’re going to review their protocols for important situations like this in the future. Even today as I write this, they’re saying they’re open to trying to make it up to Roman for all this bad feeling.

    But their immediate actions and the reporting on it has tainted my view of the team, and that’s no small feat after almost 4 decades of following the team.

    Gotta say on this one, I’m on Team Sugar Titts.

    Day 3 – Comedy Gold

    Daily Story Project

    Dad’s been homeless for a couple of months. No, not like that. He’s been couch-surfing. It’s kind of a long story.

    He had an apartment on the lower floor of my sister’s house, a nice little space with its own kitchen, full bathroom, living room, and a little covered patio where he could smoke. Yes, he’s a smoker. At the age of approximately late-80s (that’s a complicated story) I doubt he’d be able to stop smoking at this point.

    But back in January, Portland got hit with a very bad ice storm. It shut down the city, and many homes lost power for days, including my sister’s house, which was rough on an old man. They stayed at my nephew and neice-in-law’s condo until power came back. Since my sister’s house is up in the hills, it was hard to get there and back again; dad couch surfed for a bit. And then it dragged out, because my sister’s house had a water pipe burst, and when the plumber came in, they found black mold, and asbestos in the walls. It turned into a big (necessary, of course, but still) project.

    While my sister wrangled with the insurance and contractors, dad kept couch surfing with his grandson. That kept going, they wanted some privacy, so my sister asked if dad could stay with me.

    Of course. Whatever it takes. I am happy to help!

    Was nervous that having a roommate for the first time in years and years would expose all my weird habits and the odd gaps I imagine I must have in my lifestyle. I’ve been a solo bachelor for the huge portion of my adult life, after all. I have set ways of doing things. For some reason, as just one example, I don’t have many forks, compared to how many spoons and knives I have. I just live with it. If there’s someone else here eating food, they might notice and call out the dearth of forks. I can imagine it being A Thing.

    Dad, though, has been a good roommate. If he gets up before me, he makes coffee. He’s got his own bathroom to use on the main floor and he keeps it clean. He tolerates going out on my uncovered patio to smoke. He’s help pay for groceries and put gas in my car. It’s been great.

    But… he’s got a hearing problem. It’s been going on for months, since before Christmas, and no amount of nagging from me or my sister has gotten him to go to a doctor. So I’ve had to yell at him to get his attention, I’ve had to repeat myself a lot, and when he watches TV it’s very very loud. All of us have been worried it’s Something Serious, and finally my sister got an appointment at his primary care physician for this week.

    All of this is set up for: his ears were just full of wax. It wasn’t Something Serious. He just needed to have them cleaned out. First thing he said when he got back from the doctor was, “What’s that roaring noise?”

    Dad, that’s the heater. It’s sounded like that the whole time. You’ve just been deaf.

    When he sat down in front of the TV and turned it on, he literally flinched at how loud it was.

    It’s been comedy gold, frankly.

    I love my dad. I’m glad he’s here.