April 7, 2020

Old Friends covid-19: day 26 | US: GA | info | act

Before prom, 1987.

Tonight I caught up with my best friend since high school for a Zoom cocktail hour. Kip and I talked about work, music, life—the things we pretty much always talked about. It’s been a while since we’ve seen each other in-person—like ten years—but when we chat, it’s like not much tome has passed. If this whole pandemic has taught me anything it’s that these connections need to be nurtured better. We plan to make this a weekly thing.

I also got a long email from my friend and former colleague Monica. She writes:

“ I am always astounded by the idiocy, greed, crass meanness, and shortsightedness of the President. I am appalled that he has any support. I am often wondering if this is the end of the Enlightenment experiment that is our country. We live in California, true, but certain rural sections of Northern California can be a bit "red," and a bit tin-foil-hat libertarian. I usually really enjoy it up here, but have had to read a couple of papers that were meant to investigate Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point and trends that try to explain how COVID 19 is really a hoax cooked up in a Rothschild’s study in NYC to discredit the President. I have had to remind my students that it began in China. The Dems can barely get their caucus together, let alone arrange a global conspiracy to oust the Orange One. ”

Yeah, it’s always good to get some digital empathy. I need to get her and her Skunkape of a husband on the Zoom cocktail hour.

I installed MediaWiki on my home server. I transferred my student support server to see how difficult it would be. I did have some issues: first with 404 errors (and I’m still not quite sure how I solved those), then with script errors (I needed to use the correct version of LUA), and finally sending emails (I was finally able to use Mailgun). I’m still having an issue with Certbot verification to obtain a certificate—oddly I was able to get one for grlucas.com after disabling Pihole for a minute, but that didn’t work in this case. Something else is going on. I still have some MediaWiki items to tweak, but it seems to run fine.

Teaching went well for both classes today. I think I could get used to this Zoom thing.