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A fun getaway to Stowe, Vermont this past weekend to enjoy the slopes and relax in a hot tub with some fantastic beer. A few thoughts: Happily I found it easy to get back to skiing following the ACL repair several years ago (winter of 2017…?). It was fun to connect with an old friend and his new(-er) girlfriend who is quite the rock-star at snowboarding. Renting a ski house without a hot tub would be a terrible, horrible, no good mistake. Relaxing in hot jetted water after 3-5 hours on the mountain is impossible to pass up (for me). Stowe, Vermont is an awesome town in the winter. Skiing on a bigger mountain than what we have locally in Pennsylvania is such a nice treat. ...

For many months I have been taking brief stabs at getting a self-hosted bit of photo sharing software running in my homelab. Pixelfed, a very nice looking alternative to social-media sites such as Instagram, was my own personal white whale for that span of time. But no longer! I’ve finally, finally got a setup installed and working which I am happy with. What happened before? Lots of pain and suffering. Perhaps I’m just bad at this whole self-hosted thing, and more likely that there are no amazing guides out in the world which clearly explain how to run Pixelfed out of a Docker container, but it has taken me many months of sporadic starts and stops to get this thing off the ground. Given that I’ve only just gotten this all working nicely I cannot bear to relive the experience right now. I have an internal wiki with all the key notes and I’ll plan a future post about the technical details of getting this working right. ...

For many months now I have been slowly iterating on this site’s design. Each time I make a change to the CSS, my GitHub Actions script: Rebuilds the site, which is built using Hugo Triggers a redeployment to Backblaze Invalidates my Cloudflare cache However, I was always clearing my local browser cache in order to get the CSS to update! This was annoying, because I knew it meant for anyone else visiting this site they would not be seeing those updates until their local browser cache expired the old CSS file. I know I had set the max-age header for that file to, uh, a fairly large number. I’ve had a GitHub Issue open for several months telling me to look into and fix this. ...

Not the year I was hoping for, but still some good miles racked up! The hamstring/groin injury continues to heal and I’m on a path back to where I want to be. The addition of kayaks and motorcycles into my life reduced the frequency of outdoor bike rides! I plan to add some functional and strength training into the 2022 routine, and will commit to another 2-3 months of daily riding, exercise, and healthier eating. Starting January 2nd! ...

This past Sunday had some nice weather on tap, so we set off for the northern reaches of the state to explore a State Park we had never visited before. Norvin Green! We hiked the “candy cane” trail, e.g. the one which had a red/white slashed blaze. It felt appropriate on the day after Christmas! Finding the trail, though, was not a great experience as evidenced by our first photo in the gallery below. We ended up on a fire road instead, which was filled with quite a few deep and water-filled holes. However, once we did reconnect with the trails proper everything was well-blazed and easy to navigate. Lots of twists and turns on the trail, too! Every thousand feet was a blaze directing a sharp right- or left-hand turn. ...

Into week 3 of what will certainly be a years-long event around this log4shell vulnerability. Some thoughts. Ok, what is log4shell? If you are not technically-inclined, please bear with me. I will keep this straightforward! Log4shell is a vulnerability in the log4j logging library. From the Wikipedia entry of Log4j: Log4j is an open source logging framework that allows software developers to log data within their applications. This data can include user input. ...

As is about tradition for this time of year, we’ve been off visiting my family in Tarpon Springs, Florida. This means a week with good Greek food and lots of sun, and also some time out on the water enjoying a climate much more temperate than New Jersey at this time of year. The weather did not cooperate with us for ocean kayaking, so we took to the natural springs of Weeki Wachee State Park to float down along the crystal clear river. The blue-green colors and the clarity of the water is really something! ...

For the past two weeks I have been passing by the Delaware & Raritan Canal tow path, at the point where it runs underneath Route 29 northbound on the New Jersey side of the river, and noticing the pedestrian footbridge was nearing completion. Earlier in the week a few souls had been wandering along it. As a small part of the project to replace the entire Scudder’s Falls bridge, a pedestrian footbridge was constructed on the upstream span. It connects the NJ D&R Canal and the PA Delaware Canal paths. A few days ago the entrance from the canal path onto the footbridge appeared unencumbered. No barricades. No warning signs. No construction workers. Was it finally open? ...

On our way to visit my aunt’s for the holiday’s, we took advantage of being in northern New Jersey to hike along the Appalachian Trail leading to High Point, NJ. It was a chilly yet beautiful day to be outside. Starting off around 9am the temperature was 35 F. By the time we finished and arrived back at the car it had improved to 44 F. The clear skies and warm sun meant that for the hike back down we could lose the gloves and unzip our jackets. ...

A key part of visiting Skyline Drive earlier this month was the plan to camp out for two of the three nights on the trip. I’ve always enjoyed camping out in the woods (except in the snow…never again) and over recent years I’ve acquired lots of camping gear that packs up small and light for use on a road bike. Camping off the back of a motorcycle is pretty much the same thing, right? ...