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w/e 2022-10-30

The past couple of days I’ve been mostly listening to Martha’s new album Please Don’t Take Me Back, another collection that I believe could be described, fellow kids, as “wall-to-wall bangers”.

§ Monday I went with the family to see The Flames of Injustice, a musical at Witham Public Hall based on events in the town 200 years ago. Some parts were a bit am-dram but there was good singing and the effort of writing, producing and performing an original musical about such a local topic is quite amazing.

I’m not sure the last time I was in the Public Hall. Decades rather than years ago. At junior school I was on stage as one of Joseph’s many brothers, our skins painted a sandy brown that had to be washed off in the bath at home that night (“it was a different time,” etc.). A few years later I’d be taken to see local amateur productions of Gilbert & Sullivan musicals and Harold Pinter plays, which seems like a good range of British theatre.

Tuesday I headed back west from Essex, allowing me and Mary to cross paths for a coffee at Paddington station before she continued on to Nepal for nearly four weeks. And so onward, picking up our car she’d left at Hereford station, and home.

So far all is fine here alone. I’ve focused on keeping a routine and ignoring the world beyond the garden gate. It’s fine, fine.

A photo filled with many small brown leaves lying on the ground
I did go out for a couple of hours today raking up fallen leaves

§ I had been feeling quite comfortable with the VPS I’d set up to host $new_project. Admittedly it has no users but it seems to tick along and I was reasonably happy with how I’d set things up.

But this week I decided to try using a CDN for the first time and attempted to set up Cloudflare without properly understanding how everything fit together. This resulted in the site being inaccessible, showing nothing but an error message almost unheard of by Google.

Trying to undo my damage I ended up with my Let’s Encrypt certificates – which I’d mistakenly (I think) removed – failing to install. So, ah well, I backed up the database, reinstalled the OS, and set up everything from scratch again.

Which, actually, went fine. My detailed notes meant I had everything configured and running within a couple of hours, which is quite reassuring. Although I’m glad I didn’t have any other sites running on the same server, which had previously been my plan. Hmm.

§ I watched four films on Mubi this week:

Incisive commentary.

§ It’s only been a couple of days and I’m very tired of all the “Will Twitter be ruined? Where should we all go? Should we all go?” stuff.

Do or do not. There is no banging on about it endlessly. As someone once said.