There are 293 top level folders in my Music folder on my desktop PC. That represents 293 different artists. Many of them have not been played in years. Over the course of however many months this takes, or until I get distracted and completely forget about this exercise (the more likely outcome), I'm going to revisit these lost gems to determine if they should be getting more love from my MP3 player, or if they are being ignored for good reason.

One issue I'm not sure about is how to organize this effort. I do not want to do one artist per post, as that'll create too many individual posts. I could just edit this post and change the date, which I think will put it back in the RSS feed as new. Would that be annoying?

I could also track this on a page, but pages are where content goes to die on a blog.

I don't think I need a definitive answer today. If you have an opinion hit the reply link. In the meantime, on to the first entry.

Update: I changed my mind. I'm doing individual posts.

American Bang: American Bang

Released in 2010, this self-titled debut by Nashville based American Bang is a real banger. I see it described online both as Southern Rock and Hard Rock, but I don't agree with either. It's Hard Southern Alternative, maybe? The lack of easy classification probably had something to do with the short lifespan of the band. It was the only release by the band, which broke up after it's release. Three of the member went on to form The Cadillac Three and they appear to still be active today. The lead singer Jaren Johnston has written nine #1 hits for artists including Keith Urban, so I have to assume he doing just fine in the music world.

The album is fantastic though, not a single filler track on it.

Wild and Young
Rewind

Verdict: It's a keeper.

Last night, on New Year's Eve, I was in bed by 11 PM. The only alcohol I drank was a glass of wine with dinner. Continuing the trend of healthy decisions, we took advantage of the bright, sunny, cool and very windy day to hike Malvern Hill Battlefield, just east of Richmond. Malvern Hill was the final battle in the 7 Days campaign.

The Union was set up in a very strong defensive position to cover the Army's retreat to the James River. Lee saw this as his final chance to strike a blow before the Union Army escaped to safety North of the James. It was a tactical ass-whooping for the Confederates, who lost 5000 men in about 4 hours of fighting. It was also a battle that probably should not have happened as General Lee did not make any decision to fight. A series of misunderstandings and poor communication led to the Confederates attacking with very limited artillery cover, trying to charge slightly uphill across about 800 yards of open field. It was a massacre.

The hike is advertised as 3 miles, although my GPS registered 4.3 miles of walking. I also logged 11 bird species on my first e-bird checklist of the year. The most exciting species was about a dozen Eastern Meadowlarks in the fallow corn fields that comprised the field of battle in July of 1862. This is one of the better preserved battlefields. Very little has changed on these grounds in the 162+ years since the battle.

Photos

This site launched in the tilde directory of my ISP on December 31, 1995. To say it changed my life would be a bit of an understatement. I turned that night of drinking homebrew and learning HTML by looking at the source code of IBM.com into a career 3 months later when I got my first of many web design related jobs.

We started 2024 by signing away our life on a mortgage, again. We'd been renting for almost 7 years insisting that RVA was a temporary stop on the way to somewhere else. We finally accepted the obvious fact that we like it here and are going to stay for a while. We ended the year with my getting laid off in mid-November. It wasn't a surprise as the company was clearly struggling, but that doesn't make it any easier. With LinkedIn littered with posts from very talented people that have been out of work for a long time, I was a little concerned about how long it may take me to find a new gig. I started some basic prep for self-employment in case it came to that, but it didn't. I've accepted a new job with a great company and will be back to work next week. Well, I've been doing some freelance work so I have been working a bit.

Between the job issues and the election the last quarter of 2024 has been a shit show and I won't miss it when the calendar flips tonight. As usual, we'll be celebrating from our couch, if we are still awake at midnight.

2024 by the numbers.

• 50 blog posts counting this one.
• 34 nights camping.
• 48 books logged on the book page. 5 or 6 are did not completes.
• 15 albums purchased.
• 157 bird species observed and 54 checklists submitted to e-bird.

What's in store for 2025?

• More creating, less consuming.
• More hiking.
• Probably less camping, reality of starting a new job.
• More birding.
• The Marvelous 3 Halloween show in Atlanta.

Happy New Year, and I hope your 2025 is awesome, or at least doesn't suck. We may need to temper expectations.

In the past, when I've committed to writing here everyday, or at least very regularly, I never hurt for subjects to write about. It's like I retrain my brain to think like a writer, and suddenly fleeting moments that otherwise would be lost forever instead get captured forever because I wrote about them here. But writing here daily is a big ask. I purposely set up my writing workflow to make it a little inconvenient. That extra inertia is why this blog is not just day after day of bitching about the state of the world. I did that on Twitter for years. It's not healthy.

That has been percolating in my brain for a while. I'm past halfway to dead at this point, and I've starting wondering how much of life is getting missed because I simply don't remember it, or maybe more accurately it gets lost in the torrent of incoming information we all deal with on a daily basis. Most of us could make better decisions to stem that incoming torrent, but whether we do that or not, it's still a pretty serious river of shit that most of us deal with on a daily basis.

I tried a journaling thing where every morning I wrote down 3 things to accomplish that day, one thing I would let go of, and one thing that I'm grateful for. I will go back to it because picking three things to focus on each day is helpful. But I kept getting stuck on grateful. It felt like a value judgment, which caused me to get hung up on the relative value of stuff that happened the day before. A lot of what happens daily in our lives is out of our control and mostly random. Feeling grateful because random luck fell my way felt a little bit icky.

So with all that in the my head, I stumbled into Homework for Life on Mastodon today. It's a concept where every day at the end of your day, you answer one simple question. If I had to tell a 5-minute story about today, what's the one event that would be the focus of the story. It's the same idea as writing daily that I mentioned above. By giving it 5 minutes a day, you train your brain to pick out and remember those daily stories. You also probably gain a greater appreciation for all those fleeting moments that really do make up your life. Then you write that moment down daily, just one or two sentences, or even a few keywords, just enough to trigger your memory to relive it anytime you come back to it. The guy in the Tedx Talk uses a two column spreadsheet, one column for the date and one for the memory. You don't need a fancy bullet journal. It's basically the same thing as one thing you are grateful for, but the storytelling angle of it feels easier for me or putting a value on it.

Because I'm me, this will probably last 4 nights then I'll forget about until I stumble across the document where I'm recording these things in July.

A question for my 4 readers. (I grew readership by 33% recently!) Do you do anything like this?

Pop_OS LTS, which is on Ubuntu 22.04, was supposed to release an LTS upgrade to 24.04 earlier in the year. However, every developer in System 76 is focused on getting Cosmic ready for release. Cosmic is their new Linux Desktop Environment. So nobody on Pop_OS gets to upgrade until they are ready to deliver Cosmic, which is currently at Alpha 4. I thought about upgrading and then just installing Gnome 46, but there is no upgrade path. My only option is a full install. If I'm going to do that I might as well move to a new flavor of Linux. But first I had to re-partition my drive to get /home in its own partition. System 76 really should ship with /home in a dedicated partition, but that is a different issue for a different day. The partitioning went just fine, no issues at all.

I decided on Debian 12 for the new OS. No real reason, except that I feel like Ubuntu makes too many decisions for you. Mint was also considered, but I just left a provider creating its own desktop environment. Cinnamon is fine, I've used it in the past, but I wanted to keep things somewhat generic. I had noticed that my desktop was getting noticeably slower, but I really didn't know if it was Pop_OS getting crusty, or Gnome 42, or both. When I got to the download screen to make my bootable USB with Debian, I had a few options for the desktop. I decided 4 years of Gnome was enough and I was ready for something different. So I downloaded the XFCE version on a whim.

If you are wondering why all Debian or a derivative, I don't know. I did meet Ian (the -ian in Debian) many years ago, and I've just always defaulted to the Debian universe. I'm sure Fedora is fine. Don't take it personally.

The install went fine and I've been using the new setup for a couple of days. Obviously, switching from Gnome to XFCE is taking a little adjustment in getting used to things not being where I expect them to be, but so far so good. My desktop box, a 4-year old System 76 Meerkat, does seem a little peppier. I've only changed a couple of apps. Apostrophe doesn't want to run now, so I switched to Re-text for Markdown writing. No big deal. Gedit has been replaced with the default XFCE text editor Mousepad. Debian ships with Firefox ESR, which is an extended support release that I presume does not update every week. I didn't even know that was a thing, but I like it.I've dropped to the command line to do a couple of things that I didn't immediately know how to do with XFCE, but exercising my command line muscles is something I should do more of anyway, so that might be a benefit.

The only thing I seem to have lost is my RSS subscriptions. I was using Feedbro, which is a browser extension. I didn't think about exporting a back up of my feed list. It's not there in Debian. Maybe it was time for a feed refresh anyway. So if you are reading this via RSS please shoot me a note with your URL so I can add it back in Liferea, my new feed reader.