I published my first web page on 12/31/1995. And here I am on 12/31/23 still doing it. Back then it was just a simple HTML page. It's the same today, although the tools are better.

Note - today is 123123. I just noticed that as I typed out the date above.

I calculated earlier this year that I have spewed out 4 or 5 novels worth of words on this site. There are probably 25 novels worth of typos though.

My life seems to have settled into a pattern, which I guess is a good thing at my age? 2023 was much like 2022, 2021, and 2020. I'd add with less COVID, but I had my second case of COVID this summer, almost 1 year to the day of my first case. The big change for this year is that we are 10 days from being home owners again. Renting in RVA was supposed to be an 18 month thing to figure out our next move. 6 years later we finally decided to accept the obvious (that we are staying in RVA) and buy a place near the airport. We bought a newly constructed townhouse. Can't have home maintenance keeping me away from the camper on the weekends!

Last year I foreshadowed our planned camping trips on the Natchez Trace and out west. Neither happened. Mississippi was canceled due to me starting a new job in February. The western trip was canned because Death Valley is still mostly inaccessible due to flood damage, and the government shutdown was scheduled for the day before we flew to Vegas to pickup a campervan. We were booked in National Park campgrounds the entire week, campgrounds that would have been closed if the shutdown happened. Instead we stayed closer to home with two fall camping trips, early October in WV and Thanksgiving on the GA coast. I've got a week booked on Cape Cod in early September next year, and our 2nd week-long trip for next year is TBD. I've also got our weekend camping trips in May, June, and July already booked.

2023 by the numbers.

• 62 blog posts (counting this one)
• 35 nights camping
• 44 books logged. A few were logged as not completed.
• 10 albums purchased
• 116 bird species observed and 62 checklists submitted to e-bird.

So that is a wrap on 2023. We will be ringing in the new year from the comfort of our couch. We went out last night to beat the rush.

Happy New year, and I hope 2024 exceeds your wildest expectations.

Doritos partnered with Empirical, a high-end innovative spirits company, to create Empirical x Doritos® Nacho Cheese Spirit. It’s a clear, savory nacho-cheese alcohol that actually tastes like Doritios, even down to the feeling like you’ve been munching on some chips.

Empirical was founded in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2017 by Lars Williams and Mark Emil Hermansen. In the early days, Williams, a former chef at Noma, was moving from working on a prototype still to a larger one, and wanted to see what kind of things he could use to make different spirits.

“I was doing a ton of testing with every single botanical I could think of like parsley, oysters, chicken skin — just running as many different things through it [the still] as I could to get a sense of the different maturation levels, but also what kind of flavors we could extract and harness through this bespoke kit that we built,” Lars said.

gThumb, an image editor and organizer that ships with most Linux distributions, has been a favorite tool of mine for many years. It has a neat feature that outputs static web albums from within the application. I've used the feature off and on for years.

Example Album

Recently, I decided I would like to standardize on it for sharing photos here. However, it defaults to outputting a 650px wide image in the web album, which is a little small for today's larger monitors. Because it is open source, there is nothing stopping me from fixing the application.

Using Google, a few Reddit posts plus a blog post by somebody that made their own theme, and some help from the Gnome gThumb Discourse, I found the theme files at /user/share/gthumb. I poked around the theme files and found this in the index.ghtml file for the theme. There is also a container for the image in the style.css that you'll want to update to match your new file size.

<% set_var preview_width="750" preview_height="750" if="image_description_enabled || image_attributes_enabled" %>

<% set_var preview_width="650" preview_height="650" unless="image_description_enabled || image_attributes_enabled" %>

The numbers may vary based on the theme, but increasing those numbers is how you get a larger output image. I increased them to 1000, resulting in the album I linked above.