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onepageatatimeThanksgiving was mostly good: we watched the parade coverage on TV (yay!). Our livetweeting became a livetooting this year. It mostly worked well. Then we watched the National Dog Show coverage. (Shrug… it's okay, I guess, but H like of it.) And then, later in the day, we had our annual Thanksgiving viewing of the 2011 movie Tower Heist. Though I'm not familiar with Die Hard, I suspect Tower Heist is as much a Thanksgiving movie as Die Hard is a Christmas movie. The main reason we watch it every year at this time is because of a fun police chase scene that goes through the Macy's parade. (Some years, that has felt a bit awkward, given terrorist attacks with trucks driving through gatherings of people. Nobody is hurt in this movie version. And the truck is simply to divert attention from the heist being attempted at the same time.)
I have had some Mastodon frustrations: my server has been giving a lot of errors for days… I had lots of issues while trying to livetoot (errors instead of posting, long delays in receiving H's posts from another server, even though she was getting mine fairly quickly. And then… my server was down for about 12 hours Friday. And… I found that threw me off. Especially because communication was… lacking. (Partly because the admin didn't know what was wrong. There was a configuration error, and that meant that X couldn't talk to Y and was failing silently. Admin actually had to sleep on it and come back to the problem with fresh eyes before he could see (and then fix) the problem.
As a result, I've now found a Plan B. I set up an account on another server. Right now, it's just a placeholder. But… if my server goes under or there's another long outage, I can at least import my follow list and read and respond. (I'm not 100% sure how comfortable I am with the server. But as a temporary home, it would do. With so many servers closed to registrations or invite-only, I was mostly focused on finding a place. (I am also leaning to smaller instances: the one I'm on quickly grew from 60 users to 20,000 users. And I don't think they have enough resources for that. Especially if the admin is the only person on the tech side of things. The "hit by a bus" continuity issue. Or, the "if he walks away from/gets bored of running the server." He's also expressed some frustration at the number of reports he's receiving. And… I wish it would be productive to shout at him "THIS is what happens when you acquire 20,000 users and don't limit registrations!" But it wouldn't be, so I'm not telling him that.
This morning, another mild frustration. One of my pens needed to be cleaned and was ready to be filled with a new ink color. But first, the old color was slightly stubborn in coming out of some parts of the pen. (I suspect that's largely Kristin should have looked up how to clean this type of fountain pen, with a side of wanting to switch from a darker ink to a lighter one, so really wanting to be sure that the old ink woudln't contaminate the new ink.
Then, I wanted to put Queen and Castle (a nice gold color from Ferris Wheel Press) into my pen to try it out… but I couldn't get the cap off the ink bottle! (I think it was tough to begin with and then I think I may have also made it worse, because I forgot my "righty tighty, lefty loosy." I wrestled with it for several minutes before deciding, I probably need a wrench to get this cap off. And I'm not dealing with that now. In any case, I had another new ink color to try, so instead, I used the same company's Ruby Royal Flush) to fill my pen. It's… nice. I think it's a little darker red than I was hoping for. I'm a little anxious about how much glitter is in these inks. A little afraid of issues with it getting stuck in pens and being tough to clean. But it'll look nice. And the holidays are a good time for a red ink, too!
I have had some Mastodon frustrations: my server has been giving a lot of errors for days… I had lots of issues while trying to livetoot (errors instead of posting, long delays in receiving H's posts from another server, even though she was getting mine fairly quickly. And then… my server was down for about 12 hours Friday. And… I found that threw me off. Especially because communication was… lacking. (Partly because the admin didn't know what was wrong. There was a configuration error, and that meant that X couldn't talk to Y and was failing silently. Admin actually had to sleep on it and come back to the problem with fresh eyes before he could see (and then fix) the problem.
As a result, I've now found a Plan B. I set up an account on another server. Right now, it's just a placeholder. But… if my server goes under or there's another long outage, I can at least import my follow list and read and respond. (I'm not 100% sure how comfortable I am with the server. But as a temporary home, it would do. With so many servers closed to registrations or invite-only, I was mostly focused on finding a place. (I am also leaning to smaller instances: the one I'm on quickly grew from 60 users to 20,000 users. And I don't think they have enough resources for that. Especially if the admin is the only person on the tech side of things. The "hit by a bus" continuity issue. Or, the "if he walks away from/gets bored of running the server." He's also expressed some frustration at the number of reports he's receiving. And… I wish it would be productive to shout at him "THIS is what happens when you acquire 20,000 users and don't limit registrations!" But it wouldn't be, so I'm not telling him that.
This morning, another mild frustration. One of my pens needed to be cleaned and was ready to be filled with a new ink color. But first, the old color was slightly stubborn in coming out of some parts of the pen. (I suspect that's largely Kristin should have looked up how to clean this type of fountain pen, with a side of wanting to switch from a darker ink to a lighter one, so really wanting to be sure that the old ink woudln't contaminate the new ink.
Then, I wanted to put Queen and Castle (a nice gold color from Ferris Wheel Press) into my pen to try it out… but I couldn't get the cap off the ink bottle! (I think it was tough to begin with and then I think I may have also made it worse, because I forgot my "righty tighty, lefty loosy." I wrestled with it for several minutes before deciding, I probably need a wrench to get this cap off. And I'm not dealing with that now. In any case, I had another new ink color to try, so instead, I used the same company's Ruby Royal Flush) to fill my pen. It's… nice. I think it's a little darker red than I was hoping for. I'm a little anxious about how much glitter is in these inks. A little afraid of issues with it getting stuck in pens and being tough to clean. But it'll look nice. And the holidays are a good time for a red ink, too!