Construction in progress

Featured

Posted on by
Reply
bridge construction
What I feel like

Having gone untouched for countless years, rgetter.com (a.k.a. ric@large – I’m not even sure if I’m going to keep that name, what do you think?) is finally becoming active again. I was afraid my stories were going to be lost in the crowd on SubStack, so I figured this may be a better place for them.

I’m going crazy trying to self-teach myself WordPress after all these years, so the going is slow and frustrating. I am still working on the layout and adding work I’ve written that has been just sitting around. I have yet to wrap my head around moving some photo galleries to the site. For example, I’ve completely lost the page that lets me publish this staging website to my live site.

Help wanted

If you have any ideas for a good way to learn WordPress (books, classes, cheap gurus) please get in touch. The “Contact Ric” page is working, as far as I can tell. Meanwhile, bear with me. This ain’t easy. I’m trying to make it so it is.

Scars

Posted on by
Reply

She seemed to like him in a lot of ways. Sure, they went places and did things that you would normally call “dates,” movies, the Joyrides amusement park by the river, dinners out, and all that. But he simply enjoyed talking with her and being in her company. She was interested in so many things and always wanted to learn more. When he talked about football, she apologized for knowing nothing about it and then bombarded him with questions to understand it better. He took her to one of the games at his high school alma matter and gave her a running commentary about what was happening on the field and impressed him with what she had learned already. And she told him all about the jewelry design she did. It was something that never quite engaged him, but the enthusiastic way she explained it, he found himself getting a real interest in it. 

Continue reading →

The Woke vs. The Sleepers

Posted on by
Reply
Man sleeping on street
Makes Me Grateful for My Bed 1972 Daniel D. Teoli Jr
By: Daniel D. Teoli Jr. via Wikimedia Commons

“Woke” is a beautifully designed term of derision. Aiming a verb misused as an adjective at a well-educated, generally grammatically correct population is uniquely irritating. Then again, it is very hard for those of us to whom it can be applied to categorically deny it. This is especially true for me, a woke Boomer. I can easily look back and see the arc of the transformations that have been happening over the past two decades, having lived through the before and after. 

Continue reading →

Back up a YouTube channel with JDownloader2

Posted on by
Reply

Overview

Did you know if that if YouTube deletes your channel, even if they do it in error and it’s “restored,” the content is gone forever–unless you have a backup? I found that using Google Takeout can be really cumbersome with large channels and the collection of files and data it gives you aren’t in a form that is very helpful for restoring things. After searching around (like, a lot), I found a great video on YouTube from GSheets with a whole different approach.

Tiia Monto, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

This tutorial may gloss over some of the Google Sheets aspects he specializes in, so check out his video for that. But I’ll go a lot deeper into how to use JDownloader2 in the process. This is something I originally wrote as part of my job at Portland Community College, but I thought it’s worth making available to the world at large.

Continue reading →

Hello! (again)

Posted on by
Reply
Portland Waterfront cherry blossoms

Decades ago, I built a website by stumbling around Adobe Dreamweaver. It wasn’t half bad and got a few viewers. After the initial flush of success, it lay dormant and became embarrassingly outdated. Five years ago, I gave WordPress a try in a subdomain (go.rgetter.com–the “go” part is the subdomain). After the initial flush of success, it lay dormant for five years.

Now, I quietly disposed of the old site and am embarking on fleshing out this new one. Here’s what I have planned, levels of self-motivation permitting:

  • This modest post
  • Migrating various content I created elsewhere that should be useful to the general public
  • Moving the once-popular Journey to Japan pages here
  • Creating a gallery where I can show off my pictures and videos
  • Links to some of my better MacDirectory Magazine articles
  • Nagging myself to create some new content here

This little ice-breaker complete, if I have successfully fixed the file permission problem and it posts correctly, I may have the confidence to continue. Someday maybe I’ll even get good at it

What I think about when I think about updating

Posted on by

updates_screen_webUpdating an operating system used to be a lot more exciting than it is now.   Put simply, things would break. And for a time in Apple’s checkered past, it wasn’t as much “if” as it was “what.” Even if there was a change sheltered behind a couple of dots in the version number, there were very good reasons to be cautious.

Things are a whole lot better now, but it can save you a lot of grief down the road if you still treat these updates with a little care and preparation. Rolling back a Mac OS to an earlier version is not necessarily easy if you’re not ready. Continue reading →