Exploring Plex, or Trying To

UPDATE (31 August 2026): Maybe I misunderstood what the problem was with getting Plexamp to stream from my servers. I’m able to stream the music now even when I’m not on the household wifi network, so maybe I don’t need access to the router after all. (I think maybe my Plex server was just down at the time when I tried to test it.) That’s positive news. I’ve even set up a couple of small Plex servers for use in the classroom, assuming I can stream there, because I’d prefer to use that than to be dependent on whatever media …

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The (Great?) Restoration, and Looking Forward

So, one of the things I’ve been doing behind the scenes, a few posts at a time, is restoring posts and comments that ended up with garbled text. Something was set up incorrectly with this blog’s database, and I had a bunch of UTF-8 text stored in the database, except the database was set to latin-1 encoding. This worked, until it didn’t.  So anyway, I hired someone to fix it, and he was able to repair most of the database, but there were a couple of hundred comments and posts that had garbled text even despite the fix. (Presumably they …

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Returns and Recoveries

So, I was in Canada with our son for about ten days from the end of July until early August. A lot happened, and it was nice to see my sisters and their families, who gave us a warm welcome, as well as my friend Ian (who drove up to Vancouver to see us). It was also nice to properly give our son a little experience of Canada. We did a lot of things: aside from family time, which was most of our time in Saskatoon,  we visited the Forestry Farm and did some shopping in Saskatoon, played mini-golf and …

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Dreaming

Despite what I’d heard from friends, sleeping with an APAP machine (like a CPAP machine) has not really brought on a welter of nocturnal weirdness: most nights when I sleep, I may dream but I don’t recall much, if anything. I’d say the frequency for my remembering dreams has risen from maybe once a year to maybe once every three months or so.  Last night was a little different, though. 

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Lunar New Year 2024

Happy Lunar New Year! Above is some ddeok guk I made for the holiday, because I felt that maybe we should have some Korean food this Lunar New Year holiday. My wife was so happy with it she had seconds and thirds! And I had to tinker to make a decent vegetarian version of the meal, so that was flattering! Trailing behind the whole new year hustle as I do—often I’m teaching a winter class from late December to mid-January, and it doesn’t feel like a new year starts until that’s done—I tend to count new years off the Lunar …

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What To Say?

A friend recently asked how I’m doing, and I thought I might post something here, since I so rarely update this site. However, this is one of those questions it’s hard to answer.  Do I…  … go with how I pulled a muscle in my back the other day, and it hurt to breathe for about 24 hours, but now it’s slowly getting better? … talk about how I’m busily mashing together chunks of the Gumshoe ruleset and a hacked version of the Forged in the Dark system to run modern supernatural techno-/spy-thrillers? … delve into how, despite the exhaustion …

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Perspective… and Pizza

A while ago I mentioned being in the “home stretch” on the book I’m writing. A bunch of people were very encouraging when I said that, which, well, encouraged me. (Thanks, everyone.) Thing is, I still am in that home stretch, pretty close to where I was at the time I made that comment, in fact. I’m kind of stuck there. Not writing-stuck: I would be done the draft if it wasn’t for the exigencies of life. A recurrent, won’t-go-away ear infection has been gnawing on our son, and I developed bronchitis (seemingly the same damned bug), just as a …

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My First Car Accident (Er, Okay, Second)

Edit: By the light of day, I realize that what I’ve written up below was my second car accident; the first happened on the first night I went out driving with my dad, the day I received my learner’s license in Middle School. The similarities to this case are a bit surprising: it was also 100% the other guy’s fault, and it happened in an empty place. (A mall parking lot, after the mall had closed: he reversed into our car without even turning on his lights. Somehow, I spent years hearing this was my fault from my mom, in contradiction …

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The Fullness or Emptiness of the Glass

I’ve mostly backed off “serious” discussions on Facebook, with the exception of an occasional comment here and there. It’s not just because Noeul keeps me busy: It’s because while I like being able to say hi to friends occasionally, and get a whiff of news in the SFF world, share pictures and tidbits of news, and that kind of thing—and because some of my friends seem to prefer to use Facebook Messenger to email—I find that almost anything else is just a black hole sucking away my energy and time.

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Location, Location, Relocation…

So, one thing that surprised people was our seemingly sudden move back to Korea. Not just because people were surprised that we moved so suddenly, but also because we chose to come back to Korea specifically. Like any major decision in life, it’s a complex mix of things, some of which I won’t talk about here, but I thought I’d say a little about it anyway. For one thing, life on tourist visas with short-term health insurance policies (I can only get six months at a time these days) was growing increasingly untenable. (My health’s fine, I’ve actually lost plenty of weight and …

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