lennys December 28, 2023

Post-Christmas blues

Today is Thursday, and Christmas was just 3 days ago. I spent it at Mom's house in Oregon with Mom & Stepdad plus my brother, his wife and 3 kids. It was a good holiday, but was over too soon like all holidays are. I got some things I wanted and a few items that I didn't know I wanted, plus a few things I needed. The kids had a good time, and I had fun hanging out with everyone. I miss them already. This will be the last time I take any days off for a while. I'll be working on New Years Eve/Day this year, and I have a birthday coming up in about 3 weeks during which I'll also be working, so it's back to the grindstone for me. I finished up a tutorial about Django APIs and React frontends today. I think I've got the Django-end of things covered pretty well, although I still need to work on building APIs for practice, but when it comes to React and JavaScript in general I'm still pretty green. I haven't been able to find a good blog tutorial for Django APIs + React stuff yet, but I'm still looking. I was hoping I'd find a blog tutorial I could work through and eventually adapt to the next iteration of this blog, but that'll have to wait a while I work through this learning curve. When I built this blog, I adapted it from a tutorial I found on YouTube, but now I'd like to build an API that serves as the backend and use React for the frontend. This will enable me to make changes to the frontend of things to accommodate mobile browsers and whatnot without making any changes to the Django backend. I know it's possible, I just have to find a good guide online somewhere and work my way through it. I have a couple of books about building APIs in Django with a React frontend, but they don't cover making a blog in that manner so I'm still looking for something that directly covers it. I have more ideas than I have time it seems.

lennys December 21, 2023

It works!

So I got my new "Contact Us" form working on my main website and on my LS Enterprises site finally. I had worked through a tutorial I found online, but ran into issue after issue, so I tried out a different contact page tutorial I found on mailtrap.io's site (THANK YOU!!), and managed to get it working. So now you can email me by going to either lsenterprises.com/contact/ and filling out the form, or by going to lennyshort.com/contact/ and filling out that form. They're not pretty yet, but I'm satisfied for the moment. Coding blows my mind with all the little details. I would imagine that feeling is rather common among people who do this sort of thing every day, but for a relative novice like me, it's still staggering how much you have to know in order to put a website online start-to-finish like I've done. From getting an AS number from ARIN to setting up a colocation account at the data center to procuring a secondhand server and router and figuring out how to set them up to installing all kinds of software and dealing with the issues that lie therein to the actual coding of the website's backend code to making it look pretty, it's mind-numbing when I try to take all of it in. And I've just scratched the surface so far I think. On a side note, I'm going out to Oregon in a few days for Christmas. My brother is bringing his wife and 3 kids with him so it will be a full house at Mom's this year. I'm looking forward to the change of scenery. I'll be driving a rental car there and back mainly because I don't trust my old truck to make the journey any more. After my birthday comes and goes in January I'll be looking into trading it in on something newer, so I'm looking forward to that too (cautiously). It will be a learning experience for me because I've never bought a vehicle with a trade-in before, plus I'll have to get financing for it. When I bought my first new car years ago I got the financing done through GM which was easy, but this time around I'm hoping to get it financed through my credit union so I can get a better interest rate. We will see.

lennys December 15, 2023

Finally...

So the blog is up and running again after a few days of being broken. I've been attempting to get my Contact Us pages to work, and this necessitated a server move. Well, several server moves. I decided to separate all my domains by putting them each on their own virtual machine, so now this blog has a VM all to itself. It seems wasteful, but I found that I needed to isolate some issues onto their own individual VMs to make any progress, so I made 5 new VMs and now I'm in the process of setting up the domains on each of them. I'm going to keep my original web server VM for future use, and my mail server VM is still the same as before. So far I have lsenterprises.tech, lennys.site and this blog up and running, and tomorrow I'll probably get lennyshort.com resurrected. On a side note, I'm finished with the repairs to my truck, for now at least. There was an ordeal I had to work through with the shop I took it to, we were going to put a new engine in there but that didn't work out. The shop manager hunted down 3 different engines from salvage yards all across the US. The first one got shipped out, but was diverted to Los Angeles and just disappeared, no idea what happened to it. The second and third engines were both shipped to the shop successfully, but upon arrival we found that they were no good - one was leaking oil like a sieve, and the other had a blown head gasket. In the end, my truck's original engine seems to still be running okay even with the issue it has with the sixth cylinder not having compression, so I decided to just keep driving it as-is and plan on trading it in sometime next year. It's too bad, as I still like this truck and was hoping to keep it for a while longer but sometimes things don't work out. At least I am getting my $2000 deposit back, which is what I'm waiting on now. I got the paperwork from the shop that showed it credited to my checking account, and after checking my bank app today I saw it hit my checking account. Yay, I got monies!

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