Perhaps, you took one glance at tonight's post and realized its title is a nod to 12 Monkeys (1995). Well, good show, you would be spot on! This trailer might just capture how I view the present...

YouTube Link

..but, MORE IMPORTANTLY, this post's title, Twelve Mondays (2021), is about one singular thing:

"Be sure to drink your Ovaltine."

OK-OK, I suppose THAT could be a bit of a letdown. I mean, it's no pink bunny suit. Or, greater letdown still, a one-year subscription to the Jelly of the Month Club!

YES, more movie references, but this time, CHRISTMAS! Oh, that "most wonderful time of the year!"

Why now? Begin with the end in mind! When those old favorites do come on, the year is winding down with not much hourglass sand left to go around...

We have 12 Mondays remaining in 2021. What shall I do with them?

Events tonight have led me to install Microsoft Windows...which turned to Google...which got me to re-adopt Spotify—I dunno, I got on a roll so I went with it! And this time around, my return to Big Tech wasn't a pro/con power move that wrestled away my will...

—hardly, this work of mine shelves my end-to-end encryption play! Google will now be dishing out suggestions to me after its sunglasses-in-the-shadows AI parses what I write! I am no longer free to talk all DAY about the societal impact of Reese's Pieces emergence after its E.T. cameo, while not getting a SINGLE whiff of peanut butter and chocolate near that one Facebook friend who embarked on a mid-life crisis trip to the M&M's World Las Vegas—you know the one—or next to that Google search on irreverent binging while watching The Walking Dead episode about Tyreese's Pieces!

OK, so I'm NOT on Facebook, but I liked that if I wanted the OPTION to do a sweet soliloquy sans AdSense, the choice was there for me to savor such scripted speech sugar!

Perhaps, I should not be overly crestfallen about my departure from encrypted email: it's not exactly novel, for PGP emails have been around since...well, gosh, it's older than You've Got Mail (1998), an ancient world that measured by baud rates!

Still, encrypted email is WAY cool!

But, on the plus side, now that I have salvaged my Gmail account from the bottom of the World Wide Web, I no longer fear that emails written to me will bounce back undelivered, leaving its sender with that, "Oh, I'm so all alone at a lunch table on the first day of classes, SOMEBODY-GIVE-ME-A-PLATE-OF-CHOCOLATE-CHIP-COOKIES" feeling!

So, what has driven this behavior of returning to Microsoft, Google and Spotify?

A T-shirt. OK, a WHOLE ARMLOAD of T-SHIRTS! More specifically, a Cricut Explore Air 2 (with its lack of a Linux binary) brings me back to Microsoft. And you thought I was gonna say an "official Red Ryder, carbine action, 200-shot, range model air rifle, with a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time."

Recently, I've written briefly on creating my own race events with their own T-shirts. It came to me after being let down by a local race organizer; they said I wasn't cool enough for school—I dunno, I think it was something about a zombie apocalypse...who knows what people are jive talkin' these days?

And as these 12 Mondays close out the year, I recognize that time is running out on 2021's New Year Resolutions. I've got seven 5Ks to run!

How does the lineup look for the rest of year? It's gonna be a rock show! Locations TBA!

If you're a cool cat like me, you want your own website. Go with NearlyFreeSpeech.NET for your webhost and domain name registrar. It's not required to use their webhosting; there's GitHub. Point to your own GitHub Page: it's free and is beneficial in learning how Jekyll works. You can easily generate a starter theme. Before building my own, I got started with Minimal-Mistakes's remote theme starter to gain a foothold. Beyond education, the theme stands well on its own. I like Katerina Bosko's implementation.

If you're only running GitHub Desktop or use its web interface, you could just add your page/post and stick around for a few minutes for it to render out—there's a soft limit of 10 renders per hour. However, I prefer a little bit more immediacy to see things shape and hence local dev environment.

The setup is a LOT easier on Windows than what the docs indicate. Just grab the installer from here and follow this on JekyllRB.

But, what if you want your own home? Well, bring it on back to NearlyFreeSpeech.

I threw together my own notes on how to create a Jekyll setup (as unoptimized as they are), just so that I have a checklist on hand when I decide to blow away my site for one reason or another! Hey, in my 40s, admittedly, a step or two does slip out the backdoor; it's good to have everything there! There's docs out there on the process, but none (that I can ever find) seem to piece it together with clarity—or includes a truckload of non-essentials.

Jekyll Checklist for NSFN Setup

1. Create a static site on NFSN.

2. Login via SSH.

3. Setup HTTPS: tls-setup.sh

4. JekyllRB.com: Troubleshooting suggests these for NFSN, so let's run them:

   export GEM_HOME=/home/private/gems
   

   export GEM_PATH=/home/private/gems:/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/
   

   export PATH=$PATH:/home/private/gems/bin
   

   export RB_USER_INSTALL='true'
   

5. Install essentials: gem install jekyll bundler

6. Within the private directory, create a folder (content) to hold markdown and site config files.

7. Upload content!

8. Enter that newly-created directory (content) to install GEMs by running: bundle install

9. Stay there and render the content into HTML! For all future updates, do this as well: bundler exec jekyll build --destination /home/public

10. Oh no! Once the shell session ends, the gem location is lost! Fix this for the next session by making .bash_profile and .bashrc files the same (located in private) by editing the .bash_profile:

    if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then
       source ~/.bashrc
    fi
    

11. ...and edit .bashrc:

    export RB_USER_INSTALL='true'
    export GEM_HOME=/home/private/gems
    

12. Log in via SSH and run step # 9 as deep longings necessitate while your heart hammers in ecstasy!

Yes, I was in the middle of ripping Steve Miller Band's Greatest Hits 1974-1978, a band that incidentally, I had the chance to see live a lifetime ago, when I just tore my CD drive from my laptop mid-rip after finishing Jungle Love.

The ripper I was using in Linux was SLOW...

...the application I prefer is only available in Windows...

...I didn't wanted to muck up my pristine system with a WINE install...

...I didn't like the bloat of running a VM...

...I did not find the future prospect of managing hundreds of jewel cases to be promising in a temporarily minimal context...

And with great, flummoxed agitation and in a flurry of even greater gusto, I threw up my hands and thought, "Screw it all, I'll rent somebody else's collection!"

For reasons I do not understand, the catalyst for me was watching George Strait sing Fireman on Hee Haw. YES, that is ABSOLUTELY TRUE. Sometimes I don't the connect-the-dots EVEN for myself!

But, hey, before giving up on my rips, I'm listening to Brooks & Dunn's Hard Workin' Man (1993), an album I purchased as a new release on cassette at a K-Mart on Austin Peay, a location that hasn't been there for YEARS. Incidentally, that same store is the same place I first played the original NES, sometimes in the 80s as Super Mario totally blew my ATARI Adventure mind away.

Cassette turned to a CD as the years went by...it's among the albums I know from the first to last track, another album where I can flip through the forgotten names with fresh faces. I'll hear those old songs, like so many that I do, wondering whatever happened to old so-and-so. There's been so much of that in my life. And a part of me goes on and breathes the same air as they still do, a part of me that is as ageless as they are.