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Week Notes 2025-17

Week Notes for April 21-27

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Things this week

The week started out on a positive note - while the Senators lost the opening game against Toronto in big fashion (6-2 😝) as of Monday there were still 3 games to go. Little did I know that the Sens would have to wait until Saturday to get their first win...

Tuesday, when booking a doctor's appointment, I realized that I neglected to renew both my Driver's License and Health Card, both of which expired on my birthday in March. Woops! I did so as quickly as possible online, and now I'm good to go. I should be receiving new cards in the mail soon, but at least I won't be in trouble if pulled over (other than being pulled over).

On the writing front, I didn't do a lot this week (see Things I Made) but I was tagged for a Blog Questions challenge, and fellow blogger Hyde invited me to his Over/Under series; I have a set of topics to write about and hope to do that soon, but overall it's a nice honour to be included. I've been following along and it's a fun series.

Most of the rest of the week was devoted to some more tech tinkering and dominated by playoffs.

Health Notes

As mentioned I booked a doctor's appointment this week, years in the making. For a long time I've had frequent nosebleeds, usually coinciding with changes in air pressure. It doesn't matter if it's dry or humid, something will trigger a nosebleed. Most of the time it's not like...gushing blood. I'll blow my nose and discover some clotted blood in the tissue. Sometimes it will actually bleed until I stop it. There are other symptoms that make me think I have a deviated septum which probably dates back to high school maybe when I was hit hard in the nose with a soccer ball during gym class. But I don't want to self-diagnose, so - doctor's appointment.

I weigh myself daily to filter out noise on the scale, and it started off discouraging. My weight kept going up, but eventually it came back down to reality. That's why daily weigh-ins are important!

My back seems like it's returned to normal. Pain is still present, but it doesn't take a long time for me to be able to walk properly. I can get up and I just feel a stretch. If I place a pillow behind my back when I sit in an office chair it makes it better.

Tech Stuff

Oh boy, more tech tinkering this week. I started setting up a new Linux installation on a spare PC; the goal was to set up a Plex server. The installation went swimmingly, with problems only related to disc copy protection. I've worked around that and have an SSH tunnel set up so that I can transfer files over WiFi and not have to be at the Linux keyboard. I asked some Discord friends for suggestions on what else to add to the local server, and there were several good suggestions - including an NAS, which I think is a good idea considering I have 1TB hard drives lying around. I will probably move my photo storage there so I don't need to use an external HD enclosure.

Beyond that I've been doing more playing around with Obsidian. I installed a few plugins: Book Search, Movie Search, and Dataview. I'll write about what I'm doing with those in a blog post later this week, but the short version is that it's just a fun little thing I'm doing to avoid publically quantifying my media tracking.

Media

Oh, the Ottawa Senators. What a roller coaster ride. Did you know that they went to Overtime in three straight games? And lost two of them? The worst is that they had dreadful shot totals in the 2nd and 3rd periods in at least two of those games. It turns out that if you shoot the puck, you score goals. It would be nice if they could win more faceoffs (they did a better job of that Saturday night). Back to Toronto for game 5 Tuesday night.

I noticed for the first time this week the difference upscaling makes with DVDs on my PS5; I streamed some ReBoot episodes through Plex, which were ripped to DVD in 420p. I previously watched some of those episodes on the PS5. The quality difference is stunning. I am very glad I bought this machine for movies.

Things I Made This Week

Links

Just some things I've read online that interested me and I didn't get around to writing about them.