I had a series of almost back-to-back concerts as 2019 started up; Neon Trees and Fitz in the Tantrums at the beginning of May, The Doubleclicks and The Misbehavin’ Maidens in the middle, and then Lionize right at the beginning of June.

Oliver Brewing Company Tasting Room

This concert was at a venue that was new to me, the Oliver Brewing Company. Lots of restaurants and places call themselves a brewing company, usually to signify that they will have some of their own beer on tap. But this was literally a factory floor that had been cleared to set up a stage. I could see all the empty, unlabeled aluminum cans that would eventually hold their different brews. Perhaps because it was a factory floor and not a club or concert hall, the acoustics were pretty amplified. The venue seemed to know it was an issue because they were selling ear plugs for $1 each. (Probably from the stash they give to their factory workers during a regular day) At any rate, it was the first concert where I actually wore ear plugs because it was just too loud for me to enjoy; especially because my OSHA training kept reiterating that hearing loss is not recoverable. Surprisingly, it simply dampened the sound, but I was still able to hear the vocals everything. If anything suffered from the plugs it was a slight loss in the higher frequencies that I noticed during Lionize’s set. One other thing I noticed - of all the concerts I’ve gone to in the past few years, this is the first time I wasn’t one of the older audience members. There were a fair number of grey beards there to hear the different bands.

• Bake-Sale Berry Muffins
• banana poppy seed muffins
• gochujang chicken
• black bean soup
• boiled carrot with Cumin, Cilantro, and Lime
• chicken burritos mojados
• chicken burritos mojados
• cinnamon swirl bread
• cinnamon swirl bread
• cinnamon swirl bread
• first from easy fish and chips
• chips from easy fish and chips
• Lemon-Buttermilk Pound Cake
• Lemon-Buttermilk Pound Cake
• pull-apart garlic rolls
• pull-apart garlic rolls
• pull-apart garlic rolls
• Rosemary Focaccia bread
• Rosemary Focaccia bread
• Rosemary Focaccia bread
• Rosemary Focaccia bread
• rustic italian loaf
• rustic italian loaf
• rustic italian loaf
• skillet-roasted cauliflower
• Vietnamese Rolled Beef (bo lui)
• Vietnamese Rolled Beef (bo lui)

March was a bad time to have gluten allergies in my house. I did a lot of baking and most of it turned out great. The bake-sale muffins (used blueberries) in particular were a huge hit. I never knew blueberry muffins could taste so good. I’m kind of mad at every place I’ve ever eaten them before for making me think they couldn’t taste all that great. On the flip side, I was not a fan of the banana-poppy seed muffins. I think for now I’ll stick to banana bread and banana snack cake when I need to get rid of some ripe bananas. The lemon-buttermilk pound cake fell somewhere in the middle. It was good, but I find the loaf lemon pound cake I make to be easier and taste just as good. Then again, I have some mods I need to make to this recipe next time around to maybe get a better consistency.

self-portrait at Red Hat Summit

Red Hat Summit 2019 was my first Red Hat Summit. I heard quite a few people saying it was the largest one they’d been to yet and that it used to be a pretty small convention. That was not the case this year; it used up the entire Boston Convention Center. I’ve said before, concerning video games, that the best use of trophies and gamification of the meta-game are to get the player to take actions they wouldn’t normally take. Red Hat did a pretty good job of this during the summit. They provided points for filling out session surveys, which most wouldn’t have done otherwise. They also provided points for posting to the convention’s feed. I normally wouldn’t have, but reaching 1000 points netted the player some money towards merchandise at the RHEL store. So I posted about getting my custom t-shirt. This led others to comment on my post to find out where it was taking place and I was able to direct them there.

My second concert of 2019 was almost the exact opposite of the first one. The first one was a big outdoor concert venue (it was in Boston, but was configured like Pier VI in Baltimore) while this one was in the basement of a pizza place called Joe Squared. The first one featured pop artists that everyone has heard while this one featured niche bands that mostly nerds have heard. The first one featured full bands while the Misbehavin’ Maidens performed acapella and The Doubleclicks used an electric cello and other stringed instruments.

At the end of Red Hat Summit 2019 (post coming about that soon) there was a double-header concert with Neon Trees and Fitz & the Tantrums. Neon Trees started things off for the night. I didn’t look them up ahead of the concert, because Fitz was a huge band so I thought Neon Trees was just a local band opening for Fitz. Their section of the concert was a lot of fun even though I didn’t know any of the songs. The lead singer had lots of fun banter and seemed to really be enjoying himself.

• Amish Cinnamon Bread
• Brown Butter-Cardamom Banana Bread
• Buttermilk Biscuits
• Buttermilk Biscuits
• Vermouth Cracked Potatoes
• Skillet Turkey Burgers
• Pork Posole
• North Carolina Cheese Biscuits
• Stuffed Chicken Breasts
• Thai Chicken Soup

February is when I started really getting confident about my bread-making skills. Most of it was great although I didn’t like either of the two buttermilk biscuit recipes I made in February. By contrast the Amish Cinnamon Bread (ATK’s version of Amish Friendship bread) and Brown Butter-Cardamom Banana breads were SO GOOD. Both have been made again in the few months since. Everyone who was here to celebrate a birthday party couldn’t get enough of the Amish bread. The North Carolina cheese biscuits were another of those recipes where Danielle was skeptical when I told her what I was making, but ended up really liking them. The pork posole was good, but flavor-wise reminded me a lot of the chili from the same ATK book. The Vermouth cracked potatoes from Milk Street were certainly a different flavor than I’m used to for potatoes, but I wasn’t dying to make it again. By contrast I loved the stuffed chicken. It had a pesto I finally loved (no pine nuts and lots of basil) and great flavor. It was my mom’s favorite dish for the weekend she was visiting. The skillet turkey burgers were also great. The panade made it the best turkey burgers I’d ever had even though I would still prefer a beef burger if given a choice. Finally, the thai chicken soup was good and spicy.

CentOS continues to impress me with its performance on my netbook. It had never been able to properly suspend to RAM and wakeup. But while I was at Red Hat Summit, I could close the lid for it to suspend and then go to the next session and open it up and just tap any button to wake it up. It was GREAT.

Now that I’m back from Red Hat Summit, I am ready to start upgrading my Fedora computers. Well, probably not the server or the living room HTPC - I’ll take advantage of the fact that Fedora supports the n-1 release to reduce headaches and downtime. As I’ve done for a few releases now, I used the dnf upgrade facility and it worked fine. So far things seem to be working as they should. I got a weird error that said vmlinuz-5.0….. crashed, but given that it was a .fc29 package, I’m going to let that slide for now unless it turns out that things start acting funky on the laptop.

Although I’ve had a website since the mid-90s, it was 2005 or thereabouts that I first started hosting my own sites rather than relying on other sites. The first bit of hosting involved blogging and I tried a few different software packages before settling on Wordpress. And other than playing around with phpBB for my family and trying out Drupal for a bit for another site, that was it for a long time. Then Google abandoned Google reader so I moved to ttrss. And it was awesome and I didn’t have to worry it would ever go away because I was hosting it. But then this year I learned that Google Music was going to be going away and all the users were going to be pushed to Youtube Music. Unsure of whether my uploaded tracks would really migrate over (Amazon and some others have recently decided they weren’t going to host personally updated tracks), I decided to host Ampache. This had the side-benefit of actually allowing me to listen to my music collection at work since work blocks anything from Google Play. The most recent bit of self-hosting was because Google is about to get rid of Hangouts. Or rather, push all the regular Joes off in favor of making it a business tool. So that, coupled with Slack no longer working at work, led me to start up a Matrix server. That’s been plenty of fun, especially figuring out how to Federate, which allows me to access any open rooms from any other Matrix server.

I’ve both added and dropped some podcasts since last time around. Where I’m listing the same podcast as last year I may use the same description as in the past with slight (or no) variation.

Public Radio

Radiolab – Heard about them because sometimes their stories are used on This American Life. Radiolab is a lot like TAL except with a much bigger focus on sound effects. It is, in a way, the descendant of the old radio shows of the 30s and 40s. (Approx 30-45 min)