Events

The month started off strong with not only Spring Break, but a total solar eclipse!

Kolt took a fantastic picture of the eclipse:

Tara and I rode bikes out to the fairgrounds so we didn’t have to deal with traffic. Although there were a couple hundred people there, traffic wasn’t a problem. It seemed like most of the people there were from out of a town, with a bunch from Virginia for some reason.

It was an amazing experience, a lot longer than The 2017 eclipse we went to in Kentucky.

I also met another Ryan to bring into the Ryan Meetup group.

Standup and Dance

I got the chance to go to two of Rochelle’s stand-up shows, while Tara and I traveled to Akron for Grace’s dance recital.

Geekin’

Created a view scripts on my website to make it easier to share pics and text.

• status – I give it the blog and the text of the message and it posts the message to the mentioned blog
• sharepic – I pass it a pictures, the name of the blog, and a caption. The script overlays the caption on the picture, publishes it on the mentioned blog, and sends it to me in Telegram so I can post it to Instagram. Next, the script makes an 8 second slow zoom movie of the pic and sends it to me in Telegram so I can post it to TikTok.

I’ve been working on a way to self-host videos, my first set up is using MediaCMS hosted at video.goz2.us. Works well, except that I need to figure out storage of the videos.

Movies

• Godzilla X Kong: It was ok, not nearly as good as Godzilla Minus One
• RRR: What a great movie. This is my second watch and very well worth the three hour runtime. Unfortunately, the original Telugu language version isn’t on Netflix. I recommend watching it in Hindi with English subtitles.
• The Secret of My Success: Always a Classic.
• Gone With the Wind 85th Anniversary: This was my first time watching it, and I can see why it’s a classic. Plus I learned that the director also directed Wizard of Oz IN THE SAME YEAR!
• Civil War: I went in ready to be blown away and left it pretty meh. You can read more of my thoughts here. It basically boils down to, I saw Gone with the Wind a couple of weeks earlier, and it’s a better movie.
• Footloose: Julianne Hough did a good job in the 2011 version, but I watched the far superior original with Kevin Bacon. What is lost in the 2011 version is that the story is about Ariel and her father overcoming loss, not some new kid wanting to dance.
• Limitless: I rewatch this every couple of years. Bradley Cooper stumbles onto a wonder drug that changes his life.

TV

• Cheers (4)
• King of Queens (2)
• Krapolis (1)
• My Life with the Walter Boys (6)
• Rules of Engagement (5)
• The Big Bang Theory (1)
• The Great North (1)
• The King of Queens (1)
• The Neighborhood (1)
• The Office (1)
• The Simpson’s (1)
• Tracker (2)
• Wings (1)

Health

• Average Steps/day: 16,085
• Most steps in a day: 26,063
• Min steps in a day: 12,037
• Resting Heart Rate: 63
• Average Time Asleep: 5h 38m
• Miles walked: 172
• Miles ran: 17

I did a number on my back because of my Heelys. Fell flat on my back in the KES server room, it happened so quickly that I didn’t even try to catch myself.

I lied there for what I think was about ten seconds before I realized I stopped breathing. I took a breath while in intense pain and slowly got up. Took my breath away, literally and not in a good way.

I slept in a recliner for the first couple of weeks, it was the only place where my back didn’t hurt. After awhile my back felt fine while sitting, but not when transitioning in or out of the seated position.

It took about 6 weeks until I felt well enough to run again. At ten weeks I only notice it when I sleep, if I’m on my side there will be a pain.

I was asked if I was going to give up my Heelys, in which I replied with a solid “no way!”. My mom didn’t raise a quitter!

Events

The month of March started out with a bang! I drove down to see Animaniacs in concert with Jeff & Jen at The Murphy Theater. It was a great show, I’m so glad I got a chance to go and catch up with Jeff & Jen.

The next day Tara and I traveled to Teays Valley High School to watch the KHS Top Twenty, KMS Dinensions, and Ada Varsity Singers perform.

Afterwards I talked Tara into going Easton, mainly because I wanted to go to Pins and play some arcade games.

Tara and I headed off to Akron to visit Grace and eat out at Panera. A few days later I headed back to the Akron area to present at NEOTech 2024. It was also BAUD DAY, 3/12/24. The next one won’t be until 12/24/48, so I have 24 years to build the excitement.

Near the end of the month I got to go to Camp Ohio for the counselor retreat. It was a lot of fun but I had to leave early for St. Ryans Day in Chicago!

It was a 6 hour drive to Chicago, and without cruise, it wasn’t the most fun, but I didn’t care, it was another Ryan Meetup! I got to catch up with some Ryans I met last September plus meet a whole lot of new Ryans. The meetups are such a surreal event, you just walk up to anyone and say, “Hey Ryan, where you from?” or “Hey Ryan, what do you do?”

My Instagram account is a ton of Ryans now, which is also a whole lot of fun.

I finished out the month heading to Centerville for Emo Revival Night. The genesis of this trip started only a few days before when TikTok showed me a video from a band named Matthew Lee and the Standbys. What made the video stand out was it was a pop punk cover of Defying Gravity. I was intrigued to say the least, and then I came across their cover of Someone like you from Jekyll & Hyde and If ever I would leave you from Camelot. That was my senior song for Cabaret, so I wanted to know more about the band. And then I found out they were playing with four other bands in Centerville a couple of nights later.

Tickets were $15, but VIP tickets were only $30, so I bought one and got in early and meet all of the bands. It was a great night with great music! I wholeheartedly recommend the other three bands:

• Page 9 – The headliner and a great group of guys. I was so glad I did the VIP.
• Say Goodnight – I about lost it when they came on stage in the hot dog costumes.
• Shane Archer Reed and The Harbingers – They had a Ryan, so I had to let him in on the Ryan Universe.

Geekin’

Big geekin’ project over the last couple of months is switching to TickTick for my to do lists and other notes. I’m using it for tasks, repeating tasks, and also to hold on to little bits of information that I collect. Yes, I am a digital packrat.

This month I also create a script, ics2journal, which will grab each day’s events and append them to my journal. I also wanted my completed tasks from TickTick put in my journal. I start with trying to learn the TickTick API, but it doesn’t offer me a way to pull completed tasks. What I ended up doing was using IFTTT to put completed tasks into a Google Sheet. I then download the sheet using rclone and parse it to get the day’s completed tasks and append them to my journal.

The coolest thing I did was get nginx working as a reverse proxy for Backblaze b2 storage, which makes allows basically unlimited storage of files for me.

Since I use a lot of screenshots in my work, I wanted to make them look better even with my limited artistic skill. I wrote better-screenshot.sh. It will take a screenshot, round the corners, overlay it on a larger background, and add a slight drop shadow. The result looks like this:

My final project was setting up my own linktree with LinkStack, which you can check out at goz2.me/@ryan.

Movies

• Dune 2: This one snuck up on me, so I didn’t get a chance to rewatch the first one, but it was phenomenal. I’ve gained a lot of respect for Timothee Chalamet.
• Josie and the Pussycats: This was a rewatch, and it was a little disappointing. It shared the same creators as Can’t Hardly Wait which is a favorite of mine. Plus how could a cast of Rachael Leigh Cook, Rosaria Dawson, and Tara Reid do wrong? They couldn’t save it either.
• Labyrinth: This was my first time watching it, and the imagination of Jim Henson was prevalent. I loved the set design, but it was David Bowie that stole the show.
• Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire: So much better than Afterlife, and so many Easter eggs for the first time Ghostbuster movies.
• Anyone But You: The sleeper hit of the year, this was a re-watch.

TV

• According to Jim (3)
• Avatar The Last Airbender (2)
• Bob’s Burgers (1)
• Caroline in the City (1)
• Cheers (3)
• Just Shoot Me (1)
• King of Queens (1)
• Man With a Plan (2)
• Rules of Engagement (5)
• The Big Bang Theory (3)
• The King of Queens (2)
• The Neighborhood (2)
• The Office (1)

Health

• Average Steps/day: 15,268
• Most steps in a day: 25,993
• Min steps in a day: 12,120
• Resting Heart Rate: 63
• Average Time Asleep: 5h 44m
• Miles walked: 183
• Miles ran: 1 (Yes, 1)