My countdown is in double digits

When I first started down the road of selling everything I own and moving to Europe, it seemed like there was plenty of time. But then I delayed and ratholed and spun my wheels for six months, piling on the anxiety and self-inflicted stress. I think I have finally figured out that I can self-uninflict those same stresses by simply changing my plan. It’s my plan, after all.

Looking down the barrel of 2024 — and worse, having to go back to work — puts my milestone into context. 2023 is ending with a cough and a fizzle, but 2024 has promise. Its promise is not in the realm of resolutions, but is based on the culmination of much planning. A milestone.

Front Matters

I gave up on my previous attempts to use Eclipse and EASE as a CMS. The latter was broken for many months across many Eclipse releases. And to be frank, I am done with Eclipse. Yes, it’s taken me this long to finally dump it in favor of VSCode and IntelliJ.

So here we are, in FrontMatter inside VSCode, using the same ol’ GitHub Pages publishing mechanism. Given that I want more domain flexibility than I can (easily?) attain with GitHub, I’m considering moving everything to CloudFlare Pages, which is where most of my domains are registered and my DNS is configured. I’m in expansion mode, you see.

Scripting Eclipse with EASE

EASE is Eclipse Advanced Scripting Environment. It’s been around for a while. I just used it to automate creation of a new blog posting. I feel so 1999.

It supports multiple scripting languages, but I chose Python — actually it’s Jython — and made a cute little 16x16 icon to launch it. I type something in Markdown then do a git push and the rest is magic.

I like Lockdown

El amor en los tiempos del cólera

While extraverts are climbing the walls, I am loving this. I’ve actually started dreading the end of quarantine. While my physical activity could use a boost, I am relaxed and focused.