A few weeks ago I sent out a poll to the ESC group to gauge interest in a group hike at Nevado de Toluca. There was reasonable interest and we slotted this to be a family hike on the 24th. The Padilla’s and Johnston’s had to drop off last minute. It was just going to be Hadley and the Arturo’s now with the three of us. We reached the Shuttle point around 1015, hopped in a shuttle and got to the trail-head around 1100. Couldn’t wait to hop off the shuttle - the gasoline stench coupled with the super dusty windy roads was more than churning my tummy. S did terrific with no complaints! ...

Spent a good few hours yesterday and ported my garmin data over to this site here. It’s turned out better than my wordpress plugin and is way simpler to manage. I’ve still got quite a few tweaks to do but I’m super happy with how this has turned out!

Bacalar has been on our travel list for quite sometime now. Between work travel, syncing our individual schedules and just getting around to actually booking the trip; we finally get around visiting this beautiful place this weekend in November. As we get off the plane, we’re immediately hit by a waft of the Yucatán humidity, soon followed by thick droplets of rain. Strikes me just then that we’re also right in the midst of the hurricane season. A quick lookup on the weather forecast reveals Hurricane Sara would be swinging past us and into the Gulf of Mexico in a bit. I slap myself on my wrist for not doing any research beforehand but also shrug this minor oversight very quickly. How bad could it actually be? Maybe some showers here and there? We walk outside the Chetumal airport for about 500m and take a taxi from the main road to Bacalar. Oscar offers to take us there for 550 pesos. This was about 50 pesos shy of the amount the tour planner had quoted. M immediately accepts and we’re on our way. First impressions of this place immediately remind me of Trivandrum - lush green vistas with coconut trees strewn all around, narrow roads and barely any traffic. There’s construction for Tren Maya happening along the route but it barely impacts our drive. In about 50 minutes we reach the hotel and check-in. ...

Back to the Yucatan for a work trip. Too many variables to factor in and ultimately I decided to head here for just a couple days. Short but super productive. Nothing to beat some good facetime. The new building here is at a much better state than Hermosillo and we should be quite ready for the move next year. Spent about a day at the NCC and head back to the COB to close out a few things there. Wasn’t quite hungry but decided to walk over to a quaint place closeby. Barely anybody at this Puerto-Rican restaurant - Spanglish, but boy am I not glad I walked in? One of the best meals I’ve had here in Merida in a while. Salsa with some piping hot white rice served with some steaming hot platanos glazed with baked beans paste. Simple yet -potent- with flavors and spice. Surprised we did not quite visit this place over the last year. Coming back here for sure! Missed going to the Korean place this time around for the ice-cream. Spanglish more than made up for that though. ...

This is such a neat idea. Love a good purposeful e-ink display! Adding his book to my read-list.

S celebrated her 6th today. Unicorn themed - of course - and had her first and probably last ever Piñata. But for a mega meltdown initially she did great all through the event. A few weeks ago, we signed up for a Diwali party organized by the Indian Association in Mexico. Primarily on a whim and maybe for the food? The event was last evening and boy, it was a terrible disappointment! It started late as expected. And obnoxiously loud for no reason. Not quite sure if it was the acoustics at the venue or just the MC shouting into the mic. Maybe both? I love some good rock and metal. I love some good loud music. But I guess not all loud is the same. Also, this day and age, who even does a looping slideshow of pictures of people organizing the event? Dinner was supposed to be served by 1900. Servers said they had orders to serve only at 2030. Maybe the organizers wanted the food to be served only after the main event? When we rechecked at 2030, they said it was pushed to 2130. Had enough of it and walked out. People were still on the dance floor and there was a good turn out. I guess this kinda boisterous social mayhem is just not my jam? ...

Thanks to Bill Glover, I was able to rebuild my photo gallery. Similar to how I built this earlier in wordpress, all I’m doing is mimicking an archive page but with just the images. Took me a bit to figure out that the with function breaks the context and I had to dynamically reassign the permalink. With that sorted, this page should auto-update whenever I publish posts. Yay!

Spent most of this morning at the Basilica de Guadalupe. This photo does not do enough justice to how much this old church is actually falling apart.

Open notes with a running list of things I’m working on for this site. DEC 2024 Build roadmap for Garmin posts migration Fetch activity summaries over as an archive Build a yearly summary per activity Add webmentions to the site. Thanks, Hugo! Tweak CSS to display webmentions properly. Maybe explore this. Maybe explore setting up an interactions content type like Jessica Fix syndication issues Limit RSS Feed fetch to just 5 recent posts Make FrontMatter updates Camelcase proof Consolidate into just one GO script Figure out how to fetch synd links for micro posts without embed links1 Consolidate categories2 Convert old tweets to a summary page on this portal Merge old instagram posts to the photos page3 Maybe add some pagination to the micro page Migrate old PixelFed photos over. Add a proper comment form for posts4. Setup a script to autopost to GoToSocial. NOV 2024 Used lonekorean’s fantastic wordpress-export-to-markdown tool to convert WP xml to markdown learned that the hugo server and hugo build serve different purposes Setup aliases on NUC and Thinkpond to quickly build and publish. Moved the actual publishing workflow to the Thinkpond and retained the main static site on the NUC. Fixed permalinks to prevent link rot, almost? Fixed RSS feed issues For posts tagged as micro set the title to just date+time so that micro.blog picks it up as a note and not display the title. Migrate older posts as deemed fit Build a proper archive page. Made some decent progress, thanks to D’Arcy Norman’s, pointers here . Build a proper photo gallery Decided to add a permalink to each post at the end. A shortcode automatically fetches the permalink and adds it to the end of each post. ↩︎ ...

That didn’t last long. Moved over to Hugo from WriteFreely for a bit more flexibility. This site is going through some major overhaul. Slowly and recklessly.