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bridge construction
What I feel like

Having gone untouched for countless years, rgetter.com (a.k.a. ric@large – I’m not even sure if I’m going to keep that name, what do you think?) is finally becoming active again. I was afraid my stories were going to be lost in the crowd on SubStack, so I figured this may be a better place for them.

I’m going crazy trying to self-teach myself WordPress after all these years, so the going is slow and frustrating. I am still working on the layout and adding work I’ve written that has been just sitting around. I have yet to wrap my head around moving some photo galleries to the site. For example, I’ve completely lost the page that lets me publish this staging website to my live site.

Help wanted

If you have any ideas for a good way to learn WordPress (books, classes, cheap gurus) please get in touch. The “Contact Ric” page is working, as far as I can tell. Meanwhile, bear with me. This ain’t easy. I’m trying to make it so it is.

Progress – June 10, 2025

It is slowly starting to make sense, at least some parts of it. I think that everything I have up is working. I’m still trying to decide on a method for posting photos, whether to use the free, built-in tool or to pay for something fancier without knowing exactly how it would help. Stay tuned for more updates. (Oops. Got to run. I can hear our cat puking upstairs.)

Changing wireless carriers? What to know before you go!

old phone

The process can be a lot smoother and faster if you come prepared. You can do the most time-consuming parts before you get to the store. More importantly, you can avoid having to go back to complete the process.

I recently changed back to my original carrier after trying out a new one. (My neighborhood has awful cell reception, being blocked by a hill.) It was a case of, “I should have learned from the last time,” I didn’t, but here’s a simple rundown of steps so you can.

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Just Friends

old park bench

Edith stood up abruptly and smoothed her skirt, though it was the kind of pleated wool, tartan plaid that had no need of smoothing. It was just an unconscious motion she performed, like a nonverbal paragraph break. It let her remove herself from the preceding few minutes and begin a new subject. She was doing what she was brought up to do. She turned and looked down at him, still sitting on the park bench and told him matter-of-factly, “As I said, we’re just friends.” She only looked at him long enough to complete that brief statement before she turned to walk away down the quiet path that led out of the park.

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Scars

holding hands illustration

She seemed to like him in a lot of ways. Sure, they went places and did things that you would normally call “dates,” movies, the Joyrides amusement park by the river, dinners out, and all that. But he simply enjoyed talking with her and being in her company. She was interested in so many things and always wanted to learn more. When he talked about football, she apologized for knowing nothing about it and then bombarded him with questions to understand it better. He took her to one of the games at his high school alma matter and gave her a running commentary about what was happening on the field and impressed him with what she had learned already. And she told him all about the jewelry design she did. It was something that never quite engaged him, but the enthusiastic way she explained it, he found himself getting a real interest in it. 

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The Woke vs. The Sleepers

Man sleeping on street
Makes Me Grateful for My Bed 1972 Daniel D. Teoli Jr
By: Daniel D. Teoli Jr. via Wikimedia Commons

“Woke” is a beautifully designed term of derision. Aiming a verb misused as an adjective at a well-educated, generally grammatically correct population is uniquely irritating. Then again, it is very hard for those of us to whom it can be applied to categorically deny it. This is especially true for me, a woke Boomer. I can easily look back and see the arc of the transformations that have been happening over the past two decades, having lived through the before and after. 

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Back up a YouTube channel with JDownloader2

Overview

Did you know if that if YouTube deletes your channel, even if they do it in error and it’s “restored,” the content is gone forever–unless you have a backup? I found that using Google Takeout can be really cumbersome with large channels and the collection of files and data it gives you aren’t in a form that is very helpful for restoring things. After searching around (like, a lot), I found a great video on YouTube from GSheets with a whole different approach.

Tiia Monto, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

This tutorial may gloss over some of the Google Sheets aspects he specializes in, so check out his video for that. But I’ll go a lot deeper into how to use JDownloader2 in the process. This is something I originally wrote as part of my job at Portland Community College, but I thought it’s worth making available to the world at large.

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