Views from the kayak… April 28, 2024

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I love to go kayaking / paddle boarding early in the morning. There aren’t many people out and about, on land or on the water. It’s my quiet time. My meditation time. My rejuvenation time. I can feel the earth breathe, and I breathe with it. Deep, calming breaths. I can feel the strength of the sun as it rises up into the sky, and I relax even more. I can hear the gentle lapping of the waves against my kayak, and all my worries fade away. It is such a peaceful time.

What do you like to do to refresh and re-ground yourself?

Nearly two years later . . .

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OK. So, it’s been a while since I last posted. I happily retired last July and I’m having the time of my life. Been spending a lot of time on my kayak / paddleboard when it’s not too cold or windy. Just got back from being out there this morning. Unfortunately, it was both cold and windy, so I didn’t stay out long. But it was fun. And it was on a Wednesday morning, and I didn’t have to worry about any kind of work deliverables.

Anyway, life is very good right now…. I hope yours is too.

And now, even more fun…

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Today I started working in earnest with the Azure Bot service. Documentation looks solid and there’s tons of it. Lots of examples, too.

Here are a few of the links I’ve used tonight. . .

Big change of direction…

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Over the past two weeks I’ve been doing a lot more AKS studies, which included this excellent MS Learn content. It walks you through creating an well-featured AKS cluster, soup to nuts. You owe it to yourself to take a look.

But I’ve also been doing a lot of studying of the Microsoft Power Platform, specifically Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents. No code, low code environment, which sounds nice and easy, but the learning curve has been larger than I expected. I recently found a bunch of YouTube videos that I’m working my way through.

Anyway, that’s been taking up a lot of my time. Soooooo, I decided to shift gears regarding this AKS project.

Miniblog is a nice engine, but all my content is currently at jimblizzard.wordpress.com. I didn’t want to have to try to migrate all my old posts into Miniblog, so I used the WordPress bitnami image and threw it into an AKS cluster, and pointed my old domain name snowstormlife.com at it. I then exported all my wordpress content from wordpress.com and imported it into snowstormlife.com. Worked like a charm. These instructions gave me a great head start. And I pointed Open Live Writer to it so I can compose from my laptop. Easy peasy.

I still need to . . .

  • [] add a cert to snowstormlife.com
  • [] create a post about my adventures in converting Miniblog into docker-able source code and putting it into an AKS cluster
  • [] create a post about creating the Azure DevOps pipeline from the Azure DevOps Service in the Azure portal – 5 minutes and done. Maybe a video would be better, since writing all the stuff down would take a lot longer.
  • [] and a few other odds and ends.