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This is the Pain

I am in pain. It started in November. It seems to happen every year, at the end of the year. In the fourth quarter my body just breaks down, stops working, and hurts. A year ago it was my knee, two years ago it was my neck, and before that it was my foot. It hurts and I hate it.

I end up doing physical therapy, get x-rays, an MRI, medication, and I suffer. I suffer. I often have to stop my activities, pause doing the things I love. This year I had hit 1,400 miles on my bike. I had this goal of 1,000 miles in 2025, I hit it, and was hoping for 2,000 but with only two rides in December I ended the year at 1,955 miles. Still amazing but I wish I had hit 2,000.

I did manage to ride to work for 50 days, which was amazing… And the thing is, I was loving life. Fall was amazing. I was biking every day, getting outside, getting exercise, not driving a car. It all came to a halt when the pain got too bad. There are some periods now when I can barely even walk.

The thing about this pain I have now, which was originally diagnosed as sciatica, is that it’s become so unpredictable, and so painful. I guess the discs in my lower back and garbage, and it’s causing nerve pain, and it’s so, so bad. Some days I am in pain for a few hours, and some days it’s 10+ hours. When the pain is gone I am mostly fine, unless I sit in a desk chair for too long. I’ve been doing the “set a timer, sit and work for 20 minutes, then get up to stretch and move” routine for months now.

I’ve been to urgent care, where I was lying on the floor nearly crying before they saw me. And don’t worry, I’ve been crying at home when it’s been excruciating pain for more than an hour. Again it sucks… it sucks so much.

One thing I didn’t realize about the pain in my body is the pain it would cause my head. I am on medication that can cause dizziness and drowsiness, but also the pain just clouds your mind. It’s difficult to think clearly or focus when part of your body is in such pain. I’ve been missing work, falling behind on projects and tasks around the house, and just… trying to take it easy and heal, because really, I have no other choice. The “take it easy” part is not easy for me… and the healing is not here yet.

I also totally get how someone could get addicted to pain killers. If you gave me drugs that made the pain go away I would want them every time I was in pain. And I’m in pain a lot. That said I am following all guidelines for the medication I am taking because I know that’s the right thing to do. Meanwhile I’ve been using/trying heating pads, massagers, a TENS unit, lidocaine patches, an acupressure mat, and absolutely anything else non-drug I can think of… Some of it seems to help, but it’s just temporary relief.

I’m scheduled to see a doctor soon, and weeks out from an MRI unless we can speed that up. But I gotta say, life is rarely enjoyable these days.

Part of this is getting old I guess. It’s a reminder that disability will come for us all eventually. And it’s also depressing. It’s difficult to not feel hopeless, that you’ll ever be okay and feel good again. In previous years it was bad, but it felt temporary. Right now I am at the point where I am worried it will never get better, but I have to reject that diagnosis and remain hopeful, but damn… it’s hard to do.

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kan.bn Kanban Board

Back in May 2025 I posted about Focalboard which is a task management system you can run on your own as a container application. I also added a note in September about how it lost all my data.

While losing the data is completely terrible, I could have tried to recovered it, but I really didn’t like using Focalboard enough to be bothered. So I went looking for something else, and found kan.bn

kan.bn is a Kanban board, similar to Trello if you’ve ever used it. In fact, I tried Trello a few weeks ago as I used it for work about a decade ago. I guess Atlassian acquired Trello and it seemed pretty enshittified when I tried it. I mentioned in my Focalboard post how Asana, Monday, and Notion have all turned into goddamn AI platforms now so I want none of that.

Anyway, kan.bn is simple. Almost too simple. I’d like to see a few more features, but if a simple web-based Kanban board is all you need, it may work fine for you. I should also note that I’m just one person, and I don’t have a team or anyone else using this. Just like Trello it supports multiple users, teams, etc. but I don’t really need those features.

What I need is a self-hosted web application that I can use to track my projects, assign deadlines, and it would be great to be able to get notifications (email or Pushover, etc.) for tasks I need to do. Some of those requirements are why Anytype didn’t really work for my needs either.

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10K Miles: 10K Trees – REACH GREEN Virtual Challenge

In October 2025 I took part in the 10K Miles: 10K Trees Virtual Challenge which was organized by Reach Green.

Here’s an excerpt from a post on October 16th, 2025:

Every mile logged in the 10K Miles: 10K Trees Challenge plants a tree and builds community. The early success of the 10K Miles: 10K Trees Virtual Challenge has done more than exceed expectations, it has validated REACH GREEN’s mission. We set out to prove that when people are given a way to take meaningful environmental action that feels relevant, accessible, and achievable within their everyday lives, they respond.

This month-long challenge invites the REACH GREEN community to collectively log 10,000 miles by October 31. If we reach that goal, we’ll fund the planting of 10,000 trees through our partnership with the Arbor Day Foundation, REACH GREEN’s first beneficiary. Each mile logged represents a tangible step toward a healthier, more resilient planet, and the restoration of North Carolina’s endangered longleaf pine forests through our first collaborative project.

I was a little skeptical but I figured I was going to ride my bike anyway so why not join in and contribute. I love trees!

I’m not really a competitive person. I mean, I occasionally set goals for myself, but I’m not out to beat anyone. It was fun to watch the stats though, and I was usually between 9th and 12th place in the standings. October was amazing for bike riding. Not too hot, but still warm outside. I rode to work 15 days in October (often talking a longer route home) and was doing longer rides on the weekends.

In the end I came in 9th place (out of 226) with 26 hours of riding and 306.536 miles. Not too shabby! Since I was riding to work that also means it was just over 200 miles where I did not drive a car to and from work, so there’s a double-win there since I burned less gasoline and created less carbon emission from the car.

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Your RasterWeb! Wrapped!

This year you’ve visited RasterWeb! at least once… right now!

We don’t know if you’ve visited before, read any posts, subscribed via RSS, or bookmarked or shared anything.

Because we don’t track that shit.

We disabled analytics years ago, because we don’t need Google tracking you or running their trackers on this site.

It just doesn’t matter.

Sure, numbers and stats are fun to look at, but we don’t care that much. (We can always look at the server log files with Analog but honestly we’ve been too lazy to set it up again.)

We don’t rely on advertisements to run this site. Besides a normal day job we’ve got a side business that usually makes enough to cover the server costs. (Need a controller?)

You can learn more about the data we collect from you on the Privacy Policy page. It’s not much.

Well, thanks for stopping by to check out your “wrapped” for RasterWeb! We’ll leave you with a fun quote from The Prisoner:

“I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.”

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The Book of Pete

There’s a very good chance I’m going to die. Hopefully not soon, but you never know. At the end of every calendar year my body breaks down, it gives up. Usually I end up doing physical therapy, some doctor visits, and either end up in the emergency room or urgent care, and each time I learn about a new way my body is failing me.

The recent death of Rob Reiner is just another reminder that when you die, people look to your work and the kind of person you were, and hopefully they think fondly of you and what you brought into the world. So many have spoken so kindly about Reiner. My introduction to his work was Spinal Tap. I’m pretty sure it was my friend Milt who showed up with a VHS copy of it and said “Dude, we gotta watch this!” and it was glorious. We even went to see Spinal Tap when they came to play in Milwaukee.

But, back to me and my failing body… When my cat Tink passed away in 2021, it hit me hard. She played a huge role in getting me through 2020 when I faced a pandemic, job loss, job change, another job change, and going through therapy. That cat remained a constant loving companion to me, and writing and reading about her comforted me greatly. You can see what I wrote in The Tinkerbell Pamphlet. I’ve advised others to write about their pets after they’ve passed away, and I hope it helped.

Besides the cats, I have a loving partner, and other family members I will leave behind. There’s a chance some of them do not know me as much as they would like to (or have liked to) because in many ways I am a closed person. Sure, I’ve been publishing since the 1980s but like any good publisher I don’t share everything. I also do a lot of weird things my family and (many) friends don’t really understand. (And that’s okay!)

While “blogging” at it’s start was very much about sharing your opinion about things on the (new) World Wide Web, I have an archive that starts in 1997 and goes on to today. It’s not the greatest writing, it’s not groundbreaking, but it is mine. And my hope after I’m gone is that the site gets hosted long enough for the people who knew me and cared about me get a chance to explore it. To see what I thought, what I did, what I made, the images I created, the weird music and videos I shared with the world. This web site is, for lack of a better term, “The Book of Pete”.

I don’t want this to be dark, because I want to keep living for a few more decades, but I also want to encourage others to view blogging as a legacy they can leave behind. You’ll make mistakes, you’ll get things wrong, but if you use those failings as opportunities to learn and grow, then I think that’s pretty cool.

There are people having the conversation about what happens to your digital footprint once you are gone, and how it can/should be maintained or preserved or archived, and it’s not something I’ve dug into yet, but in the grand scheme everything is ephemeral. We as people, our work, our digital output… it all fades away in time.

And I guess I’m looking for a way to make it last a little bit longer.