Normand

en

Black and white picture experiment, an empty drinking glass, remotes and glasses on a low table; background is blurred

A couple of weeks ago on the Fediverse, somebody posted a picture of a bee taken with an old Canon Rebel XS DSLR and a telephoto lens. It piqued my interest, because I happen to have this exact same camera model at home.

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Oof, as I feared, this 100 Days To Offload challenge is turning out to be quite a challenge for me to keep up!

I'm currently well into my first vacation week of the summer. With the deconfinement that was still in process when I had to decide and advise my employer of my vacation dates, I decided to only take one week, and keep the rest of my vacation days in reserve for later this summer. Since Canada Day (our national holiday on July 1st) happened during my vacation week, I get to report it to next Monday, so this stretches my vacation a bit. :-D

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Last Sunday, I took my bike out for the first time in June. It was not for a lack of good weather. Earlier this year, I couldn't wait to start my biking season again. Just like last year, I was expecting to start bike commuting to work early in May, and to make longer rides during the weekends. COVID-19 and remote work threw a wrench in my plans. For no good reason, I was left with a lack of motivation.

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As I mentioned in my introductory blog post, this is not my first time at blogging. It's my third try! Today I'm talking about my first (failed) try, and what lessons I learned from the experience.

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Hello, and welcome to this blog.

I'm Normand, and this is my self-hosted personal blog. I'm a Linux user (specifically Ubuntu) since 2008, and I'm also interested in free and open source software, as well as taking back ownership of my personal data.

For over a decade I was very active in open source communities, first with the Ubuntu-fr community, where I was providing help on the forums, contributing to its exhaustive documentation and being one of its wiki admins for some time. Then I was part of the FreeCAD community where I did mostly the same things, as well as managing the FreeCAD PPAs, providing developers insights as an experienced CAD operator, and even doing a little icon work.

I'm now switching my focus to more personal matters, like self-hosting of course, but also cycling, playing acoustic guitar and maybe recording (just for fun though).

I plan on publishing in both English and French, since my native language is la langue de Molière. For a long time my online activity has been predominently in English; hopefully this will give me the opportunity to even things up.

This blog is based on WriteFreely, a minimalist blog platform, and I doubt multilingual support is possible. So I'll simply prefix English language posts with [EN], and French language posts with [FR].

I hope you'll enjoy reading me!

tags : #EN

Well, did I finally do it? Did I change my mind? A few weeks back, when Kev Quirk lauched the #100DaysToOffload challenge (more on that here), I replied on Fosstodon that I would not write a blog again. (Long ago I had a blog, and a WordPress-based webcomic that failed to launch)

I certainly don't feel like I can keep writing daily for a hundred days in a row! Not even skipping quite a lot of days. But, I'm willing to try to at least post occasionnaly. -ish.

So, that's about it for now.

tags : #EN, #100DaysToOffload