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📌 Wednesday night in Gourock, Necropolitan by Green Lung in the headphones, the kind of doom that sounds like it was recorded in a crypt with good acoustics. Fitting. Today the whole PHP world had its own little funeral rehearsal, and I spent the day making sure the Bottega wasn't among the mourners.

📌 Small hours of Sunday in Gourock, Take Me Back to Eden in the headphones, the whole album on repeat since midnight. Tonight's thing was small and I liked it: every article on La Bottega now has a button that saves the page to the Internet Archive. One click, and a copy of the page sits in the Wayback Machine, outside our hands and outside the hands of anyone who might want it gone.

📌 One in the morning, Solaris by The Ocean in the headphones (the CD arrived today, finally), and a sync that would not finish. The oldest piece of my homelab decided tonight was the night: ls on a folder full of films answered with Input/output error, and mount -a did nothing at all.

📌 Past midnight in Gourock, Mandylion by The Gathering in the headphones (Anneke, what a voice), and a plugin list open in another tab. Five plugins left on the Bottega's WordPress, down from twenty-four a year ago. One of them is Redis Object Cache, and tonight's question was the lazy one: does it still do anything?

📌 Monday night in Gourock, Invisible Circles by After Forever in the headphones. Yesterday's note ended with ten services and three machines that tell me when somebody logs in. It also ended with a question I had left for today: what tells me when the thing that tells me has stopped?

📌 Sunday night in Gourock that turned into Monday while I wasn't looking, The Moth by Devin Townsend in the headphones. On my phone, ntfy tells me every time the shared admin account logs into the Bottega's WordPress. It says nothing about the rest. A pedantic thing to fix, so I fixed it.

📌 Sunday night in Gourock, Altered State by TesseracT in the headphones, and a list of small jobs for the Bottega. One of them started as a question about a plugin and ended with the plugin gone. This is the note about that one.

📌 Another Sunday night in Gourock, Popular Monster in the headphones, depression spikes, music helps. The last note here is from the end of May. Four months of silence - not because nothing happened, but because too much did. The day job took everything it could take, and what was left went into moving an Italian collective blog off shared hosting and onto machines I now look after. Both are starting to settle. So: back to writing. Or something like it.

📌 Saturday night in Gourock, the Firth black under a sky that never quite committed to rain all day, The Protomen's Act III: This City Made Us loud in the headphones - a record twenty years in the making, the third act of a rock opera about robots refusing to accept that nothing can be changed. I spent the evening replacing my homepage. Not a glamorous job. But somewhere around the third broken certificate I realised I was building, one more time, a small machine whose only purpose is to stand between me and the platforms.

📌 Sunday evening in Gourock, the Firth gone the same flat grey as the sky, Katatonia's Sky Void of Stars low in the headphones, one of the cats asleep across the amrchair. The plan was to do nothing in particular. Instead I spent the evening watching my own YouTube front-end fall over, because somebody in Mountain View renamed a key in a JSON object and a whole class of software stopped working at once. Btw: Chuck Severance started an amazing series about AI coding. Amazing...

📌 Thursday evening in Gourock. Simone Simons' Vermillion in the headphones - that voice I've known across twelve Epica records, finally on its own, no longer sharing the room with a wall of guitars. On the desk a 2014 LG G Watch, awake, alive, with a night-themed wallpaper I just pushed onto it by hand over adb and a heartbeat icon pulsing as though it hadn't been sitting in a drawer for six months doing nothing.

📌 Late Thursday in Gourock. Heating still off for the season, the desk lamp on the warm setting, Blut Aus Nord's 777 - Sect(s) in the headphones because the album's drone matches the mood of reading a kernel changelog at midnight. The kind of evening I was going to spend reading a novel and instead spent reading apt-cache policy linux-image-amd64.

📌 More than one night in Gourock, the heating off, the UM690L breathing hard. Xandria's The Wonders Still Awaiting in the headphones throughout - Reborn on loop while qwen3.6 spent four hundred seconds explaining itself to me one bash script at a time.

📌 Two nights, no sleep, and a novel finished. David Townsend in the headphones throughout.

📌 "The best time to degoogle was more than ten years ago. The second best time is before they make it impossible." - nobody famous, but somebody right -

📌 Soen in the headphones. NextDNS finally off the shelf.

📌 Spent the night writing about the homelab paradox. It will be published — sometime — on an external outlet. Listening Ghost, mostly. The playlist tracked the mood.

📌 Migrated this site from MkDocs Material to Zola tonight. The trigger was simple: MkDocs feels like a project running on inertia. Faun playing in the headphones throughout.

📌 pfSense. Installed months ago. Never touched. Tonight that changed.

📌 Sent the letter to the solicitor this evening. Green Lung in the headphones throughout.

📌 Spent the night building centralised authentication for the homelab. Blind Guardian in the headphones. The goal: one LDAP source of truth for every host, no more per-machine root access.

📌 Updated wg-easy tonight. Twenty-two months of accumulated bit rot, compressed into a thirty-minute session. Kreator in the headphones throughout.

📌 Built a network monitoring setup tonight. Two LXC containers on Proxmox, ntopng for traffic analysis, ntfy for push notifications. Sakis Tolis in the headphones throughout.

📌 The site has two new pages now - Music and Books. Not because anyone asked, but because a personal site without those feels incomplete. They say more about a person than any CV ever could.

Speaking of which - the CV is coming. Soon. Probably after the next sleepless night. Or maybe not...