Over the last decade, I’ve had a couple of skin cancers on my face, and quite a few actinic keratoses – it’s kept my dermatologist busy. The last time I saw her, she had to remove another couple of actinic keratoses and suggested I consider photodynamic therapy to reduce the chance of recurrence; today was the day for the treatment.

The experience started with a facial acetone scrub, then the application of the photosensitized, and then a 90-minute wait for it to sink in. That part was pretty boring – I’d brought my computer, so I caught up on my email a bit.

And then came the real treatment – 16 minutes, 45 seconds with a very bright light bathing my face. They gave me goggles and told me to keep my eyes shut, which I was happy to do. They also gave me a little fan in case I got warm – I was glad I had it, because my face was on fire! I didn’t think to start a podcast playing before I had to close my eyes, so I had nothing to distract me; the best I could do was to tell my watch to time three-minute intervals so I’d have some idea of how long I had left.

I was relieved when the light went out; they had me wash my face with a very gentle wash and put on sunscreen. They told me to avoid bright light for the next few days because my skin will be very light-sensitive – we took a walk near sunset this afternoon and even then, I could feel the effect when the light hit my face.

On a more cheerful note, unplugging the cable modem and giving it a short rest seems to have helped my connectivity; it’s been nearly a full day and all of the channels are still “locked”, though I am seeing some packet loss, so I still see a call to Comcast in my future.

Our Internet has been very slow since we got home – better than the service on the ship, to be sure, but there were long pauses in downloads and many other random freezes. I’d updated all of our access points and switches over the weekend and it didn’t help.

Today, things got even worse. I logged into the cable modem and discovered that several of the downstream channels were “not locked”, and quite a few of the others were reporting lots of errors, not all of which were correctable. I also found some “MDD message timeout” warnings in the event log. So I rebooted the modem (and the router, just for good measure) and things got a lot better – all my channels were locked.

Four hours later, I’ve got two channels are unlocked again and I’m seeing lots of MDD message timeouts. And dropped packets. A little web searching says that the next step is physically unplugging the modem for a minute and letting it try to heal itself – after that, it’ll be time for a call to Xfinity. sigh

I was making a quick pass through Facebook this morning (no thanks to their most recent UI change on the iPhone – no more “Most Recent”; now it’s “Feeds”) when I came across a posting from a friend who had gotten today’s Wordle on the first guess. I “liked” the post and opened the comments, which were, of course, filled with congratulatory messages.

Unfortunately, one of those messages included a five-letter word in ALL CAPS – and yes, it was the answer. I avoided the temptation of trying that word as my first guess, but it wasn’t easy.

We took our usual post-Farmer’s Market walk this morning; we could hear the locomotive whistle from the Billy Jones Wildcat Railroad from blocks away, and it drew us to Oak Meadow Park. Lots of people were enjoying the beautiful morning and waiting to ride the train, but we had other plans in mind.

This afternoon, we saw the Lyric Theatre production of The Pirates of Penzance; it was excellent (and they have four more shows in the run!). The costumes were, as usual for Lyric, extravagant; the singing was terrific (especially Mabel); and the Hammer Theatre is a much better acoustic environment than their previous venue at San Jose City College. Go if you can!

While I was working on sending photos home yesterday, I ran into a problem with my home network – I couldn’t get into the Ubiquiti controller to check on the configuration. I even set up a screen-sharing session to a computer at home and had no success there. I didn’t have the time to worry about it then, but it was high on my list of things to deal with when I got home.

To make a long story short, something had gone wrong somewhere and MongoDB wasn’t starting properly on the controller. I tried to restore a backup of the configuration but it didn’t help. I even logged into the controller’s command line and tried a few things like repairing the database but it didn’t work – the repair script complained that it couldn’t get to the database server, which was the problem I was trying to fix.

Eventually, I found David Mello’s page on how to fix an unresponsive Cloud Key, which took me through the steps needed to get things operational again (there’s even a video, but I prefer reading to watching). I followed his procedure and all is well for now. I want to move the controller to a more robust environment, though, and I’m not willing to shell out $200 for a new Cloud Key with battery backup – I may put the service onto yet another Raspberry Pi instead. Watch this space, but don’t hold your breath.

Once the controller was operational, it told me that all of my Ethernet switches and wireless access points needed updating, so I did that, too. It was easy, if time-consuming – but I was able to do it while we were walking home from returning our rental car, so it didn’t keep me from doing anything more fun.

After lunch, it was Diane’s turn to deal with a technical problem. Her iPhone 13 mini had started to act up a few weeks ago – once in a while, the camera would fail to take a photo and the camera app would crash. While we were on the ship, things got worse – first she got a message that Ultra Wideband could not be activated (which explained the problems we were having using AirDrop), and later that same day, she got the same message about the cellular network hardware. We made an appointment for the Genius Bar this afternoon at the Apple Store in Los Gatos.

That was a mistake – it was a beautiful Saturday afternoon and people were headed to the beach. The best way to get there is Highway 17, but when it backs up, people exit and go through surface streets in the vain hope of saving time, and that ties up traffic in Los Gatos. It usually takes us about 12 minutes to get to the Apple Store; today, it probably would have taken 35 minutes. I don’t know, because we found a parking place and ran to the store to get there only a few minutes after our appointed time.

The Genius ran diagnostics which showed all sorts of issues, but she thought it was worth trying to install iOS again. The process took an hour and put up messages I’ve never seen before (“attempting to restore data”, for example), but it seems to have worked; the diagnostics are all green and the phone is behaving normally.

While we were at the store, I had plenty of time to ogle the new M2-powered MacBook Air; it’s tempting, but I don’t want to take a brand new computer to Africa next month, so I’ll wait a little longer.

This evening, we’re going to the Hammer Theatre Center for Lyric Theatre’s Light Opera Around the World – a full concert of familiar light opera favorites and beautiful songs from the cast’s home countries. It should be a nice change of pace!

We sailed into Vancouver about 7am this morning, and I enjoyed watching the last part of the journey from our room.

We left the ship about 9 and took a Lyft to Vancouver International Airport for our 1:25pm flight; luckily, we had access to the Air Canada Maple Leaf Lounge which was comfortable and had wifi, though there were very few power outlets. I used the time to clean up the way I send photos home while traveling – I’ll write that up in a separate posting sometime soon, with appropriate content warnings.

We boarded the plane right on time – and ten minutes later, they asked us to get off because “the plane was going to be used for another route”. I also got messages from Air Canada saying it was a “maintenance issue”. At any rate, they moved us to another gate and another plane and we took off about an hour late.

The views from the plane were wonderful. We couldn’t see Denali (of course), but we did get nice views of Mt. Ranier.

And Mt. St. Helens and Mt. Adams.

And Mt. Shasta.

And the Bay Area.

And, just before landing, a United flight landing on a parallel runway – it was somewhat disconcerting when I first saw the plane out of the corner of my eye!

It’s good to be home!