Today was the big day – I was Jokemaster at the Silver Tongued Cats this morning, and I came up with a terrible joke in honor of the date. I will spare you.

After that, I took a brief walk before Diane drove me to Los Gatos Oral and Facial Surgery for my tooth extraction and implant operation.

They were ready for me as soon as I walked in – I paid the bill, and we moved on to the rest of the procedure. The dental assistant got my signature on the last form, verified that I wanted “medium sedation”, and hooked me up to the oxygen monitor, EKG, and IV. Dr. Walker came in, said “hello”, verified that he was going to extract the proper tooth (again – which made me happy), and that’s all I remember until we were in the car on the way to Jamba Juice after the procedure.

I must have been somewhat communicative and conscious in the office, because they made an appointment in six weeks to evaluate the implant to see if it’s ready to have my regular dentist make a crown for it – either that, or they just made a good guess and assumed I’d change the time if needed.

So far, I haven’t had any pain from the procedure – I followed their instructions and took two generic Norco tablets in the first couple of hours I was home, and then one every four hours thereafter. I’m going to have another one just before bedtime – tomorrow, I’m supposed to switch to heavy doses of ibuprofen, which is also supposed to reduce swelling (so far, that hasn’t been a problem either). I’ve also been following the instructions to use an icepack every other half-hour, and that will continue for another couple of days.

My string of closing all three rings on my Apple Watch ended today, of course; it was nice to have a lazy day, but I’d rather have done it voluntarily!

My blog runs on a virtual machine on Linode; it’s been very reliable and having a virtual machine lets me do other things than just run the blog. And for $5/month, it’s cheaper than most WordPress hosting sites (though I did have to set up the whole stack myself).

This morning, I got a note from Linode telling me that they will be migrating the virtual machine to a new physical server in a couple of weeks and encouraging me to back it up before that happens, just in case, along with a pointer to their “Reboot Survival Guide”.

One of the steps in the Survival Guide suggests making a backup of all your MySQL databases – they suggest putting the backup into a file whose name includes the date of the backup. The thing that caught my eye was how they suggested getting the date – I’ve always used this formatting string: %Y-%m-%d, which would generate ”˜2021-03-03’, a nice, sortable format. But they suggested using %F to do the same thing – much less typing required.

I’d never seen the %F directive before – I tried it on my Mac, and it worked. I tried it on my Linode, and of course it worked there. It even worked in Python 2 and Python 3 on both systems. But when I tried it in Python 2 on our Windows machine, it wasn’t recognized. I installed Python 3 on the Windows machine, and it worked there.

I guess I should still use %Y-%m-%d if I need to write a truly portable program in Python 2. But the odds of my having to do that are very low, and typing %F is much easier!