Dealing with death

My family has had to deal with the death of a pet and the death of a friend recently. In the pet case, we put down one of our cats (cancer), she was 11 or 12 years old. The friend had a terminal cancer diagnosis and was successful in fighting it for a long time, but got to the end of the treatment trail and died a few weeks ago.

For our cat, we worked with our vet to rule out other possible causes, but the cancer cause eventually became the dominant one. We worked to make her last days comfortable and gave her chances to be outside (we adopted her as a feral cat, and she loved sitting outside in the sun). As we approached the end, our vet had a notice on their door that they had a litter of kittens looking for a good home. We decided to get a girl kitten just before the passing of our older cat. She has turned out to be a real blessing for us – so cute, playful, and cuddly. This weekend, our male cat (we had two cats before) finally started playing with the kitten instead of hissing and batting at her. That was a real turning point.

Our friend’s funeral was this past weekend. There were 300-400 people there, almost a full church – I have never seen this many people at a funeral. The eulogy was given by our friend’s adult children (survived by his wife, two children, three grandchildren). There was so much I learned about our friend from the eulogy – I almost felt like I did not know who he was! I had sung in our church choir with him for most of the past 10-15 years. Still, I felt that he was a good friend to me, and me to him, in our way. The next day, I started crying at Mass during the communion song, it took a minute to compose myself and get back to singing. I shared this with my wife, she said it was ok to cry. I think it may happen again…

At the reception after the funeral, I visited with a number of people from our choir, remembering moments about our friend. As my wife and I started to leave, we stopped to have a hug with some choir members, and I said “See you tomorrow – 8 o’clock!”. This is when we are supposed to get to church to warm up for the 8:30am Mass. I was saying it to keep the faith, that we were dealing with sorrow and loss, but we can still get up the next morning and do the work (via Peter Rukavina), and that this was what our friend would have wanted. The other thing that I want to remember is when my friend’s wife returns to our choir, to not look away (again, via Peter Rukavina):

This doesn’t mean they won’t cry. Everything makes them cry but they are tears of loss combined with gratitude for days that are gone but not forgotten. Hold their hand, hold their gaze, hold their loss. Stay with them and for the briefest of moments make them feel less alone in their sorrow.

Managing memory usage for Node.js apps

When I moved my Node apps over to Opalstack, I was having some issues with the apps failing, getting a 502 error. My account has 1GB of RAM, and I saw my Feed News Archive app reaching 700-800 Mb before quitting. After some Claude sessions and good old fashioned searching, I found the –max-old-space-size parameter to use in Node commands. As an example:

node –max-old-space-size=128 river5.js

The value used in the parameter is in megabytes (MB). For the Feed News Archive app, I set the size to 256. With those limits, I have not seen any 502 errors/app quitting – yay!

Retirement Update – June 2026

I thought I was going to do this last month, but…..oh well, better late than never! I have been exercising more (which is a good thing), and did start some personal software projects (my Feed News Archive site is running nicely!). The other major effort over my first two months was to transition to a new hosting provider (Opalstack) from my previous provider (Bluehost). When I started with Bluehost, they had an “unlimited plan” (websites, storage, etc). Over the years, their cost increased, but I was able to keep adding sites without issues. In the fall of 2025, I found out that my plan “now” only covered 20 websites (I had 59). Although many of them were test sites, the ones I wanted to keep was still higher than 20 – grrr!

I did some looking around at other hosting providers, but got a good recommendation from Anton Zuiker (micro.blog, site), and made the move! A benefit of moving to Opalstack is that I can have PHP, static sites, and Node.js sites all on the same account. With that, I will be able to drop my Digital Ocean account for Node.js apps.

The other things that has happened is that I am slowly approaching each in a more relaxed way. When I started, I had a list, and worked to get everything done on the list, and updated it during the day. Now, having a list is not so important. I feel more and more comfortable being retired.

Test – power user post

The slow death of the power user:

There’s a certain kind of person who’s becoming extinct. You’ve probably met one. Maybe you are one. Someone who actually understood the tools they used. Someone who could sit down at an unfamiliar system, poke at it for twenty minutes, and have a working mental model of what it was doing and why. Someone who read error messages instead of dismissing them. Someone who, when something broke, treated it as a puzzle rather than a betrayal.

That person is dying off. And nobody in the industry seems to care. In fact, most of them are actively celebrating the funeral while billing it as progress.

This isn’t an accident. This is the result of two decades of deliberate, calculated effort by the largest technology companies on earth to turn users into consumers, instruments into appliances, and technical literacy into a niche hobby for weirdos. They succeeded beyond their wildest expectations. Congratulations to everyone involved. You’ve built a generation that can’t extract a zip file without a dedicated app and calls it innovation.