It's been a while since I've actually rode my bike consistantly for any period of time. I used to ride fairly regularly and occasionally added in a long ride here and there. Once upon I team I rode from Sydney to Canberra, over two days, for a charity. That entailled 182km on day one and another 100km+ ride the next. It wasn't too bad, split up into 60km or thereabouts segments it was an interesting way to see the towns and roads that skirt the Rememberance Highway. However, life, idleness and a general lack of enthusiasm saw me ride less and less. A few mis-steps, consisting of failed day rides like Fitz's Challenge here in Canberra reduced that enthusiasm, or what was left of it, even further.

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This past weekend's Formula 1 Grand Prix at Spa Francorchamps was pretty much a procession. There was a bit of drama at the start with Lewis Hamilton squeezing Alonso a touch too much causing his Mercedes' rear-end to be launched into the air and his ex-Mercedes teammate, Valterri Bottas, beaching himself in the gravel trying to avoid an accident. Once the safety car period had ended, Max Verstappen proceeded to scyth his way through the field and taking a win that, despite starting from the rear of the grid, even the pundits gave short odds on

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To say I expected Liverpool to run out winners against Man Utd on the weekend is a bit of an understatement. Given the abject apathy our first two games entailed I was expecting another hiding to be honest and whilst Liverpool themselves had injury worries and suspension of their new striker, I genuinely didn't think United would muster much against them. Mostly because, it seemed, the players weren't taking to Ten Hag's system or, as they've seemingly done in the past, just decided they didn't give enough of a shit. However, it's games like this, with rivalries on the line, that can somehow inject life and passion where previously there had been none.

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Well, the headline pretty much sums things up rather neatly but it was interesting in a good way. From getting this blog up and running, somewhat properly on GitHub via the use of Jekyll, to crossing off a few projects both at work and at home. There’s something rather rewarding about crossing tasks off, even if they’re relatively minor ones. I’m also, slowly, getting the hang of how all of this comes together and recently figured out how to add images to the left menu.

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Yesterday was quite something in terms of sorting all this out. Getting the custom domain working took a little bit of effort, mostly because I missed a key point when sorting out the DNS on my host. Once I realised my mis-step it was a case of waiting for the changes to propagate which, since I was a bit silly and didn’t lower the TTL (mostly because I was doing this on a whim), it took a wee bit of time. Still, once that was out of the way it all came together nicely and I even have HTTPS up and running now, something that was seemingly more difficult than it should’ve been on WordPress.

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Well, can’t say I’m not true to form in barely posting but hey, at least I don’t do this for a living. What I have been able to attempt is pointing my domain www.pntaylor.net here instead of the WordPress blog that was there. Whilst it would be handy to run this on the server I have there, it’s on a pretty low tier in terms of their plans and given I’m unlikely to be a heavy user, leveraging what I have here on github seemed to make sense.

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