Namiko Akoi Miller April 01, 1932–September 01, 1993
Reflection
Few things are as still as a South Georgia library in the dead of summer. The air inside is thick with the scent of old paper and the hum of a laboring compressor, while the dust drifts through shafts of light.
Namiko Akoi Miller was the steward of that stillness. As the librarian of Seminole County Public Library, she was a quiet mercy in a landscape that didn’t always know how to hold a gentle thing. To a child fleeing the white-hot sun or a restless home, she offered up worlds bound in glue and buckram. She would press her stamp to the page; a small ritual of safe passage.
The quiet didn't just end; it tore. I was a junior in high school when the town’s fragile veneer of safety was once again peeled back, exposing the old shadows underneath. We learned then what we’ve known ever since: you don't ever truly outrun the way violence hollows out a small place.
This song isn't about her murder. It's about the grace of a woman in a house of stories, and the way that grace continues to haunt the pine curtains and the red clay, long after the sanctuary was breached.
I am not naturally good at time management. I can make a list, rearrange the list, rewrite the list in a better app, and still end the day with the uncomfortable feeling that I mostly attended to noise. The inbox moved. The calendar happened. A dozen small things got handled. The important work, the thing I knew mattered before the day started, somehow survived untouched.
That is the trap. Busy feels defensible. Busy gives you evidence. Busy lets you point at a full calendar and say, "See, I did things."
But a full calendar is not the same as a useful day.
Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon professor best known for The Last Lecture, gave a famous talk on time management that included his adaptation of the Eisenhower/Covey Matrix. The model is simple: sort work by two questions.
Is it important?
Is it urgent?
That gives you four buckets.
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quadrantChart
title The Eisenhower/Covey Time Management Matrix
x-axis Not Urgent --> Urgent
y-axis Not Important --> Important
quadrant-1 Do It Now
quadrant-2 Schedule It
quadrant-3 Delegate It
quadrant-4 Do Not Do It
"Crisis deadline": [0.86, 0.86]
"Family emergency": [0.76, 0.78]
"Weekly plan": [0.22, 0.86]
"Exercise": [0.18, 0.72]
"Skill practice": [0.34, 0.66]
"FYI meeting": [0.74, 0.34]
"Low-value ping": [0.84, 0.22]
"Feed refresh loop": [0.18, 0.12]
make is still one of the most useful tools in a developer's toolbox, but a lot of modern repositories need something more portable, more readable, and easier to share between local development and CI. Task is a fast, cross-platform task runner that keeps the good part of a Makefile, one command for common project workflows, while replacing the rough edges with a YAML-based Taskfile.yml, built-in dependency orchestration, variables, templating, caching, and first-class behavior on Windows, macOS, and Linux.
If you're using securitySpec to deploy VMware Cloud Foundation 9.x with external CA-signed ESX certificates, the bring-up can look successful while still leaving you with one surprise:
Post Deployment Configuration Drift
The first ESX host will be deployed with a VMCA-signed certificate instead of the external CA-signed certificate provided.
I ran into this while testing external CA-signed certificates through both the API and Ansible. The JSON payload was accepted, the instance bring-up completed, the ESX hosts retained their external CA-signed certificates except for first ESX host, the one used during the bootstrap for the vCenter appliance.
The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch does a little of both.
Pausch was a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University. In 2006, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. By September 18, 2007, after learning the cancer had returned and that he had only months left to live, he gave his now-famous lecture, "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams."
The talk became a book, but the real reason it endures is simpler than its title suggests:
It's not about dying. It's about how to live while you're still here.
That distinction matters. A lot of writing about mortality becomes soft around the edges. Pausch did something better. He stayed funny, practical, and honest about disappointment, work, family, and the ways adults drift from what once made them feel alive.
Today, him words feel especially clarifying because modern life is crowded with noise. We optimize calendars, answer messages at red lights, and confuse urgency with importance. We get very efficient at moving and very unclear about where we are going.
Pausch's voice cuts through that. He keeps asking a hard, useful question:
What would you do differently if you stopped pretending you had unlimited time?
Before you begin the upgrade, review the following checklist.
Back up anything you care about.
If the system is a VM, take a snapshot.
Make sure the current 24.04 LTS install is fully patched.
Make sure you have enough free disk space.
Be prepared to answer interactive prompts during the upgrade.
On Ubuntu Server, I would also review any third-party repositories or PPAs before you start. They are a common source of upgrade friction, and Ubuntu may disable them during the release upgrade anyway.
Every shared repository eventually rediscovers the same avoidable argument: tabs or spaces, LF or CRLF, trim trailing whitespace or leave it alone, final newline or not. None of these questions are hard. They are just repetitive, noisy, and surprisingly good at wasting review time.
EditorConfig exists to move those decisions out of personal editor settings and into the repository itself. It is a simple, cross-editor standard for defining basic text file formatting rules so contributors using different editors and IDEs still save files in a consistent way.
This matters more than style bikeshedding. Inconsistent indentation creates ugly diffs. Inconsistent line endings break shell scripts and CI jobs. Trailing whitespace produces review noise that hides the change you actually care about. EditorConfig is not glamorous, but it solves a class of problems that should stay boring.
This guide covers how EditorConfig works, the syntax of .editorconfig files, the standard properties you can rely on, where editor support stands, and how to build a practical starter template for a modern repository.
