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It was early 1981 and my Dad received an offer from Columbia House to join the Columbia Records Club. For one penny a person could get eleven vinyl records by joining this music club. Better yet, fill in the "secret bonus" 12th box with your album of choice and you got an additional album for free. Nevermind the marketing ploy here that you would be committed to buy additional albums at full catalog price in the months to follow...my dad was about to receive a dozen albums from his favorite bands all at once. So many albums were about to come through the door, that my Dad let my sister and me each pick out a record for ourselves. Whether my Dad liked my choice or not I can't remember, but I picked AC/DC's Back in Black.

This is old news but I thought still worth mentioning. Last month Drupal 8 reached its end-of-life. This means that all versions of Drupal 8 core and Drupal contributed project releases that are compatible with only Drupal 8 have been marked unsupported and are no longer supported by the Drupal security team.

Drupal 8.0.0 was first released on November 9, 2015. The last version was released on November 17, 2021. With the end of life approaching, I also updated my two websites from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9.

May be having some old articles spit out on the social media feeds. Updating sites from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 and not 100% sure what I'm doing. So much for being the CMS guru I once was...

The date was December 3, 2005 and all of Sioux Falls gathered around in the neighborhood or around their television sets for this event. The Zip Feed Tower was scheduled to be demolished to make way for new real estate projects.  At 202 feet, it is believed that the Zip Feed Tower at this time was South Dakota's tallest building. Explosives were used to bring down the 48 year old structure. A raffle was even held to see who would be the one to trigger the blast (proceeds going to the Dakota Chapter of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society). The raffle along with corporate sponsorship raised nearly $140,000. Thousands of people, including national media, lined up to see the tower go down. The stage was set!

Then this happened...

Blogging has always been a way for me to express myself creatively as I hide away in my home office for "me time". Unfortunately, the COVID-19 Pandemic changed all that with my day job requiring maximum telework which in turn transformed my creative personal space into a remote office that work owned eight hours a day. For my mental and physical health, once those work hours are up I have made the conscious decision to walk away from the computer. I now find it more necessary to find something else to do that doesn't involve screen time. This shift in priorities unfortunately reduced my writing time.

Life has a way of distracting us from our goals. Four years ago when I decided to retire CMS Report, I did so in the hope for opportunity to find a new voice in my online presence. It didn't work out so well. Instead of being more creative in my writings, I spent more time maintaining the nuts and bolts to my websites and publishing other people's articles than I did expressing my own thoughts and ideas. I know for many of you, you find yourself in a similar predicament. Between career, family, and other personal interests we have had too many reasons and made up too many excuses for not writing despite valuing our time spent blogging.

A few months ago, I reviewed six different vinyl record turntables due my renewed interest in listening to music pressed on vinyl records. Despite all six vinyl turntables being good choices to consider, I still needed to select the turntable I would bring into my home. In the end, it was the Fluance RT82 Reference High Fidelity Vinyl Turntable that I chose as my latest stereo component. 

Being a former meteorologist, I have a number of coffee cups related to weather themes. Today's mug comes to us via the 2000 biographical disaster drama film, The Perfect Storm. The film presents the story of the Andrea Gail, a commercial fishing vessel that was lost at sea with all hands after being caught in the Perfect Storm of 1991.

The film stars George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, John Hawkes, William Fichtner, Michael Ironside, John C. Reilly, Diane Lane, Karen Allen and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. The film was released by Warner Bros. and grossed $328 million worldwide.

Surprisingly, I recently sought out and purchased a vinyl record turntable. This is a surprise to me because I've spent the last three decades moving from the opposite direction as my music collection evolved from vinyl and cassette tape to compact discs and then finally to digital music stored as MP3 files on my computer and mobile devices. In this century, I don't even know if you can call it collecting music because I now subscribe monthly to an endless library of artists and songs through various music streaming services.

I'm a mid-aged man living in the future where vinyl records are in our past; so I thought. Yet, here I am. I'm looking at turntables and relearning all over again the importance of a preamps and amplifiers when connecting the turntable to a set of speakers. What happened?

A few days ago, there was a MarketWatch article published that summarized the difficulties Tesla's competitors are having going electric. The article goes through a litany of companies in electric vehicle manufacturing having difficulty catching up to Tesla. Some of the companies include Volkswagen, Jaguar, Dyson (yes that Dyson), GM, Porche, Toyota, Kia, China's Nio, etc. The article even includes mention of Harley-Davidson briefly halting production of its LiveWire electric motorcycle due to charging issues via low-voltage home outlets.

Whether intentional or not, Home Depot briefly listed a never before seen "21 inch Select Cut Lawn Mower with Touch Drive Technology" .  While we're unaware of public announcement from EGO POWER+, we came across a couple interesting pages online via Home Depot Pro that may very well be an upcoming new EGO Power+ mower about to hit the market. Details on this new mower are subject to change but below is what we can speculate from the information we know so far.

EGO is about to introduce to market a new 21 inch 56-Volt cordless electric walk behind mower with two significant features: