One cold morning as the winter solstice neared, I woke up with a collapsed lung. This didn't seem very fair as I'd already had my completely random, debilitating injury for 2025 back in January when my ankle stopped working for no reason.

Apparently it's common for spontaneous collapsed lungs to affect tall men. It does seem particularly egregious though - when I go to sleep buffered by at least four pillows - to wake up with new injuries.

I did go to hospital about my collapsed lung a couple of days after the solstice after spending a week thinking it was some kind of weird covid that only affected one lung and didn't show up on RATs. The doctor checked out my X-ray and suggested a conservative approach as opposed to admitting me to stick a needle into my chest cavity and suck out the excess air. The conservative approach was appealing to me too. So since then I've had a couple more X-rays to see if it is getting worse or better.

According to the latest X-ray it is getting better. Could this collapsed lung be a metaphor for winter? The day with the shortest amount of lung, and then slowly but surely it expands each day and eventually there's a summer of massive, never-ending lung? And then after New Year's the roulette wheel spins again to determine what my journal entries will be about in 2026?

No, probably not. If it's a metaphor for anything (it's not) it's a metaphor for the collapse of metaphors. It's dark. I'm cold. I'm growing old. I'm not running out of visual imagery, I'm running out of novel feelings to allude to with them.

But at least the solstice is done with. Soon it will be sprung.

The reason that most of the photos and entries from Norway aren't posted yet is because it takes a long time to edit photos when you have a lot of other stuff going on in life. And when I started chipping away at it in the hours before bed, I realised I was running out of disk space on bradism.com which was stopping me from uploading images and even logging in. I had to keep deleting log files that would then grow again over the next day and block me again.

I knew I needed a long term solution as I have plans to upload many more photos and no plans to upgrade my web hosting before 2027 when my extremely cheap, grandfathered deal finally runs out.

A cursory glance at my server’s file manager confirmed that the webroot directory where all the static content is hosted was consuming nearly all of my disk. All my images are currently hosted in JPG format, with an optimised JPG version as well, plus a card and thumbnail version. There are new formats, like AVIF and WEBP, that are much smaller without compromising on quality like I had been doing by exporting JPGs at low quality which made them look terrible.

I had the idea to use Cursor to enhance Bradism to handle new image uploads and convert them to AVIF. And to also add a button in the admin side so that I can convert known old images of large size to AVIF as well. This sounded like a good idea, and with AI it shouldn't take too long. Right?

Unfortunately, I had not set up the Bradism dev environment on the computer I upgraded to last year, so I had to do that, which entailed doing a lot of setup work on a new Virtual Box. And then I inevitably had to upgrade versions of things including PHP which led to deprecation warnings that I (AI) had to fix. Oh and in my new house I use the WiFi instead of ethernet which means the performance of my mounted disk in the virtual box is very bad. So yes, the AI did enhance the image upload process, add the button, add multi-image upload, come up with a new colour scheme, and fix a bunch of depreciations. It only took a week, most of which was spent not coding but setting up the environment.

Coding Bradism features was not how I planned to spend my Friday evening. I actually planned to spend it in the emergency department because I have a partially collapsed lung. But that’s a different story that hopefully one day someone will fill me in on. Instead of being in hospital I added the features and then logged on to the production server so that I could deploy them. As a quality minded individual I checked the remote server’s readiness to accept the deployment and make sure there were no modified files that would get overwritten by a deployment. And when I checked that, I noticed an Apache generated error_log in my webroot directory. And on closer inspection I noticed that this, adjacent to my JPG images, was 1.74GB gigs. Of the same deprecation warning that was for some reason being logged, fourteen times, every time someone (AI) visited my site.

So all that development effort did lead to the freeing up a lot of disk space. But it could have happened a lot quicker.

It was not a good idea to watch the first episode of True Detective Season 4 on a dark, windy night right before bedtime. Not because the horror themes make me feel scared. Because the Alaska themes make me feel cold.

I can now add Mosjøen and Mo I Rana to the places in Norway where I have been rained on. Despite that, there were plenty of dry moments on the road trip north today.

We started in Brønnøysund and during a good breakfast I realised today was actually a public holiday in Norway for some reason. That reason is Kristi Himmelfartsdag, which translates to "the supermarkets are closed or in some cases open in smaller configurations".

The Brønnøysund Bridge

This is one of the different things Norway does, along with not believing in bath mats and adding bacon to condensed milk. (I tried some Bacon Ost on bread this morning and I was left with only more questions.)

The drive was shorter today so I cruised a lot more and we stopped at various rest stops which often had little walks attached.

A lake with little islands by the road.

A large, long lake ringed by mountains, just after a tunnel. With a nice toilet.

Another way up in the last of the snow with a board walk to a small lake.

Another was next to a fast flowing, glacial river and a track rest area. And a toilet. No pictures.

Where we stopped for lunch - Mosjøen - was along a river facing a wide mountain range where instead of waterfalls running down the face it was still snow packs filling the vertical gaps in the rocks at higher altitudes. Lucky it took me twenty minutes to find a working car charger because after I did it stopped raining long enough to reach the river and assemble some tuna sandwiches with stolen breakfast rolls. It rained on us on the way back to the car.

We reached Mo I Rana, and without many options for dinner, I tried the double chicken burger with chips at Circle K. That was still nearly $30 but it fed both of us so not a bad result. Circle K also has chicken salt in 1 kilogram shakers.

After dinner I tried another walk to the town's only open supermarket, which I did not realise was downhill. It rained on me several more times, but I did see a few neat things on the way back up the hill.