It’s Easter Sunday (4/20!) and time for my spring sports and ubuntu upgrade updates!
Football
We’ll start with the off-season sport. Back in February it looked like the Cleveland Browns were going to lose Myles Garrett due to his “desire to win” but then a few weks later the team gave him 122 million reasons to stay for another four years. Not that it matters since the Deshaun Watson/quarterback problems continue to curse us.
After losing to the Washington Commanders in the NFC Wild Card game at the end of last season, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers will be playing their 50th season in the NFL starting in the fall with Baker Mayfield at the helm again, so that’s promising at least.
Baseball
Now the early-in-the-season sport. Due to a heavy load at work and an upcoming project go-live that conflicted with my typical trip to AZ, I had to skip Spring Training out in the Cactus League this year. To keep my streak alive though (I don’t think I’ve missed going to at least one spring game going back to 1999, except for the pandemic and lockout years), I got down to Sarasota to see the Rays beat the Orioles 6-3 on a beautiful Saturday afternoon in March (and got to visit a new park too!).
Speaking of the Rays, you probably saw that Tropicana Field was severely damaged by Hurricane Milton back in October. With the roof unable to be repaired in time (and ongoing talks for a new stadium still at a stand-still), my Tampa team will be playing the 2025 season at Steinbrenner Field in Tampa, the spring home of the New York Yankees. Yes, outdoor baseball in Florida (but there’s been a few schedule changes to avoid the hotter and rainer parts of the summer here)! It’ll be weird for the Yankees when they come to town and have to use the visitor dugout and locker room. 🙂 Needing to adjust to a new home stadium has its disadvantages though, and the Rays are sitting at the bottom of the AL East at 9-12. I can’t wait to see the Guardians here in September, though! Cleveland is sitting in 2nd place in the AL Central at 11-9, just 1.5 games behind the Tigers.
Basketball
On to the playoff sports. My Cleveland Cavaliers finished the regular season at 64-18, winning the Central Division and clinching 1st place in the East (both for the first time without Lebron James). They started out the season with a franchise record 15-0, broke that win streak record with a 16-0 run later in the season, and were in 1st place pretty much the entire time. They face the Miami Heat in the first round of the NBA Playoffs starting tonight. Go Cavs!
Hockey
The Lightning had a pretty good season (their first one without Steven Stamkos), finishing with 102 points which put them in 2nd place in the Atlantic Division and 3rd place in the Eastern Conference. Yanni Gourde came back from the Seattle Kraken (which he joined during that team’s expansion draft), Nikita Kucherov won his second consecutive Art Ross Trophy with 121 points, Jake Guentzal filled the Stamkos hole by scoring 41 goals, and the team had four players with 30+ goals (Point, Guentzal, Kucherov, and Hagel). It’ll be another Battle of Florida when the Bolts take on the Florida Panthers in the first round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs when they start on Tuesday. Go Bolts!
Ubuntu
That’s it for the sports, now on to Linux-related news. Ubuntu 25.04 (Plucky Puffin) was released this past week. After running my pre-upgrade backup scripts, I kicked off the sudo do-release-upgrade (no need for -d this time!) which as usual took about half an hour to download and apply all the updated packages and then another half hour or so for me to re-apply my changes to the affected config files.
I only had one problem this time and as usual it was with my good friend PHP. Just like Noble, the upgrade replaced PHP 8.3 with PHP 8.4, removing the 8.3 packages for libapache-mod and mysql but not re-installing the corresponding 8.4 versions (which broke WordPress (this blog) and my Piwigo photo gallery). Simply installing the two missing packages with apt-get install and restarting Apache resolved the problem but it’s still annoying that this doesn’t happen automatically.
One other thing I noticed was that my Pulseway monitoring app (which I was using for reboot notifications and some basic monitoring along side of my Nagios setup) was no longer working. It turned out that Pulseway discontinued their free accounts back in October! I’d been using Pulseway since Marius started it as Mobile PC Monitor back in 2011, but really didn’t need it (and wasn’t going to pay for the service) so I removed the agent from my Linux machines and then deleted the app on my iPhone.
Have a great summer! See you back here in the fall for the Questing Quokka (and hopefully some October baseball!).