Unprecedented.

This whole Covid-19 thing is clearly unprecedented. Things are strange and tough, but we are all in this together.

It has effected my farrier clientele in ways I never expected. I never thought I would see the things that are happening today, and it looks like more unexpected things are coming soon.

Honestly, I just don’t get it. There are so many questions; so many oddities. But, that doesn’t really matter. We just have to abide and survive the best we can.

Changes for me.

Its interesting. I have been sitting still for a few years now and all winter I made plans to get out and about. I have so many cool toys to bring out and I’m really ready to get out and play these days.

Lots of plans – all canceled.

Oh well. Better safe than sorry. I get that.

We will just make some new ones.

New tech.

This is all geeky stuff, boring to most, but it is also a philosophical one for me. I’m a fairly hard-nosed open source advocate, at least for my own use. I like to mess with the technology, but I also try to live the philosophy.

A lot of my time lately has gone into creating a new, more resilient scheduling and data management system (accounting, billing and documentation system for shoeing progressions).

The simple solution I have been using is great, but I want a few more features and a lot more access/ redundancy. Simply put, this upgrade puts all of my files, schedules, tasks and everything else on my private server. I can access them all from any device and any browser. It’s all integrated, easy to organize and – collaborate.

The collaborate part is the secret sauce that I am really looking forward to leveraging with clients and other farriers and vets.

It sounds simple and not much different than Google or iPhones can do. That’s true, except this puts the whole thing under my own control.

After spending a few weeks researching, I decided to install NextCloud on my server, and I absolutely love it. I built the system last week and I have been testing it this week. Of course, there were a few bumps at first, but everything seems to be surprisingly smooth now.

Videos and content restarted…

My son Will and I were on a roll making videos this past fall. We had put together a game plan for content and for some reason, I thought we would continue through winter, but winter certainly put us out. Since we don’t have a shop to work out of these days, we turned into fair weather creators and stopped.

Since I got the server and all of my cool communications running, I have been putting together an itinerary for getting videos and content rolling again. We are back at it now.

Changes for my clients.

I never thought I would see things so “shut down”. Its April 1st and so I expect we may be roughly half way through this ordeal if we are lucky. Barns are continuing to close for safety.

All shows are cancelled; even summer camps are cancelled and that is a real problem for these places. I really don’t know of everyone is going to make it through this.

The traffic is so quiet and the barns are almost completely empty of the usual bustle.

I’m trying to do my best for my clients by reducing their costs any way I can. We are in this together and the only way we will get out is together.