Sunday, May 9 2021

2019-06-25 Tuesday cooking, the good place, kubernetes, and homelab

Good Morning Journal!

Yesterday was a lot of fun. I managed to pull off a pretty good deep dish pizza, starting from scratch at 5 and pulling it out of the oven just before 7. I'm starting to realize something: weeknight meals are a lot harder to pull off then the weekend. The because of the time crunch, it's not really a great time to try new recipes, and if I do, I should go easy on myself. Every night during the week, I basically have exactly two hours to put something on the table. Usually it works out, but I've lost my patience a few times. I know this sounds like I'm just patting myself on the back, but new perspectives that make it easier to hold onto patience are important.

Ugh - having a hard time forming the words this morning. Yesterday was my debauchery catch up day from being on call last weekend, and against my better judgment, I slammed three fantasy factories in like an hour. We did start watching the Good Place again, and the episodes were really fascinating. Marissa pointed out that we stopped watching it in season 3 just when it started to get good. We were immediately sucked back into it.

I also got to work on a pretty interesting time lapse for Marissa. It's a lot of footage, so I only made it as far as concatenating raw footage together, but I at least had the time to pick a song snippet and get an idea for what I want to do.

My mind is still reeling reading about the new pi. I was going to treat myself to one yesterday, but they're sold out everywhere. I might have to wait a month or two. By then, there should be a lot of good kits and cases available, but I already have the green light. I decided not to set up a kubernetes cluster on digital ocean. I got to the setup screen (which they've completely changed and it's all disgusting now), and noticed it was $10 for only a gig of RAM. I just couldn't justify it. Then I started staring at the board on my wall and started wondering if I could move the whole setup to local kubernetes. I have some more things to research, but I think it might be possible. Kubernetes or not, I think I'm going to move the hard drives to the motherboard. It's cool having them hang off a pi, but I wouldn't need the USB hub if I plugged them into the "router", and I would definitely get faster I/O.

So in short, my next tech project I think is redoing my board with kubernetes. Man, I love a good hobby project.

Alright, let's have a Tuesday!

2019-06-26 Wednesday concert on the square, anger, work, and gazpacho

Good Morning Journal!

Today is the summer's first concert on the square! For the uninitiated reader, that's when an orchestra is invited to play a concert on the steps of the capital, and all of Madison hangs out on the capital lawn. Alex and Cassie are to blame for getting us into it - last summer we tried to go every week with them, and they're pretty diligent about saving a spot on the lawn.

Last year, I would normally spend the first half hour of the concert combating the crowds and waiting in line for a food cart. Not this year! Marissa and I are committed to bringing our own food. I'm really excited for the challenge of packing meals that can be served cold out of a cooler, and are vegetarian, so Alex and Cassie can partake. Last night was a heavy cooking day because I stayed up to make gazpacho soup. And boy, we were both immediately made believers during the taste test. Gazpacho basically tastes like a liquid salad, in the most refreshing, non-perturbing way possible. What a way to open up concert on the square! As a side, I also toasted up some garlic bread. I think that's going to pair just beautifully.

So what else is going on. Had a pretty good day at work yesterday. Our team finally met to discuss the implications of security rejecting our ADR for the proposed service, and as I suspected, it's not as dire as it initially felt. In between meetings, I got to push forward to with installing my auto-unsealing script on the legacy vault nodes, which is of questionable value but undeniably fun.

Marissa also commended me yesterday for how much my anger has been improving. We were watching The Good Place, and there's a problem with the video files in season 3 that cause plex to freeze every five minutes. Knowing I have a problem with patience, I just had to remind myself that there was nothing I could do besides the silly workaround I found, and it worked! Watched two episodes that way with no outbursts. I think I made a breakthrough, and it's amazing to make real progress on something that I've struggled with for as long as I can remember.

Today is work from home day. Going to don some cozy close and set up at the coffee bar. Today, we're eating lunch at glass nickel, then I'll probably pack the cooler for concert on the square. Fearing a Tupperware leak, I wrapped a few layers of duct tape around the top of the gazpacho soup, lol. It's precious cargo, can't take any chances!

Alrighty then. Let's have a Wednesday. Here's to concert on the square!

2019-07-01 Monday coding, focus, and party

Good Morning Journal!

I had a nice, relaxing weekend. Spent a lot of time cooking, coding, and hanging out with the family. I had a bit of a burst of energy and completely emptied my side project queue. Friday night, I finished porting all my stuff to terraform and then set up an archive website. Last night, I coded up a script that would invalidate cloudfront caches as it's updating static content, only to realize that it was a fifth of a cent each time I did that, so I shut it off completely. It probably would have only been a couple of bucks a month, but I was planning on running this automatically on merge, so I just don't want to worry about it. So all that's left now is to finish the script that will generate the blog. I'm planning on making it full in the last five journal entries tagged "public", and that's all! No archives or anything. I'm still kicking around the idea of linking to other pages, like recipes and "about", but we'll see - it will all depend on if I can make it look as pretty as it looks in my head.

Ah - I'm having some foggy brain this morning. I keep taking breaks from writing this journal entry to debug the build. I guess I had a surge of ambition, but I'm having a hard time focusing on other things. It's difficult to find a balance in things when you get excited about a coding project. For the longest time, I used to work as long as I wanted, especially when Marissa and I weren't married yet and I'd spend long nights in an apartment alone. I used to stay up until three in the morning writing code. I would keep writing until I felt like it was completely finished.

Maybe setting up the plan for the week will help clear my head. This week is a big one, hospitality wise. Wednesday is concert on the square, so Tuesday night I'm making veggie dumplings from scratch. Then this Saturday is Rodney's party, where to be honest I still don't really know what I'm making. I should probably go for something basic, so I can focus on execution and being present for the party. If I go with something like ribs, I might be too distracted, especially if they don't turn out well. The night of Rodney's party, Adam, Sam, and possibly others are staying the night, so I'm also taking care of breakfast in the morning.

Alright, time to jump in the shower. Let's have a Monday!

Oh, and happy July!