Listening to: Pete Yorn
A paraphrase from a Pete Yorn interview:
“My music is written to be listened to in your car, while crying.”
With that thought, here you go.
A random day in February
Nice day. Made spaghetti – we make enough for more than a few meals later, so it’s a half-day effort. The whole upstairs smells delicious, but I couldn’t eat another bite.
Ran a new network line to Christina’s new office – this required 2 panels cut into the drywall, and one hole drilled in the floor. Turned out really well, and not a chaotic mess. Now only the kitchen and living room lack network cables, but our wifi mesh is pretty good, so that’s not a today kind of task.
Also finally decided on a larger synology NAS to replace my storage server. Moving from a server to a NAS seems counter intuitive sometimes, but other than a few apps that will run as docker containers, it just needs to store things, and NAS devices to that well. Plus they tend to be quiet, and the hotswap bays are nice.
It IS going to mean some future server rack re-org, likely removing EVERYTHING from the rack, then adding once at a time — an early summer project perhaps, ’cause that’s a whole day of downtime, guaranteed.
Alan Watts
I stumbled across the text for this a little while ago, and I know it will be a joy to come back to and read again later.
To be a human being you have to love the light, but you also must trust yourself to the darkness. Be able to let yourself go in the faith that you’ll arrive back all in one piece.
Now, it’s alright. The ground is going to hold you up. So just just lie down. And there’s nothing else you need to do, because the ground is firm and it will hold you there.”
“Look, do you know what you’re doing? You’re trying to hold yourself together. As if your skin weren’t strong enough to contain you. And you’re doing this all the time to keep yourself from falling apart. Why? You think, do you, that if you don’t hold yourself together you’re just going to go bleah and disappear into some kind of frightful green jello? No, you won’t.
I’m really looking forward to this christmas break.
It’s been a long year. Tomorrow’s the beginning of my vacation though, and that helps a lot.
I managed to get my broken tooth repaired this week – second one in what, the last two months?
I’ve discovered the joys of the ‘Edge’ plan with Rogers .. you can turn in your phone anytime — if you’re switching to another contract. Looking to just be done with it? You can’t even give the phone back until the last 30 days, even if you offer to pay everything you’ll owe upfront. Two different phones, bought a month apart. That will take some time next year to sort out.
Mortgage season comes next year, we’re up for renewal, and rates are .. less than optimal really. Going to have to crunch the numbers, and get the right combination (and from the right broker). RBC is wooing us, and I have a mind to see if we can’t get a shorter term – less than 12 years) to maybe get this paid off by age 60.
Also a lot of home improvements coming – for example I’ve had an eye on our garage door since we moved in a decade ago, and this year I want to replace it. Our bathroom counters were a fail, and it just shows I should’ve gone with my gut and cancelled them, even if there was a penalty. Now we’ll need to do them again, this time in stone.
Windows as well, not all of them, but enough that it’ll probably pinch a bit. I’m not sure if we’ll manage them this year.. but we’ll see.
Everything’s in the new year though, for now there’s a solid week where there aren’t any big items looming. I intend to enjoy it.
Merry Christmas.
Lasers pew pew.
Little update
Reading glasses came in today. They’re definitely what I need for close-up work, and absolutely something I’d take off to look any further – exactly what I was hoping for. Already used them to read some very tiny writing.
Replacement router came in yesterday and went in, along with new switches. 98% of what I was hoping for, and with luck the last 2% will get sorted with a firmware patch later this month.
Charged up my car battery, it doesn’t handle sitting idle for long periods in cold weather. Now it’s topped up at least, and won’t give that low battery warning.
Waiting on final word from the accountant about taxes, then we can go and sign and pay – it’s always a good time of the year once that bit of business is behind us.
Life update
So I was going to post this on facebook.. but then no. I barely use facebook these days, and there’s little value to dropping any more data into that sinkhole.
I might’ve posted it on reddit, but it’s a slice of life kind of post, and I don’t really want to expose that for cross referencing, I already give enough life details by accident.
I might’ve posted on one of the new sites, post.news, etc, but they’re really new to me, and I don’t know that I want to start doing that somewhere I may not stay.
So, here I am.
I have this week off. It’s the first time in a while I’ve had this many days off, and it’s been fantastic. I’ve continued my efforts to replace all of the initial network wiring I did .. back in 2014… when we got the house. Yeah, I know, keeping hack jobs is bad karma, but it’s been working, so it was hard to justify changing it.
I have maybe 2 or 3 more network cables to replace, then I’m done with that kind of wizardry for the near term.
I have a patch panel coming for the main rack.. getting it in place will require more than a few changes to the rack layout, I’m not even starting that until mid/late January however.
I’ve discovered the bathroom counters we JUST had replaced.. suck. MDF anywhere near water is a bad idea. I had a bad feeling, but I got sucked into that sunk costs fallacy, and didn’t cancel that part of the work before it went in.
Now, we pay for it twice I guess. Second time will be with Floform, who did our kitchen counter (and wow, amazing).
Also need to replace the garage door this year – I’ve put it off and put it off, but I really shouldn’t wait until I don’t have a choice. I have a few companies in mind to call this spring to get quotes from, we’ll be doing one of them for sure by summer.
We also need to again look at a new washer/dryer — these ones are occasionally frustrating, and the dryer is starting to sound like it’s wearing out. A not surprising expense, they only seem to last a handful of years, and we use them every day, sometimes several times a day.
I have additionally considered getting permanent A/C for our bedroom — I think that’s going to slip a year, but I do want to make it happen. Portable units .. work, but they are bulky and somewhat loud.
Similarly, I have a plan to get our windows replaced – they’re not outside of their lifespan yet, but some are in less than great shape, and better to do them while we can still afford it.
Work is .. well, working out. Some future plans are slowly coming together – winning the lottery would help, but in the meantime the slow path is still progress.
Saltstack adventures
Still working through Saltstack. Definitely a small community at work on this, but pretty regular software updates. In some ways it reminds me of Ansible and how it can be challenging to find a bit of prebuilt boilerplate to meet a specific need — I’ve been a bit spoiled in that regard with Puppet.
That said, I’ve been making good progress. I have a minimum-spec list of things I need this to do, and every day I’m able to cross off another one. I’ll admit I’m quite drawn to a client-server model that’s *push* and *pull*, not just one or the other. I’m not sure why it’s not more popular, that combination alone makes it tremendously appealing to me.
It’ll still be some time before I try applying this to any of my working hosts, and some (like my mailserver) will be a massive undertaking.
It’s taken a bit to get semi-comfortable with Jinja templating, but it’s similar in many regards to ERB, so other than how ugly each looks prior to processing, I have no real complaints.
I did have to discover the difference between {{ var }}, {{ var | json }}, and {{ var | yaml }} — which for ordered lists comes out as [‘var’], [“var”], and [var] respectively. Yes, I put that here so I can find it again later 🙂