To new-ish beginnings

I’ve long waffled about blogging; for the better part of the last 20 years, at least. I’ve undergone a few life changes, journaling to myself doesn’t have the ring it should, and social media gets dumber and dumber, so I’m rebooting my blog yet again. Will it be focused? Don’t count on it. Will it be interesting? Probably not. Will it be regular? Wait; who’s even asking these questions? Also the answer is no.

I figured I would start this new venture with a list of features and bugs for 2023. Things have been all over the map, folks! But given how scattershot things have been, putting them all into one post will give you a taste of the sorts of things I’ll write about here. I’m sure I’ll still fall into the same doldrums and swings of enthusiasm as I always do, but at least this time the trimmings will be shinier: I’m powering this blog with Ghost, running on a homelab setup that I’ve been happier and happier with since I moved in.

Oh yeah, I’ve moved. After my divorce (right before the pandemic started), I moved into an apartment in my hometown and enjoyed living there for the better part of 3 years. Over time though, I got tired of things like… picking up my mail in a separate building, crossing the parking lot to get to my car, climbing four flights of stairs to get to my apartment, not having an optimal out-of-the-way space to build and run a slightly noisy homelab, etc. After shopping around the area, I settled on Midtown and found a nice 1926 bungalow with a stone basement with a drive-in garage: the perfect place to construct a server rack. So I’ve installed an Ubiquiti UniFi system, I have a Raspberry Pi running some smaller utilities, and I’ve converted a 10+ year old Intel Xeon PC into a Portainer application server that I’m running this blog on. And that’s been a key feature of 2023.

A bug of 2023 has been… my partner’s cancer! We found out about it pretty much the same day I closed on the house, and by pure coincidence the house I picked was mere blocks away from the hospital where they’d be getting treatments, so that was extremely handy. It’s now 10 months later and their treatment has been rather successful so far. As of tomorrow, their radiation is complete, and their multi-year course of maintenance drugs begins, so they’re not out of the woods yet, but all in all they’ve handled it extremely well.

Another feature of 2023 has been focusing on clearing out games in my backlog. I haven’t plugged in my Xbox or PlayStation in months; this is all PC gaming on either my living room rig (which now has an RTX 4070) or my Steam Deck (which I’ve modded with a 1TB NVMe and an atomic purple shell). Recently I’ve finally cleared Larian Studios’ Divinity: Original Sin I and II, and I’m very slowly making my way through Baldur’s Gate III. I also played and finished Alan Wake II which was an absolute delight (and inspired me to play Quantum Break). I’m restarting my go at the Yakuza/Like a Dragon series, starting with Yakuza 0. And server issues aside, Helldivers II has been a blast. And like always, Final Fantasy XIV has me constantly hooked.

I’ve been able to get a lot of summer gaming time in because of gout. Gout sucks, folks, especially when it starts in one foot and plagues you for 4 weeks, and then gives you a couple weeks off, and the appears in the other foot for another month. It’s hampered my ability to do a lot of the housework I’ve wanted to get done to make my new space my own and delaying my opportunity to feel more embedded in my new neighborhood by walking around on a regular basis. Fortunately it’s cleared up by now, and I’m back on track (my uric acid levels are back to normal for now). And even though my body is telling me gout is a feature of my life about once a year (ugh), I still consider this a bug.

Work continues to be great; I manage a team of iOS and Android software engineers for a learning platform and technology publishing company, a place I’ve been for over 7 years now. My company seems to care about its people and the company culture, and is very cautious and deliberate about its growth strategy, so we’re not as beholden to the extreme layoff cycle that the tech industry is in the middle of. So in a dark environment, that’s a bit of a feature. Happy about that.

And to end things on a feature for 2024, I’m researching a lot more about the history of the neighborhood I’m in now. I mentioned I bought a house in Midtown; specifically I’m in Plaza/Westport Hill, a part of town that has seen some drastic changes over the last century since my house was built: the development of the Country Club Plaza, the rise of the Saint Luke’s Hospital campus, the removal of a large chunk of the neighborhood to build Saint Luke’s Bishop Spencer Place, the demolishing of tons of bungalows to build a bevy of new urban homes, and more. I aim to share all of my findings here as an outlet so hopefully that’ll have some sort of place to live on the internet.

I’ll wrap things up now, and finally hit the submit button on my first post on this new blog. Onward and upward!