Weekly Wrap Up

Weekly Wrap Up

Wrap-Up: Lets Try to Be Positive Edition

Ramen Junkie 1 Comment

It’s been a hot minute since I really posted. To be blunt, I am pretty much just endlessly frustrated lately over the state of everything. Particularly the state of politics here in the US. I mean, I knew it would be shitty. I didn’t think it was going to be THIS relentlessly shitty, this quickly.

Lets take a peek inside the background at some journal topics here…

Or not. Lets try to, I dunno, be positive I guess. Whats been going on lately that is not awful.

Learning

Like last year, I started doing some leader-led training courses after work a bit. Its been, less rigorous than the ones last year, and mostly consisted of doing a Udemy course. This year’s topic so far has been AWS, or Amazon Web Services. Which probably powers like 75% of the internet or something. I am actually not sure why it was being offered because I am not sure we even use AWS at work, I think we mostly use Azure, but then, I am not part of that side of the business, so I actually have no clue what we use.

The Azure courses were full though.

As for AWS. The training specifically was to prep for the Amazon Cloud Practitioner certification. I probably should go take it. I am pretty confident I would pass it easily. The only part of the entire course I stumbled on was the weird, added later, 6-point diagram thingy. I can’t even remember the name of it. Like a lot of training of this nature, the whole course felt a bit like a sales pitch for AWS. But this particular section, which the class says was added later to the exam, felt very very very much like sale pitch nonsense.

Sales jargon and bull shit terms are my kryptonite. I can listen to and absorb some technical this and that about EC2 and S3 Blocks all day long. But this 6 points of whatever, fuck I just instantly glaze over. Don’t feed me “feel good” buzzword crap, please. Ever.

I also started doing a bit of Cybersecurity stuff (again) through some work access to something called Immersive Labs. I have no idea if its any good, so far I have just been doing basics, because it was required for work, but I seem to have full access, and it feels like something I should dig into more.

Back on the cert issue. I should go take the exam. I never did take the exams for CCNA or Pentesting for the courses I took last year. I don’t personally give a shit about certs. It shows you paid money to take a test somewhere. Feels very much in the vein of “feel-good jargon”.

Whatever the case, I have kind of wanted to better understand AWS in general for a while, and the course, overall did a great job of it. Most of it’s tools are well beyond anything I would probably ever need or use, but there were a few that were interesting.

First is the basic EC2. These are essentially their “on-demand servers.” These are not nearly as mysterious as I thought, and once you spin one up, you can log in and do all the normal Linuxey backend stuff one would expect. My thought was, of course, I could migrate my current web stack to AWS from Digital Ocean. I’m not sure I would really save anything for all that effort through. I do not have the need for some crazy highly flexible scalable environment. I’m not concerned about performance really. I’m just running a few WordPress instances against a basic database. At best, I would probably break even on my current spend for a bunch of migration work while supporting Amazon more, which I am already leaning more and more against.

Second was S3 Buckets. This is data storage in the cloud. I’ve considered using it for my backups a few times. It seems useful for some complex cloud app or systems. Even with Glacier storage, which is not on demand retrieval and is the cheapest, I would end up spending more than my current spend there. Right now I have a Microsoft Office 365 Family Plan and a bunch of segmented syncs off my NAS. That gives me 6 TB for around $70/year, AND Office for everyone in my family. That’s a great deal. Rough estimates in the calculator on Amazon, with only my current usage, puts me breaking even with Glacier.

Lastly, and the one I am more likely to use is Amazon Lambda. This one is really interesting, and it seems to just be, a way to run scripts int he cloud. I’m not sure I would use it a lot, but I could definitely see writing some simply monitoring/notification scripts and sticking them in there running once an hour or so. You get a ton of free runs per month too, which means it probably would cost me nothing int he end.

The Fediverse

Something that has stemmed from all the crazy stupid nonsense in the world is pushing more to move to use Federated social media more. I set up a Pixelfed account, which so far is mostly just reposted toy photos from IG. I have been poking around some Lemmy instances a bit. I am trying to use my Mastodon account a bit more. And BlueSky. Though that is less independent and federated.

Being more active in the Fediverse does not have to preclude not using mainstream social media. I do kind of plan to try to just, I dunno, focus less on just endless angry news. Not to say I am going to stop paying attention, just, more, add more attention elsewhere, also. Balance the awful with the good, or something.

I honestly just, hate what seems to be happening with Social Media. I hate that the mindset is that “Social media was a mistake” and “Facebook etc are evil.”. They really are, but also, it was not always this way. Social Media is good, and can be good, but they (social media companies) get too much out of making everyone fucking mad and miserable. I want to go back to giving a shit about family and friends on Facebook. I want to follow local news without brain-dead idiots filling the comments.

Oops, I am ranting a bit. Let’s be positive.

Language

I don’t have a ton to say about my language learning, but I did want to mention it. I feel like I have crossed some sort of threshold. I am not amazing at it, but I find lately I have a much much easier time understanding Spanish, and in a fairly passive way. I also was inspired a bit by a Reddit post, and have gotten way way more aggressive with lessons. There is a lot of repetition at the point I am.

A lot.

Muchos

I have been getting a little too bored with it. My current strategy is to finish the first bubble in a section, then do the first story, then skip ahead to the exam. I don’t need 5-6 more bubbles to prepare for that exam. I got it. This has actually been working pretty well. Especially because the repetition isn’t limited to within a single lesson section, it extends beyond to future lessons.

I am not doing it as aggressively as the Reddit post person did. They did one of these per day. I am doing one of these ever 2-3 days. I have done some other languages, but I have been working on this course for too long.

I also feel like I am retaining it better, because I am less bored.

Other

I have not been up to a lot much else. Like I said, the mess of everything just kind of saps my give a shit, which is frustrating. When I have not been doing class, I have been playing Infinity Nikki, or Fortnite, and we have been rewatching all the Marvel movies. Most of that is more Lameazoid topics.

I have avoided it (somehow) but everyone in my house has been sick for the past few weeks as well. Kind of sucks because it means the shop is closed. This is a slow time of year for that anyway, at least one of the other local businesses in the area there said they close for January usually anyway. Also, the bulk of the sales for the shop are on ebay anyway. The bulk of the space is for managing ebay items, the shop portion is just a nice “bonus”.

I’ve also been fitting in a lot of serious hardcore Bookmarks sorting. I kind of touched on this recently I think, I mentioned setting up Link Ace, which I have already dropped, for now. I’m just creating my big link list Digital Garden now instead. It works fine, it’s easily searchable. Another nice benefit is I am being reminded of a lot fo things I bookmarked to “look into later”. I have a nice sorted pile of ‘to-do projects” that I had completely forgotten about now. I can ignore them in a whole new way this way.’

Weekly Wrap Up

Weekly Wrap Up – 11.24.2024 – 12.01.2024

Ramen Junkie 1 Comment

When I write these in my local copies, I don’t put the date ranges on them, just the date they were written. Its one of the most pain in the butt parts of this because it means opening some sort of calendar. I mean, its not hard, but I really do not look at calendars a lot. At least not beyond “Day of the week”.

While I am rambling about things I don’t follow, I also don’t really follow the weather. Somehow, despite decades of data, and AI and all the magic pf technology, weather predicting still seems like a complete and utter toss up 90% of the time. I prefer to just, decide when I walk put the door, or over dress with hat and gloves or whatever, that can easily just be discarded.

On to this last week. It was of course, Thanksgiving week. We went down to my mother in law’s for the day, though no real fancy dinner or anything, just sandwiches, and doing various tasks around her house that needed done.

Speaking of Thanksgiving, I lied last week, I caught, part of, the Macy’s parade. It starts earlier than I thought. The antenna hook up went way better than expected. Despite that we sort of sit “downhill” because we are nearish the lake here, and the antenna itself isn’t even above the roof line, I can receive almost all of the channels I should be here. CBS which os very far is a little iffy at time, and PBS, which is probably the farthest, shows up but never locks in. But Fox, ABC, CW, the religeous channel, all tune in with all their subchannels.

The Saturday after Thanksgiving was very busy at the shop, which was nice. The town had a holiday event and it was “Small Business Saturday” so we actually had a regular run of customers. Many first timers and many who really liked the shop. It was a good sign, hopefully.

Weekly Wrap Up

Weekly Wrap Up (11.17.2024 to 11.24.2024)

Ramen Junkie 1 Comment

I started posting these, a while back but they kind of fell by the wayside. I guess some of it just got covered in regular posting, and some of it ends up on the other blog, if I bother. Probably, I decided I didn’t really care. But maybe I should care. So here we are.

I have actually done a few of my “wishlist todo” projects this week. I have recently been hardcore digging through my too many bookmarks problem in Firefox. This has been an ongoing effort for a few months now, but I started on a phase two of this project this week. Specifically, I set up a separate bookmarking app, for some of these bookmarks. After some looking at options, I very lightly started using Raindrop.io, but I also remembered that I really want to not rely on other services that may randomly raise prices, limit features, or just plain close.

So instead, I set up LinkAce, in my docker set up. It was, surprisingly simple. Some of my attempts at docker set ups fizzle out. The biggest thing I have to watch for in the docker-compose files is for port use. Everything thinks its alone and wants to exist at port 80 or 8080. I have them numbered up now, 8080, 8081, 8082, etc.

The long term sort of idea.

  • Link Ace will be a sort of, well sorted repository of things that could be useful when I want to go look for them.
  • Anything that is a text or article gets clipped and dumped to my text archive.
  • It needs clean up, but I have been working on a series of markdown files that work as a sort of wiki for coding information.
  • Various bookmarked todos get put on a proper list. “To Read”, “To Watch” “To Play” etc.
  • Anything I may want to buy gets put in a big spreadsheet with pricing etc. I have actually already done this, since these bookmarks were already sorted together.
  • I have a zillion little projects bookmarked, these will all go in a list as well, or possibly (Probably) get sorted put into a Joplin notebook for each project. Like, sometimes I research a bit of a coding idea, them bookmark several different code snipped I may want to use.
  • Things I actually regularly use, will just stay in Firefox. The idea is to get Firefox itself down to maybe, 50 actual bookmarks. Not, 10,000. I am not sure I am exaggerating with that 10,000.

Anyway, projects this week, I got side tracked. I hung up an antenna on the side of the house today. I may put it on a proper mast later, but for now, I just stuck it on the leftover DirecTV mast that hangs off the back of the deck. I have not tested it yet. I doubt I get a ton of channels, but I should be able to get WAND and WBUI, which are both in town.

Everything else is like 40 miles away. I doubt I can get them with the antenna where it is. I literally have done this sort of thing for a living as my job for almost 20 years now. I have a “pretty good idea” of how well this placement will work. For now, it will work for what I want, which is the occasional need for local news, The Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade, and maybe The Super Bowl.

I am not even going to be here for the Macy’s Parade, so that is… Kind of a bust.

Anyway, in the past, I could get a few channels just laying the antenna out in the deck and hooking it up. If I were super cool I could use some of the spiffy work tools I have to peak the signal etc. But I am not cool like that, also, the position won’t let me actually swing the antenna all the way around to point AT 90% of the towers in the area.

Another project I made a lot of headway on, because I can do it easily while playing Throne and Liberty. Years ago I purchased a bundle of Piano courses from a teaching website. I have been, for many years, meaning to go through and capture them with OBS for offline use, and just, archival in case that teaching website ever goes offline. YT-DL did not work annoyingly. Even using browser cookies. So a manual OBS recording, then clipping them apart in Clip Champ is the way.

In other less exciting news, I got new shoes. My old ones had a big hole in one side and I threw them out. I went to three whole stores, then bought some boring Sketchers, because I almost always buy Sketchers. Then today, I went to put on my old old old shoes to go work outside and discovered my “old old old work shoes”, are the same as my new shoes. Except the work shoes are all gross and filthy.

This wasn’t intentional.

What I Listened to This Week

Weekly Wrap Up

Weekly Wrap Up (01.14.2024 to 01.20.2024)

Ramen Junkie No Comments

Hey yo, not dead, just busy mostly. I forget if I mentioned it at all before, but starting right off at the beginning of the year I started doing some night classes through a work deal, so that has been eating up a lot of time. They run 3 nights a week for like 5 hours. The last one is on Tuesday though, so that will be over, until the next one I’ve signed up for at the end of February.

The class currently is a CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Administrator) prep class. I am pretty sure it also includes taking the exam at least once. It’s a Zoom class with an actual instructor, none of this self-paced online class stuff, like I normally do. It’s kind of weird being in a class like this, it’s been a while since I had an actual in-person class of any kind. My training for work was kind of that, I think I had a very brief Cloud Computing one a few years ago, and other than that was in college, back 20+ years ago.

It’s interesting, I already know some of it or know the general idea of some of it. My overall Achilles heel on this sort of thing is I am very very bad at “Industry jargon”. I can tell you the dookicky connects to the whoosits and I understand the what and the why of it doing it’s thing, but when it comes to actual terminology, I tend to lose it a bit. This is on a bit of a sliding scale though for how actually relevant it is. If the jargon is relevant and meaningful, I can usually remember it, when you get off into things like, corporate inspiring double speak jargon, I completely glaze over and don’t even hear it.

The future class and a third that I am on a waitlist for because it may already be full, will be much more interesting I think. And much more in line with any sort of potential “career pivot” in the future (look at me, using jargon like a pro!). The one I’m signed up for is Pen Testing for Cybersecurity, and the one I’m on the waitlist for is prep for some cybersecurity exam.

Notice I can’t remember the names of these certs, because, for the most part, certs fall into that “out there abstract jargon” area. It’s like this weird, pay-to-win gray area between self-paced learning and an actual university-level diploma or some sort of official license. I actually have the latter two, FWIW, a degree in Mechanical Engineering, and I am (I think) a licensed Engineering Intern (I think it doesn’t expire). If I ever got a job working under a Professional Engineer, after 5 years I could take another test and become a licensed Professional Engineer.

Anyway, aside from class stuff, the most exciting recent developments has been with my car. Two things, one, for at least a year now, the heating/cooling has been out of whack. I mostly just sort of dealt with it. I tried a few things, like changing some fuses and relays, adding coolant, etc. I finally scheduled with a mechanic to get it checked, and I suspected a leak in the coolant line, which it was. But, a week ago, a week before the mechanic was scheduled, we got this horrible winter storm and the battery died died. I’m actually not sure I’ve ever changed the battery in this car, I probably have though. It’s 9 years old now, give or take, and just under 100,000 miles.

This battery thing wouldn’t have been a huge issue except that one, it’s been freezing ass cold out, which makes it hard to get outside and pull the old one out. And two, I’ve been taking the above-mentioned night classes, which eats up the daylight time I had. I think Tuesday, after work, I pulled the old battery out, Wednesday I took it over to AutoZone on my lunch break to get checked. It was dead dead as expected. The AutoZone tech, looked up the new battery, and then suggested I could “pay quite a bit less elsewhere” and suggested a few other places in town. Which was nice of him, though I don’t think he quite understood his job.

Anyway, Thursday, the day before my car appointment, I went to a local battery shop around the corner from work, the first suggested place to go. Online reviews said it was the best place in town and they sell Exide batteries for very affordable prices. Irritatingly, they were closed, they were supposed to be open, according to the signage, but the door was locked and no one was around. So I rushed over to the second option, at the farm store a bit farther away. Got the new battery, stuck it in, and sure enough, car started just fine.

Then Friday I got the heating fixed, and it’s quite nice to have heat again in my car. There was a leak in the temperature sensor housing area. Cost a couple hundred for the part and then another couple hundred for labor, but it was overall about what I had hoped to pay. The place seemed decent as well, so I’ll have to go there if possible in the future when I need a mechanic. My old mechanic is down in Pana where I used to live, and my wife’s father, who was also a mechanic and did some work on our vehicles, passed away a few years ago.

Oh, and I got a new phone at the start of the year, I don’t think I mentioned the phone yet. I went with a 2023 Motorola Edge+. I’ll post more on that later, maybe, probably.

Weekly Wrap Up

Weekly Wrap Up (12.17.2023 to 12.23.2023)

Ramen Junkie No Comments

It’s that time of year again, when everyone is cheerful and celebrating and partying and buying gifts. That’s right, it’s my birthday. And these days, there isn’t a lot of partying or buying gifts. Which isn’t really a big deal. I have long gotten to the age when I really don’t care much for all of that.

It’s always kind of been a sort of, blessing and a curse having a birthday this time of year. On one hand, you end up being around more family more often so you end up with more “token gifts”. Often you at least get like, a cake or something, as a secondary dessert to whatever party was already occuring. It also just gets overshadowed by this other dude’s birthday.

It’s also just more meaningful when you are young, like I said, these days that doesn’t matter much these days. It’s just another year, another day. I am not even that old yet, though all things considered, I am likely on the downturn of “halfway”. I should probably buy a motorcycle or a fishing boat or go skydiving or something…

Mortality is kind of weird. I am not sure I really want to think about all that at the moment.

Anyway…

It’s going to be weird at work in about a week. We don’t really take any trips or anything and so back in like, September or October, I started doing math with my vacation days and found that I had a LOT of them. I have not worked a full 5 day work week in months. I only worked 3 days this week and will only work 2 next week. But starting next year, it’s back to normal.

I have also signed up for this CCNA course through work, so for the first few weeks, I get to work, then come home and do like 5 hours of virtual training each night. Its not paid time, which is fine, the cost is covered though. One of the nice sort of perks through work is that I get access to a few paid training deals, and we are allowed to do the training out of hours if we want.

I am almost always trying to learn something new. I almost always have at least one online course that I am periodically working on. Currently, I am doing a Javascript course, a C# Course I have kind of abandoned, a Godot4 course which has been fun, making cheesy little games, and more recently an AI/Machine Learning course.

There is also my constant Duolingo learning as well. I gave up on Norwegian for now. And Spanish was getting boring again. I wanted to try the new Music course Duo is rolling out but it’s iOS only for now. So I picked up my third planned language, Japanese.

I feel like, Duo’s Japanese course, is not super great, if you know nothing about Japanese. Fortunately, I have picked it up pretty quickly because I studied Japanese back in High School. It’s been over 25 years and I don’t remember a lot of it, but it’s coming back and it has helped me breeze through learning the Katakana and Kanji, and I was already familiar with the basic sentence structure concepts. Duo is full of new concepts and words though, since early parts of Duo courses are definitely geared towards “I am going to be a tourist”. My High School learning was more, “I am learning the language.”

Speaking of Japanese, last Sunday, I went and saw Godzilla Minus One. It’s fantastic, I recommend seeing it. I am looking forward to going to the black-and-white version that was recently announced. It has a lot of feel of the older Godzilla films, without being quite as cheesy “guy in a rubber suit and cardboard buildings,” to it. It also isn’t all “action drama” like the US-made Legendary films Godzilla. Though I really like the Legendary movies and that version a lot. Godzilla is really terrifying in it, for not really being the main focus of the film.

Anyway, time to wrap up, I hope to do the usual bloggy thing of some yearly wrap-up posts soon. Also, I did not forget about Advent of Code, I just didn’t do it this year.

Have a Happy Birthday to all.

No wait, that’s not right…

Happy Festivus!

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