Weekly Wrap Up

Weekly Wrap Up

Weekly Wrap Up (01.14.2024 to 01.20.2024)

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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)

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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!

Weekly Wrap Up

Weekly Wrap Up (11.19.2023 to 11.25.2023)

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Oh look, I fell into the “Trap of Not”. I am pretty sure I mentioned it before. It’s just a little phrase I think about sometimes when I want to do something but I just, do not. Specifically, in this case, writing and blogging. Like these little Saturday write-ups, I wanted to at least keep up with them, but I ended up, well, not. I also feel stupid jealous of people who blog and write regularly right now.

Look at Cynni’s Blog here, she writes daily. Long detailed posts, daily, with her dog and her little neat cartoon images spiced in. I’m jealous of that. My excuse is often that I don’t have the time, but the reality is, I kind of DO have the time. I just keep falling into Not. Another one that I’d love to be more like with Lameazoid is The Figure in Question. Not so much daily reviews, just more a long daily catalog of “here is this figure and this is why I like it.”

A while back I picked up this massive ball of blogs from a Hacker News posts. I’m still, still going through them, months later. There are so many that seem to have died for one reason or another. I mean, writing regularly, or even semi-regularly I suppose, is not for everyone. The process of going through them is slow, but there has been a fun accidental mechanism in my RSS reader that has helped. Basically, the feeds never update all at once. I get maybe 10-15 new ones showing up daily, but I think it’s timing out otherwise. So I skim through the ones that do show up and see if any of them are interesting, if not, I dump them. If they are interesting I throw them in a new category to better look at later, or if they have an obvious theme, I categorize them accordingly, since it’s Hacker News, it’s MOSTLY “Personal Blogs – Tech Enthusiasts”.

It’s also weird how some of these people organize their blog titles. Some people give useful information, and some just have these weird one-word titles that feel completely meaningless. Some of these blogs seemed completely themed around some extremely obscure tech topic (I usually drop these). You can tell when someone started a blog because they picked up some goofy random new coding language. Most of these I find, are also dead blogs. I guess they got tired of the topic or didn’t find an audience or something.

I always tell myself I don’t care about having an audience, and I keep plugging away at it anyway. For decades now. It’s a little crazy maybe. And I just write whatever comes to mind. I’ve been sitting here for an hour or two, having eaten my breakfast, done some daily quests in Sky, and browsed my RSS reader. Everyone else in the house is still asleep except the cats, so it’s nice and quiet. Anyway, I tell myself I don’t care about an audience, but also I don’t understand why everything seems to go nowhere.

Which brings up some of my activities this week. Working a bit to better understand the whole Search Engine Search Console thing. I set up a plug-in to give both blogs a mobile theme because I know Google complains about that. It’s boring and ugly, it gets the job done, I guess. I also have no idea why some of the issues listed are simply, “Page discovered but not indexed”. Like, ok, that’s on you, why are you not indexing them? No other explanations were given. I’ve also found it wants to index pages for individual images and such.

Which is another thing I should do. I need to flip through the gallery adding alt text to images. For accessibility. I am all for accessibility, but honestly, most of the images, don’t super matter or are meaningless if you can’t see them. Sorry people with bad or no sight, it sucks I am sure, but me describing a random concert photo, is not going to help you get the feeling of the photo. Most other images amount to something basic, “Python Logo”, “XXXXX Album cover.” You are not missing anything not seeing it. I think there is actually a way to get screen readers to ignore those images. A picture is worth a thousand words, and those thousand words already exist in the Blog Post the picture is in. There is one blog I read in my RSS reader with a dude who is absolutely obsessed with alt text. Like, it’s literally probably something he should see a shrink or something over because when I write obsessed, I mean OBSESSED. If I were a person who needed alt texts, I would be upset with how wordy and insanely long this dude makes his alt texts.

Other fun this week, it is, of course, Thanksgiving. We went to my parent’s house and had a very basic turkey, potatoes, corn, and green beans, style Thanksgiving dinner. My brother and his family were busy. It was enjoyable.

Side note, I typo-ed the word green. Are you OK there Spell Check? The obvious word is not there at all.

I’ve decided to dump the whole “What I Got” part of these. I might do the toys and games stuff on Lameazoid if I ever started regularly posting there again, but I did want to throw in that I bought some more memory for my gaming PC. It came with 16GB, which is decent, but I’ve been doing some AI stuff and I may move my Video Editing to that PC from my old PC, so I added another 32GB of RAM. Total of 48 now, which is probably a bit excessive. Nothing fancy, I was looking at fancy but realized that it wouldn’t do any good because it’s just going to clock down to match the speeds of the current 16GB, which was plenty fast enough already.

Weekly Wrap Up

Weekly Wrap Up (08.27.2023 to 09.02.2023)

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Another slowish week, aren’t they all kind of that way. I’ve been filling a lot of my time with learning again, on two paths. The first is the fairly newishly released Foundational C# with Microsoft Learn on FreeCodeCamp. It all feels very familiar as I know some C/C++ and some Python and some Javascript now. The real issue there is I am constantly forgetting things like semicolons. Also, Arrays feel really screwy in C# for some reason. Variables in general I suppose, because I’m not used to explicitly typing variables.

I’m going to finish it, but I am a bit let down because the course is all, “Build something to work in the Command Line”. Which is cute, but I really want to get more into building things with GUIs and things that aren’t just cute automation scripts.

Which sort of touches on the other learning I’ve been doing, which is explicitly graphical, because I have been learning GODOT, the game-making engine. I’ve only done one course, but I picked up the recent Humble Bundle package. It’s a rerun of Zenva courses, and I thought I had picked it up previously. With the whole current Unity controversy, it’s come back for an encore. I rather like it so far, granted so far it’s been a crash course of the basics and then build simple little coin-collecting game.

I did already modify the tutorial code a bit because I didn’t like that the character could leave the screen. I may mess with it a bit more. I kind of want to build Pong, again, with it. Pong has sort of become my own personal “Hello World” of game-building projects in different types of code. So far I’ve done it in Python using Turtle, and C for the Arduboy. I’ve been thinking a bit lately about if it could be done using CSS and HTML since CSS can handle some variables and do dynamic actions. I’ve also been thinking of how to make it using prims and scripts in Second Life.

Back to GODOT, it has some advantages because the scripting is similar to Python, which I am most familiar with. The courses are all fairly quick too, which is nice. It seems kind of corny, but I do really get a kick out of these basic simple games on these various platforms. I think it’s just the whole “I made this”. Even when it’s like 90% some tutorial, it’s still neat because, “I made this, I put this together and now when I press the WASD or Arrows (another mod I added), the little character moves and collects the little coins.”

God knows if I’d ever actually produce anything to “release” but I’ve always loved the idea of making a game sometime. I used to draw out elaborate platformer levels based on other games in a sketchbook when I was younger.

The other real big event this week was my wife’s uneventful (her choice), 50th Birthday. We didn’t really do anything on the birthday itself, I went to the store, so exciting. There is a party the following weekend (today), but I’m not sure she is super excited for it.

Activity Log

I didn’t acquire anything really beyond the GODOT Humble Bundle. Oh right, I did pick up GI Joe Classified Shipwreck. Then I picked him up again, after returning the first one, because the hand broke off, with barely a touch, right out of the package. Lousy shoddy QC there Hasbro.

Live Shows Weekly Wrap Up

2023.09.24 – Weekly Wrap Up (09.17.2023 – 09.23.2023)

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I am bad at selfies.  I added one last week to these little journal posts and I wanted one for this week but they are kind of bad.  Or maybe I am just bad at looking excited.

Anyway, I’m not late, I am intentionally not on time, because I was busy yesterday.  I spent almost all day in Champaign (Urbana technically) at the Pygmalion event at the Rose Bowl Tavern.  I’m actually not sure if there is one of these or more of them per year, but it’s apparently the 19th year.  It’s a little craft vendor fair alongside a bunch of musical acts both indoor and outdoor.  I primarily went to see Lauren Mayberry’s first solo tour.  But I also like music, so I went early to see all of the outdoor shows.  There was swap flip-flopping between in and out on the schedule, I didn’t want to lose my spot up front, so I just stayed outside.  There were other Lauren/CHVRCHES fans there doing the same, which isn’t surprising.

Overall I saw 6 acts total, one of the scheduled outdoor acts, ggwendolyn, had to cancel.  This also meant the schedule got compacted up and while it was originally supposed to start at 1:45, things didn’t start until 2:45.  So I got there early, and then got to wait a bit longer than expected.  Not a huge deal.  I got to watch them doing the soundcheck, which, at least for me, was super interesting.  This guy, we’ll call him Bob, because that was his name, everyone on stage called him that, would go around checking mics and making sure things work then he’d head into the “crowd” and have band members do tests to balance things out.  Then they would all adjust their little personal directional speakers for levels on the various tracks (vocals, drums, guitars, etc.) on a personalized basis.  All from a little portable wireless pad.  It was neat.

Also, I say “crowd” because at this stage of the day, there were, maybe 20-30 people mingling around the small parking lot area where the shows took place.    As the day went on, the bands became clearly more and more professional about how they operated, and basically just, produced better and better sound.  As as that progressed, the crowd size grew and grew.  It was fun to watch actually.  From fairly basic setups to more and more complex setups, from using the house speakers for the feedback audio to using in-ear headsets.  From just, checking the watch after every song to see how much time there was to play, to having a full-on set list, ready and set up and available.  From random comments about writing up songs because of “X”, to having full-on fun little stories.

Anyway, I saw, in order:

  • Emily the Band – She mentioned that she went to school at U of I in Champaign and had played at the Rose Bowl Tavern a few times, so they seem to more or less be a local band.  It was the first time they got to play on the main stage.    I enjoyed their set and they seemed like they were having a fun time all around.
  • Fiona Kimble – She was alright, though probably my least favorite of the day.  The easy comment here is, it felt like there were too many people on stage, but then she said the pianist had come in special and they did a couple of duet songs, so well, maybe it felt like too many people because they had a bonus person in their set.
  • Lutalo – I really enjoyed his set.  It was very low key, basically finger-picking folk music on an electric guitar.  Dude seemed to really get into his songs too.
  • Tim Atlas – Dude was really good, and they hit all the right notes of having a band that felt like they all were really having a good time while putting out some good, varied music.  The guitarist also had a talk box (think Peter Frampton, Do You Feel Like We Do), for one song, which was fun.
  • Claud – The only artist I managed to get around to listening to before the show, and it’s funny how much that changes one’s perception.  I also found that I really enjoyed Claud’s music, from my before the show listening, and I was already kind of a fan, because it’s enjoyable.  I don’t really know why but it kind of reminds me of sort of, toned down a bit King Princess.  Just the vocal styling, the lyrics, and all that.  I want to listen to more of the artists I saw but probably Claud most of all.
  • Lauren Mayberry – Ok, Claud most of all, behind the obvious.  I tried to mostly avoid watching other people’s videos of Lauren’s solo tour, so I could mostly go into this show blind.  I had already listened to the one single, *Are You Awake*, and I had listened to *Crocodile Tears* beforehand.  It was all great, and definitely a good different feel from Chvrches.  Kind of reminds me a bit of Wolf Alice maybe.  Probably my favorite was the final track, *Sorry Etc*, which is one extreme end of the styling and very very “screamo punk rock” style.  The other end probably being *Are You Awake*.  Also, probably just because of where I ended up standing up front on the end of the stage when she came to my side of the stage, she seemed to be “angry face screaming” a few times like right at me.  

    Please don’t want to kill me Lauren, I’m sorry, etc.

Anyway, I’ll probably make a gallery of my photos at some point, though they aren’t real amazing, my phone’s camera isn’t super great.  I had asked them about bringing my proper camera and it was in the car but I decided it was too much of a hassle.  

I did have a fun good sign moment before the show.  I had stopped in a few stores over in Champaign before the show, and when I walked into Five Below, there was a familiar voice on the radio, with the CHVRCHES/Marshmallow collab track Here With Me.  It took me a minute to place the song because I don’t really listen to it, basically ever.  I keep forgetting it exists, which is funny because in some ways it may be the most popular CHVRCHES track due to the Marshmello exposure.

The rest of the week was relatively uneventful aside from Friday evening.  I went and met up with my parents and brother and a couple of my nieces and we went to watch the Route 66 Carshow parade in Springfield.  I didn’t end up taking any photos, but it was fun.  Basically, a lot of the classic cars that are in the show itself all just, drive to downtown.  They go a pretty good distance, as they start down near Dirksen and Stevenson Drive and go downtown.  I realize this is meaningless to most people but this means they go 3 miles or so up Stevenson and then 3 miles or so up 6th Street to downtown Springfield.  It’s a good distance on some main throughways in the city, especially for a bunch of classic show cars.  Also, there is a police presence, but they also don’t block the roads, so there are just, regular cars driving around them.

I’m sure I’ll write up on it eventually, but I also kind of spur of the moment updated my PC from Windows 10 to Windows 11. It’s mostly the same honestly. I hate how I can’t dock the taskbar to the side though and I immediately changed is the centering on it though because the centered icons is functionally garbage and it’s ugly as shit. I also found a cheap price to update it to the Pro version from Windows Home. There are a few virtualization things that are only in Pro, but also only Pro allows for Remote Desktop access. It’s actually something I have been wanting to do even in Windows 10, for the same reasons. Also, in theory, I think Pro has fewer ads stuck in it, because well, you’re paying for it.

On Friday before going to Springfield I had the day off so we also put out the fall decorations around the outside of the house, though they aren’t completely finished. Also a few indoor ones but my wife does all that, I just haul totes around for that.

Activity Log

I’m not going to go into it all, but one of the stores I went to was Ollie’s.  Which I’ve been to elsewhere years ago when traveling, but this one opened up recently, closer to where I live.  It’s basically a closeout store, lots of stuff for like, 75% less than what it would have been originally.  They had a ton of Marvel Legends I didn’t care much about, and a few Star Wars Black Series I didn’t care about.  What I did pick up was a pile of Fortnite stuff.  Also, they had a bunch of Eternals Marvel Legends, which I have most of from previous markdowns, but I picked up Ajak, which was the only one I didn’t have.  I kind of really like the design of the Eternals, but I they are also all very samey looking, with almost no accessories, which made the figures a huge turn-off at the standard ML pricing.  I’ve managed to collect them all at like half price or below, which is just fine for me.

Not much else otherwise this week.

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