What am I up to?

October 26, 2024

Resume Gap - Oh Nos!

I’ve recently tried to catalog what I’ve been doing to keep myself busy. I don’t like doing nothing, and I do feel busy. It broke down into several categories of travel, education and technology, personal life, and home improvement.

Education and Technology

Moved my blog from Netlify to Cloudflare.
Started a self-hosting journey. Stopped a self-hosting journey, not because it didn’t work, but because it wasn’t used.
Created a community site with an astrojs landing page and mediawiki on a racknerd VPS.
Moved my email from Hostpapa to Mxroute. Moved my personal parked domain to Cloudflare.
My greatest education achievement: Got my AWS-SAA-CO3, Solutions Architect Associate certification.

Personal

Selectively applied for some jobs. Got very close, and/or to offer with a few, but nothing worked out yet. I am still trying to find work, but still being selective.
Went through the public high school selection process for my son. Toured a bunch of schools. Ushered him into a new school.
Unfortunately, became a surrogate and trustee for a close family member. The estate requires much paperwork and the trust’s house requires much of work to empty. Fax is still a thing for many papers.
- Got into coin collecting, diamonds, fur coats and watches due to the estate collection.
Saw one of my previous companies that went public not do so well (so far).

Travel

St John, USVI
College Reunion - Notre Dame, Indiana
Notre Dame football games - two
Steamboat, Colorado to ski
Hamptons, New York to hang out with college friends
Maine to see family and because it’s beautiful
London, and the countryside, on a canal boat tour
Paris, Strasbourg, Basel, Berlin, Amsterdam and Brussels, all via train travel. Even got to see an Olympic game (women’s rugby 7s).

Home improvement

Redo shower pan caulk to eliminate leaks.
Reworked my home network. Installed a beefy Mikrotik router and learned how to configure that complex machine. Ongoing - need to configure this with more vlans.

Learnings

I use project management skills that I’ve honed over the years to develop plans for long term personal projects. This means that I break down tasks to manageable items. I document the plan to get the project to completion. I typically diagram and whiteboard complex topics, for example I have my home network before/after drawn up in Excalidraw, and I had the complex high school admissions process documented on a white board. For the shower project I did a pros and cons of doing it myself vs. hiring someone, as well as a risk assessment. For most of the tech projects I am doing build vs. buy decisions.

It feels like I should expand on some of these topics, and I have some exciting future plans, so stay tuned…