The Big Book of Small Python Projects...and other stuff.

So I'm about one-eighth of the way through my newest book, "The Big Book of Small Python Projects", and so far I'm not very enthused. I just finished writing a program from the book that uses a random number generator to play a small game, which is good practice, but I've found that I would prefer to be working on something a little more complex than what this book has provided so far. I'm probably just being picky, but making text-based games is not very interesting to me. This book is written for beginners primarily, and I guess I'm more at an intermediate level now so the exercises aren't very fulfilling. I'm hoping the rest of the book will have some more interesting code to work with. At any rate I'm going to keep banging away at it until I'm finished with this book, then move on to something more interesting. I restarted the Python lessons in my datacamp.com account. I've worked through the "Beginner" and "Intermediate" levels so far, and overall it's been good, but I'm still left with a feeling like I'm not grasping the material as fully as I wish. the next step is a Python project in Datacamp that does something with Netflix movies - I read through the description but haven't started it yet. Hopefully it'll be more challenging than what I've done so far. I keep reminding myself to look into Ansible, but I haven't got to that yet. I'm going to read up on it some today, and maybe start the process of installing it on my Cisco gear. I have a small server in my cabinet at work that I'm not using for anything right now, so I think it'll be useful as an Ansible box. That way I can keep things separate from the web hosting server that runs this blog, because I don't want to get the big server messed up somehow. Last Wednesday (my day off), I washed and waxed my entire truck. So I've got that off of my to-do list. The next major home project I have is restoring the bottom toolbox I've had sitting in my living room for a year and a half. I need to disassemble it so I can get the frame sandblasted and ready to paint. I restored the top toolbox for it a long while ago, and it's been sitting on a shelf in my living room for a long time now. Once this project is complete I'll move all the tools I have into these two boxes, get rid of some stuff I don't need any more, and have a nice setup. Hopefully I can get moving on this before I go on vacation in a couple of weeks. I'm still studying the CCNA stuff too. Right now I'm going over the chapters in the CCNA books that cover cloud computing services. It's irritating to discover how much of this I've forgotten over the last year or so, but all I can do is keep on banging away at it. I'll need to go over some of the router and switch IOS stuff again, to figure out how to setup my gear with the new IP block I got from ARIN recently. I will also need to figure out how to get NAT working on my Mikrotik router again. I had it partially working when I set things up last year, but ran into some issues I never figured out. The Mikrotik router OS is a different animal altogether that I'm having to fight with, I have a book but it was translated from Italian or something so it's not a huge help. The book also doesn't cover BGP, so I'm out in the weeds a bit in some areas with this thing. Ah, the challenges of a life in IT. The amount of subjects you have to be fluent in is mind-boggling.