Learning

It's another quiet Sunday morning at work. I just finished another set of DataCamp lessons, and started a new section about web scraping. It hasn't covered much Python so far, just HTML and other things, most of which I already know. For the last couple of weeks I've been doing a chapter a day, which has worked out pretty well. However today I had some extra time on my hands, so I quickly worked through 3 chapters altogether: the last chapter in the "Developing Python Packages" lessons, and the first two chapters about web scraping. I'm leaving the rest of the web scraping stuff for tomorrow. I did go to Half Moon Bay last Tuesday (my weekend), but I didn't get a chance to go for a walk in the Murray Ranch park like I wanted because the road to it was closed. There was a sign that said the road was damaged due to a flood or something, so I guess that's a no-go for the time being. I did go for a walk on the beach and watched the waves roll in for a while, which was good. Afterward I got some food from a burger joint there that I like, and drove home early. Highway 92 was closed so I had to go a different route to get there, this time along the coast on Highway 1. It was foggy so I wasn't able to see much, but I could tell on a good day it would be a beautiful drive. I'm looking forward to trying it again with better weather. I was on the phone yesterday for a couple of hours trying to help a customer troubleshoot a BGP issue they had. They had one route that wasn't propagated correctly for a /16 IP block because their customer had made some last-minute changes outside of the normal time window, so it turned out that they had to wait for those changes to spread out across the internet which took several hours. I had to get with two engineers to get it sorted out. It got a little frustrating at times being on the phone for so long, but in the end we were able to give them a satisfactory explanation (I think) of why things weren't working yet. I learned a little bit about how BGP works too, so it was all good in the end. I still have those two switches sitting in my cabinet at work, I might try to install them this coming weekend (Tuesday - Wednesday). I also have that bottom toolbox sitting at home waiting to go to the sandblaster. I don't know if I'll get to either of those things this weekend, we'll have to wait and see. I have a couple of meetings with the VA to deal with first, so my free time is limited. I had a CAT scan run about two weeks ago that I still need to get the results about, so I've got to make a doctor appointment soon. I had blood work done last month, got the results back and found that (as far as I know) I'm in good general health so I'm not anticipating any bad news, but you never know with these things. I need to call my brother and catch up on things. We haven't spoken since last Christmas, so it's overdue. The last I heard he was still having disagreements with his ex-wife about taking care of their kids, so there's some drama going on there. I hope he's doing okay. I visited them last year for Thanksgiving, and back then they had a pretty good deal going there, a nice stable life. Hopefully that's still the case. I'll bet he's still got a garage full of disassembled cars and motorcycles he's working on, that's a big hobby for him. I like to help him with that stuff when I'm there.