Confidence

I'm not feeling too confident right now. Lately I've been working through the statistics and machine learning lessons on DataCamp, and if it weren't for the built-in AI they have I don't think I'd ever figure it out. I haven't studied either subject thoroughly before so I try not to hate on myself for struggling, but it's hard. There's a lot of math, which I know I'm not good at. I can do algebra just fine, and I can even sit down with a math textbook and work through the examples, but there's something about it that just makes me feel inadequate when I don't easily understand a subject in math. It's always been like that with me and I don't know why really. Not a lot else going on lately. I missed the Python meetup last Tuesday, which is a shame but from looking at the Discord channel where they put the lecture slides I doubt I would've gotten much out of it. It covered some software I'd never heard of and I have a feeling the whole lecture would've gone straight over my head anyway. I'm planning on attending the next meetup, but you never know. I finished painting the first coat on my toolbox project. I'm going to put another coat on it, but right now I have to wait on the spray paint I ordered from Home Depot to arrive. It's supposed to take 10 or 11 days for some reason, maybe they're shipping it from China, I don't know. I think I have enough paint to cover the drawers so I might move forward with that part of it this coming weekend. We'll see. My router is still working. I haven't had to touch it since early last week, which is good. I replaced one memory stick in my big server, and that fixed the websites-being-down issue apparently, because everything has stayed up since I did that. Now, I need to figure out how to setup NAT on my Mikrotik router again so I can get my Ansible server up and running. After that, I have to figure out what's wrong with my Cisco 2821 router. It can't talk to one of the switches I have in the cabinet right now, and I think it's a logical error I'll have to figure out. Eventually I'm going to blow up the config on all my Cisco gear and set them up with the IP block I got from ARIN, but that's more of a long-term project. I have a lot to do before I get to that part of it all. I put in my vacation time for Thanksgiving and Christmas. I'll be driving to Oregon for both trips. It's time to start Christmas shopping again (ugh), I have a few ideas saved in an Amazon wishlist but I'm going to have to come up with more than just that if I want everyone to have a happy Christmas this year. There's 3 groups of people I need to shop for, and I'd like to find one gift I can get for each of them like I've done before. Last year it was miniature fire extinguishers. the year before that it was big boxes of food, and I can't remember what came the year before that. I'll come up with something.