It's been a while

It's been a long time since I posted anything here. No reason for it, I just fell out of the habit of writing for a while. But I'm breaking that long streak now. When I last wrote anything I had just gotten back from a trip to my brother's house in Dallas. That was a good visit that was over too soon. A lot of small things have happened since then, nothing earth-shattering but more a logical progression in a few areas. I finished up my Cursor project and moved on to a different LLM, namely Claude from Anthropic. It costs the same $20 per month that Cursor did, and so far I've gotten some good use out of it. Claude is more of a general-purpose LLM I think than Cursor, and I've used Claude to do some online research on what my long-term options would be. Claude does seem to have an issue with the web connection at times, such that I have to submit my prompts multiple times to get a result but that hasn't been a big issue. It's been really helpful with one area I've been looking into - going back to graduate school. I wrote a few sentences about my career goals and what I was looking for in a school to attend, and Claude saved me a lot of time and energy narrowing down the options. After taking some time to consider what was available I decided on one particular college that is in the Bay Area and submitted my application a few days ago. Now I'm in a holding pattern waiting for the school to accept me and make my account on their website active. I'll be starting in the spring 2026 semester, studying informatics, which is all about managing and presenting data to humans. The program I applied for has a cybersecurity specialty that I'm going to pursue. I'll still be working while I'm going to school, and since this is a completely online degree I think I should be able to make things work. This program covers material that is similar to a lot of what I've been exposed to in my work life, so I think it's a good fit for me. I'm not sure if I mentioned this before, but I had a customer at work approach me back in March about coming to work for them directly. He didn't have any kind of formal job offer at the time, and since then I've been waiting on his company to decide on hiring someone. I've exchanged a few emails with this guy over the last few months, and the most recent response was that it had been pushed back to this coming quarter, meaning it'll be October at the earliest. So I'm in a holding pattern on that one. While I've been waiting I did a few things to try and familiarize myself with the work this company does. My contact at this company gave me some basic information on the kinds of software and OS distros they use, so I downloaded and installed some software named FreeIPA on one of my virtual machines on my server at work. I spun up a few VMs, installed CentOS on one, Rocky Linux on two others and Fedora 41 on another one, and set them all up in FreeIPA so they could talk to one another. Getting it all set up took about a week to do, but now that I've done it I'm prety sure I could re-accomplish the same set of tasks much quicker now. This company develops processor chip designs for what are called RISC-V chips, which is a type of processor that has a relatively small set of registers and a large number of instructions (as compared to a CISC chip, which has lots of registers and not so many instructions). I found an online mini-certification that was basically RISC-V 101, worked my way through that and signed up for the next course, which is about building the physical chip. I'll be starting on that later this week, time permitting. Well that's enough for now I think. I'll be revisiting this blog again soon, possibly after I hear back from the university about my application. Wait and see...