Posts by lennys (72)

Sadness

I had a friend who passed away last month, on the 18th. He was living in a nursing home and couldn't do anything for himself any more, so it was not a big surprise that he had passed on but it was still such a shock when I got the message. I had known him since I was a young teenager, and he was one of the few adults I had in my life who was always there for me, no matter what. I got to visit him in his nursing home back in late April for a few hours. It was good to see him but sad to see the shape he was in. He had a TBI with a stroke on top of it, and while I could tell he was still in there, he couldn't talk hardly at all and had to be tended to 24-7 by the nursing staff and by his wife. She did an amazing job of advocating for him and seeing to it that he was comfortable and well cared for. There will be a memorial service next month. I'm going to say a few words. That's all I have to say for now.

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...

Just another update...

So another month has gone by without an update from me. There have been a few events in that time, so let's get into it. I just got back from a five day vacation trip to Dallas to see my brother and his family, plus my dad and stepmom, who drove down from Indiana to visit with us all. It was a good visit, I was sad to leave at the end of it. I got to reconnect with my nephews and bond a little bit with my niece's kids too, plus see my brother's new house, visit with my sister in law, dad and stepmom, and generally relax a bit after six months with no time off. My brother hurt his back picking up a transmission in his garage a couple of weeks ago, so he was hobbling around while I was there. He had an MRI done and they found some cartilage from a ruptured disc was pressing on his sciatic nerve in his back, which caused some foot pain and swelling. The doctor told him the cartilage would dissolve over about six weeks or so. He got some prescription pain medication which helped a bit. He could walk but was still in a lot of pain, so he spent a lot of time laying on the floor with his foot elevated. Hopefully it will clear up soon. He's working from home while this is going on and his job has been supportive, so I think he'll be okay eventually. Dad and I had a chance to talk while I was in Dallas for a few minutes. There's been some hard feelings between us for a long time because of some of the things I went through when I was a kid and young adult. We didn't talk for a long time, but about six weeks ago when we were planning this trip my brother and I had a long phone call with him and sorted some of it out. My dad expressed a lot of regret over the way we were brought up and said that there was a lot he'd go back and change if he could. Hearing his apology helped a lot, and now I'm planning on checking in with him on a regular basis going forward. About a week and a half ago, I had a job interview with Equinix. It didn't go very well. I didn't know what to expect walking into it as this was the first "corporate" style interview I've had, plus it was the first time I've had a job interview in several years, so I wasn't really prepared for it like I could have been. They asked me a bunch of technical questions that I kind of stumbled through, some of which I couldn't answer very well. They said that I would hear back from them in about two weeks, but I'd be surprised if they want to schedule a second interview so I'm not getting my hopes up. Also, after thinking about it for a while I'm not so sure this Equinix job was what I really want. They work 12 hour shifts, on weekends, and some time on the night shift is required, and that's not really what I'm hoping to find in a new job. It wouldn't be an improvement over my current job, which has me working an early morning, weekend shift already. What I want is a Monday to Friday, 8 to 5 type of job that has me working in a data center environment where I'm comfortable, so I'm thinking that Equinix isn't right for me, after all. If nothing else the interview was good practice for the next one, so I'm not too upset over it any more. This past month I spent a lot of time working on that Cursor Udemy project, and now I'm at the point where I'm thinking I should move on to something else. Working with the Cursor AI has been interesting, but it's a time sink that I'm not anywhere near the finish line on, and I really don't think I want to invest much more time with it going forward. After that interview debacle I'm more interested in polishing my other skills, so today I dug out my old CCNA notebooks and brought them with me to work, hoping to have some time to go over them and refresh my memory on the networking side of things. I may still work with Cursor a little bit just to see if I can get any progress made toward finishing that project, but since I had to shit-can the first Cursor project, after starting it over twice, and having spent a month working on this Cursor project, I'm not feeling too confident about it now. It still isn't clear what the finished product is going to be, and I'm afraid that I'll just wind up investing a lot more time in something that isn't going to work out in the end. I'm not a web developer any more, and since this project is so heavy on using React and JavaScript (two things I'm not that familiar with) and light on Python, the progress has been slow and painful. It just isn't what I'm looking for now. I wanted to work on a Python project using Cursor, but this isn't that and I'm thinking I should just move on. I feel like my networking skills are atrophying, especially when it comes to Cisco IOS, and I want to rekindle some of that before I lose it for good. Well, that's good enough for now I think. I could write some more but it's getting tedious, and I think this post is long enough. In my next post I might write about this new Mayo Clinic diet I've been on since January, or my experience working with the Arnold Schwarzenegger "Pump" fitness app. Both have been interesting and difficult in their own ways. Or who knows, I might write about something else entirely. Anyway, back to the grind...

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