Wavesliders

The family is doing great. We are gradually getting back to our pre-pandemic selves. Alyssa is well into her sophomore year and has found her tribe in the form of the Drama program. She is focusing on lighting and plans to explore other back of house roles. Aidan changed majors from History to Business. He will be a second year next fall (VMI counts backwards so that is a Junior or 3rd year at traditional schools.). Feels like a better fit for him. Although he still loves history, he is much more engaged. I think it challenges him more wich motivates him. Jennifer is still managing her commercial warehouse located in Ashland. She and her partners are actively working towards a sale so it is taking a little more time and effort. I left Capital One on April 7, 2023 wrapping up a 28 year career with the company. I came to realize that it was time for a step change and a need to center back on my values. I have always been passionate about process and statistics. I have leveraged TQM and MRP concepts throughout my career. Even before agile became the methodology de jour. I have decided to focus the next leg of my career in the Manufacturing / Industry 4.0 space. Someplace where product is tangible rather than just terms and conditions. Something that brings joy. I am taking a couple month hiatus before starting my search. Excited and optimistic about the road ahead.

First order of business while on hiatus is Trail Therapy. Looks like its going to be a hot summer so putting off the camping until the fall. Morning trail walks are on deck until then. After Squirrelmagedon '22 I have almost given up on growing corn. I did get Red Winter Wheat down last fall and it is doing really well. Just a few weeks away from playing in the dirt! Corn is going INSIDE the cage this year. Wish me luck. I have a laundry list of things to do in the shop while on break. Two sets of doors and finally building a CNC machine. Step 1 is to learn to and practice welding aluminum. On the electronics bench just wrapping up the garden monitor but that is really to brush up on IOT and MQTT more than circuits. Looking to delve into LoRaWan next which looks really interesting.

I'm looking forward to adding to my portfolio and getting some resemblance of a post production workflow in place while over the summer. Culling has always been a challenge (80k and growing) and there are a lot of duplicates to sift through after consolidating everything to one place.Some interesting AI tools are emerging that may make lighter work of it. I'm also working through an online color grading workshop that should help a lot.

For the Home lab I'm moving as much as I can to a self hosted Kubernetes cluster running on Debian 11 VMs across a several Gen7/8 Proliant servers. K8s took me a while to get stable. It's a fundamental shift in thinking really and is a pretty steep learning curve. Helm, Flannel, Rook, MetalLB, Nginx and Grafana. So far I have moved GitLab, Airflow, Jenkins and JupyterHub to the K8s Cluster with Postgres, Redis, RebbitMQ, Taiga, Penpot and my docker registry on their own VMs. Once I get the SAS Extender installed and extra storage in place for Rook I'll start on the rest.