Wavesliders

We are all doing great as we wrap up 2024 Alyssa graduates this year and is working through the college application process. Aidan is a 1st year at VMI and will graduate in the spring (They count down to being a senior). Jenni sold her warehouse in Ashland with plans to do something in the commercial leasing space. When I left Capital One on April 7, 2023, I took a full year off. I spent most of my time off Hiking, Camping, gardening, and self-study (Go, React, K8s, Kafka superset...) Looking forward to leading a new team and managing big complex programs again soon.

I tried a plant-and-forget garden this year with excellent yields on squash, cukes, and hot peppers. Not a great approach for tomatoes or beans though. The electronics bench has been focused on repairs rather than builds lately. I picked up an old C64 to work on. Sourcing parts is a bit of a scavenger hunt, but I hope to have it running soon. The VIC-II Kawari project looks promising. It uses an FPGA to replace the VIC-II.

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.