Frickin Laser Beams in the eyes After over 30 years of needing glasses I'm getting Lasik surgery to correct my distance vision later today. I'm a little nervous, but not so much to keep me from going through with it. Being able to have normal distance vision without glasses will be so
2.5 years The COVID-19 pandemic has been a shitshow for a long time now, but my wife and I remained vigilant this whole time. N95 masks, staying socially distant, avoiding gatherings. I have been 100% remote for work for a long time now, so that helped too. My wife took early retirement
SG Junior Back in the distant past I used to play guitar. Not well, but well enough for a punk band. Since then I gave it up, nominally because I have tendonitis and just can't play like I used to. The songs I wrote were too fast for me to
Spaghetti Sauce I learned to cook spaghetti when I was 11 (I think, maybe 12?) and over the years I have developed a 'go to' recipe that is super easy and which I quite like. Here it is: Ingredients 1. 3 8oz cans of no salt added tomato sauce 2.
Moving during a pandemic TL;DR it's not recommended Sometime last year (2019) my wife and I began seriously discussing moving to be closer to her parents. Later that summer we went out to visit and look around at where we'd like to settle in the area close to them
AWS AWS, SAML, Lambda and a Makefile I have a Go AWS Lambda job that I release using a Makefile in the project. As part of the release I need to tell the Lambda job to update to the latest binary (kept in an S3 bucket). We use SAML for credentials, which will time out and need
Life Executor If I had known what I know now about being the executor of someone's trust/estate I'd have tried really hard to not take the job. It would have been better to pay an attorney to handle everything after the fact, and I think if the
DNS Added a pi-hole to my network I had read about the pi-hole [https://pi-hole.net/] project, and decided to make one, because the Raspberry Pi is neat hardware and I hate ads and tracking. Having once work in ad-tech I can attest to how soulless and disturbing it is. I bought a Raspberry Pi 3 Model
Career On dealing with naysayers This post might come back to haunt me someday, but... Today a friend of mine mentioned that a new leadership hire shot down something he mentioned, claiming that it was too ambitious or out of reach. Naturally this was upsetting, as well as a disappointment. He then asked: "How
Cryptography I can't say enough good things about 1Password. I can't recommend 1Password [https://1password.com/] strongly enough. When huge breaches like this one come to light you can use their integration with haveibeenpwned [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] to find out what username/password combos have been exposed and then use it to login to those sites and
SaltStack Featured Generate Secure Pillar Anyone using Salt Stack should be familiar with using secure pillar files. If not, here is a basic intro I created for setting it up. Using the secure pillar can prove a challenge for folks who aren't familiar with GnuPG or PGP in general. This is a shame,
