04/06/2024 19:29:50

As some of you may have noticed, I have been rather quiet over the last few months. There are a lot of reasons for my silence. The more observant among you may have even noticed that content has disappeared and reappeared from this site several times over the same time period. Long story short: The nature of this site and how and when I use it to express myself is changing. This change is long overdue.

For starters, I have been working on getting another job. After much soul searching and interviewing, I'm happy to announce that I will be returning to a former employer, Paylocity. I will start my new position there later this month. I finished my two week notice with Urban Electric yesterday and it was a very cordial departure, despite our deep differences of opinion when it comes to the subject of custom software development. They were and are truly wonderful people and I wish them nothing but the absolute best.

12/29/2023 12:04:41

So as most of you know, I tend to take the last few weeks of every year off. Primarily I use this time to celebrate the year and reflect on its events. I also use this time to tie up any tech loose ends that I have... and boy did I have a few this year.

My biggest piece of in-home tech debt was definitely my camera system. For years I have run a hodge podge front door camera which basically amounted to an indoor web cam mounted in my front window which was pointed at the foot door area of the porch. The web cam was hooked up a to Raspberry Pi 4 running an RPI distribution called MotionEyeOS. Sadly this software hasn't been updated since mid 2020 as the maintainer had stepped away and nobody has stepped up to maintain it since.

11/15/2023 20:47:39

Yesterday I almost died. At least I came as close to dying as I have ever come over the course of my life. I hadn't been feeling well since Monday morning. I was experiencing quite a bit of abdominal pain and bloating. It only got worse as time progressed on Monday and that evening I just wasn't able to sleep. No matter what position I got in, I just couldn't get to sleep due to the aches and pains. Finally right before 3 am on Tuesday the 14th I woke Annette and she convinced me to let her take me to the emergency room.

Annette saved my life, because I was going to wait. My plan at the time was to tough it out until the Urgent Care center opened in a few hours and drive myself down there after Annette left for work so as to avoid the possible expense and embarrassment of wasting an ERs time. In any event, as it turns out my gall bladder had an infection and the situation was rapidly deteriorating. This prompted the wonderful workers at the Prisma Greer Memorial Hospital to suggest an immediate removal of the gall bladder. They gassed me around 1 pm on the 14th and I woke up a few hours later sans gall bladder and was greeted by Annette and my parents.