November 2025
Introduction
With this being my first post figured I should put a lil snippet of myself, within reason. I'm in my early 30's, I grew up in the northern midwest, I'm married, and I work in tech.
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I'm still not sure if I want to put days in their own pages and then keep it organized by months. I guess it really just depends how much I end up spitting onto the screen.
I mentioned I work in tech. Slightly more specific is I work in IR or Incident response doing digital forensics and recovery work. It can actually be pretty rewarding work, especially when you find a smoking gun while doing some analysis or you solve some wild problem for a client while trying to help them get back on their feet.
It can also be a bit of a slog at times. Work volume is all over the place sometimes and I just can't stand sitting around twiddling my thumbs.
With that I've been going through a course online that teaches backend development. Do I think I'll ever pivot to be a backend dev? Honestly at this point probably not but you never know. I really got into it because I want to learn how to program more. I do a lot of scripting with PowerShell and Python at work but I want to get better and better. I'm honestly really excited to dive into the Go portion once I get there. I'd like to try and do more of my projects in Go, even if it would probably be better suited for a one off script with Python or PowerShell. I'll write more about this tomorrow, I have to leave for our first ultrasound appointment for our first kid!
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Our 8 week ultrasound went well! To be honest he looked a little bit like a blob, ...but to be expected at only 8 weeks. Definitely excited to have the next one and see more of a lil human per se.
I imagine with this blog situation I'll be pretty good about doing it daily since it's new, but I fully expect overtime to not have daily updates. Plus how much is there really to talk about.
Back on the programming piece, I really never thought it was something I'd enjoy. Ten years or so ago I went to school for computer science and just hated it. Hated programming as I thought it was soul sucking. Looking back, I simply just wasn't motivated and didn't see how it would apply to my life at the time. Now though I'm very much enjoying it. I like having a problem to solve, especially if it's a problem or task that others routinely do that can be automated or improved with a simple program or script. The next section of my course is actually in straight C so I'm curious to C how it goes.
My father in law is pretty well off. I say this because near the end of December he's taking us out to New York City for a pre-christmast vacation. I've never been so I'm excited to experience the city, especially around Christmas time. Go skating at rockefeller center, the whole deal.
One thing we are doing apparently is part of our Christmas gift is some money to spend at FashionPhile. Now I grew up, looking back, on the poorer scale. My parent's did a great job because I never felt like a poor kid, but as an adult, retrospectively we definitely were not rich. I say this because what even do I purchase at this place. Even with not having to buy it myself it seems pretty daunting to choose. I mean a nice watch would be great accessory but my wife mentioned maybe picking up a nice pea coat to have for winter dates. I have no idea, I'll probably poke around and see what's up.
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I thought starting this blog would help with how I was feeling in my ole brain. The day before thinking of this I was playing solitare alone at home and wanted to have a nice cry, so I popped on a home video my dad made when my brother and I were pretty young. People make videos like this all the time now but back in the early 90's honestly was pretty impressive what he was able to put together. Even now it gets me boo hoo crying like a baby. I love and hate watching it at the same time. Time always moves on you know.
So I need to come up with a personal project for this programming course I'm going through and I think I finally came up with something. I want to write a rudimentary python program that helps with taking snapshots and managing some VMs in Proxmox. Now I know that you can already do that now with the Web UI, but it would be nice to be able to say, snapshot these 3-10 VMs all with this name. Oh but when I'm done I only want to remove it from 4 of them. It's a minor problem that I seem to always wish I had something for so why not spend hours on a solution using REST lmao.
Speaking of my course, yesterday I wrote my first C code. Actually pretty interesting how it compares to Python. As a fun test I wrote and compiled a C binary that just runs a loop and prints up to 10000000. Then I wrote a small loop in Python do to the same. Pretty wild starting the Python script, waiting a few seconds and kicking off the compiled binary and watching it rapidly catch up to the Python script. You always hear that Python is slow but it was cool to see that being put to reality.
Tonight the wife and I are doing a paint night and I got her some nice non-alcoholic wine so she can partake in a wine and painting night. Not sure what I'm going to paint yet but I'll maybe report back on what I do paint.
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Had a little wine and paint night with the wife last night. Non-alcoholic wine for her of course. Nothing like having an idea of what to paint in your head and absolutely failing to execute when putting it on cavnas. I like to think I'm pretty talented musically, but god help me when it comes to painting/drawing.
Hopefully today I get a decent guitar tone setup. I use an Axe Fx 2 XL, which for those who don't know is an amp model box. It's actually wildy useful and has in the long run, saved me a ton of money. Unfortunately I only know how to use maybe 10% of what it offers so I'm getting together with our lead guitarist today to try and improve the tone I have. With our recent live show that was recorded my guitar definitely got lost in the mix between the bass and lead guitar.
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For this course I'm going through I see on the course list I need to come up with a 'personal project' of sorts. I ran into the classic, 'what do I code' problem. But I did end up having a brain wave and created a python program to manage snapshots in Proxmox. ProxSnapMgr. Funny picture aside, I'm actually pretty proud of this project on the whole and honestly hope to add some more functionality in the future, what that could be who knows.
I tend to run updates in my homelab usually all at once with Ansible or sometimes manually if I feel like watching some progress bars. But one of the most annoying parts is snapshotting all my VMs/LXCs before I do it, cause ya never know. But this will allow me to snapshot any number of resources I want and then also allow me to remove any snapshots I want, all from the CLI. I sometimes like to keep certain snaps on higher priority resources just in case.
Today the wife and are doing our first daycare tour. Hopefully it's not shit and gives me good vibes about sending our child there while we work. Curious what the pricing will be as well. We have another tour someplace else later in the week but my choice is this place just because it's literally a 2 minute drive from our place.
Today we are also telling my wife's family that we're having a baby. We decided to tell her family first so she can have that bonding moment with her mom, which is totally valid. We'll be telling my family at Thanksgiving to allow my family to also have their 'moment'. Important to me that both families have this.
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After working our lead guitarist on a tone I came up with something way better than what I had before. Kinda fun to go through that process before hitting the studio. Makes me feel like a big time musician. Hopefully today at rehearsal it sounds good with the group. Also got to pick out one of his Gibson Les Pauls I'll be using to double track my parts. I think with my Fender Strat and a Les Paul it'll have a pretty neat sound.
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Toured another daycare facility this morning. This one was definitely much nicer you could just tell lol. Unfortunately there is a bit of a waitlist so I suppose we'll see if we get lucky. We ended up telling my wife's family about our pregnance the other evening and it went great! Still excited to tell my family on thanksgiving for sure.
Thinking of switching to Tidal from Spotify once the new year begins. I just want my spotify wrapped ha. A buddy of mine recently just switched and he's been really enjoying it. I've never been pleased with how much spotify doesn't pay it's artists per stream and Tidal is better about that. Plus they also don't have rampant AI slop on their platform as far as I know. Part of the pain of moving though would be moving over my playlists. My friend mentioned there is a service that you can pay a couple bucks to do that for you which is nice.
But I think I'll look into the Spotify and Tidal API's and make my own. Why pay a few dollars when I can use hours of my time to do that same thing
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We have our first official OB appointment today. Very curious how it will go and all that. But exciting! Hopefully health wise everything is a-okay.
I think I figured out what I want to get my wife for Christmas this morning. Sometimes leading up to the big holiday I'm panicking for a least a month or two because I just don't have an idea. I want it to be something she'll use and enjoy of course, but I don't ever want to be lame and just get some jewelry or something. I think she'll be somewhat surprised with this one though. At least I hope.
For awhile now I've been dealing essentially tennis and golfers elbow at the same time. I believe this stemmed from Covid and continously doing basically bicep curls as a main exercise. As at the time, that's all my former room mate and I have to work with. That plus me having a desk job where I'm on my computer all day compounded with most of my hobbies are hand/arm based. Video games, music etc. It comes and goes in waves but it does seem like it'll be around for a long time unfortunately. Recently it's been pretty managed, I have a pretty good ergo setup for work and I try and limit the amount of upper body based excersies I do at the gym. Usually only introducing one new workout if I'm feeling like my arms can handle it. It's certainly an extremly frustrating injury though. Heck I was coding some of my recent project on my laptop on a chair in our living room for two days over the weekend and just those two days irritated the ole arms. Can't have shit. Which is unfortunate because I like hanging out there and doing that stuff but if it's not ergo and healthy for the arms, gotta not do it.
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You ever have days where you just feel like you can do literally nothing correct? That was yesterday for me it felt like. I ordered this sliding accordian type door for a downstairs guest room and I didn't measure the length correctly I guess so it had a large gap. While I was able to remedy the problem it just felt like another failure on what feels like failure after failure of dropping to the ball. Recently I've been feeling very overwhelmed but I couldn't tell you by what. But it does feel like every task weighs 100 lbs. And I'm trying my best to hold them up all on my shoulders and sometimes I just want to let them all drop.
On a more positive note, we toured another day care today. It was ...interesting. They have this whole character universe they created with these cartoon characters where each character is supposed to help a child with something. Like reading, technology, charity etc. You get the picture. It was kind of a lot but we're considering them at least for infant care, banking on the fact that we get into our #1 choice by the time our kid really starts learning things.
We're also telling my father in law and his wife that we are having a baby tonight. Should be fun honestly. They're taking us to a pretty nice steak house which I'm sure will be very nice as they're pretty well off people.