I’ve been a bit slack with updates lately due to being too busy. In no particular order:
My Contract’s Been Renewed!
My current client finally renewed my contract, so that’s a relief. Unfortunately it’s just for an extra 3 months though, which will take me till mid March. The long term contractor there is retiring a little before that and he reckons there’s plenty of work for further extensions. Fingers crossed as the market is horrible at the moment.
Update: I was given the lead on an initiative to move their systems from using Oracle databases to PostgreSQL, which is a long term thing, so hopefully that’ll aid in staying here whist I ride out the market.
I bought a New Car!
Given the above, and the fact that my wife and I had been planning it for a while - for the first time in my life, I’ve bought a NEW car! In 3ish months or so, we’ll have a 2025 green Kia Sportage GT-Line S Hybrid. 🎉 Just this once, I’m having a top-of-the-line model with ever single feature they can throw on it. The monthly payment is a little more than our rent, but I’m gonna consider this my reward for living half a century and spending 99% of my working life in gainful employment. I’ve even ordered a custom license plate that has my initials, my year of birth, and “TEX” as the last 3 characters.
It should start being built soon and we should take delivery around the end of February.
Health
Not to linger too much on this topic but there’s good and bad news. On one side, my enemies will be dismayed to learn that I’m within 6 lbs of my high school weight and not being in any way overweight anymore. With a ton of hard work and graft over the last decade, I’ve gone from 2XL shirts down to medium. From size 38 trousers back to 32. I even fit into my old high school letter jacket. Not that I’d wear the bright red thing.
In total, I’ve lost 38 kg or 83 lbs or 6 stones.
My diabetes is even under fairly good control. On the negative side, my enemies will take comfort to know I didn’t lose that weight and control the diabetes soon enough to avoid getting neuropathy in my feet and legs. This means I’ll probably be in some form of low-grade chronic pain for the rest of my life. But, meh… It is what it is.
It’s who we are. We fight. We survive. We endure. We don’t need a reason. We are imperfect creatures. When we stumble, we reach for a shoulder to lean on. When we fall, we stand back up. We see the horizon ever out of reach and still we march on… Certain the answers lies just beyond it. Because that is our way. –Cid / Clive – Final Fantasy XVI
Joined Bluesky and Finally Closed Twitter
Most anyone who might be reading this will probably know that I’ve given in and joined Bluesky, and finally closed my Twitter account. Twitter had already gone super toxic, but after the recent US election result it was fully taken over by right-wing pieces of crap. Here or on home page, near the top you can find a link to my profile so give me a follow if you wish.
Frankly, I do prefer Mastodon, if only because: it’s entirely open source, the ethos is better, the users are more tech-savy, and I can write VASTLY longer posts if I chose to do so. But, for short things, Bluesky is like the Twitter of old and perfectly pleasant with it’s sharable blocklists.
A Little Tech Project.
I’m still waiting on parts, but I’m building a new home Kubernetes Cluster, made up of 4 Rasberry Pi 5s, all powered via ethernet (POE+). Still lots of info and pictures all but an article will eventually end up here and on my cloudcauldron.io blog.
As always, you can add my RSS feed to your reader of choice and if you made it this far thanks for reading!
Chris