51 Facts about me at 50.

• I was once in a boy’s choir when I was very young.

• I learned to swim.

• I went fishing in lakes and creeks - a lot.

• I was a boy scout.

• I swam in the Rio Grande river between Texas and Mexico.

• I learned to drive.

• I worked at Burger King as my first real job.

• I worked for an oil company cleaning rigs with a horrible hot soap and diesel emulsion.

• In high school, I learned how to change the brakes of a Ford pickup truck in under 90 seconds, and then competed at a state level in auto mechanics.

• I worked as an auto mechanic.

• I graduated High School

• I once took a sneaky trip to Mexico with a friend.

• I joined the United States Air Force.

• I learned how to load both conventional and nuclear bombs and missiles on F-111 jets.

• I moved to England for 2 years.

• I swam in the Atlantic ocean.

• I got married and managed to stay that way for 29 years and counting.

• I won a bomb loading (Lodeo) competition in the United States Air Force and I still have the engraved clock to prove it.

• I once saw 6 live nuclear bombs being put into a plane.

• I moved to Fayetteville, North Carolina.

• I learned how to load bombs, missiles, and the cannon of F-16 jets.

• I wore hot and oppressive “chem-suits” and gas masks for hours at a time during Air Force training exercises but had the times of my life.

• I was stationed in Saudi Arabia for a short time, where, aside from loading live bombs, I got to drive my squadron back and forth to the flight line in a bus through wild checkpoints.

• I swam in the Gulf of Mexico.

• I moved back to England for 28 years and counting.

• I worked as a roofer for a short time, then as a labourer on building sites.

• I had my first (and hopefully last) major operation.

• I learned a number of computer programming languages.

• I worked as a software engineer in Ireland.

• I slept rough several times on the streets of Dublin out of necessity - and to this day I still donate to soup kitchens and homelessness charities.

• I learned how to administer databases.

• I learned how to build, configure, and deploy computer systems in data centres.

• I visited France and Spain for work for a few days.

• I went on holiday with my family to Egypt, Florida, Greece, Lanzarote, Rome, New York, New Orleans, Vegas, Cyprus, and Scotland

• I have volunteered as a trustee and IT systems administrator for 3 charities/nonprofits.

• I have swam in the Red Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Aegean Sea.

• I road tripped with the family across the western United States from Nevada to Texas, and across both Louisiana and Texas going the other way.

• I watched a sunset at the Grand Canyon on one side with a full rainbow behind me.

• I raised two strong, independent, and kind daughters.

• I visited Poland for a friend’s funeral.

• I learned how to be a DevOps engineer and build computer systems in the cloud with code.

• I built my own gaming computer from individual parts.

• I have owned almost every Nintendo console ever made, a Sony Playstation 2, 3, 4 and 5 - but never any kind of Xbox.

• I started my own company (twice technically).

• I have grown my own fruit and vegetables for over a decade.

• I gained financial comfort and bought most every material thing I ever dreamed about getting - aside from a guitar.

• I learned that true happiness doesn’t come from any of that.

• I graduated from University and gained my degree in Environmental Management and Technology.

• I caught Covid at least once.

• I broke multiple ribs in a bicycle crash.

• I thrived in lockdown.

from “Ulysses” by Alfred Lord Tennyson

Free hearts, free foreheads - you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
‘T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Work

• I’m down to 44 days left in the contract, 28ish working days.

• I had some successes integrating our Alertmanager into a corporate tool called Service Now via its API, so we can send alerts in theory. I say in theory as no one’s defined any useful alerts in our eleventy-seven thousand metric points. Given we have no SRE, that’ll probably fall to me, and it’s really not my area of expertise. But, we do what we must.

• Made no progress on getting the Application Gateway / WAF into Staging. Will slip that in tomorrow and work to automate it a bit better with Terraform and Helm.

• Learned about the existence of something called Blackbox for Prometheus which will allow for synthetic checks to remote addresses. Certainly cheaper than monitoring from an external company.

Food and Health and Age

• Had a jumbo hotdog covered in chilli for lunch. It was from the nearest burger van and wasn’t great so I have many regrets.

• Doesn’t matter though as I seem to be losing weight regardless of what I eat these days. I like to think I eat healthier and general and the youngest daughter and I do go gyming once or twice a week - but I’m probably just riddled with tumors with my luck. Am I joking or just being a hypochondriac? Even I don’t know! Should being 50 hurt this much?

Business

• I need to find a better finance tool to keep track of my business bank account. I don’t need anything over-complex and Quickbooks is a nightmare for that. Might look at Wave again.