Dreamcaching: Notes on the New Year

This is the introduction to what will hopefully become a timely logging of my activities. One of my goals for this year was to code more often. It's rather fun that my class in Scripting for the Web requires that level of commitment. Breaking away from the information security world and rather building things that are consumable is a fun change of pace. It's a nice change of pace from overtly technical commentary to something more relaxed and personal. In support of this goal are always my two cats Sundance and Cassidy who are pictured to the right, and my partner A (she/her).

This is a photo of my cats - Sundance and Cassidy.
Me making a silly pose while attempting to tie on a new lure while ice fishing.

Fooshing in the Northeast

Fishing has always been my preferred method to connect with nature and clear my head. Even when life is flying by fishing gives me a moment to take a breath and take stock of what's important in my life. It's what drove me back to academia, and it's what helps keep me sane in this insane world. There's a fun dimensionality to the sport - tension of the line, turbidity of the water, target species and its most common prey, influences from the climate, etc.. These datapoints get reduced to intuition in older fishermen. Having the opportunity to observe this intuition from decades of practice is something quite marvelous..

Smoothing the gray matter

Since the age of 4 I've been a voracious reader. I went from the child that said I'd never read, to the kid churning 10+ books a week. Since joining the workforce I've dropped that habit and spend most of my time reading through dev docs, readmes, and code. This isn't quite the print media I'd grown to love. To combat this mind numbing content, my goal for this year is to read at least 3 books a month. To the right are my current run of books for this year!

The books Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir and The Second Amendment: A Biography by Michael Waldman scattered on an orange wool rug
A diagram of new infrastructure that's used to support this blog. The image highlights the flow of traffic from the internet and how it routes through UFW rules to various services over authorized ports.

Oh look, some infra

Web hosting. It comes with the territory of trying to write a small blog. Captilizing on this requirement, it felt like the appropriate time to begin my transition off of cloud-based infrastructure and begin standing up my own alternatives. Without stable infrastructure at home yet I've opted to rent a VPS node from OVH that's based in France with unlimited bandwidth. This should handle all of my needs for remote fronting of content. For the time being there's only this limited Apache2 server. In the future there will be other fun hosted services (wireguard, dnscrypt, Gitea, etc.) to explore and maybe even some cool personal projects. I've rendered out a little map of my progress to the left!.