So, I took a bit of a break. Definitely not intentional, but well... life hasn't exactly gone the way I expected. This is going to be a (somewhat) brief update about the last 9 months, which might shed some light on my absence.

When I made my last post in November, I was certainly expecting to come back to making posts after finals were done. I was just finishing up what (I thought) was my last semester at K-State, so I wasn't sure how much time I'd have for tinkering with my lab. At the time, the lab wasn't really doing much anyway other than hosting a single Minecraft server for my friends. Not much about that has changed, by the way. I had a start date at Cerner set for early January, so I knew I'd have a couple hectic weeks after finals as well. All of that added up to less time learning the things I thought I wanted to learn, but who knows if any of that would even be relevant at my new position anyway? My lab went on the back burner while I waited for things to settle.

Then it all went sideways.

As you may have guessed, the fall of 2019 was not my last semester at K-State. I hadn't put in any effort into two of my classes, and my final grade sunk a third. That meant that somehow, out of five classes, I had failed three. I had to re-take those classes, delaying my start date by half a year and costing me over $8,000 in student loans. There were some other side effects as well, but I will get back to that later. Luckily I was able to keep my old web developer job, my boss hadn't even thought about de-provisioning my account yet since I technically had a couple more weeks left on his payroll. I got my key back and headed back to work. Again, the lab stayed on the back burner. I didn't want to mess this one up, too. The stakes were too high, I had too much to lose. Again, more on that later. I kept my head down until about mid-March when spring break hit. That was when the COVID-19 situation went off the rails.

K-State told all students not to come back after break. Online classes continued as scheduled, and in-person classes had an extra week off while teachers prepared. It was at the end of that week that I moved back to my parents' house because I had almost no support structure in Manhattan (KS), and I didn't want to endanger my grandma by heading out there in an emergency. I thought it would only be for a month or two, but I ended up living with my parents until I moved to Kansas City in early July. The extra time with family was a blessing and really helped me recover from those side effects that I mentioned. I don't know how I would have fared in that little 300-square-foot apartment I was occupying, but not nearly as well as I did at home. I moved my lab with me, but really didn't do much with it initially. When Animal Crossing: New Horizons dropped for the Nintendo Switch, I did help create a Discord bot to help keep track of the turnip ~stock~ stalk market. If you're interested, you can find it here. That is currently being hosted on a VM with far too much power for such a lightweight app, but I have power to spare. Other than that, the only VM I'm running is the Minecraft server, which was actually shut down at some point and then re-created with 1.16. I was able to talk to my dad, a very high-level sysadmin at Caterpillar, about infrastructure hosting and learning about different systems, most of which amounted to him encouraging me to learn AWS. I'll do that eventually, especially since Cerner is using AWS, but some of the discussion was helpful for helping me plan out what I'm doing with my ESXi host. I'll eventually get around to another post about that.

At the beginning of July, I moved to a nice 2-bedroom apartment in the KC metro area. I tripled my floor space, got actual kitchen cabinets (instead of bookshelves), and set up the second bedroom as an office. Given that all of my training with Cerner has been remote work so far, it was a good move. After orientation, I dove into training where I blew the Linux, LVM, and OracleDB material out of the water. There was some other content in there as well, but it doesn't make me look as good so I'll just gloss over it. On Monday of this week (August 3rd), I went through the draft process, which is basicall speed-dating but for managers instead. I met with 7 different managers in 2.5 hours to determine which team I wanted to be on. The other students did the same, and each student provided their manager rankings while each manager provided rankings of the trainees they met with. In the end, I got my first choice, a position in the Operations Center. I won't go into detail for now, but the schedule is very unusual and I'll need federal clearance before getting my hands truly dirty, but this is a huge step up for me.

There's a bit more good news: part of my first paycheck and bonus went toward buying components for a new computer. The old one has been freezing up on Linux ever since I started dual-booting, and the issue has persisted through memory and motherboard changes. In the end, I discovered that Ryzen CPUs (like my R5 1600) have major stability problems on Linux, and I would have to replace my processor. Additionally, games like Monster Hunter World had my processor maxed out on both CPU and GPU even on medium graphics, so I wanted an upgrade for further future-proofing. Thus, I headed to Micro Center and bought myself a whole computer-worth of shiny new parts, including an Intel i7-10700 and a Radeon RX 5700 XT GPU. I also got two 1TB SSDs, so I no longer have to rely on a 3TB HDD for mass storage across both Windows and Linux. After loading up Void Linux (originally musl, now glibc), the new build is flying and hasn't had a single freeze in the almost two weeks I've had it. As for the old build, that will be sold to my parents as an upgrade to the family computer, which is still using a second-generation i3.

However, not all has been bright and sunny. The worst side-effect of my extra semester is that my girlfriend broke off our 3.5-year relationship. The main reasons were that I wasn't putting effort into school and that I had stopped paying attention to what she wanted in the relationship. I think our physical distance played a major role in the second factor, but that could've been mitigated if I put effort into studying and graduated on time. This is the main reason why going back to my family in March was a good move, as I was able to spend time socializing with other people who cared and I managed to catch up with some local friends from high school who I've kept contact with. The breakup was originally phrased like it was a simple break and that we could get back together in the summer, but a brief text conversation in June revealed it was not to be. Getting closure with the relationship (and removing that "maybe" hanging over my head) ended up being more relieving than I thought, but the emotional scars are still there. I'm not going to spill too much here, but as I've said multiple times, this spring would have been a lot worse on my own.

So there you have it. I almost failed college completely, lost my girlfriend, moved to a new city, and started a new job. Life hasn't exactly been smooth for me, and I haven't kept up with learning administration. However, I've (re)started a couple of side projects, so hopefully new content will be coming! I can't wait to keep moving forward and growing, because that's really the only thing to do.