I’m still alive, I swear. You can check my pulse. It’s still sorta going.

I need to write more posts for this blog, if only to reflect on my own feelings a little bit more in writing. Maybe journaling again would be a good idea, maybe publishing it out to the world like this.

Updates have been sparse, but that’s to be expected. The toddler has taken up a ton of my time, much to my joy and amusement. Unfortunately, days have started to blend together into the same mush, which isn’t great. I need to start breaking up my weeks a bit more and going into the office instead of simply WFH all the time, if only to prevent myself from getting into a “every day is the same day” funk.

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An Old Man Reminisces

The first grill I ever bought was a Weber kettle. Christ, I was young then. Young and stupid. The first time my roommate and I tried to light that thing was on the balcony of our third floor apartment. Central Ohio didn’t really get hit hard by hurricane Ike but a storm was definitely rolling in from the east. We set the grill up on the north side of the building and couldn’t get the damn thing lit for all the wind, so we used more and more lighter fluid. The lid came into play in short order, thankfully, and we ended up letting the thing rust out on the balcony. I don’t know if we were more afraid of the grill or my own asinine stupidity, but it was definitely fear that kept me from using that thing much more.

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The Long Boring Part Before the Recipe

Thanksgiving dinner is my favorite thing to cook every year. It really only got big for me when I was 19, my group of friends ended up starting a friendsgiving a tradition that has so far lasted for 15 years. It’s been my favorite day of the year every year and as I’ve grown up and started my own family I’ve carried that love for that event over to the holiday proper.

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This is a short story I found in my old Blogger profile while I was cleaning things out. The date on this is 3/22/2010, which seems like it checks out to me. I remember writing this after taking some adderall to study and ended up cleaning the whole apartment, writing a single page of legible fiction, and then failing out of community college.

I’m posting this here because I lost it for 13 years. I never thought I’d see it again and I want to keep it so I can go back and wish I had the guts to edit this and make it something worth my time. Presented without further ado: Confessional. I warn you, it’s not great.

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I made a fun little website called sansculottid.es all about the French Republican Calendar. If you’re not familiar with the calendar and why I think it’s cool, go immediately read Ursula Lawrence’s excellent introduction to her French Republican Wall Calendar.¹ Her calendar’s focus on the natural elements really drew me in, and I really think this part stands out.

The authors of the original calendar thought carefully about when to honor each item. If they did it right, this version should at least be somewhat predictive of what will come into season when. For example, rhubarb almost always appears in the grocery store within a week of Rhubarb Day. Tulips, violets, and lilacs also tend to appear in sync. And for those of us living in northern climes, there is something truly appropriate about assigning coal, peat, and manure (yes, manure) to the depths of January.

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My go to move when making a character for any TTRPG is to make the Zealot of a Small Order. A lot of the time for me this takes the form of a Lawful Neutral dwarf cleric who is utterly devoted to one very specific reading of one very particular facet of one domain a given major deity.¹ It’s so fun and easy to come up with a character concept that has an interesting perspective by taking that reading to its logical conclusion at a Heroic 11² I like that Zealots of Small Orders tend to be earnest weirdos who seldom fit in. I love the idea of dedicating your life to an aberrant perspective on minutae.

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I really haven’t used my Windows machine much since getting the Mac for work. I should probably stop that, it’s just…so much more convenient to use the Macbook in most cases. I mean, it certainly helps that it’s portable and not tied to one desk location, but I’m usually at that same location using the same monitors for the Windows desktop.

I guess the problem is I mainly use this machine for gaming and since the baby I haven’t really been able to dive into games like I used to. Maybe that will change, maybe not, but the one thing I do know for certain is I have been enjoying setting up this machine to use WSL 2 in as many cases as possible. I never really had to spend to much of my time developing anything specifically for Windows and I honestly can’t imagine a world where that would happen anymore. With the power of containers it’s kinda pointless to do anything but run Linux nodes and ship your software in a container. In the long run, I kinda expect to see the death of Windows development for the Enterprise.¹

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We made it back! The Tupperbaby is an incredibly understanding traveler, though we did run into several issues unrelated to the baby.

You see, when Reagan fired those 11,000 air traffic controllers for striking, it had knock-on effects throughout the industry that caused permanent damage to not only that industry but to the labor movement writ large. This was followed by a series of recessions, terrorist attacks, recessions, coronaviruses, and recessions have kept the remaining airlines confident that they can get away with poor behavior because the government will just bail them out with no consequences. So now they’re just not afraid to funnel all their money right back to executives and shareholders.

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This post will be periodically updated as we travel throughout the day. I’ve set it as a draft for now (so this should be erased), but we’ll see how that goes.

I hate traveling, particularly flying. I’m over 6 foot tall, so there’s no comfortable way to sit in an airline seat for me. On top of that, I’m a Big Dude¹ so it’s even harder to just sit comfortably than you’d imagine. Last year we took the train west to Oregon and that was truly a delight. I’m less than thrilled about going through TSA again and I’m certainly less than thrilled about being in an absolute hellscape of suburban north-central Texas

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It’s working! I set up a self-hosted action runner on one of the scrappernetes nodes and made it run as a service. This allowed me to start building out steps using the doctl tools after I was able to install that on the node as well.

This was pretty easy with the Actions Runner documentation.

Download

# Create a folder
$ mkdir actions-runner && cd actions-runner
# Download the latest runner package
$ curl -o actions-runner-linux-x64-2.301.1.tar.gz -L https://github.com/actions/runner/releases/download/v2.301.1/actions-runner-linux-x64-2.301.1.tar.gz
# Optional: Validate the hash
$ echo "3ee9c3b83de642f919912e0594ee2601835518827da785d034c1163f8efdf907  actions-runner-linux-x64-2.301.1.tar.gz" | shasum -a 256 -c
# Extract the installer
$ tar xzf ./actions-runner-linux-x64-2.301.1.tar.gz

Configure

# Create the runner and start the configuration experience
$ ./config.sh --url https://github.com/foo/bar --token fubar
# Create a service.
$ ./svc.sh install
# Last step, run it!
$ ./svc.sh start

From there it was just a matter of making sure runs-on: self-hosted is in my workflow, which coincidentally looks like this.

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