I’m Still Alive

This blog has been dormant for over a year. That’s okay. I needed to shift my focus to other things. I’d like to begin writing again, but before I get back into it, I feel like I need to give an update of a few things since my last post.

Workout Update

I had written previously about my goal to workout and focus on my health. I did really well on that before the pandemic hit. I was consistently working out for 30+ minutes every weekday. I had figured out how to make it part of my daily routine. I would drive into the office early, workout at the onsite gym, shower and start the day at my usual time.

When the pandemic hit and we all began working from home, I never figured out a new hack to make home workouts really work for me. I have not been into a gym since the beginning of the pandemic, but I did do a lot of biking and hiking over the summer with my wife.

Workouts will start again soon.

The Election

I usually don’t share publicly my thoughts regarding political things, but I have to say that I’ve been absolutely appalled by the behavior of President Trump regarding this election. What he demonstrated was a complete failure of leadership. That’s enough on that.

Drumming

One thing that the pandemic enabled me to do was do much more drumming. I have an electronic Roland TD-10 drum set, which isn’t top of the line, but is a good enough kit. Over time I’ll begin upgrading components and eventually I will swap up to a better drum set. During this time, I discovered Drumeo, which I wish existed when I was in high school. I’ve mostly been following along with their videos on Youtube, but I plan to sign up for their membership for exclusive content. The Drumeo team really understands their customer. Drumeo has built an amazing product, videos, community, and culture. I love it!

Technology

One last thing. My family’s iMac has bitten the dust. We’ve ordered a new one, but the new machine isn’t likely to arrive for several weeks. So, I finally broke out a Raspberry Pi 3 that I bought over a year ago and never did much with it. I’ve set it up for my kids to be able to use during the day. It’s been awesome to see how excited my youngest kids have been in discovering Linux. I’m running the standard Raspberry Pi OS, so they are experiencing a Linux desktop for the first time. I taught my eight year old how to install game packages from the terminal. We installed about 75 games last night. He’s had fun exploring all of the different screensavers that are available. Fun stuff.

My thirteen year old published his first website last week. That was pretty fun to see him write the HTML and CSS, use Git, Github, and Netlify to put it all together. It was a super proud parent moment.

Blogging

It has been so long since I’ve written anything here, that I needed to upgrade gems for my Jekyll powered blog. I had to relearn how all of this works together. I still think Jekyll is awesome. I’d like to try out Gatsby at some point. I’ve been following its development since Kyle Mathews is an alumni from my program.