Archive by year

Today my Midco connection was converted from cable to fiber.  It was a couple hour outage and went pretty smooth.

First the aerial run was swapped to fiber.  It is much thinner, as the tech noted that I had beefy RG-11 stuff installed before.  That terminates in a box on the outside of the house.  Then a small fiber patch cord was run in through ledger using the conduit that I previously put in for my garage network run.

The tech was very good to work with.  He said he normally does commercial installs, and was on this job because I have a business connection.  The cable routing of the patch cord in the basement was outstanding and meticulous.  Without me even asking, he followed my other cables through 4 different section of finger-duct all around the corner under the stairs.  Glorious!

My OPNsense router recognized the new connection and the Dynamic DNS service automatically updated my outside DNS entries to point to the new IP address.  This was also a win!

The new service is 300x300mbps for $85.  Previously I had 200x20mbps for $115.  Business class, because port 25 started getting blocked a few years back on the normal plans.

The day was overshadowed by the PHP vulnerabilities.  Early in the morning I deemed them worth shutting things down so I had disabled my 80 and 443 NAT rules.  Then later when I had time I disabled all the entries on my reverse proxy server, re-enabled the NAT rules, and then enabled reverse proxy entries one by one as I verified they were not affected or patched them.  Oh and also I had some trouble the day before when a couple VMs curiously spiked in CPU and became unresponsive.  So reliability has not been great in the last 24 hours!

Our third child Annette was born on August 7th and is now one month old and healthy.  For the previous children I took the three paid weeks of leave offered by my employer, but for this one I opted to try out the 12 weeks leave available through the FMLA program.  If I hadn't, hiring help seemed likely.  Now I am through with 4 weeks of it and wanted to do a look back.

Having three kids three and under of course keeps one pretty busy, even with two parents at home.  Getting an hour or two in a day for household projects or hobbies is challenging.  So getting anything like that done seems like the most notable thing about the weeks and is mostly what I write about below, but 90% of the waking hours are feeding and entertaining children.

In the hospital I read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy--a relatively short book.

Week 1

We had Anna's mom helping us for the first week which was super nice.  It seems like the first week was all about recovering from the hospital experience.  What they do there is as pleasant as reasonable, but you don't leave feeling well-rested!

Avril was going through a rough 3 weeks of bedtime.  After 7:45pm putdown she would cry on and on no matter how many times we checked on her or "reset", often finally going down amicably at 9:30-10:00.  This put a serious dent in our late evening relaxing!  I don't recall exactly why this started or ended.

It seemed like we had some sort of doctor, chiro, or whatever follow-up appointment every day.

Week 2

Anna found her dream dining table in a rummage sale listing so we picked it up Sunday morning.  Duncan Phyfe-style table with missing leaf, and 6 chairs.  The table itself needed lots of TLC so I spent a few hours on both Sunday and Monday gluing various pieces of it back together.  It turned out pretty good!  The chairs are solid but once the kids are done making messes they will be due for a reupholstering.

A few days later Louise jumped up on the table to get some food and scratched it quite a lot with her claws.

Again almost every day some sort of appointment.  One of them was newborn photos which turned out lovely.

Week 3

I looked out the front window one morning and saw a Blackstone grill and some junky furniture on the curb.  The house across the street is a rental and sometimes the tenants just put stuff out in a "free pile" (as we call it from our boating days, when there would be a free pile in many of the cruiser-friendly marinas).  So I went over and rolled it across the street to its new home.

It needed some work, so same drill as the table gluing--a few hours sunk into it each of a few days.  It is funny how restoring a grill--normally a Sunday afternoon project--can consume all free-time for days when you have very little of it.  Anyways I tested it out with a propane tank, used an angle grinder flap-disc to take it down to bare metal, re-seasoned it, converted it to natural gas, and bought a hard cover for it.

Sometime in here I finished the second book in the HHGTTG series.

At the end of the week I attended a meeting of the Mandan Historical Society.  For the past few months I had been investigating why their website was offline and communicating with them to see if there was interest in reviving it.  After some back-and-forth, the final answer at this meeting was yes.  Since then I have been putting in some time on this occasionally.  The website had a lot of great information on it so I think is worth saving.

Week 4

On Monday we had the van in to get the lane-detection camera calibrated, since they had forgotten to do that a few weeks prior when replacing the cracked windshield.  Then that evening we got a new rock chip, and only about 1/4 mile away on the same road where the previous windshield had gotten cracked!  This one didn't spread so we "only" had to take it in on Wednesday to get the chip sealed.  While that was getting done I took Alice and Avril in the stroller for donuts a few blocks away.  Hopefully we can be done with all that window business for a while now.

Our ISP (Midco) was out for a site survey.  After years of "fiber is coming" mailers and commercials in the area, it seems like we are just days or weeks away from it finally happening.

Overall

I am happy with the choice to take this much time off.  I do miss certain aspects of work and especially the exciting projects that are probably going on with a merger that closed shortly before I left.  But the work here at home is important and also rewarding.