Returned (Again!)
It's not a good look when every third post on your blog is to apologize for your extended absence, but that's where I am. For the devoted Pepperland followers, you probably noticed that the blog was not just stale, but offline for a while. (Since December 2022, in fact.) The little Raspberry Pi 4 computer that hosted the site got the Adafruit strain of Covid-19 and abruptly stopped working. This came during a fairly busy time in my life, and so restoring the blog – which was admittedly a bit fallow, anyhow – dropped pretty low on the priority list. I just today crossed the entry off of my to-do list that I wrote there on January 25, 2023 to "extract information from my blog."
Why I've been preoccupied since December 2022 is a story (or series of stories) for another day. But there's a lot that's happened in the world of technology since my last blog post that I'm eager to get talking about. I'm still a network nerd, though no longer professionally – I retired in January 2023 once my Juniperian handcuffs came off. Most of the things I've been investigating since my last post are in the world of AI – which, incidentally, is related to why I wanted to resuscitate my writing to begin with.
Over the past year of retirement I've tried to develop a bit of discipline to keep myself sharp. One of the bits of discipline is around writing more. I even took a writing class, to develop my process and to establish some habits. Armed with a fresh perspective on technology, with a renewed interest in writing with a regular cadence, and with nothing but time on my hands, I hope the next post I make on the blog isn't another apology for an extended absence. But if it is, I'm sure it's with good reason.
Before I originally launched my blog I wrote a handful of posts to establish a backlog, so that I could post something once a week but not (immediately) feel the pressure to have to write a weekly article. This time, I re-launch it without a backlog. I'm putting myself out there again with no safety net, but I do intend on posting something here weekly, if not more often (should the mood strike).
Look to this space for some of my thoughts and experimentation on AI, networking, mathematics, game theory, and maybe some talks on the music I'm listening to or the books I'm reading.
Thanks for sticking around, those of you who did. And for those who are just finding my blog now that it's once more beaming its signal out into the ether[net], welcome!