Life, Kids, Technology & that move to another continent
What I have to say is not new. I learned it from my dad. He was a strong believer in clarifying this misconception. It came up recently when the girls, my mom and I were at a chocolate factory tour in Germany on half term Break.
This is very important so i will only go over it once. White Chocolate is not Chocolate.
Enjoy your holidays…
I asked OpenAI’s ChatbotGBT if it can become Skynet. It explained that no it cannot become self aware or launch nuclear strikes.
Phew, I trust the word of an AI I don’t know how it was programmed. I feel better now.
A totally random useless yet nostalgic data point for today. It has been 6,000 days since I started at Thomson Reuters. I thought the nice round number was cool.
I would never have guessed were that journey would take me, yet here i am a divestiture, and acquisition later in another continent.
Photo taken outside 3 Times Square after i accepted the offer and before i started.
I have had this one in queu for a while. The photo is self explanatory. I love how creative the girls are
My kids may love living in England. However they may not yet have fully native however. This is based on their request to watch the USA vs Iran World Cup match instead of England vs Wales.
Of course after the USA’s first goal the girls did have me switch to the England game. That and we are watching football so their is that.
I can finally say that I have started a new role today at work. Saying I have moved roles isn’t new. I have done so on average about every 1 to 2 years over the past 14 years at Thomson Reuters / Refinitiv / LSEG. This change feels different. Since as far back as 2018 it became clear to me that I wanted to do more in the Security area of Technology vs the Operational area that had been working in. Since then I have tried to spend as much time as I could personally and professionally in the security area with my main role still being operationally focused.
In 2020 right before COVID-19 hit I applied for a role in a Security Architecture group. The timing was not good due to the pandemic. At the time i was a bit disappointed however it worked out in the long run. A few months later another role presented itself that was still in Operations (Reliability Engineering). It was however a good career progression for me. I wouldn’t have thought to go out for it until prompted. Advise from that is listen to people you trust.
Flashing forward to this year I was interested in a role that came up. I was talking to my previous manager about it. She was very encouraging and gave me some advise i did not initially act on. A few months later I approached someone doing a similar role I was interested in. I was looking for advise on what I could do to beef up my skills so I could apply for the role. The response I got was I should just apply. So I did.
I got the offer in late July. I have been transitioning with ever increasing amounts of time in the new role since August. Today is the first day I am full time in the new role. It is a bit anticlimactic since i have been spending most of my time in the role for most of October.
What is funny to me is the role is very different in many ways however at the core is still the concepts of DEV SEC OPS. It is just approaching the problems from a different angle. That is overly simplifying things a bit How i go about my work is vastly different now. There is also so much to learn however that is the fun part.
Now I need to start explaining to people what a BISO is and stop explaining what Reliability Engineering is. I do have some confidence now that my wife will stop telling people (very incorrectly) that I am a project manager.
I have had numerous hosting providers in the past 25 years. Do I date myself by saying that? It is the truth I guess. I have hosted a website in one form or another for easily over 20 years. Trying to think of them I cannot recall all the providers I have used. I have had full service web providers. I have hosted my own. Way back when I first started out I even used free sites like Geocities or hosting via my AOL account. Yes I had one of those. I have had dedicated service providers for just mail and blog. And probably for a while I might have done nothing other than simply used Gmail. Over two years ago I moved to a provider siteground.co.uk. They hosted my blog, some email domains of mine that are not on Protonmail and any odd and end webiste I put up. For what they offer it is probably overkill for me. I signed up because the previous provider I had Hostpoint.sh contract was up. Hostpoint was on the expensive side. They were a great provider for what they offered. The cost benefit for me did not make it economically sensible to continue to use them. Siteground had a really good deal so i signed up for a 3 year contract with them. For me three years is like a lifetime. I never used to like 1 to 2 year mobile phone contracts. The deal was too good to pass up so I signed for that term.
Now as I write this I have less than 6 months on my site ground contract I looked at how much the renewal cost will be for my hosting. Without the deal the prices it is about triple what I was spending. I have had zero problems with Siteground. Like Hostpoint they have been a fantastic hosting provider. My challenge is for what I use them for the price they’re charging just seems ridiculous. I could host a site myself at home if I wanted to sort out mail relaying. I do not want to so I started looking for alternative providers. Oddly most hosting providers are not very cheap. yeah $5-$15 (£3-£12) or so sounds inexpensive however it adds up over the year. Most of the good ones are on the higher end of that range.
Giving up on the relitivly expensive consumer proivders I ended up looking at lowednbox.com for deals for a VPS. If you do not know a VPS is. a Virtual Private Server. So basically a virtual machines at a hosting provider. A friend showed me the lowendbox site ages ago and i really didn’t bother looking into a VPS. I was doing too much with my Raspberry Pi’s so did not want to pay for any remote systems. Now however a cheap (£1-£3) a month VPS (Virtual Private Server) might just do it for me. Most of what is offered at the £1 range may not be enough RAM for my needs however for slightly more or basically £15-£23 a year i can get a pretty decent virtual server that i could replicate most of what i get from a provider. In my search I even found a provider that does shared hosting (what most people get as webhosting) for $1.50 a month.
I wasn’t sure what i wanted so i picked up two seperate deals (3 if you could a VPS i got for a VPN project that i may write about another time) from lowendbox.com. I got the cheap $1.5 a month shared hosting as well as a VPS for a year for £22. Even with both providers I am paying 25% of what i would have paid if i renewed siteground.
After a bunch of trial and error with the cheap shared hosting provider and the VPS I settled on the VPS. While I was figuring out what to do and realised the $1.50 a month basic provider didn’t seem to be working out I approached the situation a bit differently. My VPS can support my website pretty easily. Even if there is a reliability issue the website doesn’t need to be up 99.99% of the time like email kinda needs to be. That meant I could decouple my mail hosting from my website if I could do it cheaply enough. I went about trying to find an email only hosting provider. The problem was just like with regular hosting everyone offered really cheap introductory rates and then the price was much higher. With email only hosting providers it was kind of funny since the price they were offering I could buy a cheap complete hosting package for the same amount of money. I then continue to look for relatively easy to maintain out of the box email applications so I could possibly host a dedicated email VPS. That was proving problematic.
In my research around hosting my own mail on a dedicated VPS I stumbled across someone reviewing a relatively inexpensive email hosting provider. Their annual plans that offered more than what I needed were pretty cheap. What was even more interesting was the fact that they offered a lifetime plan that was only slightly more limited than the annual offering I was looking at. That lifetime plan options was also more than enough for my needs. It was approximately three years worth of hosting upfront to get the lifetime plan however the company seemed to be around for a while and pretty stable. I assume that I could at least get a return on my investment in the first three years. If I am lucky I won’t have to worry about paying for mail hosting for a while beyond that. The email provider was MXRoute.
I set up a few of the email domains that are use already and the system has been pretty stable. The final cut over was moving the mail domain my mum uses and that I sometimes use. The move was pretty easy. The only challenge was setting up mum up while she is in the US and I am in the UK. The fix was getting her to use GMAIL. She had a GMAIL account she previously used already. I just directed her GMAIL account to pull from her old hosting provider I had. I then switched her over to gmail in two FaceTime sessions with her. Then once GMAIL was working I simply changed the POP account settings in GMAIL web for her and migrated the MX records of the domain. Overall there was not may issues.
With mail sorted I went back to the VPS I setup and got my blog setup. I decided to use Yunohost for the VPS. it is an app that sits on top of Debian that lets me administer the server and install other apps pretty easy. it had a one click install for WordPress (what I use for the blog) as well as many other applications. After playing around with the setup for a while I decided to move the blog over and hope for the best. I found a plugin that pretty easily migrated the blog from one instance of WordPress to another. I then changed my DNS and everything moved over pretty well. I am finishing writing this in on 6-April, exactly one month from when I moved over to my VPS. So far things are working fine. Only thing different for me and the old provider so far is that I need to remember to monthly take a backup of the site in case I break something.
Overall my VPS is costing me £24 a year. If I kept site ground that price would not cover 2 months on the regular priced plan I would have to move to when my contract runs out. Now lets hope I do not mess up my setup since I only have myself and friends to fix it vs a provider!
Editing note I wrote this in Feb 2021 and agave been slow to post. Funny enough even though I change my tech setup a lot this post is still accurate a year and a half later.
I took for granted doing basic things around the house. Such as putting dishes in the dishwasher, or bringing laundry upstairs. Those tasks are more challenging being performed with a not so furry friend on your shoulder.
When I first read the Harry Potter books I was already an adult. They only came out when I was an adult. I even noticed a review I gave of Harry Potter and the order of the Phoenix way back in 2003 on this blog. My mum who was a reading teacher at the end of her teaching career suggested for a while that I read them. This was at a time when only the first three books were published. I was reluctant since I am not typically a fan of fantasy books. I like science fiction not necessarily fantasy. I had to argue the distinction with my wife and nephew the other night while talking about reading Harry Potter to the girls. Since I was travelling for work all the time at the time my mum first recommended them. I was reading books very quickly while on the plane or travelling I took my mom up on her recommendation. I bought the first book. I was hooked after that. I blew through the first three books and then waited patiently for each subsequent book to come out. I would immediately buy it and usually finished it straight away.
In general I look back on reading the books for the first time and I thought they were good. There are obviously issues I had because of some of the childish stuff they did but I would say I was generally entertained by the books even if it was first a children’s book and i read them as an adult. Reading to my kids I love how much they enjoyed each of the books. I was ecstatic that they were finally willing to read them with me. Even better when we started reading them in April 2020 as lockdown for COVID was new both girls were semi into reading. They were not yet book lovers. Now after months of reading to them they each spent time with Harry Potter and other books I feel like they are both on their way to being book lovers.
As I started reading the series again to my girls I began to have a different opinion of many of the characters then I did when I first read them. When I realise that I thought back to something my friend Amanda had once told that she did not consider herself a Gryffindor. She also said she didn’t think that I was one either and suggested a Online Quiz that sort you into your hogwarts house. I am not typically an online quiz fan however I gave it a go. I actually gave it several goes since these tests aren’t necessarily scientific I did not get the same results all the time. It did get me reading more on the defining traits of each of the houses. As I did that and the quizzes again I realised I am pretty sure I’m not Gryffindor though some part of me thinks maybe a little. I am most likely Ravenclaw. Of course only in a story are two or three general traits what put you into a social group. If I had to pick which trates I think I exhibit or prefer over the others even if I exhibit some traits from all the houses I would still say Ravenclaw stands out.
I do not want to bash their Harry Potter characters since I love the books however wow Harry and Ron and to a smaller degree Hermionne do some messed up stuff. Gryffindor might call that brave or bold. At minimum it’s borderline reckless. Even as a kid I wasn’t like that. So blue and bronze colours from me.
My self identification as Ravenclaw has only been a mild disturbance in our household. My children being Gryffindor according to them. I don’t remember what M said she associates with or if she commented all. i think she wants nothing to do with this discussion.
If have to blame anybody I blame the lockdown for a lot of free time to read the stories and background details about them to way too much detail with my children.
Earlier this week i decided i was not ready to be the dad of a 10 year old. My soon to be 10 year old told me that i couldn’t stop it. She was right.
Here i am with a 10 year old. Today is our first non kids party party. Instead of a party with lots of ids at a play place or at the house she is having a few friends goto the movies and dinner.
On one hand no big party to put on. Or M to put on. On the other hand I have a 10 year old.
The title of this story is because for years when talking to the girls about turning 10 i would joke that they would be on the “wrong side” of the number 10.