Well, it’s certainly been a couple or three months since I’ve posted anything I can let be public.
Where am I at in October of 2026?
It’s a Saturday. It’s October 10th. The colder season is trying to set in after long hot summer months for this area.
I’m in Cincinnati, still.
I’ve been in near-total isolation since 2020 when the Covid crisis set in.
I have been so busy most of the whole time that I haven’t really given myself alot of time to reflect outside of the necessary vacations, where, the focus was on enjoyment of the rare downtime.
On the career front, my time at IBM ended in January. I took a short contract somewhere to pay bills before my current gig, I believe in mid-June to late-July.
Then at the end of July I took a longer term contract at a place I can’t name publicly yet. I’m approaching the 90 day mark which I earmarked for evaluation, and it still looks tentative. While I’m enjoying it, it’s drinking from a firehose adapting to it, and I’m now a “younger old guy” instead of an “older young guy”. My consolation is that most of my peers are also senior in the field and this is a closer age group than I’m used to working in for 2026.
In terms of the tech, I’m behind on containerization and modern CI practices for development shops after working in infrastructure where those things did not exist for 5 or 6 years for the IBM work. I need to learn Gitlab inside and out, and I’m still struggling with debian packaging process and its supply chains, conventions etc. for a repackager.
The toolchains are all different. It’s not a setup that just “being smart and figuring it out” learns, it requires exposure and effort on it. Even the documentation doesn’t help very much — it’s heavy on reading, lots of reference, and sparse applicability of reference with little sidegain. The Debian documentation is both volumous and, while not bereft of value, the value is sparse and pieced together over time. This is likely because it was developed organically. Some of the packaging smells like older trust models that aren’t really used anymore.
I wish I’d found this place younger when I had more energy to grind on it.
My house rental is in a bit of disrepair from repeated grind periods. I’m still recovering from the lock-in required to manage this sudden job shift.
In terms of fitness, I’m really not in great shape. Still stronger than the average bear but weaker than I’ve been as an adult. I just haven’t had time for working out getting in gear for the new work. I’ll have to address it and soon, old injuries are coming back that testosterone can’t mask or isn’t masking anymore because I’m getting older. Grey is setting in faster than I hoped.
There’s a cross-strategy, cross-domain, cross-era secret squirrel “convergence” approaching that I’ve been looking forward to for a long, long time. I don’t know if I should describe it. There are backup plans to backup plans, but tying it all together for a full circle if all goes well will be sweet. It’s rather obvious, but I’m not dealing with very strategically intelligent problems these days and most of my struggles are environment, routine and age. Still, it’s the principle of the matter.
In terms of Dark Horse, I’m still staring at the package manager. I barely have time to work on it.
Austin move? Tentative still. March? Who knows. I’m back into one of those Jungian provisional lives until shit settles down from all the chaos last year and this upcoming circus trick.
Hell is other people.