Black Cat Blog

Thoughts, Stories, and Ideas

  • To The Salt Mines

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    Today begins a 7 day streak of work. While I am not thrilled about it, I will manage. At least during the week, I am only working 4 hour shifts. That makes things much more manageable. Today I shall live in the present as I did yesterday. I will enjoy the challenges that Linux and BSD provide.

    I would like to look for work right now. It’s something I want to do but I’ll end up doing it passively because the grass is not greener on the other side. The schedule I have now works despite not quite being ideal. At least work is easy enough.

    This morning I want to get my private cloud going. I had time this morning to install the operating system and I chose Alpine Linux for its small, efficient footprint. I’m finding that there is an ideal Linux distribution for just about every scenario. The only 2 Linux distributions that I dislike are Ubuntu and Mint. They’ve been as troublesome as Windows.

  • I Am Doing Better

    I have been on a low dose of Abilify now for a couple of days and I am doing better. I didn’t realize how tired my depression was making me. For the second day in a row now I have no needed extra sleep. I won’t use the word hope just yet. I have to see how things pan out over a 30 day period. I need some time to be convinced that this is not a placebo effect.

    I’m going to be working for the next 7 days straight but I am not finding myself that much bothered. Of course I say this now but let’s see how this actually plays out. I did a good job living in the present and not thinking of the future. This is exactly the headspace that I needed to be in and I will take this win.

    I even managed to finally get my fully virtualized network and VMs done. I realized ChatGPT was the enemy of this endeavor. I just did plain old Duck Duck Go searches this time to separate the wheat and chaff on my own. Lo and behold I found the answers I was looking for. AI is really not good for very much. Nothing beats good research and critical thinking.

    I realized I needed a virtual network for my home lab to exist on so I’m not breaking shit for poor Denisse. Part of that challenge was the fact that Verizon gave me this shitty router that I had to work around. I also wanted features like an internal DNS server for my home lab so that I don’t have to assign IP addresses to the VMs. All I have to do is let DHCP do its thing and the names get registered with DNS. This makes management easier.

    I really like dnsmasq. It makes DNS and DHCP easy. It’s had a somewhat dubious security history but it is healthy now and it’s mature software. It works well for virtual networks like mine. Now that all of this is done, I can spend some time spinning up a private cloud VM. At least the tinkering is done. The network is finalized.

  • Mourning The Loss of a Dream

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    I’m mourning the loss of my dream to one day have land in the mountains. I think I have come to the sad realization that I won’t be climbing out of poverty. I’m thinking the coming years are only going to be increasingly difficult. I fear that my life is going to be one of survival. Perhaps I’ve accepted this. But that doesn’t mean I cannot create new and very practical dreams.

    Since my prescriber has added Abilify to my regimen, I’m doing mentally better. Instead of feeling like I could break down and cry, I feel like I honestly could create new dreams that will be every bit as good and more achievable. I wonder what the coming days will bring. I know I’ll be in survival mode for a while because the economy is bad. I’m fortunate enough to even have this low end job. Service jobs are even hard to get!

    For the time being, I’m trying to live in the present, go to work, and do what I love which is working on my home lab. I’m not going to think more than a few days ahead. This is still living in the present. I feel good when given a good mental challenge and task.

    The next mission is to setup a private cloud with Nextcloud!

  • Some IT Work This Weekend

    I decided to get a lot of IT work done this weekend. One of my major goals was to get my lab systems on to a virtual network. The virtual network uses NAT for outbound connectivity but does allow some things inbound. I had to do this the manual way and it’s been a challenge. One of the things that makes Linux and BSD so powerful are their networking tool set. With the pretty much stock install, you can set up an entire virtual network within a host. If you’re willing to roll up your sleeves, there are some very cool things to do.

    The first thing I did was create a virtual network with a bridge on my server called virbr10. The virbr10 has a dummy interface called virbr10-dummy. The dummy interface is just to keep the bridge in an up state while the virtual machines load on boot. It’s an important thing to do so that the boot time is faster.

    This consolidation is ultimately a good thing but taking a lot longer than I had planned. I am still wrestling with getting my Mastodon instance moved but that’s okay. I know Mastodon can be really finicky. It’s not tolerant of stupid/arrogant sysadmins. 😆

  • The Positive Trend Continues

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    It looks like the positive trend is continuing because I woke up and felt like smiling. I cannot say that I have felt like this in many, many weeks. Even this low dose of Abilify at only 2mg seems to be augmenting the Fluvoxamine antidepressant that I am on. I hope that the trend at least continues. I am on a low dose so I hope that the risk of tardive dyskinesia is low. That’s what happened to me on on the higher dosages, those at 5mg and above. I had some uncontrolled facial movements. I think I just want enough to work even minimally.

    Last week was one of the worst weeks I have had in a while. I am happy it is over and I can look forward. The one takeaway from it is that I am strong, perhaps stronger than I believe. My therapist is correct in her observations. Today I want to take a sobering look at the potential next steps for my life since Uber is no longer going to be a possibility. If entrepreneurship is still a potential goal, I have to figure out a way to get my name out there.

    The main thing for the next three days, today included, is to rest. If ideas come to me, I will simply jot them down for further exploration and examination next week. My brain needs rest after this week and definitely not further stimulation. I’ve been over-stimulated as a result of the anxiety and depression. The feeling has been super unpleasant so keeping things wound down will be welcome. It may be a challenge to simply jot the idea down for later examination because my particular symptoms of autism wants for me to act on them right away. That simply will not do right now.

    I want to watch some movies and shows with Denisse and just let my worries disappear for a while. I would even enjoy simply keeping Denisse company while she studies for a bit. I could peck away on my laptop.