I’m so angry that I am bordering on an autistic meltdown. I have this one co-worker that seems to take particular delight in ordering me around even though she is not a supervisor and has been told so. Now I am upset. I have everything the benefit of the doubt. Now, I reported this in the chain of command. I only hope I don’t lose my job. I feel like I could explode right now. I must keep it together. I have to. I cannot afford to come unglued.

If I become unglued, then the bitch wins. I’m not letting her win. I’m just going to go about my business calmly and rationally. Or as best as I can at any rate. It’s times like these that I know I need DBT therapy. The trouble is DBT is not quite available for folks on Medicare. Nobody in Delaware that does DBT accepts this insurance.

This blog is my coping skill right now. I need to get my thoughts out of my head and this is working. I don’t want this co-worker living rent free in my head anymore. I’m going to keep my eyes on the prize: self employment. The journey begins next week at the Delaware Department of Labor. I’m trying to be realistic here. It’s going to be awhile before I will earn enough to be independent of this security job that I have now. Patience is in order.

I’ve got to calm down. This isn’t good for my heart and circulatory system. I’m going to have a heart attack if I don’t figure out how to master this. I’m headed for a widowmaker if I don’t figure it out. But I’m determined not to die until I, at least, make the effort at business. I hope I can get approved by the DE Department of Labor so I can begin to break free.

I just have to make it to August 26th and my meeting. I can do that. Hell, I can make it to tomorrow. Staff meeting tomorrow will give us pizza. I’ll get an hour of overtime as well.

Throughout my life I have always defined myself by what I did for a living. I think I mostly did this because that’s what society does. We judge people based on what they do to earn money. I am struggling to unlearn defining myself by what I do for a living. It does not matter that I work as a security guard and not in information technology. All that matters is that I show up on time do my job reasonably well and get compensated for it. I will define myself by my passions, my interests, and my personality not by what I do for a living.

I guess my self-esteem is always been that low that I’ve always had to define myself based on what I do and when I have not been working in information technology I felt like a failure. I have to get over this feeling because the likelihood of me getting back into a technology based career is not real high at 50 years old. But simply because I don’t work in information technology does not mean that I cannot continue to enjoy it. Arguably I like it more now that I don’t have to do it for a living. I don’t really know because it just seems like I’m not happy no matter what I do. I hate my professional life when it is in information technology. I hate my professional life when I’m not working professionally.

So if I am working on defining myself I am a motorcyclist, a traveler, and experimenter. I am someone with deep-seated passions. I just wish I did not have significant mental and developmental challenges. I wish I were more normal functioning. Autism is kind of a mixed blessing. On one hand I am grateful for the additional intelligence that I have but it seems like that was traded for struggling with what should be common sense for most people.

Right now everything is overwhelming me from a sensory perspective. I wish I had some silence or at least something to drown out the noise of the world. I am being “barebacked” by 2 people. Barebacking is playing your cell phone out loud without using headphones or earphones. All this is just too much and it is making me angry.

I really have to try not to explode here. Babies crying, cell phones playing, bad elevator music. All just too damn much. I need to save for a good quality pair of over-the-ear noise cancelling headphones. Something from JBL or to that effect. I need to tone down the over-stimulation somehow. Everything feels like nails to a chalkboard.

Every little thing definitely did bother me today. I just want to go ballistic with anger. But if I do that I’m going to end up in the nearest jail and/or prison. I desperately need an outlet for my talents. I would like to be able to do something better than simply be a security guard. But on the other hand I know that being a security guard is a nice simple job. My job ends when I clock out and that is not always the case with information technology.

I wonder what teaching is going to do. I wonder if I will enjoy teaching information technology to recent high School grads or even high school juniors and seniors. Will they have the passion that I have? I guess only time will tell. But teaching is the only career that I could really do that would afford me experimentation with information technology and to still earn a living at it. Most IT jobs don’t want you to experiment because they need the infrastructure reliable and predictable. But when it is treated as an academic problem, the room for innovation vastly grows and the room for experimentation also grows alongside. If I could find some people that are also interested in computers and experimenting with them, I might have something.

Yes as the title reads, I am really sick and tired of my life. There’s nothing easy about it and everything is a 10-yard fight. I’ve had enough. At least, I don’t have to work for ops security any longer. I had a surprise inspection and the person doing the inspection took my uniform shirts and I am so grateful for that because I don’t want to deal with them. I really don’t know how I am going to make my life better other than to try and have my own business. But that is easier said than done as everybody knows.

At least I will have the next 3 days off. I really need them as I am just super exhausted. It is really difficult to keep switching shifts around and it’s exhausting when my bio rhythms keep getting thrown off. It means that I am not sleeping well and I am probably not eating very well either. I had the unfortunate misery of discovering that I have to work an extra hour today. My manager basically said oops I forgot to tell you. What the actual fresh hell?! How do you forget to tell someone that they will be working an extra hour? I just don’t know the answer to that but it confirms that I’ve made the right choice to move on to a new company.

I just hope that my experience at Allied universal will be okay. I know that it’s not going to be great but I hope it will not be terrible either I just want my new security guard job simply be manageable I hope that this is not asking too much. I wonder when I should start really putting in the effort in earnest towards starting a business. One school of thinking has that if you don’t start now and you don’t get into it you never will. Another school suggests that you should only really do it when you are ready financially emotionally mentally etc

Tomorrow is my last official day and I just want to call out and have 4 full days off before starting my new job but I don’t think that would be advisable. I’ll just go in to work tomorrow as expected. I don’t want to go out of my way to make an enemy out of OPS even though they have left me feeling alienated and exhausted. I don’t plan on ever going back but the prevailing wisdom is to not go out of your way to burn bridges. I certainly am not going to do this but I would really like to as I’ve physically had enough and I am exhausted. It might be better to start the new job completely rested. I might just say f*ck it and walk away.

I wish I could say my experience was good at OPS but it was a 10 yard fight and the company really did not even have much of a veneer of respectability. Bigger and better things await. I just probably won’t see much time off in the future. As this position is new, I might be working some extra days or even hours so I am thinking I might want to have 4 full days off just to recuperate from the constantly changing shifts where I am at now. Yeah, I am calling off. I am physically and mentally done. The 1.5 years of employment at OPS have been anything but a picnic.

I have to summon up the energy to try and do some content creation as well. I’d like to see if I cannot get a second career as an IT teacher off the ground. To do this, I need curriculum and content. I think I might spend the rest of the last shift of my OPS career doing so curriculum design!

Doing this deep dive into the home lab computer hobby has really challenged my research, critical thinking, and troubleshooting skills. I am also grinding away the surface rust. In the process of my research, I vaguely remembered that proxying has been used as a technique to avoid the problems of hairpinning and NAT. I am not really in an easy situation where I can just move things into a DMZ network and resolving IPs internally hasn’t completely solved my problems with email. Anyhow, I read about TCP streaming through NGINX and I thought maybe it just might work.

Thus, I installed the streaming module and configured a TCP streaming proxy for ports 25, 143, 587, and 993. It turns out that this was so successful and so much simpler than worrying about correctly configuring source and destination NAT to do everything so precisely. With just the simple TCP proxy in place, all I had to do was to source NAT everything through a simple rule and my email problems are elegantly solved.

I am learning a lot of things I didn’t know and I am seeing some gaps in my knowledge that research will have to fill so that I can continue to write the book that I am in the process of planning: Grokking the Home Lab: Learning Through Building Real Systems. I think it is about time someone wrote a book for the new home lab hobbyist. At least I know I am going to leave out some material on network address translation hairpinning – because fsck that! There’s a lot easier ways to go about solving some of the problems introduced by IP address sharing.

While the challenges can be, at times, frustrating, I am enjoying the journey. I need to sit down and find a good time to write and document all this. I need a format that works for me and I have yet to find one. My therapist recommended letters and that did not work so well. I am thinking of setting up another blog dedicated strictly to IT whereas this one is more of my mental health coping skill and life strategy. It would be somewhat confusing for readers so I bought a domain called www.tcpipguy.com. I think that will be the name for my blog. I might add a the to it. Maybe building the book out of timely blog entries that are related to home labbing is the right approach.

I am very tired and going to need a couple of days off. Fortunately for me, I will have Thursday and Friday off. It’s not quite enough time but better than nothing at all. I guess I am taking what I can get. That much said, I am learning to do what benefits me the most and not necessarily what helps my employer. I am unlearning being a “people pleaser” and it’s hard when I was raised that way.

I am working a split shift today for a total of 12 hours. It’s not going to be easy but it will be completely doable. During the time period that I have off – between 11am and 4pm – I will hang out at the library and hopefully accomplish something of note. I want to try and make some headway on my book with the working title, Grokking The Home Lab: Learning Through Building Real Systems. I had some material written but it wasn’t in the style recommended to me and hence it was scattered and I ended up scrapping it.

When I go to the library this morning into the afternoon, my operative plan is to write this book in a series of letters to a, “Dear Davoy” style. Nan, my therapist, recommended this approach as a method to reduce writer’s block. She assumed that it would work for fiction and non-fiction alike and I don’t see how this won’t work. Right now I cannot concentrate much and that’s because I have not fully woken up yet. Once I do though, I want to be ready.

I guess that doing this in a series of letters will make it so that it will be easy to write out of order and from a stream of consciousness. Oftentimes, this is the way I think best. I can always go back and organize the material at a later point. I can always do the edits at the same time. Since both DNS and IP addressing is very important and I’v been hard at it. So while both concepts are fresh in my mind it is time to put the writing efforts in.

I am a bit late to the blogging game today and it was mostly because I am just so damn tired. When this week is said and done, I will have had close to 60 working hours. To top it off, 28 hours will be paid at time and a half. 8 for working a holiday and the remaining 20 for straight over time. It will all help very much but it’s going to leave absolutely smoked. I am again reminded of how much I hate America. America is a country where we give assistance to millionaires and billionaires while the regular working class gets nothing except for hardship.

I am ready to go home and hit the hay because I am so tired. Fortunately, this shift is flying by and I only have two hours left. Then I get to come in and work from 7a-11a tomorrow. That won’t be bad. What’s going to suck will be Tuesday and Wednesday where I will be working 12 hour days. I guess it’s going to be nice to have Thursday and Friday off before the fun begins next week.

I am going to make another attempt at writing a fun information technology book. This time I have a much better idea for the intended target audience. Surprisingly, my therapist helped narrow down the audience to the intermediate computer user who is fascinated about how computers and networks operate and wants to learn more; take it to the next level. In my latest thinking, my ideal reader will want to balance learning by doing with grokking the theory behind it as well. So I may sit down to figure something fun out this weekend when I am at work

I am planning on enjoying today’s day off to its fullest possible. Yesterday, I was so tired that I was falling asleep on the job. I will also have Friday off too and it will feel good. In an ideal world I’d rack up enough paid vacation and just relax. This is going to be a short article as I have a lot to do.