Onward, the migratory nerd

A recent storm in which lightning struck rather close to my residence, and fried various bits of networking equipment, caused a whole different type of migratory nerding. In this case, rather than a ‘virtual move’ involving switching hosting providers, how I build my websites, or such, it created the need for a physical move and consolidation of my computing equipment.

I’d been contemplating the move already, because my bedroom, in which I previously located my home office, is rather small and heats up drastically when I’m busy working on multiple monitors and towers. (Not to mention that the heat seems to funnel into that room from the rest of the house).

And, of course, since I was at it, I decided to organize and purge a rather large amount of electronics and cable ‘cruft’ that was taking up space here. Soon there will be donations and a trip to the local electronics recycling depot to finish the job.

I am grateful I live in an area where there is electronics recycling for the equipment that is dead, while still having a variety of options for donating at least the more mainstream goodies that aren’t useful to me, but can be reused by someone else.

I also have boxes of paperwork that need to be shredded (past the ‘retention period’ required for any kind of review) and various ‘odds and ends’ which have accumulated (or, like dust bunnies, somehow secretly reproduce when I’m not around 😉)

I guess it could also be classed as ‘spring cleaning’, as ’tis the season.

On the plus side, I now have three monitors in one spot and attached to the same computer (and KVM switch), so I have a much more ‘screen real estate’ with which to work. I find this makes computing much more comfortable.

In an unrelated move, I have also done regular ‘migratory nerding’ in which I have made some important updates to my resume such that I can use the online resume as input to Pandoc which I use to create a Word document which I tweak slightly to create printed and PDF copies for submission. I am also happy about the fact the online resume now looks like a proper resume, especially when printed, rather than looking like resume was shoe horned onto a web page.

With the cross-skilling I mentioned due to officially begin at the start of next month (May 2023), along with a potential contract, I will likely not be doing as much ‘migratory nerding’ and tech writing, as I will be largely occupied with those opportunities.