It's the start of another week! The last week of July, actually, which
is both exciting and kind of scary? Time has been flying this
summer. I'm really excited for classes to start, though. I miss
college so much. The pandemic isn't over, but at least we're in-person
again. I just hope that people don't get tired of taking
precautions. If they do, things could go very poorly, to say the
least.

In slightly more exciting news, my roommates & I made a trip to the
local electronics store this weekend to grab some parts that we all
needed. I got some networking cables & a switch to start building my
homelab with, as well as a Raspberry Pi power cable. Somehow we ended
up with 3 Pis and only one power cord? Anyway, I can't do much yet,
because I'm on weird campus internet that seems to put each device on
its own segment. I can't ssh into anything via the network, I have to be
hardwired in. All the ethernet drops in the walls are dead, too,
which sucks. We technically aren't allowed to run our own routers, but
that's just because the wireless interferes with the other stuff in
the building. My brother was supposed to bring me an ancient Mac Mini
that I had in my closet at home, but he forgot. Maybe I'll try and
grab it this weekend. My plan is to use that as a hypervisor and then
run a router/firewall thing on it so I can route traffic through my
tiny network. I have no idea how well it's going to perform. I know it
won't be great, but I'd like to at least try it before I go and look
for expensive equipment to buy.

Also, I've been learning PHP so I can take up a bit more
responsibility at work. It's definitely an... interesting
language. What bothers me most so far is the lack of consistent naming
conventions for built-in functions & variables. All lower case? Snake
case? Agh. I guess that's just what happens as a language evolves over
time. It has been nice to work with something that makes HTML forms a
breeze. Honestly, the biggest barrier is setting up a local
development environment. Well, it's actually pretty easy on
Ubuntu. Windows doesn't look fun, though. I just wish someone had told
me there was a local dev server built into it earlier! I spent all
that time trying to get a (secure) local apache setup up and running
when I really didn't need it. At least I'm learning.

My partner gets home late from work today, so I'm in charge of
dinner. I still need to come up with something. We're low on
vegetables, so I'll see what I can do. Here goes!