Decibels, watts, P=I*E, DDR4-2133, RAID 5, yagi, et cetera cetera cetera blaaaaaah It’s been a long while since I’ve written a blog post on here, which signals both a burn-out and a kind of transformation. I had a lot of high goals for myself when I was doing web dev, and I realized a lot since January.
Since January, I’ve done a lot of writing, a monthish ago I hit 100+ poems written this year, and I’ve studied quite a bit. Much politically has gone on and at times that’s consumed my attention. Both on a national and local scale I’ve had my eyes glued to a variety of internet platforms.
For the past few months I hit a mire of uncertainty as I’ve been as lightly as possible looking for a job. Hitting a few sites with resumes, then waiting to not hear a reply or to get a decline. I did get an interview but I didn’t get the job. My life had felt pretty lethargic. I did keep busy reading, writing, but it was always fairly passive. I did get into DOOM modding quite a bit, but I hit a creative wall with it and needed to take a break. Same thing with making beats. A lot of creative forms took a back seat to my mild crisis of worth.
Creativity was feeling dry and the amount of effort it takes to detail, test, and create map strategies for DOOM was a high mountain of learning and time. This was the same with making beats. I made many loops and some very experimental stuff, but none of it is all that good. Sure, I did learn a lot from both endeavors, but I feel like it wasn’t taking me anywhere or sparking any synergistic interests with other hobbies like web design.
Then July started treeaaating me riiiight, I kind of started just staying inside and studying. It started with HAM radio then it became a mix of HAM and IT. I have a near-set goal to get my technician class license and this renewed an interest in IT. A couple of friends of mine and I had the plan to begin using networking, radio, and servers to build a meshnet. I kind of realized that when creating goals we should connect them in a variety of ways, so now there’s a tension and purpose to studying HAM beyond just doing it and the A+ beyond getting a job. Studying feels much more purposeful and breaks feel much more earned. There’s also a great need for a balance of these things else you’ll just end up in long spans of work and crash.
But yeah, I’ve been studying HAM radio. I haven’t picked out a particular transceiver for that, but I’m planning on maybe just getting a handheld for now and continuing to study the license material after I pass the test. I’m about 72% certain I’ll pass, I’ve been reading and taking many practice tests. The actual test questions are available publicly which basically means if I keep practice testing I should pass.
With IT, I’ve been getting through a slightly older A+ book for the 901/902 exam. I’ve gotten about halfway through it this past fortnight. I reviewed through the actual technical bits like PCIe vs PCI vs PCI-x or the difference between parallel and serial transfers. While reviewing this material, I installed another 1T HDD and reseated & applied more thermal paste to my CPU/CPU fan. There was an issue with the CPU fan, where it wasn’t sat all the way because only two of the pegs were fully into the motherboard. I managed to get another one fully snapped in, but the other one is difficult to get in without taking the motherboard out. I plan to do a full cleaning of my components, so when I do that I will. Since seating another peg on the fan, I’ve noticed a great increase in my PC’s performance.
After getting through the review of hardware and making some flash cards; I began learning loads about the Windows OS. I’ve always been able to do things like defragging the hard drive or similar, but I never got into the nitty gritty of configuration like with the registry or MMC. Similarly, I played with DXDiag which is a video, sound, and related diagnostic tool that gives you a lot of information about those aspects of your systems and tells you in anything is wrong. I’m excited to play more with the registry or MMC to learn more about the advanced options that Windows offers. Similarly, I can’t wait to fully grasp the variety of diagnostic tools and other functions of Windows.
Aside from this, I hope to come back to web design. I have a few projects in mind that I’ll talk about later if I complete any of them. However, one plan is to try to fully grasp responsive web design so I can make this Neocities site look right on a variety of resolutions.
I think that’s about it for right now. I plan to get through the remaining half of my A+ book and move onto a Cybex on for the 1001-1002 A+ tests. I also will be attempting to work on learning various Windows utilities and hopefully more complex things like Powershell & the registry. Finally, August I’m going to be getting my HAM license and doing the Technician class exam! Wish me luck :)