FIPO

content/blog/init.md

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+---
+title: "Initializing Sabbatical"
+date: 2024-07-28T21:01:03+02:00
+draft: false
+---
+
+## Friday
+
+{{< image frame="true" width="13em" float="right" src="/img/init/celine.png" alt="Celine Dion at the Olympics" >}}
+
+This was my last workday. I had taken a short vacation with Marina and Quinn to Helsinki, Finland.
+It was already booked before the sabbatical paperwork was finished. It was originally one week, but
+I decided to cut it short, return on Wednesday, and spend the last two days tying up my work
+activities, handing over projects, doing some emergency _perf_ n&eacute;e _grad_, and so on. At
+around 19:00 or so, I closed the laptop lid after visiting memegen just one more time. I can kick the
+habit, I swear!
+
+Going in to this planned Pim-outage, I can't help but feel the love from my cow-orkers. Many, many 
+people stopped by on IM or in a last minute meeting and said "have fun!", or "enjoy your time off!".
+I appreciated the note from Brian and Matt as well. My _PRE_ colleagues said "seeya!" and some of
+the _GPP_ captains I work with promised they'd not break shit, while others asserted they would
+absolutely break shit. Who knows what I come back to, you know?
+
+In the evening, Marina and I watched the Olympic games opening ceremony. Fred was cheering it on
+from his place, and we all agreed this is a very exciting spectacle. He's proud to be French. Me,
+not so much (but then again, it ain't much if it ain't Dutch!), but I'll give it to them: they
+really organized a slick opening. Chapeau!
+
+## Saturday
+
+I spent the weekend frontloading my first project: cleaning up my basement.  I took inspiration from
+yesterday -- we got up at 08:00 and Marina and I decided to trim the hedge between our yard and the
+neighbors'. We were smug to report that at around 09:00 this task was finished. We then took down
+the 8 year old and very weathered white container/box that we have in our back yard. Its plastic was
+so far gone that it crumbled upon touch. It was kind of fun kicking it and pulling it, bopping it,
+twisting it, and making it turn into a pile of rubble. We completed the task, including sorting
+through its innards (and deciding to toss most of it), and it was now 10:00.
+
+Armed with hope and a bushy tail, I descended to the basement, where I sorted things in rough piles:
+some switches, some servers, some router equipment, lots of power and network cables, DACs, fibers
+of various lengths, and so on. Then I spent most of the day rummaging around and extracting about
+three 60 liter garbage bags with things I don't think I need anymore. You remember that nerd that
+has a box of oddball cables and chargers in their garage? I'm no longer that nerd.
+
+## Sunday
+
+This morning I wook up at 09:00 and pretty quickly got to work, because in the process of "sorting
+through" the crap yesterday, I obviously made a much bigger mess! Last year, I grew some chillies in
+the basement serverroom (because it's always 26C there!). The experiment did yield some pretty nice
+Naga and Trinidad Scorpion chillies, but unfortunately my plants got infected with some vermin, and
+kind of all died.
+
+I had removed the plants and done a cursory cleaning attempt, but largely ignored that corner of the
+house for a year or so. I now need that corner, because it's going to be turned into a storage
+facility, as it'll enable me to offload all the crap in my current working room, which is sprinkled
+all over the floor currently.
+
+I spend the morning continuing to mapreduce over the mess. It's funny how in my cleaning algorithm,
+first everything gets exploded into many piles of adjacently relevant things: power cables in a
+pile, network cables go there, computers and switches stacked over there in the corner, cardboard
+boxes here, and so on. That's the mapping phase. But the reduce phase is meant to very quickly put
+everything in its final spot.
+
+### Side Quests
+
+{{< image frame="false" width="5em" float="left" src="/img/init/sidequest.png" alt="The SideQuest logo" >}}
+
+After lunch (vegetable soup and a cheese melt), I go on a little side quest: I create this website.
+You see, I've always been a Jekyll user (which is written in Ruby). Michal showed it to me and I was
+pretty immediately impressed with how it works. But, in my previous travels with Paul I used Hugo
+(which is written in Go). I thought I'd create a website for my sabbatical using Hugo.
+
+No biggie, just download, initialize the website, choose a theme (I chose
+[[notrack](https://github.com/gevhaz/hugo-theme-notrack)]), and off we go. But, my life is always
+more complicated than that. I use a `gitea` server with `drone` to do CI/CD on every merge. No
+problem, I initialize a `.drone.yml` which checks out the site and its theme submodule, builds it
+with Hugo, and pushes it with `drone-rsync` to the four `nginx` webservers at IPng Networks.
+
+I am used to the `minima` theme in Jekyll and while it looks similar, the `notrack` theme doesn't
+look quite right. So off I go on an hour of futzing around with the SCSS, HTML and other bits and
+pieces. I am quite pleased with the result, but in the process I notice that the gallery and video
+features of Hugo's `notrack` theme, want to upload large files to Git. OK, off to a
+side-quest-side=quest I go: enabling [[Git LFS](https://git-lfs.com/)]. In itself, not too
+difficult, just `pkg_add git-lfs` on OpenBSD, `apt-get install git-lfs` on Debian, and `brew install
+git-lfs` on my Mac. But after enabling it, the files won't upload. Ah! I need to allow the `nginx`
+server a larger `client_max_body_size`, and we're off to the races. I enable the `drone`
+configuration to use LFS during the build, and voila! Every `git push` now builds, even with large
+files.
+
+If you thought this would not be a nerdy series of articles: you thought wrong.
+
+### Sunday Evening
+
+I summon Marina for an ap&eacute;ro, which she gladly obliges. We soak up some sun in the back yard,
+while I drink a raspberry Gin & Tonic, and she drinks a Mattei Cap Corse, a drink we found while
+over for dinner at JC and Sandra's place. I make a quick dinner of Chicken Tonight, Quinn arrives
+and gobbles some up as well, and we disperse like shrapnel.
+
+Marina is off to make a watercolor painting tonight, so I spend the after-dinner evening continuing
+to make headway in the _reduce_ phase. I extract a box of IPng polos -- if you are reading this: I
+have M, L, and XL in stock, hit me up! -- and decide to give them a wash as it can be damp at times
+in my basement.
+
+I think by tomorrow evening, I'll be
+mostly done! I pour myself a glass of Legaris crianza and start S01E01 of The Last of Us. I've seen
+it before, but I feel like watching it again. I feel .. cathartic. Often times, on Sunday Evening I
+cannot really do things that would take me through Monday, because there's work on Mondays. But for
+the next thirteen weeks, there will be no work on Mondays. 
+
+It's Sunday evening, July 28th, and I'd like to start my _sabbatical_, please.
+
+# Pictures of the day
+{{< gallery-category >}}
+  {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-07-28/IMG_0400.JPG" caption="See that blue background wall?" >}}
+  {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-07-28/IMG_0401.JPG" caption="Boxes full of cables and schwag" >}}
+  {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-07-28/IMG_0402.JPG" caption="Lots of random crap lying around" >}}
+  {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-07-28/IMG_0403.JPG" caption="The serverroom is a bit .. messy" >}}
+  {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-07-28/IMG_0396.JPG" caption="A stack of Mikrotik switches" >}}
+  {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-07-28/IMG_0404.JPG" caption="A stack of in-development PDUs" >}}
+  {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-07-28/IMG_0408.JPG" caption="Our backyard chairs beckon for an ap&eacute;ro" >}}
+  {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-07-28/IMG_0409.JPG" caption="I am doing laundry -- of the IPng schwag polos" >}}
+{{< /gallery-category >}}
+
+{{< gallery-modal >}}
+{{< gallery-script >}}