Having no good photos to share this week, I quickly went outside and discovered both how pretty the night sky is and how good my camera is.

Transforming Demons into Angels.

Adminisk8or

08/06/2023

I really do love the summer. I almost regret not going camping more than I have been, though. I suppose I still have a handful of weekends to remedy that...

First fun story of the week was a major accomplishment of mine, in which I explored uncharted territory. I have a 3CX phone server at home, which I use just as a nerdy way of saying I technically have an intercom and bell paging system, as well as occasionally testing out VoIP-related stuff. I also have Home Assistant because- well, it goes without saying. Well, this last week, I began thinking to myself, "gosh, Home assistant seems to have a service for pretty much everything... I wonder..." Initially, I was a little disappointed, as I discovered 3CX was not a current module or add-on. But then I saw that VoIP was. And there began one of my more fun endeavors. Looking out on the web, there was little I found in the way of documentation on it. In fact, the closest thing I could find was people directly connecting their VoIP phones. I was nearly on the point of giving up for the day, and it was nearly by accident that I finally figured it out and accomplished one of the nerdiest things I've ever done: I sent a voice command to turn on and off devices over an IP phone. Usefulness factor: 1/10; my joy and excitement: 20/10. The second story involves the title of this blog entry. Last week, I removed a less-than ideal server from a client of mine and installed some newer hardware, migrating their VMs over. I nicknamed this older server the "demon server", because it would sometimes, seemingly with no reason at all, starting going into a freezing sort of non-responsive fit, in which the only way to fix it was to physically hard-reset the host. Since the old server was not desired after the project was done, I took it home and decided to do some surgery. I replaced some of the potentially problematic parts inside, and got the latest build of VMware 8 running on it. Having a plentiful dose of processing power already, I offered it to my brother to do some home lab testing with. I then spent an evening showing him the ropes of VMware and such... but the biggest obstacle we had that evening came from a rather unexpected source...

Everytime we would connect either a shielded ethernet or DAC cable between that server and the 48-port network switch it was plugged into, the switch would instantly die, power and all. It was a very confusing problem, until I realized the issue was the switch. See, I had repaired this switch not but probably a year or so ago, but apparently I did a poor job of it... so, in a strange twist of events, the demon server finally gained its angel wings and shed light on a big problem we didn't even know existed. Funny how solving problems and troubleshooting sometimes leads you down unexpected paths.

And the last interesting story this week came from an unexpected moment of growth I saw in myself. Come to think of it, perhaps the blog title could slightly be applied here, too. I share this one carefully, but also straightforwardly, as I have no reservations about my own honesty. My wife and I have been practicing (and just had the opportunity to perform) with our church choir over the past few weeks; and in this particular choir, it was a larger geographic group than usual. As such, I had the opportunity to run into and catch up with someone who I've previously mentioned in a blog post... probably this last winter? This person was my girlfriend in high school- now happily married for quite some time. Since then, we've run into each other probably several times, and each time has been a nice brief moment to say hi and catch up a little. But yesterday, after a dress rehearsal in the morning, we caught up and got talking for a good while; we talked about fun memories from choir in high school, caught up on personal life stories, the goods, the bads, and the current day-to-day life difficulties.

During this conversation, I had what you might call an out of body experience- not so much the type you hear about with people dying, but rather the kind where, in my mind, I stood outside of the moment I was in, and looked at what was happening. I suddenly recognized something that both made me feel a little silly, but also a bit proud of myself. Until about that moment, I had put this label on her as "my girlfriend from high school"- and that was the main identifier I had assigned to her. This was, of course, a pretty silly and stupid way to think. But now, I finally saw things more clearly, and I proudly discarded that old label and in its place, I put "an old and very good friend", as well as "a wonderful and great person"- and it was true.

And in that way, it's funny how, despite thinking I had well moved on from my old self ten years ago, here I still was, hanging onto that last bit of rubbish that was just taking up space in my mind. In a funny twist of events, we're actually possibly thinking about doing a double date sometime soon- her and her husband, and me and my wife!

But that's enough for my share of stories for this week. Until next time, see ya!