I did not hunger.

For the entire 0.27 fans who I think read this blog somewhat regularly, sorry for the delay on my latest post. You'll see why it was delayed in my story below.

This week has been no shortage of busy, expensive, and also fun. I had to get my catalytic converter replaced, so that stung pretty hard. My HomeAssistant had issues like no one's business, to the point where I was up til 3 in the morning getting it fixed and up and running, again. I changed out the motherboard on my office PC, only to change it back to what it was, because the new hardware was no better than the old one, and then replace it to the new setup yet one more time, because in the process of things, I bent and broke some processor pins on the old board. That was a lot of... spent time.

One of the stranger things that happened this past week included a series of mysterious technology events. Yesterday, at work, I was playing a somewhat dangerous game, changing some interface settings on a client's firewall, including MTU, link speeds, and IP networks. And yet, among my dangerous game playing (don't get me wrong, I was being cautious and careful), there was no harm done. ...that is, until I took an interface that was already there, but not yet setup, and assigned it a network address. Suddenly, for no reason at all, that site and their main office stopped communicating. My coworker who is more experienced in this looked at it with me, and we could find zero reason why it happened. At length, we decided the best course of action would be to reboot the firewall; so we did. I told our client, "Yep, it should come back up in just a couple of minutes." ...10 minutes passed, and nothing happened. It was then I knew I was going to be making an hour drive out to the client's site.

Thankfully, the drive there and away was scenic and beautiful, as it's tucked away in the mountains. I got onsite, and oddly, I found the firewall (a virtual appliance) had bricked itself into a boot loop. Knowing we had daily backups running, I just went ahead and restored the backup. I reconfigured what changes I had already made, and then it was all fine and good. Before jumping ship, I decided, "Hey, I should also enable jumbo frames, while I'm here!" And then the firewall I had just restored and reconfigured deleted itself. So, I now had to do a manual restore, which took a much longer time... like 2-3 hours. I and the client were sitting there for quite some time, waiting for things to come back online. Things finally did so, and I left there at 10:30, getting home about 10 minutes before midnight. Oh, and my food for the day included about a half dozen hershey's kisses and some leftover crumbs from a bag of barbecue chips. Yeah.

With that said, despite my subtle hunger throughout the day, I made an interesting observation when I pulled into the parking lot at our home- I still had a surprising amount of engery, and wasn't feeling very tired, at all! I know there's a dozen different easy ways to explain it, given the right person. But whatever the scientific facts were, I know they were not only correct, but a well needed blessing. I was very grateful for that extra help I needed that day.

But yeah, that's why there was no blog post, yesterday. Anyways, there's my thought this week: God quickens those who try. Perhaps it doesn't always happen quite how we might expect it to, but it always works out. And in my experience, I've either been made stronger, or have been saved when I didn't have the strength. I know you will, too, if you can exercise even a mustard seed of faith.

Until next week, see ya!

I did not hunger.

Adminisk8or

10/10/2023