It's been an eventful few months. Since my last blog post back in August, I've had Lasik surgery, had a house deal fall through, discovered a new hobby, rediscovered an old one, and edged deeper into the Apple ecosystem. That's not even counting all the various developments in my professional life.
Lasik was expensive and the procedure was deeply uncomfortable, but worth it. For most of my life I've been near-blind without glasses. For the last month, though, I've had perfect vision. I still catch myself marveling at how awesome it is to have vision like this.
The house deal... well, that sucked and was expensive, but it ultimately made me realize the value of renting indefinitely. So that'll keep happening.
After abandoning Blizzard forever, I looked around for a new game to devote my lazy hours to. I landed on Final Fantasy XIV. After joining the Free Company "Mystic Exiles," I realized I'd found a new home. The Exiles are a great group of people - really friendly, really helpful, and genuinely caring. It feels like a second family. I have never had an MMORPG guild experience like that before. Plus, the game itself is a ton of fun. At time of writing, I'm barely into the content from the second expansion, and the fourth expansion is only a couple weeks away from launch. This will keep my attention for awhile, I imagine.
The old hobby that I rediscovered is Warhammer 40k. A friend of mine invited me to a tournament he's hosting at his game store in Iowa, and I decided to dust off (literally) my boxes of miniatures and re-enter the fold. It's cost quite a lot of money to get all the new rulebooks, miniatures, and equipment I need to participate in the tournament, but I'm excited about the whole hobby again.
Almost a month ago I bought a new iPhone 13 Pro and gave my iPhone 11 Pro to my wife. Since she was on Android before, and we chiefly used Facebook Messenger to communicate, this opened up a host of new options for us. Now we use mostly iMessage and avoid Facebook if at all possible. It's a little annoying to not have iMessage on Windows, but at least when I'm using my Mac I can type out messages to her.
As for all of the developments in my professional life, well, that could be a whole 'nother blog post all on its own. Suffice it to say that the technology that I spend most of my dayjob hours on has changed dramatically, and I'm addressing some interesting new challenges. I'm really starting to dig Hashicorp Nomad as an alternative to Kubernetes.
So that's a bit of what I've been up to the past couple months.