Back to Work Today

Back to work at Armis today and mainly getting my new machine setup. This M1 Mac is currently flying, but I still have to set up Adobe; we will see how that goes. For now, I am having a great time setting all this up.

I think it is time to dig into setting my Loupedeck up again, and that needs some love every time I reset to a new Mac. At least I don’t have to set up each set of app shortcuts themselves because Loupedeck does a great job of that already. At least for the apps that I need the Loupedeck for, like all the Adobe ones.

Still Waiting.

This whole year has been challenging to say the least. So many things have happened. I started working at VMware, and I now work at Armis. I started the year with both of my daughters living in the United States, now only one is, the other in Belgium, going to school. My son is also in school while holding down a job as a data scientist. Words cannot convey how proud I am of all my kids. I can’t say enough about them. They are all bright, creative, and aware enough to make it through this world. I just miss them dearly.

Waiting for the happy new year.

This is me updating things for the new year while trapped by Covid

Finally finding time to get this set up properly.

Not many people noticed, but I recently drug this simple website through the mud. It went through at least 4 different content management systems. I wanted to try out the Jamstack, and I did.

In the end, I kept to my static page generated via Jekyll. I started with Good Ole WordPress. Hell No. That is still a bloated mess. I then tried something I had never tried before TextPattern. I got it up and running pretty quickly, but it was just too much for what I need. That resulted in too slow page loads. Done. I moved on to GhostCMS. So Cool. That was another one that I got up and running very quickly, locally, that is. To push my content to a static site, I had to hook in other services like Netlify. Nope Done. Jekyll remains my go to.

I am pushing this all to github via the repository first...https://ianvanhoof.github.io That feeds https://ianvanhoof.com And my _site folder is hooked in via SFTP headless push that feeds https://vanhoof.us All with one post update.

Trying to Recharge

I grew up brown, living in the south. I've been called every iteration of the N-word that comes to mind. I want to be out protesting with the black lives matter movement.

I have a problem, though, with being on the at-risk list for Covid-19. I still don't feel comfortable going to the store, much less being around a crowd of protestors. I'm proud to say that each of my three kids is out there each day. They are representing our family while I stay out of trouble.

#blacklivesmatter

My big contribution was helping my daughters make some signs for when they go. I wish I could do more.

Thank you, kids, for doing what I cannot!

I have been getting back into drawing cars again. This time I am working on a Porshe. I will be posting it soon, so be on the lookout.

Getting Windows Back

This weekend I casually updated Ruby on Rails on my MS Surface pro. I then tried to run Jekyll so I could update all the things I STILL want to work on here, and it blew up in my face with all kinds of GEM errors.

It wanted me to run a specific version of WDM just for windows, and when I put that line into my local GemFile, it blew up again. Call me flummoxed at that point. I clapped the laptop closed and went about relaxing for a bit.

That is when I started thinking about how long I've had this laptop. It's been at least three years. I have read online that many people have issues with Gem versions being out of sync, so I went back to that infernal machine and checked my Ruby Version. On Windows Ruby gets installed right at the root of C: drive, so it quickly became apparent that I have six different updated versions on my drive. All installed in the same directory. All were trying to use or install a different version of the MSDEV environment.

My computer was running slowly anyway. So I did what any self-respecting former IT folk would do, and I wiped the machine. Little did I know that the MS Surface didn't like being wiped. The MS Surface prefers that you use the Windows Reset utility in settings. In my mind, that is not a real wipe. I want HD formatting and partitioning—zeros writing over data. I want an actual wipe, not just an OS swap.

As it turns out, it wasn't that hard of a task. Microsoft has a resource that you can download right from the surface product page. It is a utility that will make a bootable USB stick with a little program that wipes the drive for you. Boom, download, install, reboot, wipe, record scratch!

That little utility left my drive with one partition on it that the Windows install disk would not recognize as a boot disk. So when I booted from the Windows 10 install USB, then tried to partition the drive, it spewed disk errors. When I dropped to the CLI, good old Diskpart showed me one big MBR partition. One clean command later, I had deleted that partition and left just a clean formatted disk. Doing that allowed the Windows disk to take over that task, and partition the disk however it wanted. That worked, and so did the clean install of Ruby.

My Jekyll install works again, and I can post articles from my surface once again. You are looking at the result. Now I can concentrate on cleaning up all this code and getting to work on Protozoa again. I have so many ideas. :-)