Status Update - Spring Semester 2022

Preface

Hi all! Another semester has come and gone, bringing with it the end of my first year at WPI, and of college in general. It’s been one hell of a year, but I think I’ve grown as a person and dealt with my problems in, if not a healthy way, then at least not an unhealthy way.

Personal

Over the C term break, I successfully transferred jobs from the Service Desk to Network Operations. This is a lot closer to what I want to do for a living, and so far it’s been a lot of fun. Most of the work involved is patching and testing, but I’ve also been working on some of the internal software tools, as well as being a general Linux geek. One of the one’s I’m most proud of is dns-plotter, which was written to help debug some DNS resolution issues a few weeks ago. Basically, it takes a target address and a DNS resolver, and tries to resolve the address every so often. When it’s done, it graphs the results using gnuplot(1). The source code can be found here.

Projects

Campmaster Constantine

Unfortunately, Campmaster Constantine’s service was sunset on 11 February when the entire two-year-old database was wiped out overnight. You can read more about that here. I’m working on the replacement, which can be found at that site.

Organization

I’ve started making daily lists of my tasks following a mangling of bullet journaling, where each task gets a special symbol depending on its status (to-do, done, cancelled, or postponed). When I need something to do, I look at the list and pick something. That way I know what I need to do, and I can look back on previous days to see when I did something in case it ever comes up.

Each night, I’ve also been trying to summarize what happened during the day below the task list, including my feelings throughout the day. This helps to drain all that stress out of me before I sleep, and anecdotally I think it’s helped a lot.

That’s all for this semester, see you after the summer!