2023 a Year in Review

2023 brought with it a lot of changes for me professionally and in my personal life.

Professionally, I left a job in a local school district that turned out to be more corrupt than I had expected and took a job in the district I completed my K-12 public education in.

Overall I am happier now but I wonder if I made the right choice to switch back to the K-5 level instead of staying in a secondary role. I started my career in education K-5 but I have always enjoyed teaching older kids. I have not settled on where I want to end up next year, but I like my team and I like my district so I don’t plan on leaving that right away.

In my new school district, I feel more respected than I did in my previous district. The district is also a lot smaller than the previous district so I feel like I have more reach. I know the director of my department and the director knows me, and it isn’t because I’m causing problems for her. Overall, I am pretty pleased with the situation and I want to grow myself professionally with this district.

In my personal life, I have rediscovered some old hobbies and found some new ones.

I spent a good chunk of my summer replacing my home network with UniFi gear, and wiring my house for wireless access points. I wanted to do this because my old setup had automatic updates I couldn’t turn off and occasionally they would break the entire network. On two occasions, the old routers—Eero Pro 6’s—updated and lost the authentication information for my ISP. This required me to do a full reset of the routers and redo everything because all of the config for that was in the cloud.. a place I couldn’t get to because my network was severed from it—there was no local gateway to configure the connection.

After upgrading my network, I dove into the world of hosting a media server for myself as well as a web server for this blog. Running Plex has been fun for me and I like the process of converting physical media into digital. Right now I am in the process of ripping the anime Tenchi Universe so I can watch it in Plex.

I plan to upgrade my home server this year. I’d like to get a new Mac Mini with the M2 chip for Plex. I understand people will say that I can do better for cheaper by going with a mini PC or some other bullshit, but I don’t want to. I will then repurpose the existing home server—a late 2012 Mini—to a server for this blog and other uses. I am considering Proxmox. I would eventually like to transition this blog from Hugo to Ghost, but the current hardware it’s running on is just not really powerful enough.

Networking wise, I’d like to wire Ethernet to more rooms this year and finish the projects I couldn’t during winter break.

Personally, I came to a realization that I have been dealing with stuff that makes me unhappy for a while because I have not felt secure enough to do anything about it. I am going to continue to focus on my mental health to help myself improve.

Anxiety and depression have been kicking my ass lately.

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