Saturday, March 18, 2017

I'm Back ?

As Noted in my original post this was an unintentional blog and my feelings were a bit like those of Dread Pirate Roberts for Westley  in the Princess Bride "Good Job Westley. I may kill you in the morning, Good night". And Still Westley lives on.

I found I had 2 issues with blogging when I stopped in 2006
  • The time to do a decent even vaguely researched post is HUGE, for example there's probably 10-15 hours gathering the data and writing up my last presented post ("Now what do they do with it?")
  • It became very clear that my then employment and the topics I found of interest were a little too similar. This could present the issue of potential security violations which I took/take very seriously (unlike certain recent Presidential candidates for the democrats).
  • Similarly my views on the operation of the company I then worked for would probably NOT be appreciated.
That problematic work relationship was ended in 2011 just before Thanksgiving with a layoff. They had been ongoing as with the likely second term of a defense opposed democrat there was very little new development, and what contracts there were we weren't winning. There had been  a constant drip drip drip of people just not being around. In a secure environment a layoff is very weird, it feels a bit like being made a "unperson".  When you are laid off you are told by HR and then in general you walk in to your desk clear it out with your supervisor watching. Then you are walked to Security to hand in your badge and any security related items. Then you are walked to your vehicle with your posessions. This is because at the point you are informed of your layoff your need to know is gone and although you still have a clearance you no longer need to know for the work you were doing just 15 minutes ago before you talked to HR.

So now its 6 years later. I did ~2 years of  contracting to a company now defunct and now work doing realtime work in JAVA for video delivery for a small contract house in Boston. With the passage of time I am in my later 50's. I am still married with two daughters and live with  two cats (beware potential cat blogging). The elder daughter is now a middle school teacher in north suburban  Boston having graduated 2 years ago. My younger daughter is a Junior in Mechanical Engineering at a local engineering school (no not that one 😀 ). We are down 1 cat, one leopard gecko and a all the fish, and the two remaining cats we have are elderly (14+). 

My blog will still be somewhat anonymous as who knows if any employer would appreciate my blogging. I will NOT blog on specific work subjects (or my current employer or their contracts), but still one can never be too careful.

I am a Evangelical Christian and currently a member of a Baptist (Converge) church. Its the same church, as before but the ABC went thoroughly around the bend and many new pastors deny (or talk mealy mouth) around the divinity of Christ and the salvific nature of his death on the cross. We left the ABC over this although they will state (like any good SJW) it was over ordaining homosexuals. As far as I can tell ordaining homosexuals is a mere peccadillo compared to ordaining those that deny Christ.

As noted I am of orthodox and Calvinistic tendencies in my beliefs. I am also an  egalitarian in that I believe that it is appropriate for women to teach and be pastors. I believe this to be a secondary issue (i.e. Christians can agree to disagree on it) but others do not.

I am of a Conservative/Libertarian (more precisely minarchist) bent in my politics. In general I'm of the view that the least government is the best. However I am pragmatic and do recognize that there are things the government does tolerably well (just not a lot of them). I grew up in a politically split household. My Dad was a strong Irish Kennedy Democrat, my Mom an old line New England Republican. This is NOT an Olympia Snow RINO but neither is it a Bill Buckley conservative. This species was a fiscally conservative/socially liberal (by the norms of the 70's) person. These Republicans were willing to help the poor/ down trodden but with the expectation that once helped if they could they would stand on their own and help others. These Republicans saw Roosevelt (FDR Not Teddy) as an abomination due to the massive increase of the commerce clause. The names my maternal grandfather used for FDR  would ionize the air about him for several feet. I favor government even less than either of my parents

I have a variety of hobbies. I love to observe the stars and have an  8" schmidt cassegrain that I  have sadly not used in 5 years living by eye and binocular  observations as setup for even a simple 8" scope is time I have not had. I enjoy  computer and video games and spend time playing them with my younger daughter when she's home. My karate participation is gone as as I aged and moved up in rank I had a tendency to injure  (and re-injure) myself constantly making me miss practices and fall behind in advancement.

As for Blogs I read regularly this has radically changed. Of course Mr. DenBeste
had stopped USS Clueless long ago and with his death even Chizumatic has gone silent.
 If you pin me down to my current five favorites they are:


(Yeah that's 6. Hey I'm a software engineer and recovering C programmer ,
started counting at 0,  think of it as a fence post error...)

I read bunches of others, but these get daily perusal. Well, if you're still here and I haven't  bored you to death yet show up every once and a while. I can't promise I'll rise to the levels  of the  sainted Den Beste or even Sarah Hoyt but the length of the pieces may rival them. You know what they say "If you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance..."

I'm almost certainly not going to be blogging daily, if I manage bimonthly it'll be amazing ("Think he'll make it?", "It'll take a miracle...").


Tregonsee (L2) signing out for now...
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