I won't go over the mundane details that I went through in my last entry, as other than the ant problem I've been having not much has changed. So it's on to the substance.
The truth is that I feel like I'm drifting through life at this point. I guess some people would say that I have nothing to complain about since I have a steady job in a time when so many people don't, a place to live, and more money coming in than I've ever had before, but everything has its price. And to be honest I don't really want to do what I'm doing at IBM for the rest of my life. I thought it would be a great entry into the world of working with computers for a living, but getting in at IBM has convinced me that it's not really what I want to do for the rest of my life, at least the way I'm doing it now. If I was going to work for the ideal company as a system administrator, it would be a place where I actually get to touch the hardware, for one. I'd also like to be able to install new systems and have a say in what OS and software to use. And it would preferably be in an environment that's open to using something other than Windows since at this point I'm probably going to be using Unix and Unix-like systems for a long time.
But I also find myself thinking that maybe this whole IT career change was a mistake after all and that maybe I want to get back into broadcasting, particularly radio broadcasting. I have to say that the job I liked having the most was as an announcer and a production assistant at KUNI. It wasn't just the job itself that I liked, but also the people I worked with and how I was treated by my supervisor and management. The only issue I have with going back is that I'm afraid that radio and TV broadcasting may become a thing of the past given how so many people are using the Internet for what they would have used radio and TV for in the past. If that happens then I'm pretty much out of a job. I've also considered taking the broadcast engineer path as I do enjoy the technical aspect of radio and TV (but mostly radio) and it's why I became an amateur radio operator in the first place. Unfortunately the same problem applies, plus it would require getting more education on my part.
Right now I'd say I'm comfortable, but not happy. I do like Dubuque for the most part (radio here is troublesome due to being in a valley and being surrounded by high bluffs as a result of being in the
Driftless Area, but it also makes it look beautiful, especially in the fall), it's farther east which makes getting to some places, most notably Chicago and anything east, easier, and I'm glad I moved away from Waterloo/Cedar Falls as it was past time for me to get out of the metro area of my hometown. But I also realize that outside of IBM there's not much here in the way of employment, so if I do end up going in a different direction than what I'm in now I'll have to move once again, possibly out of the state for the first time.
In any case, I need to take the advice I gave to
djkaton and take some time out for myself and think about all this. I can't keep operating in cruise control unless I want the status quo to continue, and I certainly don't want that.
Other than that and a little Starmen.net drama that I'd rather not get in to and is pretty much over anyway, there's not much that's been going on. I did finally check out the Mystique casino and beforehand ate at Houlihan's at the hotel near it after discovering it when going on a bike trail on Thursday night/Friday morning. Houlihan's was great and I'll have to take any visitors here there sometime. As for the Mystique I wasn't all that impressed, although it is easier to navigate than the Diamond Jo due to being split into two areas. One thing I do like about the Mystique more is that they didn't get rid of their poker room, although it only has three tables. As far as gambling went all I did was spend $20 on the roulette table, which I lost at roughly $5 a time. I would like to try their buffet sometime. I've heard mixed reviews about it and I would have tried it had I not discovered Houlihan's and wanted a sit-down meal.
I'll leave you all in this entry with some output from the uptime command on Saionji, the first-generation iMac that I have:
7:29AM up 230 days, 11 hrs, 2 users, load averages: 1.76, 1.24, 0.80
This system isn't even on a UPS and it's still survived the lightning, the sometimes heavy load, and my own tinkering, though I don't tinker with it much. It's my local DNS server and also my Icecast server, although the latter is only used for relaying Radio PSI streams, both for me to listen as well as archive without making two connections to the main server and as a publicly-available relay server in case the main Radio PSI server is overloaded, though I don't advertise that due to lack of need/interest by anyone else.