A Year of Blogging (2023)

As 2018 ended, I had successfully blogged every week for the entire year. This was a new years resolution that I've somehow kept for now five years and counting.

So lets recap my favorite posts from 2023.

This post was a fun deep dive into how my food taste has changed over the last twenty years and comparing the fast food, meal kits and good ole fashioned home cooked meals. Pictured above was a creation of guacamole using only limes and avocados from my backyard.

Feeling as people are getting more aggressive in day to day life I take a single recorded dash cam experience to review how I feel people have changed in the past few years. Perhaps it was COVID-19 or maybe its just how the world has evolved to "eat or get eaten" mentality.

Little did I know how quick attackers could react when releasing an IP into the world. I deleted an old server which left a dangling DNS record to an IP I no longer controlled. The new owner of this IP quickly determined that fact - validated their ownership of a domain the didn't own and proceeded to submit millions of SEO spam to Google. It cost damage to this domain (connortumbleson.com) and took a few days to unwind how the attack occurred.

A short obsession with weather led me to finding and purchasing my own little personal weather station. Wiring up the stream of data to a local service (Prometheus/Grafana) is where the challenge remains. I can't stream straight from the station to Prometheus without a little intermediate service and those options range from paid, abandoned or build my own.

After doing blog posts about old events I lived through (ice storm, flood, etc) I realized that there is a large population that likes reading 1st hand experience from an event. It is relatable and folks research these events to remember them. On that same vein old children's toys seem to fit that bill. I started diving into a variety of toys I really enjoyed and K'NEX was one of them. I was the kid that preferred K'NEX to LEGOs.

Documenting build outs of this home has been always a fun interest - from building out the home-lab to adding some random camera in the attic. I wish this post could show how many wires I've now fit into one little wall passage into my attic. This was the 5th cable and now I'll probably have to figure out an alternative to fit any more additions. Either way its still funny to look back and say - "I've got a camera in my attic".

What started as a "bad movie" night with friends we ended up picking the first movie of a series of incredibly odd movies. I pushed through and watched the remaining three movies on my own and produced this large multi-thousand line recap of the movies. These movies are what happens when you take a talented individual with his childhood idea and end up producing a few films which are odd, but a good form of entertainment.

Confused as I drove by a huge river that was always without boats and full of caution/warning signs. I was curious why this existed and soon found out it was built to take huge amounts of water during flood/hurricane instead of it funneling through the city. A huge task completed a long time ago with the forethought to protect the growing city - I look back at that and think that's amazing. I struggle in present terms to know a comparable enhancement at that scale in the Tampa area.

2024 is just a few hours away and I'll still be here blogging weekly. Thanks for reading and here is to another year.