Yeah..... I'm Thinking I'm Back.

 

Back when I was born (1960), the U.S. aerospace community was probably in it's heyday, where speed and altitude records were exceeded on a seemingly yearly if not monthly basis. It seems like, we are in a similar place  with computing and most especially, mobile computing. I've been out of the game a bit for the last 2-3 years partially due to coaching swim at my school and the addition of another hobby which has consumed the lion's share of my time, attention of disposable income (such as it is)!

To borrow and work off of a question I was asked about my renewed participation in tech, to which my answer was pretty much as above....

The thing that symbolically represents that is probably my participation with the Thinkpads Forum on which I was (and am again) a "moderator". What caused this change?

Yup, just like lots of things this last year, even my hobby time has been substantially changed by COVID-19. So, this is what happened. Firstly, this last year, I had reach a natural fulfillment point in my other hobby and there wasn't really any more goals that I truly hadn't achieved. Then about a month ago, I started feeling not quite normal, and was very tired a lot. I had thought that it was the norm for being in the later part of the season and the accumulated fatigue along with some typical winter allergy issues for this part of the country. Turns out, it was much worse! On MLK Day, my wife took me over to a Clinic and got tested. For the next 2 weeks, I WAS DOWN, and quarantined in my office which has a daybed in it and a bathroom just outside. I found that the only thing I could really do (other than to fall asleep constantly) was to watch videos. One of the weird things about my experience with COVID was I didn't lose my smell and taste like everybody else, but also to not be able to read either, or I'd get a terrible "migraine" type of headache. I ended up watching a lot of history and technology videos. The history stuff for obvious reasons given my vocation, but the tech videos led to 2 things.

One led to an item that should have been obvious, but was curiously absent from my life. Home automation. I came across a pair of Lenovo Smart Clocks for $20 each and jumped in. It turned out that my thermostats were already system friendly so there I was. I soon added some cheap addressable light bulbs and it's clear that I'm pretty much hooked!

As I sit here writing this post, I'm also impatiently waiting for the arrival of my first true hub, which is the Lenovo 2nd Gen "Smart Display". It's very similar to the Google Nest Hub, but can much more often be found discounted. It's job will be to live in the kitchen, and control the various devices of the system as well as fetch recipes, display weather and anything else we want Google to tell us. Apparently, it can also do Google video calling for numbers that are set up for that. I can't wait because, it'll be the controller downstairs in our house for a while. It was supposed to be here on Tuesday, but the regional distribution center for USPS here in the Dallas area pulled one of their patented tricks..... send it to a completely different town from where it was posted! Rant over. 

The other thing that occupied my time while quarantined? Yup; the current state of computing tech. Over the course of the last 3+ years while occupied with swim and being the dad of 2 teenager, I have kind of lost track of the ongoing state of the computing world. When I last was "on it", Intel was dominant, Skylake was new and NVMe was just coming on the market. So, I've got some catching up to do.

Another reason is my daughter's significant other is a graduation senior who's going to major in one of the computing sciences. He like most folks really don't know much about computing hardware. It'd be one thing if he and his family had the money to throw at the problem, but he/they don't. So, they need to get the most for their dollar. Obviously, in order to advise him, I needed to get myself "up to date" on the state of the industry.

So, again, back to the John Wick analogy, I feel a bit like this scene where he goes to his basement and breaks into the concrete floor digs out his old life to do what needs to be done.