It’s been another week already? Well, I guess that means it’s time for another blog post!
Monday was fairly routine – nothing particularly noteworthy to report. Just the typical start-of-week meetings and catching up on projects.
However, Tuesday brought a fun change of pace as I headed down to the Farm Progress Show in Decatur with some coworkers. For those not familiar, it’s the nation’s largest outdoor agricultural event, and this year marked its 20th anniversary at the permanent Decatur site. The scale of the show is always impressive, and it’s fascinating to see all the latest innovations in farming technology, both from our company and competitors.
Wednesday was probably the highlight of my week from a learning perspective. Our team has a standing monthly lunch & learn, where we either discuss ongoing projects, or a special topic that would be of interest to the team. This month we invited the data science team, who presented a deep dive into how LLMs actually work under the hood, and some of the science and terminology behind them. I’ve been aware of these tools for a while, and have used them lightly, but hadn’t really taken the time to fully understand the underlying mechanics. The discussion covered everything from training processes to how they generate responses, and I found myself genuinely fascinated by the whole thing. It’s one of those topics where the more you learn, the more questions you have…
Thursday and Friday were back to the standard mix of meetings and project work. Nothing too exciting to report there. 🤷♂️
Saturday started with the inevitable yard work – yes, more mowing. I think this might be the last time I need to mow my full lawn until we get more rain. It’s a bit annoying, but hey, at least I’m getting my steps in!
Throughout the week, with some extra time on Saturday, I continued working on digitizing and cleaning up/editing more family photos. My goal is to knock out 5 or so a day, which seems really slow, but keeps me making forward progress!
This weekend also brought a major decision point I’ve been wrestling with: how to rebuild my home server that recently had a few hard drive failures (within the last ~2 months). After much deliberation, I’ve decided to stick with my current chassis (an R710) and source some used enterprise SAS drives off eBay. It’s amazing what you can find in the enterprise surplus market if you’re willing to do a bit of hunting.
With the rebuild, I’m also tentatively planning to make the jump to TrueNAS instead of going back to Ubuntu. I’ve been wanting to experiment with ZFS for a while now, and this seems like the perfect opportunity. The data integrity features and snapshot capabilities have me intrigued, even if there’s going to be a learning curve involved.
Before I made the decision to begin a server rebuild & migration to TrueNAS, I spun up a temporary Plex server on an old computer that I’ve had sitting around. I realized that without a functioning home server I’ve not been listening to audiobooks, and therefore my yearly reading has been slipping. I had tried to come up with an alternate solution previously, but nothing had the same simple workflow as Plex + Prologue, and I didn’t want to switch back to the Audible app (partially on principle). As soon as I had a functional audiobook server again, I started in on a book I’ve been wanting to read for a while: Making It So by Patrick Stewart (narrated by the author)!
Sunday morning started with a combined Divine Service (which we do on 5th Sundays of the month), with a guest pastor (Rev. Dr. Chad Kendall) visiting from Concordia University - Chicago. It’s always interesting to hear different perspectives and preaching styles, and I appreciated his message.
Throughout the weekend, I also continued working with Dorico on that project I mentioned last week involving my sister. I’m still learning how the software works, but it’s beginning to feel more natural!
And that’s a wrap on this week’s post! I’ll be enjoying my long weekend (thanks to Labor Day), and look forward to seeing what happens in the week ahead!
