season's greetings

[Lonni J Friedman]

Hi Jay!
You definitely make retirement seem like a lot of fun.  That's far off
on the distant horizon for me (at least 20 years).

I'm still in the SF Bay area, although we bought a house in the Santa
Cruz mountains last year, and we absolutely love it.  On a clear day,
we can see the ocean from our living room, and we've got the mountains
all around us every day.  Lots of wildlife too (deer, turkeys,
bobcats, and the occasional mountain lion).  Yet, we're less than 30
minutes drive from both Santa Cruz (on the coast) and the rest of
Silicon Valley.  I just hit my 6 year anniversary working for a well
known streaming video company, on the team that manages their CDN.
Lots of interesting challenges & problems, and I haven't had to touch
a Windows system a single time.  Its all FreeBSD & Linux, all the
time.

We're actually seriously considering getting a solar array with
batteries, as our semi-remote location tends to have frequent, and
sometimes lengthy power outages.  Currently we have a 21kW propane
generator, so its not the end of the world when power is out, but
generators are loud, and propane is expensive.  I don't think I'd want
to be purely DC power though.  We've got too much stuff that requires
AC, and replacing or somehow retrofitting it all would be too much
hassle. I'm reading your web page now, and its got some fantastic
info!

I also travel (for fun) quite a bit (typically 3 big international
trips/year).  Just last week, I returned from spending 3 weeks driving
around southern Africa (Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe & Zambia).  It was
a spectacular trip, covering 6049km (that's nearly 3800 miles).  I've
got a detailed trip report (
http://netllama.linux-sxs.org/llamaland/?p=2619 ) and photos (
https://www.flickr.com/photos/netllama/albums/72157712323812082 )
posted for the curious.

2019 was by no means a bad year for me, but I'm always hopeful that
the new year will be an improvement.

best wishes in 2020!

On Tue, Dec 24, 2019 at 9:18 PM Jay Nugent <jjn at nuge.com> wrote:
>
> Happy Holidays, all !!!
>
> On Tue, 24 Dec 2019, Lonni J Friedman via
> Linux-users wrote:
>
> > Its been mighty quiet here...
> >
> > Happy Holidays!
> >
> > Hoping everyone's 2020 is better than 2019, and may it be the year of
> > the Linux desktop  ;)
>
>
>     Here's what's happening in my life...  I'm retired now, even collecting
> some Social Security - which I never thought would be around by the time i
> was old enough to collect it.  Did some teaching at a local community
> college for a few years teaching Linux/UNIX System Administration.  THAT
> was a LOT of fun!
>
>     These days I keep adding more Solar power atop the house, add more
> batteries to the battery bank, soon will add a Wind Turbine, and have a
> lot of fun wiring up more things in the house to run off 12 volts DC as I
> don't want to run an AC inverter.  Wrote a "Primer" showing how this
> 'project' has been coming along:  http://www.nuge.com/solar
>
>     I keep adding more stuff to the Primer from time to time.  Have a LOT
> of stuff to add -- maybe after the holday season is over.
>
>     My wife and I are both "Preppers" so we've been making sure that we can
> live independent of conventional infrastructure for a VERY extended period
> of time.  Food, water, power, fabricating tools/skills, gardening,
> canning, etc.  We are making the house MORE energy efficiant and are
> considering Geo-Thermal as well.  Linux plays into this as a great way to
> collect energy usage measurements, track Degree Days and other useful
> weather information, solar light-level readings, etc., all collected on
> Raspberry-Pi's running Linux.  So my BASH shell script writing skills are
> being pushed to the limits! (grin)
>
>     As I like to say:  You Cannot Manage What You Cannot Measure
>
>
>     My wife retires in 151 weeks (yeah, she tracks things quite closely).
> When that happens we hope to do a lot of traveling around the US, Canada
> (she was born there), and Mexico.  Perhaps we can visit with a few of the
> fine folks we've met on this list :)
>
>     So what has everyone been up to?  Hope you all are in good health and
> living happy lives!
>
>
>        --- Jay Nugent  WB8TKL
>            Ypsilanti, Michigan
>
>