Summary-2020

I can agree that 2020 hasnt been the best year ever with all the issues happening: racial violence, USA political turmoil, coronavirus, etc. But I need to look at the bright side:

  • Got a job offer in Jan 2020 that opened doors to very interesting changes in my life.
  • Got a visa for a new country
  • Leave my old job
  • Stay out of work for two months, learning a lot “working” from home.
  • Start this blog
  • Reading more books than other years
  • Visit Sofia (Bulgaria), Porto, Nazaret and Batalla (Portugal)
  • Remind my Karate
  • Fitter than ever (no injuries, more days training)
  • Passed Kubernetes CKA
  • Cold showers + breathing routines
  • More scheduling than to-do list
  • Cooking many new things.
  • Saving a lot
  • Helping family
  • Friends are doing well.
  • Focus in my mental well-being
  • Start a new job

Chilli-no-carne

I cooked a vegan dish last night for a friend. It is a mix of something similar I did some time ago but now with mushrooms and red wine.

Ingredients:

  • 300g mushrooms shredded via food processor
  • 1 small potato cut in small slides + olive oil
  • 1 red pepper
  • 1 can of passata (tomate sauce)
  • oregano + salt + pepper + splash red wine vinegar
  • 1 can of mix beans
  • red wine (100ml)
  • 2 small pieces of dark chocolate (85%)

Process:

1- In a saucepan, heat some oil, add the potatoes and red pepper. Fry them. Keep stirring so they dont stick in the bottom.

2- Add the tomate sauce, stir for a couple of minutes, adding the oregano, salt, pepper.

3- Add the mushrooms.

4- Add the can of beans, keep stirring. And add the red wine

5- At no low-medium heat, keep stirring form time to time. Sauce should thicken up and not stick in the bottom. Taste, add salt/pepper if needed.

6- 10-15 minutes later, taste. Check pepper and beans are soft. Add chocolate, it should melt quickly and darken the sauce.

7- Remove from the heat, and serve in bowls!

To be honest, it was tasty, not difficult and quick.

Reverse-Eng-Vaccine-Code

Very interesting link shared by a good friend. I wasn’t aware there was a bit of openness about the vaccine, taking into account that at the end, this is business….

I like the similarities between computing and DNA/RNA and the hacks introduced to make it work (plenty of Ψ, production enhancements, spikes, AAAs end) I think this should be interested to show in schools to get more students in science.

I didnt know the founder of PowerDNS was so keen of biology.

DNS-Secondary-Multiple_Primary

I had a couple of blogs from cloudflare regarding DNS infrastructure. One is regarding DNS secondary and the other about having multiple DNS primary servers in a different provider.

Regarding the Secondary DNS is interesting how they have moved to a kubernetes infrastructure with its issues.

For setting up, different primary servers in a different provider makes sense nowadays with so many options. But there is some research to be done. You dont want the new primary DNS servers relaying in the same cloud provider as your current setup. It is interesting the mention using OctoDNS for zone management and TeamCity for CI/CD.

Patatas-con-ajo

“Patatas con ajo” was a typical side dish I had with a beef steak when I was a kid. I remember that acid/strong flavour of the potatoes. I have tried a couple of time lately and I couldn’t find the flavour. So I check a couple of videos, and this one gave me the clue, vinager! And then I realised that very likely in each household, this recipe has a different name like “patatas a la vinagreta”.

In my case, the potatoes are fried with much less olive oil so they dont get that crispy. Once they are cooked, removed from the pan, and put chopped garlic, parsly and vinager (I used white wine one). Cooked for 30 sec and then add again the potatoes. Be sure everything gets mixed. Then remove from the heat.

I found that childhood taste! And the day after, they were even better!

Vertical-Farming

In one of the summaries I receive, I checked this article. I had read before about vertical farming and I thought it was a really interesting idea, mainly for the saving in water and soil. But I never thought that they were actually quite expensive to run because the electricity and tech needed (and real state). I am pretty sure that at some point not very far in the future they will be cost effective. Although it doesn’t feel natural.

Mindset

This is the last book I read this week. I bought it after reading other book this Summer about focus. And to be honest, I was quite surprised. The main idea is if you believe your capabilities/skills are born with you or you can develop them. Dr Carol Dweck shows how is life when you think you can develop your skills. And that is useful for anything. As well, you can have a growing mindset for some things and a static mindset for others. My mindset for the book was that it was going to be all about career and hard work. But I was surprised that there were more subjects related to a growing mindset, like education (children), family and relationships. I was to narrow-minded initially to the idea of growing mindset but it makes sense to apply it for everything in life. Learn when you have static mindset and make the effort to grow. Drop by drop, the bucket gets filled, said my Golang instructor. I really liked the examples about teachers who went beyond anything to show their pupils they could learn, and they did. And reminded me to the Dangerous Minds movie. I have told myself millions times that some people are born smart and I am not. But I need to realize that I have been growing since I decided to study and advance in my life. So, keep applying it, keep growing. For study, for work, for sport and relationships…

Tao-Te-Ching

I finished this book this week. My favourite part was the introduction as it gives a brief view of China’s history and the thought schools developed around 100-500 BCE. One of the main figures of that time is Confucius and his school of Confucianism. Other school developed in that time was Taosim. It looks back to an ideal time even before the origins of the first Chinese kingdoms, all based in a basic way of life: survive with the minimum and avoid problems. There are a lot mysticism and no much logic in the statements, but it seems that’s the goal. Follow life, it is not lead by logic (as we would like).

Some of my favourites:

Knowing others is intelligent.

Knowing yourself is enlightment.

Conquering others takes force

Conquering yourself is true strenght

Knowing what is enough is wealth

Forging ahead shows inner resolve.

At the end, the book is small, but it can be tricky to understand. The philosophy is quite different from the Western one I am use to but I liked it. There are always small gems to take with you.

They_Live

Reading in a chat roon, somebody posted this. I thought this is so current, but realized it is from 1988 and from John Carpenter. In my mind he only filmed horror movies but this one looks like it has something else. Will watch it next week.

3phase-PDU

This is a very interesting blog entry from Cloudflare about PDU deployments in DCs and the theory behind. Nowadays nearly everything is cloud oriented. But we forget they still need to be deployed physically. In a old job, going dense in physical setups, requires more power and 3-phase PDUs where a must. The blog is quite good explaining the reasons to move to 3-phase and the challenges to balance the power. When you buy “colo”, you buy space and power, and that is not cheap.