1 HistoryFrom the time I started working as a Unix administrator professionally, I’ve had an interest in dotfiles. My first job was as a Solaris administrator. For the time, they had a nice set up with NIS and NFS mounted home directories. My dotfiles followed me to which ever machine I logged into. This allowed me to have a unified dotfile experience, so I kept building my dotfiles for the years I was there.

Back in the 1990s, I was a big fan of 2600, a hacker magazine. The 2600 name comes from the 2600 Hertz tone phone phreaks used in controlling phone systems back in the day. In the back of the magazine they listed meet ups in various parts of the world. There was the Vancouver 2600 meetings, which I used to attend. Sadly, it seems they no longer take place. We used to meet in the the Pacific Centre food court to discuss all sorts of things.

Duckduckgo began offering an email filtering/obfuscation service, which I promptly signed up for. It’s gratifying to have emails in my inbox that no longer contain trackers. I started updating various services with my new email address, including the domains I own. Recently, Cloudflare also started providing email forwarding services for domain owners. Instead of forwarding to my personal email account, the emails for my domains now go through DuckDuckGo’s email filtering system first.

In the early 2000s, I had spent more than a little time jail-breaking original XBox gaming consoles to run XBMC, now called Kodi. So, I was quiet engaged, as I was recently listening to the Darknet Diaries episode on the XBox Underground. As I listened, something leapt out at me. The discussion of hackers getting XBox 360 Dev Kits. From what I remember from my time at DemonWare, these were not supposed to be in the hands of the general public.

In 2013 I started mining Dogecoin as a distraction from my stressful job. At the time, a company was offering a VPS for a one time payment. It was “free for life” after that. Of course, this model doesn’t work and eventually they started charging people an annual fee, which is when we parted ways. The way the model worked is you pay the one time fee for units toward a VPS.

After years of picking away and poking at a keyboard, I have finally published my book! The Sabbatical Guidebook As you can see from the book’s cover image the book is called The Sabbatical Guidebook - The Nuts, Bolts, and Everything Else You Need to Plan Your Sabbatical Adventure. It is exactly that. I have poured all of my experiences, conversations and research into this slim tome. It’s as pragmatic and concise as I could keep it, without being dry.

In April 2017, I was staying at a hostel in Paris waiting for snail mail as a part of my visa application process. During this stay thefts were occurring in our dorm room. There were three of us that were staying in the room for a longer period time. The people who stayed shorter terms were being stolen from. Suspicion was of course on us three. Then we three were stolen from.