General

Every year for the past 5 years I’ve participated in the National Kidney Foundation’s Kidney Walk to help fund services to help those with kidney disease and those who are at risk for kidney disease. This year’s walk is very special. My mother, Barbara Hanselka, lost her battle with kidney disease last year. I will be walking in her memory. Kidney Walk is the nation’s largest walk to fight kidney disease. Held in nearly 100 communities, the event raises awareness and funds lifesaving programs that educate and support patients, their families and those at risk. ...

Today is the 2nd month since my mom passed away. It has been a lot harder than I thought it would be. I’m not entirely sure what I expected, to be honest. It seemed like everything today upset me. Music, videos, thoughts. Even work was stressful. Ultimately, I took off the rest of the day from work because it was simply impossible to focus. All I could do was think of everything I missed about her. Everything I would tell her and enthuse about with her. ...

My tears are a strange mix of happy and sad. She is free of all this fighting she had to do for the past 20 years, and she is finished with all the pain and struggle of being in sick. We had a great last conversation, which you can see in this screenshot.  I wish in a lot of ways I’d gone to see her more, especially after I started working for GitLab and could work from wherever. I know it isn’t my fault and I know there is no way I could have known. I know she held no ill will and neither does my dad. I know she was extremely proud of me and I am so lucky that I was able to share so much life events with her, such as beginning a career, buying a house, etc. ...

As many people know, my mother passed away last week, 2016-08-17. It was somewhat unexpected. She had been in the hospital for quite some time, but she certainly seemed to be getting better. Her heart ended up stopping in the morning and it took them ~30 minutes to revive her. Once she was revived, they believed her to have severe brain damage. We decided to issue a DNR should her heart stop again. This is absolutely what she wanted and I am 1000% sure of this. Ultimately that night, her heart stopped once more and she passed on. After, they confirmed that she did indeed have brain damage and would never have recovered. ...

Recently, I set up my own Gentoo overlay on GitLab with CI using their shared GitLab Runner. I had a lot of trouble at first with getting the CI to cooperate with what I wanted. Getting repoman to work in the docker image was pretty irritating until I found a docker image specifically for testing using repoman. Once I found that, it was super easy! My main purpose for setting up an overlay was primarily to learn how it all works. A friend and I had done it before but I wasn’t quite so familiar with the actual setup. Secondary reason was the desire to use a more recent version of atheme-services as it appears no longer maintained in portage but was recently revived upstream. I have a few other ideas for what I may want to put in there, but for now it is just small time modifications to ebuilds.