“Hello there…” - Obi Wan Kenobi
There have been so many changes that have occurred in my life over the last several years. In addition, I haven’t made much time to blog about stuff that I have been working on, or the events happening in my life. That does not excuse my absence from the blogging community, but I think you would probably have reacted the same way if all of this occurred to you.
Here's a few highlights since my last post:
- As you probably are already aware, VMware was acquired by Broadcom in November 2023. I had been employed with VMware for over ten years. This acquisition introduced a ton of changes to my work-life. Right off the bat, panic set in and we all feared for our jobs. Over the last year and a half, I truly felt like an inmate on death row awaiting his execution. I didn't know when it would happen, just knew that it was going to happen. Finally, in March, I got the word and was laid off. Broadcom released a majority of PSO resources during this time, and I was picked up by a Broadcom partner. I am now fully onboarded with Entelligence -- doing what I did for VMware/Broadcom. I can honestly say, I feel much better mentally knowing that this burden has been released.
- During the layoff, I moved from outside of Atlanta, GA to western Connecticut. This has also been quite the challenge, moving between states (2000 miles! Holy Cow!). Uprooting my family from our friends and routines and interjecting us all into a whole new world. My wife keeps saying we 'live in a fairy tale'. In a sense, we do. Since we have been here, we have seen a herd of deer, black bear(plural), porcupines, bobcats, foxes, and numerous other woodland creatures. As we have been unpacking and making each space our own, we have also discovered several idiosyncrasies in our new older home that had to be addressed - water leaks, electric work, etc. Oh, the joys of home ownership.
- The day after the acquisition was finally announced in 2023, I lost my father. That has been its own ordeal. The woman, who served as his caretaker, cozied up and conned my father into removing my siblings and I out of his will, leaving her everything. Legal battles ensued.
- During the pandemic, my wife found that she had colon cancer. She had to have chemo therapy during lockdown. We are officially over three years cancer clear. I won't say cancer free until it has been five years. But so far, she's been doing very well.
Now that I have returned and working on my blog again, I have finally made the move from my wordpress site (micronauts) to this new Github pages site. I am happy to be in a situation where my site is more secure and modern.
As you can see from the looks of things, I have made quite a few cosmetic changes. I found the look/theme of the site from here. It’s a jekyll theme made for devlopers – give credit to Sujay Kundu for his amazing work. Of course, I have modifed the work a bit – in addition, making it more my own.
As for how I made the physical move from wordpress to gihub, I borrowed inspiration from a few fellow bloggers:
Chris Ayers - https://chris-ayers.com/2022/12/20/migrating-from-wordpress-to-github-pages
Harald Uebele - https://haralduebele.github.io/2021/02/10/Moving-my-Blog-from-Wordpress-to-Github-Pages/
Laszlo Fazekas - https://medium.com/better-programming/how-i-migrated-my-wordpress-site-to-github-pages-842afd262f9a
When I downloaded the wordpress export, I had to convert the XML into content that could be consumed by this jekyll site. I used the tool wordpress-export-to-markdown to make the conversion. One of the above websites mention this.
Once converted, I then had to go in and edit each and every entry that I have made over the last 15 years so that they could be seen. First, this is tedious and I hated it. I will also add that while the content was saved, some of it doesn’t look how it did in the WYSIWYG editors from wordpress. I may, or may not, clean them up in the future. But at least the data was indeed saved.
Eventually, I will convert micronauts.us to point to this github page. But I don’t know when that will be. Maybe sooner, maybe later.
