---
title: Status Update - Spring Semester 2022
date: 2022-05-06
---

# Preface
Hi all! Another semester has come and gone, bringing with it the end of my first
year at WPI, and of college in general. It's been one hell of a year, but I
think I've grown as a person and dealt with my problems in, if not a healthy
way, then at least not an unhealthy way.

# Personal
Over the C term break, I successfully transferred jobs from the Service Desk to
Network Operations. This is a lot closer to what I want to do for a living, and
so far it's been a lot of fun. Most of the work involved is patching and
testing, but I've also been working on some of the internal software tools, as
well as being a general Linux geek. One of the one's I'm most proud of is
`dns-plotter`, which was written to help debug some DNS resolution issues a few
weeks ago. Basically, it takes a target address and a DNS resolver, and tries to
resolve the address every so often. When it's done, it graphs the results using
`gnuplot(1)`. The source code can be found [here][dns-plotter].

# Projects
### Campmaster Constantine
Unfortunately, Campmaster Constantine's service was sunset on 11 February when
the entire two-year-old database was wiped out overnight. You can read more
about that [here][glitch-campmaster]. I'm working on the replacement, which can
be found at that site.

# Organization
I've started making daily lists of my tasks following a mangling of bullet
journaling, where each task gets a special symbol depending on its status
(to-do, done, cancelled, or postponed). When I need something to do, I look at
the list and pick something. That way I know what I need to do, and I can look
back on previous days to see when I did something in case it ever comes up.

Each night, I've also been trying to summarize what happened during the day
below the task list, including my feelings throughout the day. This helps to
drain all that stress out of me before I sleep, and anecdotally I think it's
helped a lot.

That's all for this semester, see you after the summer!

[dns-plotter]: https://git.carathe.dev/muirrum/dns-plotter
[glitch-campmaster]: https://glitchbot.net/campmaster