My Year in Review - 2024 Edition
Overview
Professional and Personal Life
I went on a 3 week vacation in May to early June. I travelled with my family to Portugal, spending time in Lisbon, Nazaré, and several other towns and cities. It was a fantastic trip that I was able to spend with family, and I am looking forward to going back again in the future.
I always take a laptop with me whenever I go on an extended vacation. This time I decided to take a laptop that I had sitting around for a while, a Lenovo ThinkPad T490 (Intel Core i5-8365U @ 1.60 GHz, 16.0 GB DDR4-2400, 1 TB NVMe) that was running Windows 10 Pro. I wanted to take a laptop that was meant for Windows 10 to see how much of my workflow was still compatible with Windows. The laptop worked perfectly fine, except I noticed a lot of odd OneDrive issues that I had forgotten about. I have no intention of abandoning macOS at this time, but it was just something that I wanted to test. I also plan on testing my workflow on Ubuntu (or another Linux distribution) at some point in the next few months just to get a sense of how things still work with it.
Skills Competition Retrospective
I wanted to talk about this series of posts that I did in early 2024. It has been over 15 years since I participated in the Skills Ontario and Skills Canada competitions in May of 2009, so I thought it was time to properly document my experience with both events. I underestimated how much I wanted to say, and it ended up being a three-part series:
There were a few reasons why I wanted to write about the experience, but it mostly came down to me starting to forget little details about the competitions. It also didn’t help that information on the internet from 15 years ago had decayed considerably, and referencing certain information was starting to become an issue. At the time of the competitions I kept a lot of articles, documents, notes, and photos, which I dumped into a folder and sort of forgot about. In the process of putting together these posts I had to sort through those old documents to figure out certain details and do a lot of cleanup in the process. It was a good exercise and I am glad that I did it.
Some information about the two events is lost to time. I was using my old college email for some communications and that account is long gone, and I never preserved anything from it as I wasn’t able to export anything from it. I also found out that I didn’t really take a lot of photos during both events. I had a BlackBerry Curve 8330 at the time, and while it was a great phone it was absolutely terrible at taking photos. It was also a different time, I had no motivation to take photos during the lead up to the events, something that I would definitely do now. I have been to several Skills Ontario events since 2009 and I always took the time to check out the other competitions and for some reason I take photos whenever I am there.
Even though these posts took some time to put together, I am glad that I did it. I will probably make additions to it in the future as I continue to go through old documents in my old backups. The Wayback Machine filled in a lot of the blanks and I am always thankful that it exists. The attacks on Archive.org in 2024 put into perspective how fragile the entire system is.
It was also a nice experience to go through a lot of my old work from Cambrian College. As an exercise I am going to try and recreate my final project from my last semester and see if it works in Cisco Packet Tracer since that project was done with physical equipment. There is no real point in doing that, but I want to see how complete everything is and I will post about it if I am successful or not.
Spin-Off Project
In the process of putting together all of the information that I needed for the Skills Ontario and Skills Canada posts, I ended up accumulating a lot of information for it. I will try and work on putting that information in an accessible format over the next few months or whenever I get time. I need to ensure that I do this properly, as I do not want to get any of the details incorrect.
I have put all of this into GitHub, and I am working on a way to make the information accessible. This project relies heavily on the Wayback Machine, so it depends on how reliable that site is.
Miscellaneous
Apple Silicon
My 2020 MacBook Air M1 is still going strong, and for a first-generation device I have no complaints. At this point I am going to keep using it until it stops working. I can’t justify replacing it with a newer model since there is nothing wrong with it at all.
Microsoft 365
Over the last few months of 2024, I have migrated completely away from Microsoft 365 for my personal usage. I will post about the experience in the next few weeks when I take the notes that I put together and organize them into something a bit more readable.
Google Domains Sale
I was really unhappy with Google Domains being sold to Squarespace last year. I have nothing against Squarespace, but the reason I moved a lot of domains to Google Domains a few years ago was because it was easy to use, and there was no upselling happening. Squarespace will inevitably change things and try to monetize absolutely everything, so to avoid the issue altogether I just left the platform. I moved all of my domains to Namecheap since I heard a lot of positive comments about them, and so far they have been phenomenal. There are a lot of included services that are easy to use, and I have definitely been taking advantage of those services.
This is yet another entry for Killed by Google.
Website Changes
I did a lot of cleanup on all of my old posts over the last few weeks. I did some checking and there were a lot of small errors in a lot of my older posts, so I took some time to clean up those posts to make them easier to read. I also removed a lot of aliases that were brought over from WordPress that weren’t being used. Even though I think that everything that I post on this website is a snapshot of what I was thinking at the time, it isn’t static so I can make minor changes if needed as time goes on. One of the things that I like about using Hugo is that the entire website is in markdown files, so making quick edits is trivial. In the process of going through everything I found a lot of external links that were not working correctly, so those have either been corrected or removed entirely. I also corrected a lot of thumbnail images that were not displaying correctly, which were migrated from WordPress.
I also made a few changes with the way that I used Gumroad, and that includes modifying the URL to use store.mjcb.ca. I am planning on using the Gumroad more in the future, and I wanted to make the change now so I don’t need to do it later.
I only really post on this website when I get time or there is something that I want to post about. I don’t have any quotas, I don’t use this website for ad revenue, and I don’t have anyone asking for me to post anything. I have no issues posting 50 word, 500 word, or 5000 word posts whenever I find a topic that I want to go over. I am not planning on making any serious changes to this website, as I am still happy with Hugo and the way that everything works with it. The Hugo Clarity theme is also still working well for me, but at the end of the day changing the theme is trivial if I wanted to change it.
AI Tools
I haven’t really said a lot about AI on this website, and it is because I really have no interest in it. I don’t use it for anything, I don’t depend on it for anything, and at the end of the day it is just another tech fad that will probably go away. I have tried several AI tools over the last few months and I have never found them to be particularly useful. At the end of the day I don’t care about AI, and I am getting tired of hearing about it.
I recently upgraded to macOS Sequoia 15.2 which came with Apple Intelligence. It is not useful, but it is quite humorous in the way that it tries to summarize things like email notifications for me.
Social Media
I am not a fan of social media at all. I find it to be a complete waste of time, and I have serious issues with the way that it is used to spread misinformation on a large scale.
Out of curiosity I have also been trying out Bluesky and created a profile. I never used Twitter, and I have certainly never used X, and I never really understood the appeal of it. I find the experience to be a strange unfiltered echo chamber, so I probably won’t keep it around for long.
While I don’t really consider it to be social media, I have had just about enough with LinkedIn. The site is a shell of its former self, and is just full of influencers who post complete nonsense all day long. Over the last few months I have turned off all notifications and uninstalled the app from my phone. I try to make an effort to check the site a few times a month, which I usually forget to do. If anyone is trying to contact me, LinkedIn is not the way to do so.
I have also been testing Discord for a future project that I am working on. If I end up using it I will post more information in the future.
2025 Goals
I have several posts that I want to make in 2025, and some of them are going to require a bit of work to put together. I will post all of my sources on the docs.mjcb.ca website, as I want to make sure that all of the background information is in one location.
I will make an effort to post some networking content in 2025. I have had the tagline, “A website about networking, system administration and other things that interest me” since the day that I started this website, and I have never actually posted anything that is network related. I did some thinking about this recently, and I think I finally realized why I never talk about networking topics on this website and it is because of my job. I post a lot about Microsoft and server topics, and I think it is because I don’t work as a systems administrator anymore, I work in networking and security.
Practical Guide to PKI with Windows Server - Second Edition
I have been asked a lot about this recently and this is still happening. I wasn’t able to work on it a lot over the last few months due to other commitments, but I have been able to work on it without too many distractions lately and it is getting close to being completed. I use GitHub to track issues with the book, and I am down to about 30 tasks that need to be completed. This may sound like a lot left to do, but that is down from almost 160 issues from the beginning of 2024. The book is a lot different from the first edition, and has taken a lot of time to put together. I have not just updated a few screenshots and added a few details, there is a lot of differences that go more in-depth on the subject matter. This is all based on feedback I received for the first edition.
I won’t get into the details, but I have rewritten a lot of the book due to feedback from some testers that I gave early copies to. I won’t commit to anything, but it should hopefully be done in the next few months.