Hobbies

Mechanical keyboards

Being someone who more or less types for a living, I'm obsessed with finding the best feeling, best sounding, and best looking keyboards. My current daily-driver is a dark blue Tofu Jr. with a PVD gold weight, with DUROCK L5 Smokey Blue switches, DUROCK V2 Smokey stabilizers, and MT3 Dusk keycaps. Can you guess my favorite color? 😉

Keyboard kits are fun, especially those that require soldering. So far my soldered-keyboard collection includes the Nibble 65 and the Orange Boy Ergo.

My "homelab"

My prior DevOps experience introduced me to some of the basics of IT/sysadmin work, specifically networking, virtualization, and server/app hosting. I no longer perform these tasks professionally, but why let the skills I learned go to waste?

Turning these skills into a hobby was seamless... once I had the right equipment. Since I was setting everything up at home I had a few constraints for my hardware: 1.) low power consumption, 2.) a small physical footprint, and 3.) it should operate as quiet as possible (heat is currently not a factor - the U.S. Northeast can get pretty cold!).

Second-hand professional workstations are an amazing value (if you can find a good deal!). I run most virtual machines/applications on a refurbished Dell Precision T7810 with two Intel Xeon E5-2690 v4 CPUs with 56 total threads, 256 GB RAM, four 4 TB NVME SSDs in RAIDZ1, and a NVIDIA Quadro P1000. I also have a HP ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus with three 6TB Western Digital Red HDDs in RAIDZ1 for redundancy. I'm currently working on setting up an "AI rig" with a NVIDIA RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB GPU for running LLMs, training large models, etc.

I worked with VMWare ESXI in the past, but nowadays I usually opt for open-source solutions when they're available. Therefore, the primary operating system on all my server hardware is Proxmox. All other operating systems are virtualized through it. This includes TrueNAS for storage management and backups (with direct hardware pass-through), one Ubuntu Server instance per machine for hosting Docker containers, and other various Linux distributions as needed for game server hosting, custom images/OSes, and personal projects. Other more specialized devices are also in use, including micro PCs acting as pfSense routers and network-wide DNS filters.

I host a slew of services, apps, and websites on my homelab. I have roughly 11TB of usable storage which is used for backups (virtual machine snapshots, important files/documents, etc.) and media hosting for my family and friends. This website, among others, is self-hosted using Docker, Cloudflare, and a local proxy manager!

Music interests

I grew up listening to classic rock - Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Eric Clapton, ZZ Top, pretty much anything with a very strong lead guitar. The saxophone, however, is in my opinion one of the most versatile and unique-sounding instruments out there. It is used effectively in classical/orchestral, jazz, blues, big band, classic rock, and even modern pop, not to mention its pleasantly-surprising cameos in virtually every other genre. My all time favorites are Clarence Clemons (and his son Jake, who sounds eerily similar to his father; don't believe me? Listen to this live performance of The General by DISPATCH), Benny Golson, and of course John Coltrane.

I started playing the alto saxophone at age 10 and was a natural. Throughout middle and high school I played first chair in both concert (orchestral) band and jazz band. I also picked up the guitar during high school, taking lessons from a phenomenal guitar instructor, Dan Sitar. Like, really, this guy is insane at his craft. 6/6 would recommend. Unfortunately my musical inclinations were put on the back burner during college, however I'm sure getting back into it is just like re-learning how to ride a bike... right? 🤞

Right now my Spotify On Repeat playlist is populated with Marcus King, Sturgill Simpson, Chris Stapleton, Miranda Lambert, Tyler Childers, Hank Williams Jr., Journey, Chicago, Michael Jackson, Tracy Chapman, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and others (country is my guilty pleasure 🤠).