My last word of 2021

 Unquote

The Ends Times are here!

The death of Betty White could possibly be heralding the end of the world, because if 2021 got Betty White, then what hope do the rest of us stand!

Happy New Year! I guess

 Well this is it, the closing day of 2021. Really it has not been a terrible year. Sure we are still in the middle of COVID, but lets be honest, we were always going to be dealing with this for 3-5 years, we just did not want to admit it to ourselves. But really, 2021 did not turn out too bad, we got vaccines, so we could start going out again, businesses opened up and we got a little normal back. Things got reorganized at work and I have found myself doing more interesting work with actual challenges instead of just bullshit busy work. I spent more time with Shannon, we actually got out of town a couple of times to have some fun. My visit to Billings was far less stressful than it was in 2020. Over all, 2021 was a good year and I am fairly optimistic about 2022.

Happy New year everyone!

Crypto Currency

 Over the last couple of days I have entered into Crypto mining. No I have not bought a $12,000 Bitcoin miner, I am not that crazy. No, I joined a Monero mining pool, which allows me to put low powered machines to work mining the Monero crypto coin and still some small amount based on how much work these otherwise idle machines do, everyone who contributes CPU cycles gets a cut. I put 2 Raspberry Pi 4's to work along with 2 Optiplex 3050 mini's to work on this project. The 2 Pi's are averaging about 90 hash's per second, the two Optiplex's are averaging around 600 hash's per second. Over the last couple of days as I put my mini farm to work I have acquired 0.0003 Monero or about $0.05. Yeah, I know, its not much, but hey, if I eventually get 1 complete Monero, at its current price of $190, That will pay for every penny of what I have sunk into this equipment over the last 2 or 3 years, then of course I can start paying off the power this sucks down.

I am not a big believer in the whole crypto currency thing. Frankly to me it is like gold in World of Warcraft or maybe even Monopoly Money. It have no real value except what people attribute to it and eventually all those big mining operations and hedge fund managers who are hoarding all this crap are going to cash out and it is all going to come crashing down. There is no way I would ever spend $190 of actual cash on buying a Monero or god forbid $47,000 for a Bitcoin.

So why then am I putting effort into mining it? Well for one thing it is an interesting technical challenge setting up the hardware, compiling the code, getting everything working. Second, though eventually this is all going to come crashing down, until then there are some uses for crypto currency, especially Monero, which has some extra security features on it that make tracking it much more difficult. While I have no intention of doing anything illegal, you just never know when you will need a stash of untraceable money at your disposal.

Anyone interested in getting started should watch this video, it is a great starting place.