Over the weekend, Hamas stormed Israel and committed what can only be described as a series of atrocities. Thanks to the specter of Social Media, they gleefully posted a series of videos as the invasion commenced, so proud were they of the massacre. These videos demonstrated a lack of humanity so profound, I’m at a loss to comprehend how someone becomes so twisted. A mostly naked woman with broken limbs in the back of a pickup, surrounded by men praising their God and spitting on her comatose and possibly dead body.

So my 46th birthday has come and gone. As per usual, I took the week off and played video games. The primary focus of this time was spent on Armored Core 6, a mech-focused game by FromSoftware of Dark Souls fame. It’s an excellent pastime, and even though I suck at it, I’m having a blast (pun intended) blowing stuff up with mechs. Unfortunately during my second playthrough in pursuit of the second of three possible endings, I noticed a lot more eye floaters than usual and a weird squiggle of bright light in the periphery of my right eye.

So I already noted in my previous post that my Macular Degeneration had returned. I hated to admit it at the time, but it meant finally doing what I’d been putting off since this whole adventure began. I had to prepare myself for potentially slowly going blind. My existing desk situation was going to have to change. Goodbye old friend Getting Carded Given that I work with computers all day, I knew that meant I needed to replace two things: my monitor, and possibly my video card.

Looks like I’ve fallen a bit behind in my updates. The tl;dr of it is that June was all about travel, and July wasn’t. I traveled to London for a few work meetings from July 4-8, and then literally a few days later, Jen and I went to Florida from the 12th to the 18th. Then we went to her parents’ to celebrate Jim’s birthday. At that point, it felt like we’d be in some kind of vehicle until the end of time.

Given all of my work on my basement project server, it occurred to me that I would eventually need to override my router’s DNS settings if I wanted general availability through the house. I can modify the DNS settings of my desktop or laptop, but that doesn’t really scale to every cellphone, TV, media device, or other janky tech strewn around our domicile. There’s just one problem: ISP-supplied equipment does not allow that.