It's been a while since I last added to my gopher hole, so here's a quick post about some 
events over the past few months.

First and foremost, the baby is doing very, very well.  She is just over 5 months old now 
and is doing everything right.  She sleeps pretty well, eats really well (starting solids 
now), is super mellow, and smiles --all the time--.  My wife and I are finding that a third 
child completely overloads our capacity, so the fact that she is a mellow, happy, healthy 
baby is a huge relief.  She is now at the stage where she has figured out how useful her 
hands are, and she grabs everything.  She particularly likes to grab by chin and hold on 
tight; or occasionally grab a handful of throat flesh 
and twist.

A couple weeks ago, I spent a week in Denver, Colorado for the Supercomputing 2019 
conference.  
I wrote a long shlog post about it on rawtext.club and don't want to duplicate that whole 
thing here, but I'll say that the conference was incredibly interesting, and exhausting.  I 
focused on sessions on data science tools, "last mile to exascale" computing, and on 
reconfigurable computing (FPGAs).  This was my first time attending an SC conference and I'm 
already planning to go next year if possible.  Next year is in Atlanta.

Although childcare work has now expanded to fill pretty much all my waking hours, I've still 
been able to do the up-before-dawn routine to squeeze in a little hobby work.  One pursuit I 
haven't let slip is running rawtext.club.  I finally found the time to migrate off of 
Debian, and RTC is now running on Arch.  So far, so 
good.  I still run Ubuntu on my work 
laptop, so I still get exposed to a Debian-ish system regularly though.

Within rawtext.club, I finally found some time to put linkulator back on the front burner.  
Linkulator is a minimalist shell-based link aggregator, a little like YCombinator News or 
Lobste.rs, but stictly for command line communities like the Zaibatsu or rawtext.club. With 
help from users asdf and sloum, linkulator is now very, very close to a new and completely 
refactored release.  Unlike previous versions, this one does not rely on setuid and does not 
use Unix Domain Sockets.  We have adopted a completely decentralized architecture in which 
files are all kept in user home directories and aggregated on the fly.  You might think this 
would be slow, but so far it seems like it's blazing fast -- and I guess it will continue to 
be until it is run on a highly populated system.  Coming soon!

At work, I was somehow able to inveigle my employer to buy me a subscription to Linux 
Academy and I've been trudging through tutorials there in my down hours in the office.  I 
have no need for Linux certifications, but the information is useful nonetheless.  I'm 
currently working through the LPIC certification trainings, and will then move on to some 
cloud engineering topics.

I'm currently taking a break from cleaning the house as my oldest daughter's birthday party 
just ended. Cake crumbs, juice boxes, and other party detritus are everywhere.  I'd better 
get back to cleaning that up.

Although I haven't been posting in my gopher hole much, I have been reading.  Thank you all 
for the great posts you've been making!