Again, I have neglected this blog. Partly because life is life, partly because I was unsure what I wanted to post about and partly because I’m lazy. I can’t fix life, and I can’t fix my laziness - I’m too damn old for that one - but I do have some ideas on where I want to go with this blog. I will give the occasional post about life. There are many things to come with life this year.

It’s been nearly ten months since my last post. A lot has happened in the last ten months. Clayton granduated from graduate school and took a new job in Little Rock, Arkansas. Benna took a new job with Vanderbilt University. Joseph graduated from his Georgia Tech - the real school. The last year for me has been a year of rekindling childhood loves. Since March 2023, Elisa and I have seen Billy Joel in concert three times.

After nearly two months of studying and taking practice tests, I took and passed my AZ-104 exam to receive my Azure Adminstrator Associate certification. My primary tool for preparing for the AZ-104 exam was Microsoft Learn. I highly recommend taking practice tests for this exam. Many of the questions are detailed limits for Azure resources. I cannot emphasize enough that hands on experience with the base Azure solutions of storage, key vault, compute, recovery vault, monitor, subscriptions, and Azure policy is required for this exam.

Moving to a static website generator like Hugo from a CMS tool like Wordpress does come at the cost of losing built in features like comments. Hugo provides support for several third party providers for comments. After looking at a few, I decided to go with Disqus. Disqus provides for a free option. Ad supported of course, the saying “nothing in life is free” is not more apparent than on the Internet.

It’s been just over two weeks since I started this blog. My original plan was to use Wordpress to manage my site. I had worked with Wordpress previously, and it is very popular. I decided to use hostinger to host the blog. I found hostinger pretty easy to setup, but ran across Hugo. Hugo is a tool that converts Markdown into static html. There are lots of themes, and add ons for things like comments and Google analytics.

Calling all my WhoDat friends. Go and sign up for a chance to go to London for five days and to see the Saints play the Vikings. I entered, I mean why not? It would be an amazing trip but more importantly it’s a really worthy cause. A cancer diagnosis changes not only the person’s life but their family and friends’ lives. So go on over to https://alltroo.com/sweepstakes/brees/ and enter. You will be contributing to a wonderful cause and might just win a WhoDat dream vacation to London.

I’ve been an IT professional for 28 years, sports fanatic for 50 years 😱, a father for 27 years and a husband for 33 years. And now I’m a blogger for one day. It’s been quite an interesting day. I tried to setup this WordPress site using a free hosting site but struggled to get my domain to work with it. After setting it up two times only to have the site return to the “Welcome to famous five-minute WordPress install” page, I decided to go all in.