This weekend's festivities include upgrading the house router to a TP Link model with WiFi7 capability. A task I want done while I'm still around to do it. It will future proof the house network for many years.
You leveraged your skill sets nicely to find and improve employment. I enjoyed teaching at the community college level for 3 1/2 years. Great students. Limited budgets. Affordable education. We don't do that as well in eastern Idaho. The new CEI facility in Idaho Falls is a good start.
In reality it is mostly a large pile of e-waste that has very little value to anyone other than a hobbyist such as myself. I have been correctly accused of being a hoarder. Most of it is stacked out in our airplane hangar. I will probably start putting things that might have some value to others up on eBay when we are ready to move to a cheaper part of the country.
I am familiar with pre-IDE hard drives. I still have at least a couple MFM controllers and hard drives in my assortment of vintage computer equipment.
You leveraged your skill sets nicely to find and improve employment.
This is not a completely accurate assessment... I spent approximately ten years in a family business that was mostly a giant pain in the rear but did get me to expand my horizons a bit. I did try to take classes that might have eventually helped me get an engineering degree. What I knew about computers before working as a lab assistant mostly came from working with computers outside of an educational setting. I got my job as a Hazmat Fire Officer because I have always been extremely good at taking any type of standardized test... which civil service tests used to be.
My firefighting experience reminds me a little of my experience flying. By the time I jumped through the hoops to get my private pilot's license I had already been flying hang gliders and ultralight aircraft for years. I got a 100% on my written test by reading books, watching VHS tapes and getting a sign off from the instructor who I logged dual time with. My first solo in a General Aviation aircraft was anti-climatic because I already had at least a couple hundred hours in my little ultralight airplane. Even my first solo in the ultralight by accident but anti-climatic because of all the time that I already had flying hang gliders.
I didn't mention that I spent quite a bit of my childhood interested in chemistry. I learned as much from this as I did in college chemistry classes that I took along with continuing education in Hazmat operations.
I didn't pay much attention to my teachers in school, but was clever enough to get good grades anyway. I always had my own agendas from the time that I was a child. I have been thought to have attention deficit disorder and hyper-activity along with being somewhere on the Asperger Syndrome Diagnostic Scale. But they did not diagnose this type of thing when I was a child or put me on drugs which I am grateful for. I get along well with others for the most part.
I had no idea that my brain worked differently from others until I got a work study job helping people with learning disorders. This caused me to become interested in the subject. Later in my life I went to a mental health professional who felt that drugs would be helpful to me. But the drugs suggested would all have caused me to lose my FAA Medical Certificate.
I am not completely normal but have learned to live with my eccentricities as have my wife, children, and grandchildren. We all have our crosses to bear. I feel very fortunate that I am able to troubleshoot and figure out how to fix nearly anything.
Sorry for another meandering and lengthy post.
I sincerely hope that this will be a long time from now.
I set up a WiFi6 “mesh” router system last year, but I went on the cheap side, so it has had some irritating issues. I have a router on each floor of our three-story house connected with cat 5 cable and another router out in our hangar which is about 100 feet away. This gives me good coverage everywhere. The routers transmit both on the 5.4GHz and 2.4GHz frequencies so they work with all of our security cameras and lights.
We do not have very good cell phone coverage, so we usually make WiFi calls with our cell phones. The issue that I have is that when the cell phones switch from router to router they often drop the call. My next-door neighbor is some type of IT engineer. He says that purchasing a higher quality system would likely be the easiest way to get better and more reliable performance.
My wife enjoys the British comedy Doc Martin, I remind her of the central character, except that I am more friendly and talkative. But I can be awkward in social situations and am not always very good at recognizing non-verbal cues from others.