I have a lot of hobbies, to the point that I even describe myself that way on my About page. Many of these are carried over from childhood, others I picked up as an adult, mostly from seeing cool things on Reddit and deciding to try them. Music was my first love. I started in elementary school with trombone and piano. I didn’t keep up with the piano lessons, but trombone became my primary instrument.

I was at one point in my life a pretty good trombone player. Had I wanted to, I probably could have gone to college for music but I decided against it for various reasons. Mostly, I was afraid having to make a living as a musician would kill the joy I found in playing music. I still played regularly in college, through Scranton’s Performance Music department, which is shockingly large for a school that doesn’t have a music major.

I did something this week I never do on purpose: I clicked on an ad. Shameful, I know, but I had a reason. My wife and I had talked about getting some Philly sports apparel because we don’t have much and we’ve been going to more games. Pro sports apparel is expensive, which is a large part of the reason I haven’t bought any recently, so when I saw an ad on Instagram with a coupon code for Eagles appparel, it seemed reasonable to check it out.

Growing up, I didn’t stay at the beach as a vacation. When my family went to the beach, we drove there in the morning, spent the day on the sand, and stopped for dinner at an Applebee’s on the drive home. After graduating from college, I started going to the beach with my partner’s family, who had spent a week in the same beach town every year for the past twenty years.

At some point in the last few years, I became interested in self-hosted services, probably via r/homelab and r/homeserver. It serves two purposes: a hobby and a way to have useful things with less reliance on big tech companies. Because it’s a hobby, setting up new services or improving my environment don’t always feel like work. It’s frustrating when there are issues, but the process of troubleshooting and getting the whole setup working is mostly fun.