Well it's been a while! After a few years of retirement, moving into the city to downsize, COVID, grandchildren, world wide insanity... one thing I can promise:
I will NEVER use the word "insane" save when referring to an individual person.
So what's up?
I've been messing around with crypto mining, the "real fun" math involved (yeah! a real life use for partial differentials), doing a little 4x5 photography, a lot of gardening in our little South Philly row home patio, and coming up with ways to entertain 6 and 9 y/o grandchildren without causing serious bodily injury.
So that crypto stuff? Frankly, we made out during the post COVID BTC run - relatively low difficulty coupled with a willingness to tolerate electric bills let us turn those miners into what amounted to bond equivalents. Paid for by mining, the electric bills amounted to a tax on the income. Those electric costs let us compute a cost basis that meant no actual federal or local income tax would be due.
Current projects are setting up a a DuinoCoin farm - just a bunch of ESP32 modules mining a "for fun" project that has a great deal of educational value - the algo is understandable (more or less), cost of entry is about $5.00 and if you name the miners after the grandkids they interested for a few minutes at least.
There might even be a YouTube channel that might be named "DeGustibus" that might actually have some content sometime soon.
Oh yeah... cruising - we have a cruise port (more or less) in Philly now! It's only NCL at this point, and the terminal is "under construction" but we don;t have to fly, drive, or even take the train up to NYC so we snagged a 7 day cruise using MyVegas points and about $800 USD to upgrade the cabin and add the "Free at Sea" package which includes booze, "specialty dining" and some internet.
