jwegner.io on www.josephwegner.com

Boundary Waters Trip 2020

Mon, 03 Aug 2020 22:07:31 -0500

In a couple weeks, I’ll be joining four of my close friends for a canoeing trip in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Since COVID-19 is still in full swing, camping seems like one of the few vacation options that won’t bring you into contact with tons of strangers. I’ve been to the BWCAW a dozen times in my youth, but this is my first time going since I was in high school, and it’s been really fun planning out the trip. Some of my friends have done some camping in the public lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management out West, but this will be the first wilderness canoe trip for everyone excluding myself. I ended up picking Sawbill Lake as our entry point, as lots of people on the BWCA forums recommend it as a good lake for beginners. We’re renting our canoes from Sawbill Outfitters, which is very conviently located right at the entry point for the lake so we don’t have to have the canoes transported to another lake. Ideally we would have camped at the Superior National Forest campground right next to the entry point before and after out BWCAW trip as well, but the showers are closed for the season due to the pandemic, so a hotel it is. It’s not very nice being in the woods for five days and then driving eight hours back home without a shower first. I’d say that I’ll do a follow-up post about the trip, but my track record for updates thus far has been pretty lackluster.

Gen Con 2019

Fri, 16 Aug 2019 00:14:56 -0500

This year I attended Gen Con for the first time. For those that are not familiar, Gen Con is four days of gaming madness. While there were some electronic games, the primary focus is on board games, tabletop role-playing games, miniature war games, and trading card games. I went almost exclusively for RPGs, but ended up only seeing a couple demos in the exhibit hall and watching some live one-shots. I love board games, and ended up playing several that were pretty neat, but I was ultimately disappointed with myself for not playing in any RPGs. In the weeks leading up to the con, I felt a bit foolish for spending so much money when I am ~~a filthy normie~~ fairly far removed from the fandom that this sort of event attracts. I definitely could have done a better job researching and signing up for events before I arrived at the con. My intention was to go into this first time without any planning and get used to how the convention was laid out and not have to rush around a bunch. As luck would have it, I ran into several friends that I didn’t know were going to attend, and they ended up serving as my guides around the convention and Indianapolis at large.

Quinn and MJ at Izzy’s

Beginning Photography

Wed, 12 Jun 2019 19:17:42 -0500

Recently, I’ve been a bit obsessed with photography. Specifically 35mm film photography, but as a result I’m learning digital as well. Shortly after moving to Chicago, I brought a couple of my dad’s old film cameras with me: a Pentax Spotmatic F and Minolta Hi-Matic 7sii. The Pentax is a pretty standard, fully manual, single-lens reflex (SLR) camera, with a 55mm f/1.8 SMC Takumar lens which is very similar to the ever-popular K1000, albeit with an M42 screw lens instead of the newer bayonet mount. My dad had that camera when he was in college, so it seemed fitting to do the same when I was attending university as well. The Minolta is a nifty little rangefinder with a fixed 40mm f/1.7 lens, which I appreciate for its fast Copal leaf shutter and compact size. I believe it was originally my grandfather’s, as the camera bag I found it in had some of his business cards in them, which on its own was a neat little find. My initial pictures with those two cameras were pretty abysmal, as I had no real idea about how they operated, and any pictures that actually turned out were purely by luck.

First Game

Thu, 10 Jan 2019 00:09:23 -0600

As I mentioned in my previous post, I am going to be running a Stars Without Number game for some of my IRL friends. Up to this point, I have played in a lot of different role-playing games, but I have never been the game master for any of them.

Joe’s Gaming History

A long time ago, my older brother was really into Vampire: The Masquerade with his friends, and of course I wanted to do what the cool, older kids were doing, so I convinced my brother and his goth high school friends to let me play with them for a couple of sessions. He also played some Palladium and GURPS at the time, so naturally I read all of the rulebooks that he had. Also, since I was really into LEGO, he and I devised our own LEGO RPG using GURPS, which was pretty cool, although a bit unwieldy because players fictionally travel through a world much faster than we could possibly construct it on the fly.

Reading List - January 2019

Wed, 09 Jan 2019 17:57:33 -0600

I have a few books that I have been bouncing between, sometimes starting them and getting a few chapters in before I start another. Not a great habit, sure, but there are so many good books out there that I get really excited when I get a new one that I want to jump right in. If it isn’t immediately apparent from the list, I’m a bit of a science fiction junkie.

NaNoWriMo 2018

Fri, 19 Oct 2018 22:45:08 -0500

I have been enamored with the idea of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) since I first heard about it. I do not remember the first time I attempted doing it, but it has been going on 6 years that I have made an attempt each year, and hopefully this year will be more successful than in the past.

Part of the reason for my optimism is that I am finally finished with school. It only took 10 years for me to finish my undergrad, but hey, that’s life right? I ultimately learned more from the time I spent working in the industry, but it is a relief to be done in any case.

RHEL VMware Deployment

Mon, 20 Aug 2018 22:38:34 -0500

Over the last year at work, we have really stepped up our automation efforts. It started out with OS customization using Ansible, but we quickly ran into the issue of bootstrapping the network configuration. We were cloning a minimally configured RHEL 7 template to deploy new machines, but we would have to manually login through the remote console to set the IP and also change the VLAN in the admin console. However, we were on a mission ~~from God~~ to touch the machines as little as possible in the name of real automation, so even that small amount of manual intervention galled us.

Introduction

Wed, 01 Aug 2018 21:51:21 -0500

Hello There!

My name is Joe. I’ve been kicking around with various web platforms (web2py, django, ghost, etc), for a while now, trying to put up a basic website, but nothing really stuck. Coming from a systems and CS background, I kept thinking that maybe if I found the right stack, I would be interested enough in the platform that I would like writing in it. Of course, this is the classic mistake: I have a hammer, so all problems are now nails.

About Me

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Hello! My name is Joe Wegner. I’m a Systems Engineer at DePaul University in Chicago, IL. That said, all of the views on this site are mine alone and are not necessarily reflective of my employer.

This site was constructed using the Hugo static site generator. It it hosted on Netlify using automated deployments from Gitlab. The site’s (very minimal) styling is adapted from the Simple Hugo Theme. I originally started off using the Capsule theme instead, but opted for a simpler redesign. I’m not sure if there’s any layout code remaining from that theme, but better to give credit just in case.