...and I'm back!


Rajahal

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Howdy everyone! It has been years since I've been actively involved in the unRAID community. My life has finally brought me back to a place where I have the time and motivation to start tinkering with servers again, so here I am. I'm glad to see some familiar folks here, and plenty of new people as well.

 

For those of you who may remember me from the old days (circa 2010-2012), here's a brief history of where my life has taken me:

 
I started Greenleaf Technology, a custom server building business, with Kyle (prostuff1) whom I met through these forums. Kyle and I never met in person, but worked together for years over email, chat, and the occasional phone call. For 6 months I worked on building the business in the evenings and on weekends while working my full time job during the day. Seeing the business steadily grow and needing a change in my life, I moved from my small city (Reno, NV) to the big city (Oakland, CA) to chase the tech entrepreneur's dream. I'm happy to say that Greenleaf supported my life in Oakland for nearly a year, which is no small feat if you know anything about the cost of living in the bay area! Then hit the 2011 Thailand floods, which thrashed the hard drive market and ultimately gutted our business (and many others, I'm sure). An amazing lesson about the butterfly effect that I still carry with me today! As Greenleaf slowed down, I decided to hand over the reins to Kyle and pursue other interests. Around this time I started a small IT business, which has provided me with steady income for over 6 years, and helped start a coworking space in Oakland as well. This is when I really entered the bay area rat race - juggling my second tech startup at all hours while also working as the tech expert in another fledgling startup by day. While the IT work stabilized my income, I got to learn a whole new industry (property development, commercial real estate, and coworking space infrastructure) while the coworking space grew. During my two years with them, I helped them grow from one building to five, and helped grow the community from one member to nearly 200. I learned a ton and had a lot of fun in that industry, as we took on quirky and ambitious projects such as building a slide from the 3rd floor to the 2nd floor inside one of our buildings! I was fully immersed in the bay area startup culture, hosting quad-copter duels in the office, drinking beer at 4 pm on Fridays (and other days that end in 'y'), organizing building-wide Nerf battles after dark...its hard to remember if we ever got any actual work done in those days. But as the staff and membership grew, layers of bureaucracy were put in place that started to suck the fun out of it. I found myself troubleshooting printers and WIFI all day long, got bored, got a little sick of startup and coworking culture in general, and decided to move on. 
 
After I left the coworking space, I floated around a bit, falling back on IT work that was sometimes consistent, sometimes not, and ultimately burning through much of my savings. Eventually I landed a 'big' tech job, working for a large company as a tech support rep for their product. While the company paid far more than I had ever made before, it came at the disadvantage of a cubicle-bound lifestyle, which doesn't suit me. Just as I was about to quit, the company was acquired by some other company, the offices were all closed, and everyone went remote. This was perfect for me, as now I was getting paid to hang out at home all day playing board games and having sex while waiting for tech support requests to come in, which was generally something like 2 - 3 calls per day. Unfortunately it didn't last as the new overlords laid most of us off after the acquisition was completed, but I got a nice severance package and had saved up a lot from my previous paychecks. In 7 months I had earned about as much, maybe more, than I had in the previous 4 or 5 years...
 
As a parallel storyline alongside my professional endeavors, my move to the bay area also lead to my embracing of the polyamorous lifestyle. During my time in the bay I dated a lot of people, some just briefly, others for a year or more.  This added pleasure, pain, and complexity to my already hectic life as in moments of frenzy I would be dating three or four people, some who got along with each other and some who didn't, while also juggling my various businesses, jobs, and side hustles. While my bar area adventure started with me living in a shared attic (accessible only by ladder) in a run-down neighborhood, it ended with me living in a penthouse apartment with panoramic views of Oakland, San Francisco, and the surrounding area. I would regularly throw bacchanalian soirées rife with activities that I probably shouldn't mention online... My WIFI network name was Gatsby, as a reflection of how my life felt.
 
As I was being laid off from the 'big' tech job, two of my serious relationships were coming to a breaking point - my two partners did not get along, our triad was unhealthy and unstable, and something had to give. The three of us broke up from one another, and I found myself with a minimum of entanglements - no job, no serious girlfriends, and a swank apartment that I couldn't really afford anymore...it was time to go. I booked a one-way ticket to Thailand. A month later one of my partners and I rekindled our relationship, so she decided to join me for the trip. We'll call her T, and she's been the cornerstone of my life since that time.
 
T and I formed a home base in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and traveled around southeast asia for about a year. In that time we visited Cambodia, Laos, Singapore, Indonesia (Bali), and many regions of Thailand. On our return trip we lived in a campervan in New Zealand for 5 weeks, and visited Hawaii for a bit as well. We continued our poly adventures overseas, and ended up teaching a series of workshops on consensual non-monogamy and helped kick-start the nascent poly scene in Chiang Mai. During this year abroad I enjoyed phase two of the entrepreneur's dream: running your business from a beach in a far off place. It had taken over 5 years to build up my IT business to the point where I had other trained folks I could count on to get the job done and clients who trusted me to delegate the work, and finally I was able to relax and enjoy the fruits of my labor. I was able to take time to focus on my artistic pursuits, photography and film-making, and let my business mostly run itself. While I wasn't earning a lot at that point, usually just $200-300 per month, earning San Francisco dollars and spending Thai baht goes a long way. With this small amount of passive income, we were able to stretch my savings, and in the end we spent about $10k on the entire year abroad.
 
Once returning to the US, T and I lived out of my car and friends' houses while we traveled around California, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, and Colorado catching up with friends and family and seeing some of the incredible national parks and landscapes the western US has to offer. After about a year and a half of nomadic living, we found ourselves again with the urge to settle down, and with good reason: we were engaged to be married and pregnant. We settled in rural Oregon, bought a house (with immense help from my family, as the lifestyle I described above does not lend itself to large savings accounts or good credit), and now here I sit, writing this all out to share with you. For the first time in many years I have a house to store my servers in, space to tinker, and some time on my hands (at least until the baby is born). Thus is the story of my magnificent return to unRAID!
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