“It’s not about the cards you’re dealt, but how you play the hand.” — Randy Pausch

Funny how often life doesn’t really end up the way you expect it to. At all. Not at all.

Which is a curious thing to think about… where did those expectations come from?

When I think my expectations for my life, I realized that I really don’t have much.

When I was a little kid I expected to work at Nintendo. I do not, and have not. Ahh well. I’m still doing pretty nest things in the tech field.

When I introspect about it I do believe my primary expectation has been, and is, to build something awesome. I have no clue what, and where, and when.

When I think about expectations I also think of CBT and shoulding all over myself.

Beyond all that tho, I’m continuing to have challenges balancing my life because I’m pretty sure I’ve perfected the process of avoidance through productivity. Pretty sure.

But only being productive with interesting stuff. Definitely not boring stuff. Only captivating topics and tasks.

And then 3 months later I think to myself, “Huh… I’ve spent a lot of time on this interesting stuff… and very little time on this painfully boring stuff.” Almost literally painful.

That’s that whole ADHD thing.

It can make starting mental strenuous activities challenging, and finishing them even more.

Which is all a tangent from the title.

Domaine.

When I was a teen I used IRC. A lot. One of the neat - to us nerds - things we did was purchase domain names then chat using them.

We called them “vanity domains.”

So instead of [email protected] I could chat as [email protected] or [email protected] or [email protected] or something similar.

But not as short. More like timmy.org. I suppose that (this) domain is more era appropriate. It’d be pretty neat to rent Tim.com for a while. Short domains are for the early nerds or deep pockets.

Always beginning with tim@… because…

Well…

Vanity.

So I collected — I collect — domains. A lot of domains. Borderline hoarding. And I’ve done nothing with them except pay a yearly fee for them… and yet I’ve had intentions to use all of them at some point.

I’ve had no clue how until relatively recently though. So, I decided that it’s to figure out how to set them all up.

The problem with this is that:

  • It requires a ton of repetitive manual steps to link up the domains to the appropriate services - such as a website provider.
  • It’s boring setting up all that stuff.
  • I will go crazy.

I’ve known what I need to do to do this for quite a while though.

Terraform.

I use it a lot for work, yet very little for personal purposes; but, I know just how powerful it is when the services you use have providers/APIs that you may use to provision and integrate some of the most important infrastructural components.

With the quantity of domains I have, and having a better idea of what I want to do with them, I set out to Terraform my own infrastructure, and after 6 weeks I believe I’ve got it working enough that I can start deploying something.

What? No clue yet… 😉 theoretically.

One of the most annoying things I’ve run into is getting the DNS configurations/details normalized in a manner that I felt is reusable between DNS providers.

And, I’ve had to do this way more times than anyone should. Personally… and professionally.

Back “in the day” by using custom scripts and the BIND Zone configuration format. Now-a-days is a little more complicated.

With the advent of cloud providersand their ecosystems of non-standardized data structures, and suites of APIs, that perform the same stupid things.

Like DNS management.

All in all sorts of different ways.

Some in multiple.

Even with Terraform you must consider the nuances of any DNS providers you want to leverage. 3rd party or your own. This is stupid.

You can abstract things into modules upon modules… but this is stupid and annoying.

I’ve wanted a data structure I can use to represent domain names, and their records, that is more versatile than the (very antiquated) BIND zone configuration.

So, at least 6 weeks ago I got to work… and I’ve got something working! 😃

Now, I can finally see how many questionable virtual assets I’ve been renting for years and years! Now, I can (probably finally) see what my actually yearly recurring costs are for these things. I am fully expecting an unpleasant surprise. Which is the reason I gotta get it up or get it out.

This is fantastic news for myself. I’ve got things setup so I can turn on lots of things at once.

Technically, not physically.

Whether I use this stuff (I am), or I don’t (I am not), this is gonna be just great when I decide that another full-time income generation system must be implemented.

If it’s as an individual contributor somewhere then it’s gonna be great resume fodder.

Probably.

I’d think It’s pretty cool if I came across my resume and interviewed myself and learned about what I’m doing. I’m not interviewing myself though. Theoretically. I suppose that puts me somewhere on the narcissism spectrum. As is right with the world. Narcissism can be a tool is what I’ve come to learn.

Now that I’ve got this working-ish the way I want, I’ve come to the conclusion that maybe, just maybe, my thoughts on standardizing on some sort of simple-ish data schema for DNS configuration might have use to other people.

So, I’ve done some research. I believe there may be an opportunity for discussion here. Maybe even standardization.

And, more importantly, It would be pretty neat to have my name slapped onto an RFC. It would very much please my sense of vanity domain.

Fortunately, I know absolutely no one, and nothing, about how the fuck the RFC process first.

I just know that it’s run by the IETF .

And that https://rfc-editor.org/ is one of the primary websites I’ll be using to figure shit out. I’ve found a bunch of stupid boring processes to go through to get stuff in front of people.

I will use a mailing list and say, “Hi, can someone point me to the closest place to get chicken nuggets? Instead.