Well, here I am again.
It’s been such a long time since I came on my own forum.
I’ve got lots of notifications of new posts and other stuff.
So, I am glad to see that there’s been a lot of activity on here.
Destin has been doing an excellent job taking care of this site for me, and I appreciate that.
So, for those wondering, a little update on what’s been going on, how come I’ve been so inactive with fire alarms.
The first thing is that in June I got a new hobby; well I should actually say it’s an expansion of an existing hobby that’d been laid back – and this is telecom equipment. The expansion is into the realm of the Bell Telephone System, the massive relay based systems which would be on the receiving end of a rotary phone. I’ve started a small collection of rotary phones and I’m expanding it gradually. I’d love to find a small mechanical switching system but they’re very difficult to find. Fortunately for me though, I don’t have to go far to experience such a device, as there is a museum very close by with several salvaged switching systems on display, fully operational, and they let visitors play with them!
The next thing that’s been happening is college is getting much busier for me, since I am getting into some higher level classes that are taking up a lot more of my time than the other classes I had. I’m almost done though! For those wondering, my major is Computer Network Management.
Next up, I’ve decided I won’t be working in the fire alarm field much longer, reason being it’s a dead-end job, meaning the pay caps off at one point and the job ends up being very repetitive after a while. I am capable of so much more, and there are jobs which pay better and interest me more, such as what I am majoring in.
What I am doing for a job right now is I am a part-time programmer for a fairly new emergency notification system company based out of Maine. I’m no longer doing fire alarm work in a normal sense, instead I’m writing code to make this application. This means that From the Field is canceled indefinitely, as I do not expect to have another job working on fire alarms in the field.
In more news, I’ve decided to resume Fun Facts at some point, it’s not completely dead. I’ve just not had much time and don’t really have a list of topics to talk about for each episode. I originally wanted to reboot the series in September but it never happened. I even made the intro for it, which came out amazing… but sucks I never actually used it.
And lastly, I’ve gotten a much more active social life in the last few months now, I’m no longer a guy sitting in his parents’ basement all the time cruising the Internet and playing video games. I’ve recently joined a group and made lots of new local friends who I hang out with fairly often. It’s been very great. We go bowling, go out to eat, have parties, and do charity things to raise money for good causes.
So that’s really where I’ve been over the past several months. I’m not done with fire alarms, I’ve just slowed down a lot, with my collection… I really only am interested in finding the very rare and very odd things now.
P.S. According to the forum, this is my 1,600th post on here. Nice coincidence that this post is a nice round number like that.
