Quinn Chrest

Hey, it’s been a while. I have been super busy with career advancements, working on health goals, and juggling a social life. I don’t think it’s going to get any easier, but this sort of busy chaos has been a blast.

Currently out walking on Victory Memorial Parkway and I thought why not walk and talk. This means the whole blog post is being dictated while my phone listens. 🤷 I don’t know. Seems pretty self-explanatory.

The first thing that pops into my head is how busy I’m going to be in the coming months. I’ve booked out most of my weekends but the thing I’m most excited for is going to Vegas again over the weekend of the 21st. I was able to snag some tickets to When We Were Young Fest 2 and my best friend Brandon is meeting me there. It’s a music festival with a bunch of alternative rock and teen angst bands. Looking forward to seeing blink-182 and Games We Play. Also, while I’m there, I’d like to go to Zack Bagans Haunted Museum and try to get a tour of that new giant sphere venue. The clips from the U2 concert looked phenomenal.

On the health goals front, I have been counting my calories for the last month or so and keeping a fitness diary. This has been a huge help and since starting I’ve dropped some more weight along with two and a half inches off my stomach. Woohoo! For weightlifting, I’ve been doing the strong lifts 5x5 and really enjoying that as well. I’m stronger than I’ve ever been and my working sets have increased by 30 lb in the last few weeks. Thanks to everyone for the recent compliments. It helps me realize that I’m still making progress even though I myself don’t see it sometimes.

With the return of federal student debt, I’ve kind of given up on owning a home for a few more years. I think it was a bit ambitious of me to try and buy a home at 26 anyway 😆. I love living with Rosalin and Kurt and I’m sure they’re not in any hurry to get rid of me, but I would like to move into my own space sooner rather than later. So I started looking at apartments in the area and I’m happy to see the prices are coming down a bit.

This last weekend I got to go to the Minnesota Renaissance Festival with my good friends Blair and Connor. Kind of routine for me at this point to go once a year. This time wasn’t that great due to the high humidity and heat. It was difficult to find shade with no clouds in the sky. But I indulged on the cheat day and had pork chop on a stick, mini pancakes, and fudge filled banana bread along with plenty of mead. We ended with a viewing of the medieval jousting. To escape the heat we scurried off to Mall of America where I finally bought myself a pair of HOKA’s. They are these very comfortable shoes that have been recommended to me by Heidi and Lance. They’re a bit more expensive than what I would spend on shoes normally, but they’ve been worth it.

I think I’ll wrap it up here with a thank you if you’ve made it this far. I have family members that have mentioned they would like to get emailed when I post on my blog so maybe I should look into setting something like that up. After getting home from this walk I’ll look over the post and add links to anything I’ve mentioned that I feel is linkworthy. I hope you all have a wonderful rest of your week!

OMG I didn’t realize how much counting your calories mattered. I was just kind of guesstimating through my day before and was getting annoyed with how inconsistent my results were. Turns out I was underestimating how much I was actually eating. I started counting my calories last week and eating at a higher deficit and it is working out pretty well for me. Starting up a new lifting regiment this week as well with the Strong lifts 5x5. Including a cool picture of the Victory Memorial Monument I took over the weekend.

Hitting Cardio goals this week! Managed to crank out two 12 minute miles at 5 mph on the treadmill this week. This is the third time I’ve done this since the beginning of my fitness journey. I don’t think I was this in shape in high school or maybe I just didn’t try as hard then 😂

This year I joined my Aunt Heidi, her husband Frank, Uncle Lance, Christa, and Eric for my first-ever visit to the Minnesota State Fair! To beat the traffic and get good parking we left to get there at 7 AM which is not a fun time to be awake on the weekends but we managed. Didn’t have much planned for the day other than checking out some new food items this year.

After getting our Pronto Pop breakfast in we went to Shanghai Henri’s to get the Crispy Lutefisk Steam Bun. For those Norwegians out there that had to try this horrible fish chemistry project at family holidays know to stay away from this stuff but I actually enjoyed it. Along with the Asian sauces was that pungent fish flavor that reminds you of dried fish or fish jerky. I know that sounds gross to most but I enjoy this weird stuff.

Needing a drink to wash down the lutefisk we ran over to the Schells booth to grab their Grainbelt Blu slushie. They power about a 3/4 of a pint of Grainbelt Blu and then top it off with a slushie making it a refreshing drink for a warm day that lets you be a kid again gulping down a slurpee. While walking around with our adult beverages we stumbled upon a pelts and taxidermy booth. I had to snap a picture of these cute guys in the canoe.

With full bellies, it was time to check out the vendors at the grandstand. It was fun to look at all the stuff but I’m unfortunately not in the business of buying overpriced knickknacks. I did catch a few laughs looking at comedic items that say “Ope!” and “You Betcha”. Took this picture outside of the grandstand with Lance on the left and Heidi and Frank on the right.

At one point I could feel my Norwegian ancestor calling me and from across the way, I spotted a Lefse stall. Knowing what I had to do I grabbed a couple with butter and white sugar to share with the others. Lance said my Grandpa Milo would be proud of me having Lutefisk and Lefse :).

Also, had fried gator bites that reminded me of chicken gizzards, and of course, I had to have a bucket of Martha’s chocolate chip cookies. Maybe I should retitle this blog food I ate at the state fair since that’s mostly all we did was eat lol. By the end of it we had walked about 8 miles and I snapped this picture as we were about to leave. You could tell everyone was getting tired! From left to right is Me, Frank, Eric, Christa, Heidi, and Lance.

Switching up the work out routine. Wanted to try something different to compare results with what I was doing before. Especially since I’ve been having trouble pinning down a consistent routine that I like. Going back to the basics! Walk and hit 10k steps a day with 3 lifting days. Wish me luck!

Pretty proud of myself! Got one of my private student loans paid off before the federal ones kick back in.

I’d like to put a spotlight on one of my favorite youtube channels HealthyGamerGG. I would say in my generation there is a mental health crisis of many degrees with those affected not having the tools to handle it and people can be uncomfortable or unwilling to seek therapy/help. Harvard-trained psychiatrist Dr. Alok Kanojia created the channel to assist those in the online space by imparting his knowledge in a way that makes sense to those who escape into the online world. I enjoy listening to his content as I go about my day and it has helped me be more introspective. I specifically really enjoyed his talk titled “Why Your Sleep Schedule Sucks (And How To Fix It!)” because god knows we could all use some more sleep 😂.

www.youtube.com/@HealthyG…

Got new glasses in the mail from Zenni. First time ordering glasses online and I’m really happy with this new pair especially since they were only $65!

Unfortunately, I contracted the plague from those little germ balls known as babies. I will return to posting soon but I have a word of advice to avoid misfortune that has been done on to me. Don’t eat food that was offered to you after the baby took a bite no matter how cute they offer it to you…

Working remote this week in my hometown so I can visit friends and family. My father, Tim Chrest, has been brewing beer for years now and he grows his own hops in his garden. This year the hops are going crazy and he has a jungle growing in his back yard!

One thing that I never thought I would get sucked into was the world of custom keyboards. I believed that the builds all looked super cool, but they had a spendy price tag. Well, that changed for me this week! A buddy of mine mentioned that he had been purchasing items for himself and his kids on Temu. I had been noticing Temu for a bit now on social media but wasn’t interested in checking it out until I heard good things from someone I know. He recommended me the DK75 Mechanical Keyboard Kit after purchasing it himself. $35 for the board with no switches or caps. I thought what the heck, might be fun building my own keyboard for once. Finally received all the items in the mail today, and I wanted to share the pictures with you all cause I love this kind of hardware stuff!

Custom Board

The main star of this show is the DK75 Mechanical Keyboard Kit. I really like the layout of this board since I’ve been leaning towards smaller form factor keyboards recently. The volume knob is also a nice addition as well with a tactile press to mute.

Key Switches

Next, I needed to pick out some key switches. I really like the weight of the press on these Holy Panda switches from Drop. They are decently priced as well just, unfortunately, had to get more than needed since they only come in packs of 35.

Keycaps

Then for the keycaps, I went with the Red Samurai keycaps that I found on Amazon. No reasoning for my choice here other than I thought they were unique! I was so excited to get the keycaps on that I didn’t take a picture of them before installation…. Finally here is the finished product. One picture has normal lighting and the other is dimly lit.

My legs are still sore from yesterday so I spent a lot of time planted at my desk today. Thought now would be a good time to finally dive into some Linux. There is an extra computer laying around since I put together a new workstation/gaming pc this last year and I’ve been toying with the idea of turning it into a server.

I gave this video a watch by Jay LaCroix to get an idea of what options I had when choosing a Linux distro. After watching this video and speaking to some friends who also manage their own personal servers I decided on Ubuntu. Today’s goal was just to get the server up and running so I could SSH and FTP into it from my main rig so that the server could live headless on my network.

Using Rufus I was able to make a bootable USB installer. Plug that sucker into the soon-to-be server and boot off that boy in the bios. Ubuntu’s installation was easy and painless. It walked me through every step giving me plenty of configuration options. Setting up SSH took no effort since Ubuntu’s installer has the option to set it up for you if you opt-in during installation.

INSTALLATION COMPLETE!

After rebooting into Ubuntu and grabbing the IP with hostname -I I hopped over to my main rig and SSHed into the machine. In awe of how easy all of this was, I popped open WinSCP and FTPed into the server as well. Pretty happy with this progress so time to do some digging into cool things I can do. I installed Docker on recommendation and will most likely migrate my Plex server over as well. I also need to do some looking around for a different case to move the build into. Need to get one with more drive bays.

Got up at 3 this morning and drove to Camp Ripley north of St Cloud to run with one of my best friends Blair. Blair had to complete a 10k in a little over 1:45 while wearing a helmet, 50 lb backpack, and carrying a dummy weapon. They had a 5k circuit with our first lap done in 45 minutes and the following lap done in 51 minutes. We crushed it with a time of 1:36! It sucked getting up but glad I took the opportunity to go cheer him on and participate. Proud of you dude!

Excited and extremely anxious for this Saturday. My friend Blair from college has some military training exercises this weekend and friends and family are invited to cheer him on. I will be joining him for his 10K ruck at 5:30 AM. Luckily I don’t have to carry anything! I am not a good runner by any means, but I will do my best to help a friend. Previously I completed a 5K with my Aunt Heidi hosted by Minnesota Brewery Running Series. Love this picture of us that was captured by Alex Renner of Flying Penguin Studios. This is all a part of my weight loss journey and building healthy habits for the future. I am down 50 lbs since I moved to the Minneapolis area!

I’ve been using chat gpt for a bit now for a lot of different use cases. Getting inspiration, helping with business writing, and generating test/example data. Now that Googles Bard is open for public use I’m going to try it out and compare my experiences.

Bought my ticket to go to MinneDemo38! Excited to see what cool new innovations people are working on. Also will be my first MinneStar event. Looking forward to networking and meeting others in the industry!

Click here to check out the event if you are in the Minneapolis area.

Made it up to Bismarck, ND to the Wahus family reunion. Had a blast up there, but what I was looking forward to the most was hitting the trails with the old man! Unfortunately, the trails by the lake were too wet to ride that day so we had to stick to pavement. Pictures were taken at Harmon Lake.

So, I guess I’m behind on this news, but I stumbled upon Spotify’s AI DJ. I was aware of the new AI integration building playlists from music you like but I wasn’t expecting a full-on personal DJ in your pocket. The AI “X” voiced by Spotify’s partner Xavier Jernigan, will pop in, talk to you, then play about 3 to 5 tracks of whatever the AI alluded to. It’s like you have your own personal radio station with a host in all! Been listening to it for the last couple of days at work and I’ve loved the whole experience.

Click here to check out Spotify’s promotional video for DJ.

Had some USB slots on my motherboard stop working. Must have shorted or something cause I couldn’t repair it on the software side. Thankfully ASUS support is great and sent me a new board. Got it installed and everything is working again!

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