I just don’t go outside. AC running throughout the day, though I do set max temps at different levels throughout the day to take advantage of lower electricity rates or avoid higher rates.

This past week I did have to do some rare outdoors work for work over a few days. My team elected to do it in the evenings and early in the mornings. Was still quite warm, but not sun glaring down on us, we’re gonna get heat stroke from this, afternoon sun.

Wow, I feel dumb. I’ve been here for a year and never looked closely at the bee (old or new). Never noticed the cowboy hat!

So I thought I was good to start a new job (though I’ve yet to set a start date), as the HR person assigned me said it was all good about a month ago, but then today he me tells me there was “a problem” with my drug test. A drug test I took 3 months ago. So I need to take another.

While I’ve only taken a few drug tests for employment during my career, they’ve never taken 3 months to get results. Like 2 weeks at most. Something tells me my HR person screwed up (which isn’t surprising), got this notice a couple month ago, yet just now noticed this. Hate to say it, but typical government. The irony is that I’ll soon be a govt worker. If we can get this straightened out.

On a more positive note, I just paid off one more student loan! After 19yrs of paying and thousands of dollars in interest on this one – more than the principle at this point – it’s finally done. I had to get a hefty loan from my parents, but their terms are much better: 0% APR at the Bank of Mom & Dad versus the current variable 10.02% APR with the bank. Though I still have lots more students loans to go. Such a shitty, shitty system. At least I’m lucky enough my parents can help in this manner.

Stay in school, kids. But only if you don’t fuck it all up like I did. I may be paying student loans til I die.

Maybe it’s my doomerism at play, but even one year house arrest I’d be OK with. Keep him in NY in his Trump Tower penthouse. Don’t let him go out to campaign.

Obviously jail would be better. I just don’t think fines alone are going to cut it. He’s not going to pay them.

You could also add toxic glue. It’s edible! Probably only once though.

This is now going to be added to some LLM-generated answer in the probably near future.

Congratulations to you and your spouse! If you’re doing a honeymoon after (or even if you’re not), I hope you both get some quality R&R!

I finally passed the checks for the job that I got offered 11mo ago. So now they’re asking when I can start!

Which, right now, is like the worst time for me to leave my company. We have our big all-hands-on-deck event in like 5 weeks. I have a massive project I’m leading up that’s supposed to be finished by end of July. And there’s another project I’m assisting with heavily that’s supposed to be finished by July/August. Even a couple months ago would’ve been better, to an extent.

While I’m usually one who’s like “Welp, gotta go peace, here’s my two weeks!”, the organization I work for has treated me excellently over the years; about 17 of them. And the big project I’m working on is something that I specifically got invited back to the company to work on a few years ago. So I want to see it to completion (or as far as I can take it within reason). As far as the event, we are literally in the thick of it with preparation, so I don’t want to unload all my tasks, last minute, on my team either. Lastly, my boss knows I’ve had this offer on deck for awhile now and he’s been very cool with it. I don’t want to burn this bridge (I’ve burned others elsewhere before). Because if this new job doesn’t work out, there’d be a very, very high chance that all I’d have to do is ask and my boss would say, “OK, when do you want to start?”

So I’m thinking I don’t start til late August, which my boss is very appreciative of. Plus that gives me time to find an apartment and move. I’m hoping my new soon-to-be employer will agree to that, especially given my circumstances, and that they’ve had me waiting for this long. I feel like that’s only fair. I also have a friend who works closely with the team I’ll be on; he says the team is probably not even ready for me anyway.

Either way, it’s exciting. But also a bit scary, as I’ve never moved for a job, and I’ll leaving a city I’ve spent practically my entire life at. I’ll also be even further from my family than I already am. But I’m ready to go. I’ve been waiting for this for a long time, and it’s finally happening.

Sorry to “necro” this thread, but I just got around to enabling and testing out your UPS kill command suggestion. Everything shutdown as planned, including the UPS itself. Once I restored wall power to the UPS, power started flowing to the server automatically, the BIOS detected it, and the server booted-up on its own! Success! ESXi is back up and VMs are still in the process of auto-starting. This is exactly how I wanted it all to work.

Thanks again for the suggestion!

My parents were the ones who pointed me to the high seas. I was a kid (12-13yo) when Napster came out. Being the family geek, they told me to look into it since they heard about it on the news and wanted free music (early case of the Streissand Effect before it was termed as such). So I did. And we got free music. Even asked them to get me a CD burner for my birthday after that and they did.

As a kid on the earlier days of the Internet, I came across all sorts of ways to get free stuff. Games and Music at first, especially game cracks/warez. Then once torrents came on the scene, movies and shows.

I actually don’t pirate much anymore. Rarely pirate music since I’ve had Spotify for like 10+yrs now. Same with games since Steam and all the other digital storefronts have so many sales. I still pirate emulator ROMs once in a blue moon. Movies/shows would be where I pirate the most (though like once a month if that), even though I have Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hulu, and Crunchyroll. Even between those 4, I can’t find everything I want to watch.

But yeah, 99% of the time, I just don’t want to pay for things. The other 1% is that I can’t pay for something (mainly in the emulators/ROMs space). That’s all.

I’m back in Vegas visiting my folks for Mother’s Day, which was yesterday; Happy (belated) Mother’s Day to the mothers and caregivers out there! Anyway, it’s a nice change of scenery.

Work has been crazy last couple of weeks. We’re getting close to launching a project I’ve been working on for two years. So lots going on with that to get everything completed on time. We’ve started vendor-led staff training on it, which is taking up a lot of time. In addition, we purchased another service, so we have training on those as well. So practically everyday, I have like 3-4hrs of trainings. We also have our big annual event coming up, so I need to start focusing on my responsibilities there. It’s normally busy this time of the year, but I’m not normally juggling three big projects at once. Maybe I’m just a baby, but I’m not used to it. Either way, its not unmanageable. Yet. Hopefully it won’t be at all.

The nice part of being in Pacific time zone is that I finish my day around 1-2p local time (I’m normally Central time zone). The downside is that I’m having to wake up at 4-5a local time to get going, get ready, have coffee, etc. Oh well, at least I can still roll out of bed over to my laptop.

I don’t pirate very often anymore, but when I do, I use whatever computer I happen to be on. I just turn on a VPN and bind the torrenting client to the VPN only. This is how I’ve torrented for years, since the late 2000s. I’ve gotten a couple strikes from my ISP several years ago, but that was before I had a commercial VPN. Otherwise, I’ve no issues.

What are the potential security upsides of doing it on a VM/container or a dedicated machine? I can imagine some performance upsides, but that’s about it.

It’s certainly a fan theory, but that’s not a confirmed thing by any means. The location of the last battles does look the inside of a vagina, looking towards the cervix, but that’s supposedly only a coincidence.

That’s a bot, right? That can’t be real.

I’ve met plenty of idiots. Some days, I’m probably one of them. But I don’t think I’ve ever come across someone who’s pro anti-piracy. Usually people are just neutral about it. Even the most law-abiding people I know, when I’ve told them I can download movies for free, are like “Oh, are you able to get this movie for me? Thanks!”

Earthbound was probably the first game I was ever really enamored with. Even today, it’s definitely one of my favorite games ever. And it’s probably the first JRPG I ever played, and it’s what started me down a long path of JRPGs.

My parents got me a subscription to Nintendo Power magazine, and I remember reading about the game there and wanting to play it. They didn’t buy it for me when it came out, but I did rent it from Blockbluster a few times. And they did eventually buy it for me for Christmas. It even came with the strategy guide!

Everything about the game was great. I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but it was insanely accessible, even to a then 7-8yo kid like me. JRPGs tend to be darker and complex (though not always). But Earthbound still had complexity, but it wasn’t darker. Yes these kids were having to save the world from destruction, but the story was told in an upbeat, fun way. And it was just the right amount of complexity.

Earthbound is also probably the first game I ever beat. Certainly the first JRPG.

I did try the fan-translation of Mother 3. I didn’t end up finishing it. I got close, but it was far too depressing and different from EB. The game was beautifully done (as was the player-made strategy guide!), but I just couldn’t really get into the story and characters. Just wasn’t for me.

It’s definitely quiet around here. But you know, reddit or any other social media wasn’t built in a day, so Lemmy/Beehaw won’t either!

Thanks for posting so much though. You’re not the first person I’ve seen make comments about the seeming lack of activity, but you at least try to change that!

Ah, I have the seen that option to kill the UPS after shutdown, but I left it disabled because I didn’t understand what it did. And the documentation from Cyberpower is pretty lacking. But I’ll try that enabling that option, testing, then seeing what happens.

I appreciate the tips you’re giving me here!

Good idea. I did check the BIOS and that setting was already enabled. So I unplugged the UPS from the wall to simulate and test. Unfortunately, the server didn’t boot automatically after I plugged the UPS back into the wall. And I remembered that in the past, when the power went out due to storms or something, the server did automatically boot on resumption of power.

I think I know what’s going on.

With the server and a couple small networking devices on the UPS, I get about 16-17min of battery power. After a few minutes on battery power only, the UPS sends the commands to ESXI to start shutting down VMs and then eventually shuts down the server completely. That takes about 10min. That means there’s still battery power remaining, and now with the server off, the largest load on the UPS, the remaining battery time increases to like 40min since the total load on the UPS is now much smaller. However, there’s still technically power being served to the server; there’s even a small light on the back of the server that stayed on the whole time.

Plugging the UPS back in the wall didn’t do anything, which I kinda expected. It’s not going to “send” more power to the server to “wake it up.” I think the only way the server would turn back on automatically in this situation is if the power outage was long enough to completely drain the UPS and turn the UPS off completely. So at least 40min. Then there would be absolutely no power being given to the server. Once wall power is back, the UPS itself turns back on, which sends a little bit of power to the server, which the server BIOS recognizes as “Hey, I was actually without any power at all, but I have power now! Boot!” I’ll test that out next weekend.

So for outages less than 40min, the best bet would be doing a remote desktop into a computer on my network, accessing the web GUI for IDRAC, the server’s out-of-band-management software, and then powering on the server from there. I tried this out and it worked fine.

Not automatic in all cases, but as long as I have a manual means to restart the server remotely, that’ll do.

Sorry for the long post; I wrote this down mostly for myself to work it all out!

It’s going. It’s been a very busy couple days already at work. But I talked about work last week, so I’ll give an update on something more interesting (to me): My homelab! 🤓

My UPS arrived like a week ago. I set it up and hooked up devices to it: server, router, and a small switch are on the battery backup. Which gets me about 17min of runtime on the battery if power fails. Pretty good.

I was able to install the UPS software as an ESXi VM. And I got that to communicate with the ESXi host. Configured some delays to ensure it didn’t try to shutdown the server due to a momentary blackout/brownout, and I even got the software to send me email notifications (thank you SMTP2GO).

Then it was time. I unplugged the UPS from the wall. And waited for it run out of battery. And guess what? It shut down the server! Even before the UPS completely ran out of power. That said, I didn’t take a stopwatch to it, or really get a chance to monitor how it was shutting down VMs. It looked like they were all shut down properly after I powered on the VMs again, but I can’t say for certain. I could tighten this up. Either way, it basically did what it was supposed to do.

Next thing I need to figure out is how to get it to boot the server back up once wall power is back. I have some ideas on how to do it manually (if I wasn’t home when power was lost), but I think it’d be neat to figure out how to do it automatically.

I think it’s worse here than on reddit when it comes to this. Redditors these days (*takes out the walker and cane*) are shitty, but I feel like I’m somewhat insulated from a lot of it due to where I lurk/participate on reddit. But on Lemmy, I see it pretty much everywhere. Smaller userbase compared to reddit, so maybe the rudeness is more visible.

Oof. Sorry to hear that happened. Vehicle repairs suck.

I do remember my parents talking about $800 for the windshield specifically, but maybe they were just simplifying out of anger. With the dealer, with me, whoever. It very well could’ve been the estimate for the total damage. I can certainly imagine some dents and scratched paint. And yeah labor is often the highest cost.