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  • was supposed to watch a couple of my favorite (dog) clients last friday, but their owner missed his flight, so i just went and took them out for a walk. still got paid the full day rate. 😎

    went to go watch a sheepdog trial on saturday morning, which was really cool! talked to several people there, including the lady who owns the farm. saw a couple of people smacking their dogs, though (including the owner), so i don't think i'll be doing any herding lessons there.

    saturday evening we had our annual beer party (everybody brings a 6-pack of something to drink, and we throw them all together in a big bucket of ice). the dogs did really well up until about midnight when they started getting cranky, so i turned in early and let my partner watch the party-goers for the rest of the evening.

    sunday was whiffle ball with friends followed by challengers, and oh my gosh, what a movie. absolutely loved the whole thing.

    • Ugh, physical corrections like that make me sick, I'm glad you're not going to take lessons there even though it's an awesome set of skills. Truth be told I get a little sick even when the training language used is negative, no matter what certifications the trainer has.

      That said, I'm glad the rest was awesome!

      • yeah… it’s really hard to watch. the most i do is a very upbeat “oops!” or “nope!” with my dogs when we’re training. i do occasionally get frustrated with my barky aussie, but i try to keep it positive as much as possible.

  • Still doomed 🙃 Stressing over another talk with my host, who is... kinda difficult, honestly. I can't tell what's available to me (in any context) nor what I'm even supposed to be able to accomplish in any amount of time but I'm supposed to "advocate for myself" even knowing there's someone who needs this room so like... what the fuck am I supposed to do, beg to stay and somecritter who's in the same situation I was gets beaten or shot by their father but I get another week of accomplishing fuck-all because I need six sorts of support I'm never gonna get but what I get is a week at a time and expectations to just get my shit together and get a job without even somewhere to stay while I work?

    So I went from hopeless and in danger to hopeless and about to be in danger somewhere else. Worst part is, my host has some of the same major issues that I do, so every time we talk I feel like there's some understanding there, or understanding to be had. She even recognizes it as an accomplishment for me to manage to get out and take the ten-minute bus ride to Burger King. Does not seem to recognize how screwed I am, how much of an impossible ask it is to just dump a pile of "resources" on me and think I'm gonna call them all, etc.

    ...I said I wasn't gonna wall-of-text you lot <.<; Sorries! Please pretend it's just a little nibble of whine 😓

  • I've gotten permission, so I'm excited to share this news with you, my Beehaw fam, the same way I told my biological fam:

    Life, uh, found a way.

  • Most challenging teaching experiences of my still new career. I'm having a lot of anxiety over how students are responding in one class, if I'm getting through to them, and adjusting lesson plans and my lectures to ensure I am. I'm teaching a very difficult subject, with a history of students failing out of it. So after taking it over from the last professor, I've toned it down. It's a "why we budget" class and most of the students are either a) completely accounting illiterate but great at decision making or b) accountants and don't understand why we're talking about theory and decision making. It's a bit of both, across all major sectors, which makes it notoriously challenging for professors and students. Trying my best, but I'm loosing a lot of sleep over this class.

    Am I getting through? Why did only 2 students provide mid-term feedback? 1 positive, 1 not so much? All fair critiques, and fair praise, but where's everyone else? Is anyone actually doing the readings or is my approach (you read, you research a little, then I lecture and summarize what you need to take away), not working here?

    Struggles, and I also decided no scotch this week which was my "I am home now, not in the classroom" mental break from the day.

  • Way busier than we expected. Lunch for 16 (bachelor party...not the right fit since we are a local family joint) &amp; Catering pickup for 22 before service on Saturday made it a good day before we even got started. Sunday we were wiped and unexpectedly filled it up for lunch.

    Today is our Thursday so only 1 more day until our weekend.

  • My PT starts in earnest this week so I can start going back to the gym! Nine weeks of being stuck at home was not fun

  • Just started a two week family visit to Singapore. The twelve hour flight was exhausting and everyone was struggling with the jet lag. My kids fell asleep at the dinner table, which was both adorable to see and sad because they were clearly at their limits.
    We just had a 12 hour sleep, so hopefully we can start the second day with renewed energy :)
    We’re going to need it, there’s a ton of social obligations to keep. It’s been 7 years since our last visit.

  • Miserable, been distracting myself with homelab and Runescape.

    In the case of the former, I bought two separate PCIe conversion bridges so I could plug a GPU into a PCIe x8 slot. The first didn't line up with the bracket properly (this was my fault for thinking I could somehow magically fit a card into a slot after raising it a centimeter or so). The second was intended to raise the card to a low-profile height. The card I bought required the entire shroud to be removed to install the low-profile bracket. After some cursing, I got it installed, and it didn't work! Finally at my wit's end, I replaced my server's motherboard with a different one that has actual PCIe x16 slots. Still, nothing! Banging my head against the wall, I finally realized: unRAID is currently on Linux kernel 6.1. The GPU is an Intel ARC A310, which didn't have support in the kernel until 6.2. I upgraded the kernel using an unofficial repo, and the encoder immediately showed up under /dev/dri. FML.

  • finally getting more time off from work versus the 60-70 hour weeks i was pulling before, so i started participating in a game jam and trying to have a presence on fedi again.

  • 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.

    • Yay for a UPS! I'm sure you'll find some funky way of getting automagic reboots going.

    • Congrats on your new setup! A UPS is never a bad idea.

      As for the auto power-on, check the BIOS settings. Most have an option that says somehing along the lines of "computer power state after plugging it in" and you can usually set it to on, off or whatever it was before power loss.

      • 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!

  • This week is going well so far. Bought a new camera so I've been really excited to try it out. I mostly take pictures of planes, and I'm trying to experiment more with shutter speeds and aperture and yadda. I live directly under a landing pattern for the local airport, so it's not hard for me to time a plane landing and get a decent shot.

    Here's a Delta 717 coming in:

    As a bonus, not only am I rediscovering my adolescent love for photography, I'm getting outside more. I've actually met some of my neighbors doing this. And I think the anticipatory aspect of waiting for a plane to come in gives me something to look forward to as well, so that's pretty cool.

  • Final week on the final group project of the academic year. Deadline is Monday. And I am fucking pissed off.

    • Team leader and sub-team leader for the production phase of the project are incapable of providing leadership, because the former is lovely but timid, and the other is just never fucking there. With just days to go and important decisions and instructions just not happening, I have simply taken over and started telling everyone what to do. But this now means that on top of my work, everyone is now coming to me with questions, including the team leader and sub-team leaders.
    • The useless, obstructive, narcissistic, lazy, arrogant piece of utter shite who I had to work with on the last project. Well, it transpires he has basically done absolutely fucking nothing on this project since January, apart from 3D modelling half of a rock (someone else finished the rock) and modelling 80% of one character (it's shit and the texture job is half-arsed). But this week he actually had to do something, which was building one set and rigging one character. I got a phone call at 8:30am this morning from the person who had to animate that one scene, and... yeah, surprise surprise, it's only half done. Lighting, cameras, and rigging are not done. I hope the guy who has to clean up this mess calms down by Monday, otherwise there's going to be a murder.
    • After spending all day rendering shots, after making a judgement call on the resolution because it wasn't included in the assignment brief (so I guessed based on the previous project) and we were unable to get a response from the teacher when we contacted to ask. Nope, that's the wrong resolution. So everything that was rendered yesterday needs to be rendered again in a different resolution and format. Which takes twice as long. Shots that took 2.5 years yesterday require 5.5 hours today. So while I set up the remaining shots today, I've got both my laptop and my spouse's laptop re-rendering all of yesterday's work. My desk is a chaotic collection of three computers, six screens, three keyboards, two mice, and a specialist 3D mouse.

    Yeah, I am extremely fucking pissed off and if my teammate opts for murder I might just join him, because right now an awful lot of people are looking incredibly stabbable. I hate group projects.

  • I switched back to a very early morning workout routine this week, so I am TIRED.

    BUT, I'm about to DM a party for some D&amp;D, so Friday night's looking lit.

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