@JCPhoenix@beehaw.org avatar

JCPhoenix

@JCPhoenix@beehaw.org

Internet Addict. Reddit refugee. Motorsports Enthusiast. Gamer. Traveler. Napper.

He/Him.

Also @JCPhoenix. @jcphoenix

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

JCPhoenix,
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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.

JCPhoenix,
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There are some lemmy.ml communities I lurk, but yeah, the toxicity that comes out of the instance is ridiculous. I think Beehaw has defederated lemmy.ml in the past due to lack of moderation issues.

JCPhoenix,
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Indeed. I enjoyed the asklemmy community over there, but lately there have been some “questions” posted that clearly have an agenda. Basically begging the question. I’m not saying I’m some free-market, anti-regulation libertarian. Far from it. But like you said, not every post has to be about that, and that we can discuss other things other than the downfall of capitalism. So I unsubscribed from that community, and even considered leaving Lemmy altogether since I feel like those types of posts/comments are so pervasive lately.

JCPhoenix,
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Thanks for the reminder; always forget that’s an option. Luckily Beehaw already defederated from Hexbear and lemmygrad.

JCPhoenix,
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I’ve tried to recommend Beehaw to others, but I don’t think I’ve gotten a single bite. Because when they visit Beehaw, they also see content from the other parts of Lemmy – both posts and comments – that Beehaw still federates with, including .ml, and are turned off by a lot of it.

A big part of it is not understanding how the fediverse works, but that’s to be expected; it is confusing. But even having heard my explanation, they’re often still like, “Meh, I’ll just stick with reddit…” because, as you mentioned, first impressions are everything.

Do you use the device you torrent on for personal things as well?

I’m just curious as I’ve permanently dedicated my laptop to torrenting. I’ve been too nervous to install anything but the VPN and Firefox on it. Now, I’m curious to mess around with Linux some more, which is what I use on it, but I can’t fully test out what all I can do with it without signing into accounts....

JCPhoenix,
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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.

JCPhoenix,
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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!”

JCPhoenix,
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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.

JCPhoenix,
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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.

JCPhoenix,
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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!

JCPhoenix,
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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.

JCPhoenix,
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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!

JCPhoenix,
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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!

JCPhoenix,
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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.

JCPhoenix,
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A motorcycle back in the late 90s when I was like 9 or 10?

We were at a dealership because my dad was thinking about buying a motorcycle. At one point, they put my younger brother on a motorcycle because it was cute or whatever. After they took him off the bike, and my parents and the salesguy moved onto another motorcycle, I wanted to try. So I did. And I tried to be careful, knowing it could fall over.

Getting on was no issue. And getting off was no problem either. Until I was like a few feet away from the bike…and it fell over. Shattered the windshield.

Even though it was an accident, the dealer tried to get my parent’s to pay up. And I think my parents would’ve been willing to pay something…except the dealer wanted, I believe, $800. The bike was probably only a few thousand bucks – I actually have no clue how much the bike was, but, as an adult, I know how much bikes are. No way a windshield was a third of the price of the bike. Not in the 90s, not today. So my dad and the dealer got into a shouting match. We left, and the dealer tried to get our license plate number as we drove off.

Nothing ever happened with that. No cops were called or anything, as far as we know. Besides, the dealer should have insurance for these situations. But since I wasn’t supposed to be on the bike in the first place…I got in tons of trouble. Got my ass beat by my mom, got grounded, couldn’t go to a sleepover I was supposed to go to…

Definitely the most expensive thing I broke. At least based on what the dealer was demanding.

JCPhoenix,
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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.

What was your most recent dream?

This post was inspired by a dream misadventure I had last night where I was just minding my own business getting gophers out of the rice field, then suddenly on the intercom/announcements (which I did not expect to have in my dream, since I was outside, not in a building), a voice said “attention, this is a representative of...

JCPhoenix,
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So this morning, I had a dream where I was going to a coffee shop. After trying to figure out if I could order like a Frappuccino or other blended drink, I realized this coffee shop had really good bread. I guess it’d be more aptly called a bakery. So I ordered a loaf of their bread, and then they had some kinda really good honey butter. So my friend – I was there with a friend apparently, one I hadn’t talked to in several months – and I tried some. And it was really good. Though I also remember it not tasting sweet or like anything. So Idk how that worked.

And then I woke up.

When was the last time you answered a Lemmy or Reddit post/thread that was more than five months old?

I think there should be some incentive for that, like make those kinds of comments a spotlight or something. Maybe make a community called “late replies” that showcases the best such replies, or have a rule saying they grant free karma (in Reddit’s case).

JCPhoenix,
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Within the last year, I’ve definitely had some replies to old threads of mine. And if it’s a question, I’ll respond. And I think I did comment on another’s thread at least once, confirming and thanking them for the solution. All of these were tech support related. I feel like that’s one of the few topical areas where that’s acceptable.

JCPhoenix,
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Busy week at work. I took Monday sick as I was tired and just mentally not there. But that didn’t really change that I had a lot to do this week. At least I was able to get things done and make headway. My title has “manager” in it, but I manage no one but myself. But I felt like I actually did a lot of managerial and even pseudo-supervisory-type work this week. I’m starting to understand why my boss made me a junior manager at work. It only took me a couple years to understand it. That said, I still don’t want to be a director at this place. It’s not the right place for that level of responsibility. I still probably wouldn’t manage anyone (nor do I want to), and the pay wouldn’t be commensurate with what an actual director in my position would make. And I’m supposed to be leaving anyway…if the government would hurry the hell up with all the processing and checking for this job I was offered literally 10mo ago. My current employer knows about this new job, but thank god their cool with it and understanding of my situation.

Aside from work, not a lot going on. My dad suggested I visit my parents for Mother’s Day as a surprise for my mom. So booked tickets today. Decide to use points for once, so it only cost me like $60 RT on Southwest. Which is damn good, considering that’s only like two weeks away. I didn’t go anywhere this month since my Feb/March travel was way more costly than I expected, and I just zeroed out the credit card I used for that, so a cheap trip to see my family in May will be good.

For this weekend, no Formula 1, but there is an IndyCar race I’ll be watching. I’ve seen F1 communities on Lemmy. I assume there are IndyCar ones, as well. Anyone have recommendations on active communities for IndyCar?

JCPhoenix,
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Is the idea something to improve your and/or your coworkers workflow or processes? Because that’d be good at least.

JCPhoenix,
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Like 5yrs ago, I took a drug test for a new job. A few days before they called me, offering me said job, I had taken a gummy or two. Because I didn’t think I was going to get the job. They scheduled me for the drug test, but I pushed it out as far as I could, like 3 weeks, and I passed. Now it’s not like I was consuming THC regularly. It’d probably been months since the last time I’d consumed any in any form. I don’t know what your habit is like, but if you’re in a similar situation, you might be OK.

And even if they do detect it, that could be a false positive. It happens. Then they make you take another, right? Maybe push that out a little, too, to give your body more a little more time to get rid of it.

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