I love seeing your weekly readings. Always found interesting topics through your posts!
I’m currently embarking on Matthew B. Crawford’s “The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction”…super interesting ideas here.
Had a busy weekend, my brother was in town with his family so spent the last 48 hours with them. Love them, but they are pretty exhausting lol. This week at work is looking to be pretty chill, so all in all, not bad. Hope everyone has a fantastic week ahead!
loki (australian shepherd) ran four courses at an agility trial. and by that i mean he got in the ring, did a few obstacles, and rolled around on the turf every.single.time. silly boy. i guess this explains why he’s gotten most of his qualifying scores on the dirt courses, hah.
echo (border collie) passed her CGC evaluation! she’ll get her certificate and ribbon on thursday. she also came with me to the agility trial and waited quietly ringside. i’m planning to get her CGCA (canine good citizen advanced) title next, and i’ve also got her set up to start agility lessons with a different trainer next month. i love my current trainer, but i think she lacks teaching foundational skills, and we really need that.
i may be pet sitting for a well-known author’s brother in may, so that’s neat!
in non-dog news, i’ve got an appointment with a new primary care doc today to hopefully sort out whatever has been going on with my knee these past few years. it’s usually fine, but i biked ~30 miles last weekend and it flared up again.
I finished my new^2 NAS last week (for the most part). Everything has been gracefully moved over, and now I just need to tear the entire thing apart again so I can dremel out a PCI slot so it’ll fit a graphics card. I’m great at planning ahead. :D
I’m a little disappointed at myself, to be honest. I was supposed to have a hematologist appointment on Wednesday, but I rescheduled it for early next month. For the last few years, I’ve been fighting to get my chronic fatigued treated because its generating a whole tree of issues (its preventing me from progressing my life forward, I’m pretty sure its the cause of my depression, etc) - however no one has been able to figure it out because no one actually wants to take an in-depth look as to what it might be. They just run a simple CBC on my blood and say “Nope, looks all fine”.
Well, to be quite frank, I’m just not ready to organize leaving the house on Wednesday (I don’t have a car, so I have to get transportation scheduled from my insurance company) and expend all that energy, just to then be disappointed when the hematologist is 99% likely to say “There’s nothing wrong that I can see”, then I have to organize a trip to actually get back home. It turns what is a 15 minute appointment into a whole 3-4 hour ordeal. They don’t offer telehealth appointments, sadly, or else I wouldn’t mind at least talking to the doctor.
I only pushed it back a little bit till early next month, but I’m just not ready for the disappointment this week, it was causing me a ton of anxiety just even thinking about it over the weekend.
I know that I shouldn’t be disappointed in myself because at the end of the day its my choice and that I shouldn’t feel ashamed for it, but that doesn’t change the fact that its how I feel regardless - so in reality, I traded anxiety for more grief and disappointment in myself rather than disappointment in the doctors.
I’m really proud of you for rescheduling and not just canceling your appointment, which I did for years every time I had finally reconvinced myself to resolve my anxiety and depression. I’m hoping things line up better for you in May.
Busy weekend, a Michelin star chef friend of ours dropped off a great little pig to add to our amazing decor, another couple from Ireland dropped off some rhubarb so Im making a conserve for sunday to go with the Southern biscuits. We finish up tomorrow with Taco Tuesday & a couple days off. Have a pork belly & skin in dry cure with toasted spices & brown sugar, got the piglet coming on Wednesday & start prepping for the Frogmore Stew & Pig Pick’n Sunday… gonna be damn good
On the work front, I absolutely had no motivation to do anything on Thursday or Friday. Like I just sat in my chair all at home, sitting on social media/news/games. I really try not to play games during the workday, but I was just completely sapped of all motivation. Idk what the deal was with that. Not like the first half of last week was a hard work, either. At least, I was able to find some motivation and work on some things today.
I finally bought a UPS for my homelab server. Only 3-4yrs after first getting the server and like 6mo since a momentary voltage sag from the wall/mains power caused the server to shutdown unexpected and corrupt one of my VMs (at least, that’s what I think happened). And this UPS even interfaces with ESXi to automatically – and ideally, gracefully – shutdown in case of a loss of power. I think I’ll test that this weekend.
Also did and filed my taxes yesterday (Sunday). At like 5am. Because what else is there to do at 5am on a Sunday, other than taxes? 🤷🏽♂️
Yay for a UPS! I need to get around to buying one for my NAS, as the power in my area is touch-and-go when the weather gets rough. Also, you’re on ESXi for a homelab? Is there some kind of personal use license that you can get for it, or are you shelling out cash for a regular business license?
That’s exactly why I got a UPS! The electric lines to my building are overhead instead of underground, so sometimes weather makes things flicker.
And I’m using ESXi 6.5 still. There were free licenses available, but I think for the CyberPower UPS software that I’m using, it requires a non-free license. Luckily, there are license keys floating around the Internet.
A friend and I did consider buying a proper license (I have access to non-profit pricing), but with Broadcom’s recent pricing changes and massive increases for VMWare products, that’s probably not an option anymore. I think VMWare also pulled the free personal-use licenses, as well. I may eventually transition to Promox (which I do have on another server) or something else. Broadcom really did a number on VMWare =/
Yep, we’ve been dealing with the !!FUN!! of the new licensing changes at work. My boss strongly doubts Broadcom will just stop honoring the perpetual licenses, as they’ve claimed they might. Although I agreed with him, I ended up convincing him to just get the stupid subscription. The joys of enterprise software plans. :D
Maybe I’m a bad influence, idk. But honestly, I think people generally work quite hard overall. We’re often stuck working for less than we should be getting and doing unfufilling tasks repeatedly.
Life’s too short for us to be stuck in an office/warehouse/job for 8+ hours a day until retirement.
Obviously, try not to let it become a habit lol. Don’t get in trouble, but I think if people can take back their time and still ultimately be productive most of the time, then I say go for it. Everyone has off days, and they’re lying if they say they don’t. We’re humans, not machines
I hope you’re doing better!
Sent from my android while listening to RATM at work lol.
Ha, perhaps I’m a bad influence as well! I’m definitely like you most of the time. I’m usually the guy in my office who’s like, “People, relax; nothing we’re doing here is life or death!” I’m constantly telling my co-workers to just breathe and slow down a bit (read: a lot).
And I’ve definitely had a few (past) co-workers consider me the “lazy one” just because I’m not putting in 80hrs a week, crying in the office due to the stress, even though I still get my shit done. Don’t get me wrong; I’ve put in my 12hr days or working overnight or during the weekend to fix something. I work in IT, so sometimes I need everyone offline to do my stuff. But those are very, very rare.
But I still try to do at least some work each day. So it was unusual for two straight days to basically do nothing! You’re right though; sometimes it just happens and you have to ride it out. Definitely much more productive this week already!
Upgraded my network to Wi-Fi 7, upgraded my NAS to 2.5gbe, reconfigured my torrent setup. This was all to distract me from the new girl who called and tried to break up with me on Sunday 😔 poly woes. I think I’ve figured out what I want to tell her next weekend but this really sucks because she said she wanted something serious and seemed interested but then I was maybe too enthusiastic? I dunno I’m really confused on this one
Do you have a lot of devices that are using WiFi 7? I think I only have two devices, my iPhone and MBP, that use WiFi 6. Everything else is a mix of 5 or 4, and even a couple IoT devices that are still using 802.11G!
Nope! Only my phone is on 7. But my old router was only 1gbe in the back and I just upgraded to 2gbps so I took it as an excuse to upgrade hardware. I honestly don’t see much a difference between 6ghz and 5ghz bands right now, but my understanding is that for my router not everything is enabled yet (some of it is regulatory I think) so maybe I’ll see better speeds as they work on the firmware. WiFi 7 seems to only support wpa3 and the wpa2/3 mode caused some issues with some of the smart devices I have so it took a bit to get everything set up and happy.
The new router is running Asus’s version of wrt so I’m hoping that it’ll get merlin or ddwrt support soon so I can get more granular with some long desired network changes (like forcibly routing all IoT and smart devices thru pihole). I thought about putting my NUC between the WAN and my router some time ago to do that but ultimately decided against having another device and service that I’d need to troubleshoot if anything went wrong.
Built a new PC for my wife and I, first I’ve done in over a decade. Mini ITX boards are wicked cute but it did start feeling a little cramped by the end. I also built a little egg washing station to hopefully save me some time cleaning eggs this year.
Started my first week of work since I got addicted to heroin and fell into a crisis a few years ago, finally back on track in a major and definitive way, and work is going very well, just wrapped up my second day!
Chugging through the week, but work is looking pretty chill so far and the phones aren’t too loud, so I’m grateful. My garden is looking good so far, really pleased with my kale. I keep grabbing my wife and going “look, it’s taking off!” at least every day, lol. Some of my other seed trays are doing their own thing too, and it’s giving me something to look forward to this summer. It’s usually so fucking hot here, but that should make for spicier peppers >:D
Went to the farmer’s market on Saturday, which was great. We usually try to sleep in, but waking up early let us take back our weekend a little bit and we came home with some locally grown teas and other goodies.
Dreamed about mom the other night. It didn’t ruin my day the way the first dream did though. It actually became lucid because I knew it couldn’t possibly be real, so it was kind of neat. I woke up and wrote a poem about it.
Just came back from my parents to cuddle our family dog one last time before she’ll be euthanised this Friday. It was rough. I love her so much and she’s been there for such an essential part of my life (12-27). I’m going to miss her so much. I’m happy she got to have a long and happy life, but I’m also glad she won’t have to live in pain anymore - her back joints are completely worn out. Combined with the reduced vision and hearing and incontinence, I’m sure it’s her time to go. It’s just hard :(
I remember having to unsub from r/dogpictures back when I was on reddit because 80% was just pics of ‘this is my dog who just died’ - it’s just too much. So I won’t do the same to you by posting pics here, but anyone who wants a cute doggo pic is welcome to dm me 🐕
That title takes me back to The X-Files, I never watched past the fourth episode but man, that episode is so good. It’s the one when we first understand where “I want to believe” comes from for Moulder.
My week is still going, Wednesday today. Mon and Tues sucked cuz I live in an underdeveloped country and the town transformer died so no electricity for two days. It’s back now and I have started Rise of the Tomb Raider on my potato PC while listening to A Short History of Nearly Everything!
Well, campus was quite a ways from my parents, but my uncle dropped by with a battery bank that let me keep using my phone for a bit. I mostly switched between watching shows over data and walking around campus with friends. It sucked at the time, but in hindsight it was nice actually getting off my ass and hanging out with people outside.
Very tired still due to my overexertion, but I feel like I’m finally back in the headspace where I can hopefully pay more attention to the spoons I’ve got.
Already feel better than I did earlier, so horizon looks good right now.
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