I’m aware of Stash. I wouldn’t have thought of it and that might actually be a good solution. I’ll spin up a copy and see if it’ll work. Thanks for the suggestion. :)

Great to hear. I might give it a try in a limited area, like meeting people from a new hobby or friend group, then expand from there if it works f or me. I definitely see the benefit, especially for ADHD types who might otherwise forget to call someone for 1…2…3…12 months. :-D Thank you for making a cool piece of software.

I worked for a company who always positioned themselves as way more important than they were and were hellbent on micromanaging everyone. It was all about image and corporate culture. I can play that game fairly well, but I wanted to minimize my time dealing with it. I was part of a small group of 3-5 subject matter experts who rank similarly to management, but didn’t have to manage anyone. This tended to isolate us from the McJob environment as we worked things out between ourselves and all the bottom tier managers were nice to us because they wanted us to help their employees. We were salaried and unlike most jobs which use salary to make you work more hours, here salary meant I could bend my hours more than most employees and do 4x10hrs or 4x9+4hrs and leave early every Friday. Sometimes my boss would tell us to leave early for the day or take us to lunch. Sometimes we’d go out to lunch when our counterparts from a client company were around. It was an okay gig and my direct managers were okay. Covid happened and upper management could barely stand the idea of anyone working somewhere other than their watchful eye so they try to drag us SMEs back into an mostly empty office calling us “essential workers” despite us being 100% able to do our jobs from home and fully nonessential in every meaningful way. I needed the job, so I went. Around that time we got a new manager who was supposed to straighten the place out (instead doubling down on every reason the place was shit). When I arrived at our mostly empty office I let myself into the IT closet and grabbed 4-5 monitors to build myself a monitor wall. I showed up in sweatpants. I took frequent breaks. I played Tux Kart on my phone. I played songs like “take this job and shove it” over my PC speakers while I was working. We put on techno music and remixed snippets of angry customer calls to it. (QA was vibing to the tune of our rebellion!) I raced my rolling chair up and down the isles and generally acted a fool, but not enough to get fired. Our small group of SMEs was tight knit and after a few days of acting our wage, one lady quit because she had kids and there wasn’t any childcare available yet because of Covid. Our manager basically forced her into it because he would not compromise. The governor was still telling everyone to stay home. This woman straight up rage quit telling our boss exactly where he could shove it and all of us were VERY clear with our boss that he would lose the rest of us if he didn’t shape up. Of course he knew best. The bossman was a fucking self-important narcissist and tried to call our bluff only to find himself with 0 SMEs a week or two later. I went home that night and found a new job with a friend. To top it off, I was in the process of switching roles at the first company, so when I left, I imagine they felt an extra sting of having to restart that search. Their mission was “asses in seats” and they would hire anyone to meet headcount on their contracts, so whoever replaced us may not even have known how to properly turn on a computer much less fix one. One fellow SME followed a former colleague of ours who got him plugged in elsewhere. All of us found new jobs in record time. They had been driving us too hard to really document much, so when we left I assume everything collapsed back to the level of 0-experience newbies with no guidance or product knowledge at all. The company must have burned enough people because they moved most of their activity to a new city and some of it offshore where they continue their bullshit to this day. That’s what you get when you piss off nearly every qualified individual in a market! My small team of SMEs was awesome and I would absolutely work with any of them again. The comradery was top notch.

I web searched our former boss and found him on a few job sites for “high earning professionals”. He got fired a bit after we all left and I’d like to think he’s working as a grease trap cleaner now. Then again, in America we fail up.

Looks good. I’ve considered a personal CRM for some time and have been using Obsidian a little bit. Having said that, I am open to something more tailored to the task. A question: what would it look like if someone wanted to export their data out of this tool later? Do I need to be a programmer to migrate away or is it relatively simple?

I have an Pixel 8 Pro after my most recent Oneplus finally died. Having used the pixel with Graphene for a year or so now, I have to agree with you: there’s not much they could add to phones to tempt me to upgrade. I set my family’s last 3 or 4 phones next to each other and they’re practically all the exact same form factor and it’s only a minor difference in notch shape and backplate color accents that set them apart. I don’t play games other than the occasional Tux Kart race in a waiting room, so all the phones have more than enough RAM and CPU. The only reason for most people to upgrade in the current market is a hardware failure or an end-of-support event that you can’t sidestep with third party ROMS.

Yep, got rid of my last phone when the mics stopped working right, even after flashing a variety of ROMS.

My wife does this in our home. Calls and full videos are usually okay, but nobody who is not watching them wants to hear you flip through shorts. I go play Cities Skylines in my office and it keeps everyone’s peace.

Yup, my wife watches a lot of shorts. I don’t get it. I think it’s bad for you, but it’s her choice as an adult. With that said, the looping is enraging.

I have issues with that too. Some of it might have to do with VPNs, but even with everything off, my devices sometimes still can’t see each other. I’m guessing I made a mistake configuring the network or something. Instead, I usually copy files from my phone via SMB, then access the same share from an NFS mount on my PC

Lol, I would wake up some time in February with an apetite sufficient to cause a global famine.

Wife was happy. Though I have now been asked to retrieve all the ornaments from the attic so her and her sister can decorate it. I only did the lights. Teamwork!

Haven’t done this, but I’ve known people who do. Beats the tree lots.

When I was a kid we did a real tree. When we visited my brother last year we did a small real tree. Normally we have a fake tree.

We had some deaths in the family and some sicknesses, so we weren’t feeling festive last year and set up a 3 foot tall fake tree before we skipped town. This year, today, I set up the big huge fake tree as a surprise while my wife wasn’t home. I’m hoping the Christmassy decor without the work will get her into the Christmas spirit. We’ll see if she’s glad or annoyed. :-D

I read that even Azure, which you would expect to have a ton of Windows machines deployed, is like 66%+ Linux VMs. I was surprised to hear that, but it matches my limited experience.

I am thrilled every time I have the chance to reconnect with someone from high school whether it’s a student or a former teacher. Also, I’m close with someone who went through a period of physical limitations and I’m sorry to hear how this is affecting your social life. Even as a third party to my close friend’s experience, I can still conjour up powerful feelings of loneliness based on their experience.

I hope you have some great moments of reconnection!

My undergrad was set up for Windows as the default assumption. Eventually I figured out you could visit the IT help desk and they would help you set up the VPN another way.

Someone close to me went into a scientific field and had this experience at their school. 100% Linux. They taught them how to use it for everything from the ground up; regular usage, and things specific to their discipline. I would have loved to have had the same foundational experience. My Linux knowledge grew together as a patchwork of experiences breaking and fixing things, reinstalling, hacking together solutions that should never have worked, etc.

I appreciate your comment about my experience. Perhaps I’m not giving myself enough credit for what I know. I kind of know these things in isolation since my IRL friends, bar one or two, aren’t very technical so I have no benchmarks to compare myself with.

I did a little bit of cloud stuff in a past job. It was a mix of billing and tech support, nothing requiring a ton of experience or certs, though a general knowledge of computers and public cloud computing was needed. A lot of people who worked there did not have it so I floated to the top pretty quick. I work hard, but I don’t need the stress of being in a dysfunctional org.

I have definitely played nice with MS in the past and gained valuable knowledge and skills doing it. The first tech job I worked in was kind of a talent farm in the most miserable way. It was about 30% billing support, 60% tech support, and 10% sitting in the bathroom on your phone wishing you could be unborn. Poor pay, high-school-like conditions, manipulative detached upper management, absolutely unattainable goals, but you would get a resume bullet point you could then use to get hired at a bigger tech company. I did really well here, got promoted a few times, simply because I was nice to colleagues and customers and empathized with the misery of dealing with our support. A lot of my friends followed each other one at a time to better companies and I followed suit landing a tech sales/support gig. Less interesting, but almost double the money. After a few years and one layoff, now I’m searching and not even determined to stay in tech, though that’s where my most marketable experience is now. On one hand, working in tech has made it harder to enjoy computers as a hobby and I hate that. On the other hand, the good benefits and median pay for my area made this last job a godsend during a very wild and chaotic few years of my life.

I agree with you about getting out of the capitalist ride. All I need is $15M so I can buy my own hot spring and retire in the mountains. :P On a less fanciful note and hopefully on a shorter timeline, I want to save enough that I can live off of the investment income or at least supplement 20hr/wk wages using the remaining time to pursue hobbies, volunteering, etc. Having that revenue stream as insurance against a situation where I cannot work anymore would be huge. Having a budget big enough to relocate to a different state if needed is already a luxury.

I find myself wondering what’s coming after the AI bubble bursts. Despite Azure being okayish, I see a rough time ahead for MS. I know it’s a small part of their business, but Windows is becoming increasingly toxic and I think they over-invested in AI. We’re undergoing some pretty big societal/cultural shifts at the moment. South Park parodied it in a recent episode where all the blue collar workers get fabulously rich because no one knows “how to do anything anymore”. What companies/industries are going to help build things back up when the tower collapses?

Having had 30 gigs, what do you think worked out best for you when it came to finding a new job?

I appreciate the tip about R&D and startups. I ride my bike a lot and sometimes when I go through office parks or light industrial I see boatloads of tech-ish companies that have no consumer name recognition or anything. Whether it’s R&D at a big cloud provider or something similar, the behind the scenes stuff is more likely to utilize Linux.