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.

Oh, I’m a dummy, that joke went right over my head the first time!

I’m still looking for that ideal tie-in where I link it with something I care about. I don’t know if I want to stay in IT, but I have to do something and at least the skills will be transferable. The work from home aspect of IT has also been very good to me. I’ve outperformed at 40h/week support work while taking care of sick family members and working out of my… walk out basement.

At least I have some outdoor hobbies to bring balance to my cellar-dwelling tenancies.

It helps me to think about it like this:

The shittier the world’s circumstances, the brighter and longer a single good deed will shine.

Yeah, easier is better. I’ll have to confirm what apps outside of Jellyfin and Chromecast are needed, but I’ll compare some basic Roku devices. I could probably score one a online neighborhood marketplace for a few bucks.

Thanks for weighing in.

I spanned that divide. We got an Amiga in the home when most families had no computer and even then, I had to log all my computer time in a little book to make sure I didn’t spend too much time using it. I was frequently told to “go play outside”. I was taught not to give out my name or personal information online. A few years later, I remember downloading the full resolution Hubble Deep Field images, completely filling the family computer’s hard drive and probably saturating the dial up for quite a few minutes. Now I work for questionably evil companies (on my computer all day) then go home and do computer/tech related hobbies. I went from digging holes on the edge of the woods for fun to sitting in front of a computer, phone, tablet, or other tech most of the day.

Is life better post-digital? In some ways yes; in some ways no. We’ve kind of hit dopamine saturation where everything is just a click away and everything has already been done/thought/built/conceived. I have communities for the most niche of interests and I can find info on almost anything that tickles my fancy. On the other hand, there’s very little reason to leave your home and anything that makes you (or your friends) special probably looks like shit compared to the accomplishment of some random 10 year old kid from a foreign country. When the world was smaller everyone could feel bigger and more significant, but post internet, it’s clear every day that we are one of billions of people. The ads still tell us we’re special… to sell us stuff.

I find my solace in the outdoors and in regularly scheduled fully-offline social activities. I imagine being a kid got a whole lot harder after my little micro-generation.

Inb4 I compose a 4 act opera about my week’s schedule during my first shower of the week. :D

My Minecraft pals used mumble at various points. It’s less polished than some options. I like the FOSS and the simplicity but the certificates confused me as a noob. Would still recommend.

I do sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

Is there any reason to not combine the commands since the output always prompts prior to changes anyway?

Sometimes I just do a quick lspci && lsblk on a blank terminal so I can have a draggable, resizeabled privacy screen for my notes or whatever I’m working on. It looks complicated which scares 95% of people away immediately.