In our more rural subdivision, we have mailboxes on the main road. About 10 or 15 depending on the location. Coming home last night, there are 4 or 5 Amazon boxes sitting on top of the mailboxes or in between the posts. Several months back my girlfriend and I were walking and I spotted a piece of box trash sitting up the hill just a little. I walked up to grab it and it was an unopened package with the address just barely readable. We walked up and gave it to the owner. The wind up here is quite intense at times so it's not unusual to find things blowing across the mountain side if they're not secured.
Seriously. The place I work at several years ago made the decision to dump Oracle where it could. After they bought Sun, the company bailed on Sun gear as well going with "white box" x86 boxes, VMs, and Red Hat. We still have a few Oracle clusters but most of the rest of the databases are ms-sql, a few mysql, informix, and postgresql. Personally I don't think they should have such a broad swath of DBs but it seems to be working for the company.
Hah! Where I live, I can be standing at the window looking at the FedEx guy as he runs up, puts a "no one home" sticker on the door and scurries away. That's assuming he got the right house in the first place. UPS just drops the package at the front door. My girlfriend's present was left like that. We're in the house and later I step outside for something and there's the package:)
I have my phone in Do Not Disturb mode 24/7 and the 'phone rings if they immediately call back' option flipped on. While, if the phone is face up on my desk, I can see the call pop up on the display, there's no ringing or other notification.
I think that was the contract I was on when I worked at IBM years ago. I was managing IRS and TSA security servers for the first year but managing the servers was outsourced to India so I switched to a 100% telecommute contract with Starwood.
Regardless, working 100% was pretty much hell as every communication was business only and very strict so there was no camaraderie amongst the team. It pretty much killed any desire to telecommute after that.
That's weird. I know of 9 Indian restaurants in the surrounding area (Boulder Colorado) that I've been to that are generally moderately full of people but not very noisy; other than the Indian TV on in the corner:) One of the best, Yak and Yeti down in Westminster, moved from their smaller fast food looking place to the main mall (the Nepal place in Estes Park and the Indian place in Nederland are the three best in the area).
I’d love to have a discussion about this but the extremists on both sides will overwhelm any reasonable disussion so I’m off to enjoy Thanksgiving. And the family members who advocated lynching a black man are out having Thanksgiving somewhere else.
I put my phones on Do Not Disturb a while back. I see the occasional spam scumbag call from everywhere in the country if my phone's in front of me but seldom do these immoral douchbags who need to take a long time dying after a horrible car accident in which their family burns to death, leave a message.
Sadly I get them at work too and I have to answer those calls. I've taken to answering, "Good morning, this is [John], what is your emergency?" which seems to turn into a lot of hangups (we have internal caller-id so I don't worry about saying that for some coworker or manager and I'm, likely justifiably, not customer facing).
Well, Trump says “Fake News” is news he doesn’t like so there is that.
And at least from what I’ve read, “conservatives” aren‘t being deplatformed. Offensive speech is. Same as what moderators at several forums I attend do.
And as a reminder, these are privately owned sites. They can’t reliably determine your age, sex, religious orientation, or party. You can say what you want but it can’t be verified. But if you post something that breaks their terms of service, you can be sanctioned or ejected.
It’s the internet. Just like the other sites, start your own competing service.
I've lived close to and far from work over the years. Most recently I moved from a 15 minute in town commute to a 45 minute commute. I'm finding that the 45 minute commute is pretty productive. I think about work and home things, it lets me wind down and get ideas. I'll either make a spoken note or just remember what I want to do to make improvements to whatever I'm doing be it home or work related. I almost never have any music, pod cast, or books on tape going as a quiet commute is my desire. The short commute went from busy at work to busy at home with no downtime or quiet time. Perhaps taking 30 minutes or an hour at home after work to just chill would replace the commute but it's hard to make the time where commuting is unavoidable.
When I go on vacation, I ride my motorcycle and within a couple of days, all my work cares have fallen away behind me. It's the positive aspect of heading out on vacation.
And I suspect I'm a boomer of some sort, tail end at least (61 years old).
We're a subdivision in a rural (as identified by the county) area. Currently I'm on High Speed WiFi (about 20/10 speeds) and the ISP would love to run fiber out to us however they cannot use the existing power poles because they are too short. The power company is good with with the ISP running the line but it has to be a couple of feet below the power lines which puts it too low and susceptible to damage by passing vehicles.
I have two Model M keyboards. I'm typing on one now. I've had several different keyboards over the years including Dell and recently a couple of Mac keyboards for my work and home laptops.
I'm at times extremely frustrated at my tablet or phone virtual keyboards. My fingers aren't that small and I'm constantly hitting space for 'n' or even interspersing spaces to break up words due to my floating thumb. I had an Android phone for a couple of years and it was the most annoying keyboard, frustrating enough to be flung across the room more than once. I had a Blackberry back in the day and the physical keyboard, while small, still took a little pressure to generate a key. Even too close to a virtual keyboard will throw in an extra letter or space. Right now I rest my thumb briefly on the keyboard while I type.
I recall some virtual keyboard, laser light letters on your desk to simulate a keyboard. Anything like that, even a full sized tablet virtual keyboard wouldn't work for me for coding. I even bought the second Model M to replace the Dell keyboard I had at work (at IBM at that!) because scripting was such a pain in the ass.
I did try out the Dvorak keyboard a bunch of years back. Swapping key-caps on my IBM was pretty simple to make that change. But as an IT person a the time, using a Dvorak keyboard on my keyboard and then going to the users who all had QUERTY was insane. I'm not doing that any more, at least to that extent, but there are the occasional times where I need to use someone else's keyboard and switching back and forth would be annoying.
I used them for a bit back when I first got an iPad. I tried keeping lists and notes on it but it needed internet access to get the notes. I switched to the ipad notes app for notes which sync to all my devices and a shopping list app for groceries and things I want to remember to buy.
We’re at 8,200’ in Roosevelt National Forest. I bailed on cable and TV back in ‘12. When we moved here last year, we only activated high speed WIFI and have been happy with that.
I will say that I played a season 9 episode on my computer last night and laughed at the jokes.
Nah. As someone on the database side, there are quite a few people from the phone companies to our own staff that can make updates. We recently (like a year ago recently) deployed software to help our customers make changes even easier. Obviously if you’re with a small phone company, there might be one person, but absolutely there are quite a few people who can and do make corrections.
Interestingly I'm a Unix Admin and I just got upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 10. With the upgrade I can't delete icons from my desktop (I hate having icons on my desktop) and I had to have the IT guys come over to install cygwin so I could log in to my servers.
Considering training is basically non-existent, the only way to keep up on new tech is to be able to get all the new tech toys plus spend hours of personal time getting familiar with it.
Where I work, we're not doing any sort of Cloud computing but that's a big draw in the area. Either I spend the bucks to get an Amazon, Google, and/or Microsoft account and figure things out on my own, or I'm stuck. I recently interviewed for a position doing Kubernetes work. I'm reasonably proficient at it being the only guy really doing the work here, but the position had some AWS requirement that was played down for the posting ("Required: Kubernetes, Good to have: AWS"). It turns out it was more of a requirement than originally stated. (Humorously my colocated physical server is about 50% less expensive than an equivalent AWS setup, although I will say that my sites aren't tuned for AWS so the cost might be closer to my physical server cost.)
Same with other things. I don't have access to get an IP address, need to wait on Networking. I can't create a VM via script, need to wait on the Virtualization team. At home I have a vCenter cluster running two R710's with about 100 VMs which include a CI/CD pipeline (gitlab, artifactory, jenkins), Kubernetes (4 clusters), and a couple of development environments to duplicate my scripts at work plus my own coding projects. I can allocate VMs on the fly. I can self allocate an IP. And I can work on stuff we just don't do, or I don't have access to, at home.
To keep up on technology, training has to occur. Either from the company or on your own time and your own dime.
I worked as a contractor for IBM for 2 years. They had a "duck-duck-goose" style of reducing headcount. You were a cog in the machine with no way of showing the team that reduced headcount your value. Within a couple of weeks of starting there, some guy I'd never seen before walked around the cubicles and tapped the guy across from me, "you're out. have your stuff gone by Wednesday".
When the contract ended, I was fortunate enough to be placed on a new contract. The offers for me at the time was to move to Tennessee to work on building out a Data center, be a Web Developer, or be a backup and storage admin for a remote contract. In order to get the contract, I paid $6,000 out of pocket for a class (yes, contractor so IBM wouldn't pay for it).
In that year a couple of people were tapped to depart including our customer interface who had to transition all her documentation and contract stuff over to another member of the team before she left.
The apparent randomness of the selection process was pretty uncomfortable for me so I found another position and changed jobs. The pay was a bit more but the position was full time employee. Been here for almost 11 years now.
I have a perfectly good HP Scanner I bought years ago. Still works fine, but only on XP with the software and on Windows 7 using the Windows tools; HPs software doesn't work on Windows 7. I have a Virtual Machine running Windows XP just so I can keep using my perfectly good HP Scanner and my perfectly good Sony HandyCam which also only works on XP.
Long ago. My ex and I bought loads of comics back in the 70’s when we first got married. Hitting 7/11 mostly I think. I still have them, some 9 long boxes of them. But as the 80’s rolled in, comics were getting to be too costly so we basically walked away. My local game store tried carrying them recently and stopped after 6 months or so, not because they weren’t selling but because the distributor wanted him to buy a lot more than his clientele were actually buying. Personally the comics were still pricier than I wanted to pay even though I certainly could afford it now. But I can get a complete story in a book for the price of a few comics and since comics are serialized, with a book I don’t miss some part of the story like I did in the 70’s.
This is pretty much it. In an organization with 1,200 Unix or Unix peripherals, at my last check 91% of the gear is End of Life in one manner or another (OS and/or Hardware). The business won't prioritize replacements due to spending the time to work on testing new gear vs spending time creating new software. Information security won't step in and require patching for vulnerabilities or upgrading in general and their gear is just as outdated. They have no idea what's in the environment so have no idea if servers are compliant or not. About the only time we can address technical debt is when a product is retired. Even product patches address the patch and not upgrading the environment as that's not prioritized.
Years age we had a sysadmin move on to a new job and a year later apply back. He was a pretty good admin and I told the boss this. He got the job but “ghosted” us. Just not show up on the first day, Then a year later apply again. I asked him and he’d had another job he’d applied for that was better that accepted him so he took that one. I let the new boss that he was a good admin but he had simply not shown up for the first day last time. He didn’t get hired.
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In our more rural subdivision, we have mailboxes on the main road. About 10 or 15 depending on the location. Coming home last night, there are 4 or 5 Amazon boxes sitting on top of the mailboxes or in between the posts. Several months back my girlfriend and I were walking and I spotted a piece of box trash sitting up the hill just a little. I walked up to grab it and it was an unopened package with the address just barely readable. We walked up and gave it to the owner. The wind up here is quite intense at times so it's not unusual to find things blowing across the mountain side if they're not secured.
[John]
Seriously. The place I work at several years ago made the decision to dump Oracle where it could. After they bought Sun, the company bailed on Sun gear as well going with "white box" x86 boxes, VMs, and Red Hat. We still have a few Oracle clusters but most of the rest of the databases are ms-sql, a few mysql, informix, and postgresql. Personally I don't think they should have such a broad swath of DBs but it seems to be working for the company.
[John]
Hah! Where I live, I can be standing at the window looking at the FedEx guy as he runs up, puts a "no one home" sticker on the door and scurries away. That's assuming he got the right house in the first place. UPS just drops the package at the front door. My girlfriend's present was left like that. We're in the house and later I step outside for something and there's the package :)
[John]
I have my phone in Do Not Disturb mode 24/7 and the 'phone rings if they immediately call back' option flipped on. While, if the phone is face up on my desk, I can see the call pop up on the display, there's no ringing or other notification.
[John]
They're in the same strip mall area but moved into the main building. You can see it from where the old place was :)
[John]
I think that was the contract I was on when I worked at IBM years ago. I was managing IRS and TSA security servers for the first year but managing the servers was outsourced to India so I switched to a 100% telecommute contract with Starwood.
Regardless, working 100% was pretty much hell as every communication was business only and very strict so there was no camaraderie amongst the team. It pretty much killed any desire to telecommute after that.
[John]
That's weird. I know of 9 Indian restaurants in the surrounding area (Boulder Colorado) that I've been to that are generally moderately full of people but not very noisy; other than the Indian TV on in the corner :) One of the best, Yak and Yeti down in Westminster, moved from their smaller fast food looking place to the main mall (the Nepal place in Estes Park and the Indian place in Nederland are the three best in the area).
[John]
I’d love to have a discussion about this but the extremists on both sides will overwhelm any reasonable disussion so I’m off to enjoy Thanksgiving. And the family members who advocated lynching a black man are out having Thanksgiving somewhere else.
[John]
I put my phones on Do Not Disturb a while back. I see the occasional spam scumbag call from everywhere in the country if my phone's in front of me but seldom do these immoral douchbags who need to take a long time dying after a horrible car accident in which their family burns to death, leave a message.
Sadly I get them at work too and I have to answer those calls. I've taken to answering, "Good morning, this is [John], what is your emergency?" which seems to turn into a lot of hangups (we have internal caller-id so I don't worry about saying that for some coworker or manager and I'm, likely justifiably, not customer facing).
[John]
Well, Trump says “Fake News” is news he doesn’t like so there is that.
And at least from what I’ve read, “conservatives” aren‘t being deplatformed. Offensive speech is. Same as what moderators at several forums I attend do.
And as a reminder, these are privately owned sites. They can’t reliably determine your age, sex, religious orientation, or party. You can say what you want but it can’t be verified. But if you post something that breaks their terms of service, you can be sanctioned or ejected.
It’s the internet. Just like the other sites, start your own competing service.
[John]
I've lived close to and far from work over the years. Most recently I moved from a 15 minute in town commute to a 45 minute commute. I'm finding that the 45 minute commute is pretty productive. I think about work and home things, it lets me wind down and get ideas. I'll either make a spoken note or just remember what I want to do to make improvements to whatever I'm doing be it home or work related. I almost never have any music, pod cast, or books on tape going as a quiet commute is my desire. The short commute went from busy at work to busy at home with no downtime or quiet time. Perhaps taking 30 minutes or an hour at home after work to just chill would replace the commute but it's hard to make the time where commuting is unavoidable.
When I go on vacation, I ride my motorcycle and within a couple of days, all my work cares have fallen away behind me. It's the positive aspect of heading out on vacation.
And I suspect I'm a boomer of some sort, tail end at least (61 years old).
[John]
We're a subdivision in a rural (as identified by the county) area. Currently I'm on High Speed WiFi (about 20/10 speeds) and the ISP would love to run fiber out to us however they cannot use the existing power poles because they are too short. The power company is good with with the ISP running the line but it has to be a couple of feet below the power lines which puts it too low and susceptible to damage by passing vehicles.
[John]
I have two Model M keyboards. I'm typing on one now. I've had several different keyboards over the years including Dell and recently a couple of Mac keyboards for my work and home laptops.
I'm at times extremely frustrated at my tablet or phone virtual keyboards. My fingers aren't that small and I'm constantly hitting space for 'n' or even interspersing spaces to break up words due to my floating thumb. I had an Android phone for a couple of years and it was the most annoying keyboard, frustrating enough to be flung across the room more than once. I had a Blackberry back in the day and the physical keyboard, while small, still took a little pressure to generate a key. Even too close to a virtual keyboard will throw in an extra letter or space. Right now I rest my thumb briefly on the keyboard while I type.
I recall some virtual keyboard, laser light letters on your desk to simulate a keyboard. Anything like that, even a full sized tablet virtual keyboard wouldn't work for me for coding. I even bought the second Model M to replace the Dell keyboard I had at work (at IBM at that!) because scripting was such a pain in the ass.
I did try out the Dvorak keyboard a bunch of years back. Swapping key-caps on my IBM was pretty simple to make that change. But as an IT person a the time, using a Dvorak keyboard on my keyboard and then going to the users who all had QUERTY was insane. I'm not doing that any more, at least to that extent, but there are the occasional times where I need to use someone else's keyboard and switching back and forth would be annoying.
[John]
I used them for a bit back when I first got an iPad. I tried keeping lists and notes on it but it needed internet access to get the notes. I switched to the ipad notes app for notes which sync to all my devices and a shopping list app for groceries and things I want to remember to buy.
[John]
We’re at 8,200’ in Roosevelt National Forest. I bailed on cable and TV back in ‘12. When we moved here last year, we only activated high speed WIFI and have been happy with that.
I will say that I played a season 9 episode on my computer last night and laughed at the jokes.
[John]
I can't wait for the Russian videos where someone in a bubble car brake checks a semi.
"What was that Ivan? Did you feel a bump?"
[John]
Like a motorcycle. Heck, I can fit quite a lot on my bike and it was only $8,200. I do have a gas gauge though :)
[John]
Nah. As someone on the database side, there are quite a few people from the phone companies to our own staff that can make updates. We recently (like a year ago recently) deployed software to help our customers make changes even easier. Obviously if you’re with a small phone company, there might be one person, but absolutely there are quite a few people who can and do make corrections.
[John]
Interestingly I'm a Unix Admin and I just got upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 10. With the upgrade I can't delete icons from my desktop (I hate having icons on my desktop) and I had to have the IT guys come over to install cygwin so I could log in to my servers.
[John]
Considering training is basically non-existent, the only way to keep up on new tech is to be able to get all the new tech toys plus spend hours of personal time getting familiar with it.
Where I work, we're not doing any sort of Cloud computing but that's a big draw in the area. Either I spend the bucks to get an Amazon, Google, and/or Microsoft account and figure things out on my own, or I'm stuck. I recently interviewed for a position doing Kubernetes work. I'm reasonably proficient at it being the only guy really doing the work here, but the position had some AWS requirement that was played down for the posting ("Required: Kubernetes, Good to have: AWS"). It turns out it was more of a requirement than originally stated. (Humorously my colocated physical server is about 50% less expensive than an equivalent AWS setup, although I will say that my sites aren't tuned for AWS so the cost might be closer to my physical server cost.)
Same with other things. I don't have access to get an IP address, need to wait on Networking. I can't create a VM via script, need to wait on the Virtualization team. At home I have a vCenter cluster running two R710's with about 100 VMs which include a CI/CD pipeline (gitlab, artifactory, jenkins), Kubernetes (4 clusters), and a couple of development environments to duplicate my scripts at work plus my own coding projects. I can allocate VMs on the fly. I can self allocate an IP. And I can work on stuff we just don't do, or I don't have access to, at home.
To keep up on technology, training has to occur. Either from the company or on your own time and your own dime.
I worked as a contractor for IBM for 2 years. They had a "duck-duck-goose" style of reducing headcount. You were a cog in the machine with no way of showing the team that reduced headcount your value. Within a couple of weeks of starting there, some guy I'd never seen before walked around the cubicles and tapped the guy across from me, "you're out. have your stuff gone by Wednesday".
When the contract ended, I was fortunate enough to be placed on a new contract. The offers for me at the time was to move to Tennessee to work on building out a Data center, be a Web Developer, or be a backup and storage admin for a remote contract. In order to get the contract, I paid $6,000 out of pocket for a class (yes, contractor so IBM wouldn't pay for it).
In that year a couple of people were tapped to depart including our customer interface who had to transition all her documentation and contract stuff over to another member of the team before she left.
The apparent randomness of the selection process was pretty uncomfortable for me so I found another position and changed jobs. The pay was a bit more but the position was full time employee. Been here for almost 11 years now.
[John]
I have a perfectly good HP Scanner I bought years ago. Still works fine, but only on XP with the software and on Windows 7 using the Windows tools; HPs software doesn't work on Windows 7. I have a Virtual Machine running Windows XP just so I can keep using my perfectly good HP Scanner and my perfectly good Sony HandyCam which also only works on XP.
[John]
Long ago. My ex and I bought loads of comics back in the 70’s when we first got married. Hitting 7/11 mostly I think. I still have them, some 9 long boxes of them. But as the 80’s rolled in, comics were getting to be too costly so we basically walked away. My local game store tried carrying them recently and stopped after 6 months or so, not because they weren’t selling but because the distributor wanted him to buy a lot more than his clientele were actually buying. Personally the comics were still pricier than I wanted to pay even though I certainly could afford it now. But I can get a complete story in a book for the price of a few comics and since comics are serialized, with a book I don’t miss some part of the story like I did in the 70’s.
[John]
This is pretty much it. In an organization with 1,200 Unix or Unix peripherals, at my last check 91% of the gear is End of Life in one manner or another (OS and/or Hardware). The business won't prioritize replacements due to spending the time to work on testing new gear vs spending time creating new software. Information security won't step in and require patching for vulnerabilities or upgrading in general and their gear is just as outdated. They have no idea what's in the environment so have no idea if servers are compliant or not. About the only time we can address technical debt is when a product is retired. Even product patches address the patch and not upgrading the environment as that's not prioritized.
[John]
Years age we had a sysadmin move on to a new job and a year later apply back. He was a pretty good admin and I told the boss this. He got the job but “ghosted” us. Just not show up on the first day, Then a year later apply again. I asked him and he’d had another job he’d applied for that was better that accepted him so he took that one. I let the new boss that he was a good admin but he had simply not shown up for the first day last time. He didn’t get hired.
[John]