I’m sure they do, but I feel like even on r/datahoarders, I only ever see people talk about masses of HDDs, tape drives, or cloud storage.

I just don’t go outside. AC running throughout the day, though I do set max temps at different levels throughout the day to take advantage of lower electricity rates or avoid higher rates.

This past week I did have to do some rare outdoors work for work over a few days. My team elected to do it in the evenings and early in the mornings. Was still quite warm, but not sun glaring down on us, we’re gonna get heat stroke from this, afternoon sun.

Wow, I feel dumb. I’ve been here for a year and never looked closely at the bee (old or new). Never noticed the cowboy hat!

So I thought I was good to start a new job (though I’ve yet to set a start date), as the HR person assigned me said it was all good about a month ago, but then today he me tells me there was “a problem” with my drug test. A drug test I took 3 months ago. So I need to take another.

While I’ve only taken a few drug tests for employment during my career, they’ve never taken 3 months to get results. Like 2 weeks at most. Something tells me my HR person screwed up (which isn’t surprising), got this notice a couple month ago, yet just now noticed this. Hate to say it, but typical government. The irony is that I’ll soon be a govt worker. If we can get this straightened out.

On a more positive note, I just paid off one more student loan! After 19yrs of paying and thousands of dollars in interest on this one – more than the principle at this point – it’s finally done. I had to get a hefty loan from my parents, but their terms are much better: 0% APR at the Bank of Mom & Dad versus the current variable 10.02% APR with the bank. Though I still have lots more students loans to go. Such a shitty, shitty system. At least I’m lucky enough my parents can help in this manner.

Stay in school, kids. But only if you don’t fuck it all up like I did. I may be paying student loans til I die.

Maybe it’s my doomerism at play, but even one year house arrest I’d be OK with. Keep him in NY in his Trump Tower penthouse. Don’t let him go out to campaign.

Obviously jail would be better. I just don’t think fines alone are going to cut it. He’s not going to pay them.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

Just saw this other article about the UK arresting two alleged spies for China. Wonder if the German and UK investigations were a joint op. And if we’ll soon hear about other countries arrests of others for working with Chinese intelligence.

While I have work friends, and we do go out and drink, it’s almost always within or adjacent to the context of a work event. Like maybe we’re doing a co-workers happy hour. Or we had some work function that stretched into the evening, so we’ll go out for dinner and drinks together afterwards. There’s definitely been a few times where we were drinking for like 8hrs after a late lunch! But it’s very rare for me to hang out with them outside of that. Like I can count on one hand the times I met up with co-workers on like a weekend just to head to a bar.

As far as topics, they’re still friends, so we talk about all sorts of stuff. But there’s definitely more of a focus on things happening at work and less about our private lives, especially spouses/SOs. My current “work best friend” will sometimes call me afterhours and we’ll chat and vent about stress at work and stuff, and even some of our stresses at home/personal lives, but the latter tends to be more surface level. With my non-work friends, we’d certainly get deeper into those topics if desired.

It comes down to professionalism. That’s really the “firewall” between my work friends and non-work friends. Yes my work friends and I can have fun, joke around, get a little loose when drinking, share deeper stuff about ourselves, but we never want to cross that line. Sometimes it’s thin, and sometimes it’s even a little blurry or dotted. But we all still strive to never (or very, very, very rarely) cross it.

NO MOM NOOOO

FYI on the rules:

Do not editorialize titles. Preserve the original title when possible; edits for clarity are fine.

Not removing the post, but just for next time, please.

Yeah it was waaaaay earlier, which I found out too when I was writing my comment. But I did start working in the early/mid 2000s, when I was 16. Even in 2000s, it was still typical to go to the public library and grab tax forms. Or print them out from the IRS website.

I bought a few boxes of checks when I started working. I still have most of them.

In the first several years of working, I mailed in paper income tax returns. The govt would even send the blank forms out to everyone via postal mail. I think paper submissions were the norm, though electronic filing certainly existed.