pickle-wizard

I was going to suggest this too. I use my registered agent's address on all official business stuff.

I haven't worked with mainframes since the z10, but back then you could get into an entry model for about $100k.

Though the sky is the limit. The typical machine I would order had a list price of about 1 million. Of course no one pays list. Discounts can be pretty substantial depending on how much business you do with IBM or how bad they want to get your business.

A couple of years ago I wanted to vacation in Sequoia National Park. So I booked a hotel and flew into LAX. Got a rental car and drove to the hotel a few hours away.

The next morning I go to leave and put the park entrance into my GPS and it said I was 3 hours away. I was like WTF?

Turns out I had booked a hotel in Sequoia National Forrest. I still ended up having a good time. I was still able to see a sequoia tree was my main goal of the trip.

Handy stuff. This would be good for restricting service accounts.

There is a whole lot that SSH can do that most people don't know about.

About 10 years ago I worked for a startup that used a sales agency. Unfortunately it did not go well, in the nearly 3 years I was there they never made a single sale.

They didn't understand our product and had no desire to understand our product. I advocated to end the contract with them, but management refused.

So I think I would want some verbiage in the contract that says I can just walk away if I don't think it is working out. I understand you need to protect your interest too, but I wouldn't want to get strung along by someone who is just not willing to put in the work.

I haved looked much into Virtual Cards. Do they have the same BIN as a physical card. There are public lists of BINs. You could grab all the virtual card BINs and block them. Though that would take some maintenance as new ones are added.

Also it is likely that your merchant processor offers this as a service. You should speak with them. Back we I worked for a processor we offered all kinds of different logic on different card types. They are not usually turned on by default and you have to request they be turned on. One that our customers frequently requested was to block pre-paid cards.

This is great. Just this morning I was just lamenting how I hate creating AWS API Gateways, and I wish I could do it in python like I do with FastAPI.

This looks to be exactly what I was looking for. When you are production ready this is something I'll use.

I worked at IBM for 7 years and I worked with mainframe and AS/400 systems while I was there.

If you want to learn Mainframe and COBOL for fun I say do it. I did enjoy working with those technologies and you probably will too.

However if you want to do it because you think you'll make lots of money, unfortunately that is not the case. Yes I know you hear all the time about how COBOL programmers make bank. That is not quite true. They are not looking for people that know COBOL or Mainframe. They are looking for people that know their big ball of mud. If you know their big ball of mud they'll pay you a lot. However if you just know COBOL and they have to train you on their big ball of mud. Well they would rather send that work offshore to pay the lower wages. Any work done onshore is paid at low rates.

I haven't touched those systems since I left IBM 15 years ago. In fact I don't even have it on my resume anymore. Cloud technologies pay so much more and the jobs are easier to get.

This is a really good response. Your last two points are both features I could use.

I would think that tape would be better for archival storage. My experience has been that the writeable optical media does not hold up well long term.

Hopefully this gets merged into the kernel. I could use this, but don't want to have to maintain my own kernel builds.

This looks promising. I am using MongoDB in my application because the data is document oriented. I did take a brief look at using JSONB in Postgres, but I found it a lot harder to work with.

I would prefer to use Postgres as my database, so this is worth investigating. Taking a brief look at the github page, it looks like it will be easy to swap it out in my code. So I think I know what I'll be spending my next sprint on.

You are absolutely correct. My company has just a single employee, me. I still document everything. I have a kanban board for things I need to do. Things that need to be done at a specific date/time get a calendar invite with a reminder. Anytime I make a decision or researrch something it goes documented in my OneNote so I can go back to look at it later to remind myself why I did something.

I recently started on a frontend project using Svelte, knowing nothing about frontend development. I've found it very easy to use. I had a few failed attempts at this project in the past using React, but I found it quickly overwhelming.

The tutorials on the website are excellent and that was all I needed to get started.

While it sounds like you have gotten off on the wrong foot, I recommend still sticking with it. You may end up liking this other team, or if you don't you may be able to do an internal transfer in 6 months to a year.

This is a great start. I've been looking for part time work, so I signed up.

That's pretty neat

This was about 15 years ago, back when I was working at $MEGACORP we had an OC-48 running to our lab. We were having some problems with it. Thanks to 20 years of near constant layoffs all details of who was responsible for that circuit on our side were lost to the sands of time.

I went down to the basement and saw a faded UUNET sticker on the demarc, but there was no circuit id on it. Some googling showed that through the years of corporate takeovers they were now owned by Verizon. So I called Verzion Business and explained the situation. The lady spent a hour on the phone with me, but we tracked down the circuit. The address listed on the circuit was a manhole up the street from our building. They dispatched a technician and we were back up and running in about an hour. They also put new circuit ID label on the demarc so we wouldn't go through that again.

I started my sabbatical in Summer 2023. I couldn't even stand to look at a computer for first 12 months.

At the end of this summer, I started working on a software project I've wanted to build for a long time. Programming is so much more fun when you don't have people breathing down your neck asking when it will done, and why are you not completing all your story points in the sprint.

I had a problem that took me three days to figure out. I wasn't stressed at all and was able to just focus on the problem. It has also been enjoyable because I can choose the technologies I want to use. There have also been a couple of times where I start working with something and say I don't like this and go with something else.

I think it has been good to have this project before going back to work. It helped me to start like working with computers again.

One suggestion I have is to make the components as simple and generic as possible so they will still be available to repair it in the future. Getting a working ASIC in 50 years may be near impossible, but through hole resistors, caps, and 7400 series logic chips will still be easy to find.

Also think this question would be good for retro computing groups. They can tell you what their common failures are so you could avoid them.

At my last job we had a Kubernetes upgrade go so wrong we ended up having to blow away the cluster and redeploy everything. Even a restore of the etcd backup didn't work. I couldn't tell you exactly what went wrong, as I wasn't the one that did the upgrade. I wasn't around of the RCA on this one. As the fallout was straw that broke the camels back, I ended up quitting to take a sabbatical.

Nearly 15 years ago I worked with a product called Cisco Prime Service Catalog. It was a self service portal where users could order IT services, from a new laptop to a provisioning a private cloud. On the backend it used a run book automation tool called Cisco Process Orchestrator to implement these services.

The software was very expensive and you had to deal with Cisco's licensing. The open source world has a replacement for Cisco Process Orchestrator, it is called Stackstorm and it is an excellent piece of software. I have deployed it at many companies I have worked for.

However there has not been an open source replacement for Cisco Prime Service Catalog. I have come across some portal solutions, but they are the source of truth for the lifecycle data about the service like PSC does. This replacement is what I am working on.

I want to keep it open source, so I don't want to take on VC investment. We have seen too many VC open source tools that end up with a run pull after a few years. My "business plan" is sell consulting and support services around it. I don't want to build a billion dollar business. I just want to earn enough to support my self and few other developers.

Right now I am working on building the MVP as I know a few companies that could use it. It is slow going because I am a devops guy not a full stack developer. So there is a lot to learn along the way.

I've been thinking about this lately my self. At this time I don't have much interest in running a hosted SaaS business.

I anticipate my target customer will be also be cloud customers. So I have decided I'll provide them terraform code so they can deploy the infrastructure needed to run the app. I had wanted to move my dev environment from ClickOps to IAC anyway, so that has been a good motivation to do that.

Once the dust settles from the Broadcom buyout of VMware I'll probably look at create the IAC for an on-prem version too.

This might not work for you, hell it might not even work for me, but I'm going to give it a try.

I’d run a couple pair of OS2 fiber to each room.

I would also have a closet somewhere in the house big enough for a 42u rack, with a 220v 30a circuit, and some cooling.

The other thing I would do is have all the switch boxes be extra depth so that smart switches and dimmers will fit in better. It is hard to get them into standard depth boxes.

I’d invest it into a mutual fund and retire. My cost of living is pretty low so I could keep my withdrawal rate below the normal appreciation.

From there I would spend my days working out and working on open source projects.

What are thinking about doing? I’ve looked into a couple of AI master programs, but I’m not sure how useful they would be.

Yes for the most part.

I burned out hard last year, and quit my job without a plan. I am so much happier without all the stress of work.

Eventually I’ll have to go back to work, but I’ll blow up that bridge when I get to it.

Hurricane Electric offers a whole rack for $400 a month. I'd suggest contacting them. They may have some deals on partial racks closer to your budget.

2 is causing 3 which in turn is causing dissatisfaction leading to 1.

About 15 years ago I took a RHCE prep class at the local community college. I never took the exam, but the class was very worth while. I learned a lot in it. However we didn't focus on memorization of test questions like you are proposing. It was hands on and we actually implemented what we learned in class.

If you really want to learn Linux, the RHCSA/RHCE exams cover just about everything you'll need to know. Setup a lab environment in a few VMs and learn how to execute on the exam objectives. Which if you ever want to know go for the RHCE you have to do anyway, as it is graded on actual implementation.

The gold standard for the RHCSA/RHCE exam study material is the Jung book. It is very comprehensive and I highly recommend it. It is not too expensive either.

Here is a link to it on Amazon https://a.co/d/cZ8ar0N