pickle-wizard

Last fall I was laid off when the company I worked for went out of business due to COVID.

I quickly received two offers.

One was permeant work from home. The second paid $5K more, but required an hour commute each way though Austin's most congested roads.

I took the lower paying work from home job.

We use Azure DevOps at work. I like it enough that I use it for my personal stuff also. They do have a free tier, but even if you need the paid services, the price is reasonable.

VMS Software has released the x86_64 port of OpenVMS recently. However it is not currently available under the hobbyist program. They say that is coming soon.

I just took a look at Svelte. I like it. The documentation is good and looks easy to work with. Think I'll give it a whirl. Thanks for the info.

Austin is the Silicon Hills because it is on the edge of the Texas Hill Country.

Silicon Prairie is the Dallas Fort Worth area.

This is going to vary widely from company to company. Some companies will allow, some won't.

Being in direct sun in the South, I imagine that is pretty easy to hit. Guess there will be a market for air conditioned radomes.

Hey thanks for posting this. I'm getting back into weight lifting after being out due to COVID and an injury. This looks handy. I've done 5/3/1 before and really like it. Just installed it, and will give the app a try.

I have a membership to the ACM. One perk of the membership is you get a free subscription to the O'Reilly learning platform. Which has thousands of book available. It is a really good deal, as a O'Reilly subscription is $39/month and the ACM Membership is $99/year.

Yes, but sometimes the low interest rate financing is in lieu of rebates or discounts. You have to run the numbers both ways. Sometimes it is cheaper to pay the higher interest rate, and take the discounts and rebates.

Before going to the dealer, I recommend check with your local credit unions, and getting approved for a loan. They usually have pretty low rates. If the dealer can beat that rate, go with the dealers financing, otherwise use your credit union financing.

When I upgraded my homelab last year, I got around this by buying a motherboard with IPMI. It has a cheap little Aspeed video card on board. I also get the advantage of a built in IP KVM, remote power control, and a virtual CD-ROM. Basically all the stuff you get in a Dell iDRAC or HP iLO, but in a micro-ATX board.

Though I would say, that you shouldn't just quit. You should take your concerns to your manager and give them a chance to fix it. Sometimes they can.

I started a job last November, and after about 3 months I was ready to quit. I spoke with my manager and he said he would help fix the problems. He hasn't been able to fix everything, but he was able to fix my biggest annoyances. For the things he could not fix, he is helping me mitigate the issues.

Though if your management is not willing to help you fix the issues then it is time to move on. I've had that happen before too.

The location flexibility is big too. I live in Austin, and my parents live in Kansas. I drove up to Kansas this past Saturday and will work from up here and drive back next Saturday.

I've worked from home for a few years now, and before that I would have to take vacation time to go visit them.

I can't say for sure is causing the crisis in teenager, since I don't have one, and haven't been one since the Clinton administration. However I have a hypothesis.

I have seen a decline in mental health among my peer group, myself included. One common thread is an existential dread. Climate change, the current state of political discourse, the pandemic, the declining middle class, the raising costs of medical care, out of control education costs, and so on. It just leaves you with a feeling that you are screwed and there is nothing to do about it.

Teenagers are pretty aware of what is going on in the world, probably more now than ever. All this plus the normal teenage problems, and new problems like cyber bullying. This is just too much for someone who hasn't had time to build their coping skills.

Right before Corona hit, I bought a Herman Miller Aeron for my home office. For the couple of days a week I worked from home it was great. Once I started using it everyday, it aggravated my sciatica. No matter how I adjusted it, I could not get it right.

Here in Austin we have a store called Texas Office Product Supplies. They sell used office furniture. The prices are pretty good for commercial grade equipment. I took the afternoon off and went and tried all of their chairs to find one that didn't hurt my back. I ended up buying a Sitonit Wit chair. It wasn't too expensive, think I paid about $200 for it.

The other thing I did is buy an adjustable desk. I ended up buying that at IKEA. I am 6'4" and most desks are too short for me. With the adjustable desk, I am able to set it the correct height.

Next month I will have been in Austin for 13 years. I was moved here by IBM. I was working at one of their sites in Dallas and my team was relocated to Austin. I nearly didn't relocate, because I thought it would be too hard to find another job in Austin.

That turned out to be wrong. I've found there are lots of job opportunities here. Seems like there are more every day.

Down side is that out infrastructure is built to handle all this growth. So traffic is going from bad to worse. Real estate is appreciating like crazy. I like in suburbs, and my house has increased in value by 50% in 6 years. So that is making the city unaffordable. Another downside is my property taxes go up every year.

I've never live in Bay Area, but about 7 years ago I did some work for a company based in San Francisco. So I traveled out there a fair bit. Austin feel more corporate that SF. Companies move here once they are established and are looking to lower operating costs. SF felt to have a better startup and innovation culture.

Texas doesn't have the worker protections that California has. Mainly the prohibition of non-competes. Until we get that Austin will not be a replacement for Silicon Valley.

I think this is beyond the advice that HN can give. I would recommend engaging with a lawyer who specializes in labor law in the state that you'll be operating in.

How is Florida law when it comes to non-competes? I personally believe that non-competes being non enforceable in California is what created Silicon Valley in the first place. Hard to have a startup culture when your current employer can block you.

I've gone both ways. From Mega Corp to startup back to Mega Corp.

The biggest lesson I've learned is there is no such thing as a free lunch. I initially moved to the startup because I was bored at Mega corp and I wanted the chance to work on stuff that I could never do at Mega corp. Also there was the allure of making millions. I worked at two start up that went bust, before going back to a different Mega corp.

The first startup I was at sucked. I was so happy when they went bust, and I was laid off. Why? The management was terrible. Bad management at Mega corp sucks, but you are still protected by the bureaucracy. Bad management at a startup is just disastrous. Every day I saw the chance of my options being worth anything, getting closer to 0. Plus I had the daily stress caused by the ineffective management.

The second startup I worked for was great. Not that it didn't have it's problems, but I really enjoyed that job. The management was alright, and I got to work on really cool problems. They ultimately failed because they couldn't monetize their product.

After losing that job, my current job at Mega Corp found me. I decided that it would be nice to have good benefits and stability again. I get to do cool stuff at this job, but there is so much process and procedure around everything, that I spend over half my time doing paperwork.

Would I go back to a startup. I don't know. I know this time I won't fall for the allure of possibly making millions. I would have to really like the management and the work would have to be very interesting.

I started a new job last November. When I was looking for a job, a requirement was permanent remote. I enjoy not having to commute. I have an office setup in an extra bedroom. It is so much nicer than dealing with the open floor-plans that companies like. For lunch I can just cook something instead of going out an eating fast food.

I find communicating with the team works pretty, we just chat or call on teams. Some people don't communicate well, but from what I've learned, they didn't communicate well before COVID either.

I'm not saying I'll never go back into the office, it will just have to be one heck of an offer.

If you follow the homelab sub reddit, a lot of people like to run old obsolete datacenter gear.

You don't have to do that. Mine is a pair of Ryzen 2 white boxes. They are dead silent and don't put out much heat either. All my network gear is fanless too.

I do automation, so I use mine for dev/test against the stuff I am automating. A lot of it could run in the cloud, but that gets expensive real quick. Especially when I am working with a VMware stack.

I had a similar problem at a past job. Though we only had a PB of data. We used a products called SwiftStack. It is open source, but they have paid support. I recommend getting support, as their support is really good. It is an object store like S3, but it has its own API. Though I think they now have an S3 compatible gateway now.

We had about 25 Dell R730xd servers. When the cluster would start to fill up, we would just replace drives with larger drives. Upgrading drives with SwiftStack is a piece of cake. When I left we were upgrading to 10TB drives as that was the best pricing. We didn't buy the drives from Dell as they were crazy expensive. We just bought drives from Amazon/New Egg, and kept some spares onsite. We got a better warranty that way too. Dell only had a 1 year warranty, but the drives we were buying had a 5 year warranty.

Hey thanks for mentioning this. I have been looking for something like Cisco Prime Service Catalog, but cheaper and easier to use. This looks to fit the bill.

I just set it up this morning in my homelab, and it was very simple to set up.

Most of the time, that is what I'd suggest to do. However this is like the 4 wheel drive on my truck. I usually don't need it, but when I need it, I really in a bind and glad to have it.

I don't like the online conferences.

When I go to the in person conferences, it is easy to say I'm out of the office those days, and focus on the conference.

With the online ones, I always end up getting pulled into stuff, but it's ok because I can just listen in the background.

Sounds about like Interstate 35, by the time you're done, it is time to do it again.

IBM does have the zPDT for running an emulated mainframe on Intel hardware for development, and education purposes. However it is not free. IIRC it is about $1K/year. Not a bad cost for a business, but too expensive for someone to go learn on their own.

You are absolutely right about how hard it is to do business with IBM. I worked for IBM for nearly 7 years, running a small datacenter. It was such a pain in the ass every time I needed to order something. IBM sales and support process is very high touch, and is designed for the large enterprise that has a team of IBM sales people supporting them. If you are that customer it is not a big deal because you have someone to navigate the process for you. If you are a smaller customer, they want you to go through a VAR. Which is still a pain in the ass.

Windows NT and the AS/400 are about the same age. This pain in the ass sales process is a big part of why Windows NT won. The IBM sales people didn't want to sell it because you didn't need to buy services with it and it was too hard to buy on your own. Where as if you wanted Windows NT, you just bought a copy of Windows NT and installed it on an easily available PC.

We won't even talk about the time I tried to use IBM Smart Cloud Enterprise.

A few year ago I drove though that area while on vacation with my parents. I commented to my Dad that I felt like I was driving through Windows XP.

My current company is on prem. The reason is cost. Our workload requires lots of big machines, and is fairly inelastic. When we do need more machines, we know months ahead of time.

We recently just started the process of refreshing all the hardware. We looked at cloud again just to cover our bases. It is still cheaper to lease the hardware and pay for colo and a couple of people to manage the hardware, then to pay for the cloud.

I ran into that in real life.

I had a plumbing problem in my house. I had a sink that was randomly filling up with clear cool water. When I used the sink it worked fine. Now I'm pretty handy, but I had no idea what was causing that to happen.

So I called a plumber. I showed him the problem, and he immediately knew the cause. The condensation drain line for my AC ran to that sink. He suggested snaking the drain. He was there 10 minutes but that fixed the problem. He charged me $175 which was his minimum. I gladly paid it. I didn't view it as paying $175 for the fix, I viewed it as paying $175 for his expertise.