pickle-wizard

I live in the suburbs of Austin, and plan to stay where I am at. I like having everything I need with in a 5 minute drive.

While my current job has gone permanent WFH, my next one might not. So I wouldn't want to move too far out anyway.

I've been donating to political causes that I support.

For a while in Texas you could become a Professional Engineer in Software Engineering. I don't know anyone who has one it.

I just checked and the exam was discontinued in 2019 due to low interest.

I hold the AWS Solution Architect Associate certification. I had a lot of fun studying for the exam, and learned a lot.

However it did not help me one bit in looking for a job. Everyone wanted someone with experience.

My certification expires in November and I'm not going to renew it. I've decided that I'm going to work on getting an advanced VMware certification. There is still a lot of on prem out there, and I have 15 years of experience with VMware. So figure I should leverage that.

I have long held the opinion that education should be part of national defense.

I think is a good example of what happens when you do that.

I can’t remember where I read it, but I was reading an article about a company’s experience with outsourcing. One quote stood out.

“We outsourced all the profit, but none of the risk”

You are not kidding on the price of SAN.

I just started a pilot program with the iXsystems TrueNAS, which is the supported enterprise version of FreeNAS.

It was easily a 10th the price of everyone else I looked at. Plus the support contact was inexpensive.

Now if I could just figure out something about our VMware licensing. I've looked at RHEV, but we have a lot of automation built around VMware. It will be very expensive to switch.

I'm a generalist also.

In my experience you have to tailor your resume to the job. Play up you experiences with what they are looking for. Once you get into the interview stages, let them know you also know a bunch of other technologies too.

I think this would work well for me. Most of my day is spent with SSH or RDP sessions to systems that do the heavy lifting. So I'll welcome the power and heat savings.

Though I don't think I'll be buying one soon. When I travel I have a 2018 MacBook Air and when I'm at home I have a 2013 Mac Pro. Both machines still work great for my needs, and I plan to keep the Mac Pro until Apple stops OS updates for it. When it comes time to replace it, I'll replace it with a Mac Mini, and I don't need a machine that powerful anymore.

Think it depends on what you want.

Do you want to be the CEO of an Uber sized company, or do you want want a small lifestyle business, that lets you spend your summers in the Bahamas.

In a past job one of my duties was AIX administration. My favorite part about AIX was smitty.

It gave you a menu for everything you need to do on the system, but it would also give the command that it run. That was if you forgot how to do something, just fire up smitty, and get the command for future reference. It was very handy when writing scripts.

There is 2.5Gig and 5Gig ethernet. It is often called MultiGigbit Ethernet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2.5GBASE-T_and_5GBASE-T

It is still not very common. The main use case for it is backhaul for access points in commercial settings.

Before this job I worked from home for 2 years. When I wanted human interaction, I could go to a restaurant, the gym, a hockey game, or a friends house. You can't do any of those things now.

Once things open backup, I think a lot of people find that WFH is a lot less lonely.

I have a weekly 1 on 1 with my manager, but we end up skipping most weeks, as neither of us have anything we need to talk about. We tend to average about once a month.

Usually our 1 on 1s turn into a planning session to discuss project that will be coming the following months. So I do feel they are useful.

If it is too verbose for you just alias it.

It is just the software. You get the software and a USB dongle that acts as the license key for the emulator.

I used this back when I worked at IBM. Most people just ran it on a ThinkPad running Linux. I ran it on a rather beefy tower system, as it was slow on the ThinkPad.

We called the tower system, the baby z, and I took it and physically placed it inside of our System z. One day our CE asked why there was a tower inside of the System z. I told him that it was pregnant.

With all the job hopping that goes on in tech, there is a lot of Resume Driven Development. People want to use AWS because it will help them get their next job.

I'm finally in a job that I'm happy with and can see myself staying here until retirement. I have noticed that has changed my technology recommendations. For example we recently started looking at configuration management tools. Ansible is the obvious choice from a resume perspective as it is very popular. I ended recommending Powershell DSC. Why, because our environment is mostly windows, the team is familiar with Powershell, and for our use case is much faster. Powershell DSC is not as popular so it won't help me get another job. When it comes time to expand the team, I can hire someone who understands configuration management tools or powershell, and get them up to speed in a day or two.

We have about 170 servers in a colo about 30 minutes from my home. I can go months without going to the colo. Usually when I go out there it is to replace a disk.

We have a bunch of hardware coming up on end of life. I looked at moving us to cloud. The new hardware will cost about what 3 years of AWS would cost. Considering that the hardware I am replacing is over 6 years old, we are better off sticking with on-prem.

There is the z/PDT, which is an emulator that runs on your PC. It comes with a software pack that includes z/OS, z/VM, and few other things. It runs $900 a year, not sure if there is an initial cost.

http://dtsc.dfw.ibm.com/adcd/adcd.shtml

However 900 a year is still out of reach for most individuals. They should make it free.

They dropped the interest rate to 0% on all Federal student loans. So you won't accrue interest while in deferment right now.

Wow, where are you at that it is 790 a week? Here in Texas it is about $500 a week.

IBM has an internal program for training people in Mainframe skills, but for the life of me I can't remember what it is called. I was going to be part of it when I graduated college, but then 08 happened and I was moved into Open Systems support after a RIF.

A google search showed me this page. https://www.ibm.com/case-studies/ibm-academic-initiative-sys...

Check out https://www.realpython.com. Lots of great tutorials.

Windows NT was originally going to be OS/2 NT. Due to the architecture of NT, it could support many different APIs.

Due to the success of Windows 3.0 and the lack of OS/2 success, Microsoft wisely decided to expand the Windows API to the Win32 API and have it be the default API.

The book Show Stopper, has a good account of the early days of NT.

https://www.amazon.com/Show-Stopper-Breakneck-Generation-Mic...

It is interesting read.

I wonder when IBM sold off their /8. When I left IBM in 2012 it was still used internally. My department alone had about 10K addresses.

I figured IBM would eventually sell it off and I wasn't looking forward to the day I'd have to reIP all those systems. Glad I missed that party.

--Edit I just did a whois on some the IPs that I remember. Looks like IBM still has big chunks of the 9.0.0.0/8. Likely only sold off what they hadn't already used. Honestly I'm surprised they sold off any of them. With their cloud ambitions I'd think they want to keep them for use there.

I can’t use online question verification systems.

The people I bought my house from have the same last name as me. So every time I do one of those, it asks me questions about them. I know none of their information as I never met them.

I had to learn all that stuff, and it has been nearly 20 years since I took many of those classes. Except for the database design, which I use regularly, I've forgotten it all. Which is really frustrating, because I put a lot of time, effort and money into learning that stuff.

The other day one of our network guys asked me what a Red-Black Tree is. I couldn't explain it. I got an A in my algorithms and data structures class, but I haven't used it so I forgot it.

I only use NordVPN to get around GeoIP blocks on a couple of streaming apps. So I'm not too worried about my data being compromised, but I don't like the way they handled this. Think I'll start looking for another provider?

Looks like you can side load OpenVPN onto a FireTV. Maybe I'll go the roll my own this time.

My current job had a coding challenge and I felt they handled it pretty well.

It was done one site as part of the interview process. It was related to the work I'd be doing, however it wasn't super complicated. They expected that you'd be able to finish it in about 30 minutes, but you had as much time as you needed. I finished it in about 20 minutes. Since it was over lunch time, they bought me lunch. I figure lunch for 20 minutes of work was a fair reimbursement.

My AmEx does that too. I really like that feature.