One year ago, I quit my job in order to "make life easier". And by that I mean work+home in the same city. I went from 40 minutes commute - to 3 minutes. I had a blast the first week.

Then I realized that it was actually a mistake. I did not like working with "that kind of systems" and "that kind of tasks". It was tedious, stupid, and I was angry every, single day because the previous ones had built a system on 10-15 year old hardware because "it is cheaper".

That continued for a year. I discovered new stupid "solutions" every week that was potentially dangerous for the company. It built up a huge pile of shit and I started to feel that my mental health was disappearing, fast.

And equipment such as servers, switches, routers, storage started to fail because of age. Despite my warnings from day 0 to the CEO who only kinda laughed it off and said "you can to solve that", but I never got the approval to actually buy the equipment that was needed. Because "the company did'nt have the money for it". Somehow, the company had the money to buy expensive cars for the CEO - I can't really figure out that equation.

So today, one VERY old UPS died at our office. It caused some powerspike that killed off some switches and a NAS.
"Whatever" I thought, I just have to find the backup of the files and get a new one.

Then I discovered, that the NAS that acted as a iSCSI target for VM's and document storage was backed up using VEEAM on another server - that was configured to backup everything to the same NAS. I just wanted to cry, because I could not take anymore shit.

So I picked up my phone, called my old employer and asked if I could start working for them again. My old boss got insanely happy and gave me a great offer which I immediately accepted.

So tomorrow, is the day that I am going to walk into my current boss and say that I will quit. My last day will be on Christmas day. And I will start my new year with a few weeks off, and then back to the job that I actually loved.

Life is to short to work with something you hate.

I did it: I built up another PC identical to my machine (https://devrant.com/rants/2923002/...) for my SO and installed Linux Mint for her, too. That had been my primary motive for an easy and stable distro in the first place.

Now that didn't come out of the blue. We were discussing the end of Win 7 already two years ago where I brought up my concerns with Win 10 - mainly the forced, lousy updates and the integrated spyware, and that I was considering Linux as way out.

I had expected quite some pushback because she had been exclusively on Windows since the 90s. However, I didn't sell Linux as upgrade. It's just that Win 7 is over, progress under Windows as well, and we're in damage control mode. Went down pretty well.

Fast forward three weeks - remember, first time Linux user and no IT-geek:

- it just works, including web, videos, and music.
- she likes Cinnamon.
- nice desktop themes.
- Redshift is as good as f.lux.
- software installation is just like an app store.
- updates work via an easy tray icon.
- quote: "Linux is great!"
- given this alternative, she doesn't understand why people willingly put up with Win 10.
- no drive letters: already forgotten.
- popcorn for upcoming Win 10 disaster stories.
- why do Windows updates take that long?
- why does Windows need to reboot for every update?
- why does Windows hang in that update boot screen for so long?

I'm impressed that Linux has come so far that it's suitable for end users. Next in line is her father who wants to try Linux, but that will be a story for tomorrow.

Between plague and smoke, spending way too much time indoors. Localised co2 got pretty high in the office my husband and I share and opening the windows is dicey during giant spider season even before the wildfires.

So as a result, I'm starting a little indoor garden in each room. The succulent are going to be hydro, and the prayer and snake plant will get soil so I have some place to dump my coffee grinds other than the rose garden. In the next month or so we also want to set up some living moss panels to help control the nitrogen balance.

And of course, obligatory rpi sensor suite and irrigation is inbound as well. That'll be a shared project. 😸

My sister is the one who got all the support, despite her now working as a cleaning lady, having 2 kids of her own, having already married and divorced, having been in financial trouble several times, oh and she's only 22 years old. She couldn't finish high school and even getting a driver's license wasn't without hoops. Now she's dating someone as old as our mother.

I've been putting my career front and center in everything. I want to make my own business and sell a network-oriented Linux distribution through it. My mother was impressed when her colleague whipped up a basic website for their company. You can imagine the surprise when I told her that that's only one component of my infrastructure. My family and I still aren't on very good terms, but yeah.. going from "don't stare at those "screens" all day long" to "wow, you've actually done something with these screens" (to her all technology is a screen) is at least some progress I guess.

No support whatsoever though, neither in my endeavors in programming, server administration and whatnot (but hey what can I expect) but what annoys me the most is that my sister did get all the help in the world for maintaining her general household. I didn't get any of that, first night when I moved into my apartment I slept on the floor because my bed wasn't completely built yet. Now that all of that is done, I don't consider my mother very welcome in my apartment actually...

Oh well, we've gotten where we are somehow at least. Just reading, reading and reading more manuals. That's all you need really.

To all the leaders out there: Stop doing all shit on your own! Delegate! Have fate in your colleagues!
And fuck all shitty deadlines if no lives are at stake.
Cz yours is for sure!

...or you'll end like me with a heart attack at the age of 43.

Now i'm here at a health-care-hotel (dunno what it's called in english) for 3 weeks relaxing and doing programming w/o being stressed at all. =)

This week Im firing a guy who I hired 5 weeks ago. I cant take it anymore. I setted up a nice environment for him and he keeps taking whole day sometimes two or three to do a 2 hour task. He came from electrical engineering background and never had a software dev job. As a person hes more creative type not logical based type. I dont have nor patience nor resources nor time to teach him basics that be could google but simply doesnt have the mindset to do. Sorry bill gates not everyone can learn how to code, or at least not everyone should.

Advice to other people hiring new hires: test the shit out of them before hiring, dont hire from gut. This guy was giving out a nerd vibe, but the only nerd thing that he has is nerdy puns, other than that as a software dev he know less than I did when I was 12 years old.

Story Time:

When I first started working where I currently am, the manager at the time decided to send us off to a conference about one of the products our institution was purchasing at the time. She also thought that it would be a good way for me, the new guy, to bond with the rest of the staff.

During the presentations we found out that the people surrounding us were not exactly developers because of a couple of things:

1. Some examples were done with php and javascript for adding functionality to said product. The product gave you the opportunity to script on top of it (think of some sort of CMS, but it does not use PHP as its backend language) EVERYONE from the "class" in this particular workshop said they were developers. But at the sight of php in a group of 80 people or so, only about 7 recognized it, including myself and my team.

2. When they showed an example with Javascript, in particular jquery, one of the dudes in the workshop said (with extreme senior level confidence might I add) "yeah I never liked Javascript because you really can't connect it to any database in a website" <--- my face went 0.o and one of the actual developers doing the presentation did a Jim from the Office and looked at some out of screen camera.

3. During a conf talk, one PHD dude showed an example in the template language the CMS used (an obscure Java based template language)in which he was proudly calling out a technique he used to include one snippet of code into another one.....at that time, one of my coworkers squinted his eyes in disbelief, got close to me and said "is this man telling everyone in here that he discovered how to include a file? like, as a new thing?" me: "lol yes", him: "this is a waste of time, do the docs for this thing show how to do it or is he doing some sort of strange maneuver for something the platform does not support?" me: "let me check....nope, it is included, for some reason he made a function that takes the...name of the file he wants to include and passes it over to that call inside of the body....which as per the docs it is the include function...." him: ".....fuck, what a waste of time and money, fuck it lets spend a couple of more minutes here and then go get a drink or something"

That last part was my favorite really, the man speaking was not just any phd holder, but a comp sci phd holder. To this day my dude would walk into my office and say shit like "I DISCOVERED HOW TO INCLUDE A FILE WITH PHP!"

Round up kids.
I have a story to tell. The story of a war I've lost. Many battles were fought and many hours were wasted.
This is the story of wasp in a computer lab.

Today, the weather was good. So your old pal, Nomi, decided to open the windows. And as usual, that's where it all started.
So Nomi sat down and worked for a few hours. Tweaking two different neural nets, adding to its dimensions and concatenating the living shit out of the data they were supposed to process. After, she tried testing and testing and testing. It was early afternoon at this point and she was hungry. She went to close the windows and go for lunch.... When she realized, that she's not alone in the room. A big ass wasp was sitting on one of the curtains.

Now, Nomi doesn't have a good relationship with bugs and flying shit. Wait, no, she doesn't have a good relationship with moving things in general. So she panicked. She begged the wasp to leave. The wasp sat on the curtain and smirked at her. So after a while, she left the windows wide open, turned off the lights, put her hoodie on and went for lunch.

(btw, at this point my hoodie smells of sweat, fried onion, steak, cigarette and shisha. Don't ask. It was a long two weeks)

When she came back, the wasp was nowhere to be seen. So she assumed that the wasp got tired and left. But oh, how wrong she was.

After few hours, she heard something. She assumed it was just a fly. Actually, she hoped it was a fly and not the return of the wasp. But all her hopes were in vein.

She heard a buzz. And all of a sudden, an angry wasp flew in her direction. She dodged the attack and got under the table. But the wasp was not letting this go. Nomi jumped out of the room and left the door open. The wasp hid itself. She waited and waited but no sign of wasp. So she ran back in the room, and opened the window and ran back outside. She waited. The wasp occasionally would fly from one hideout to another. The wasp was making herself comfortable. At one point Nomi got angry and threw a shoe at the wasp, but the wasp caught the shoe and threw it back at her while maniacally laughing at her.

So she gave in. This was enough for the day. She ran back in, closed the window, turned off the computer, took her bag, turned off the light, and closed the door. All in less than 15 seconds. She came outside panicked and distressed, and now she's on her way home hoping that by tomorrow the wasp is gonna be dead.

The wasp and the robots are sitting alone in the lab tonight. I hope when the robots uprising happens, the robots can forgive me for abandoning them powerlessly with a wasp. 😟

So, today for my SO's father who is already over 70 and wants to try Linux. However, he doesn't want Linux on his main PC for now, rather on the old one so that he can take his time to get familiar, which is a reasonable plan.

But holy crap, what a machine! Intel Core2 Duo 4400, 2 GB DDR2(!) RAM, 250 GB IDE(!) HDD, DVD RW drive. Graphics, sound and LAN integrated on the mobo chipset. It's half a miracle that it doesn't run on steam. The machine had been delivered with Vista and has always been painfully slow.

It doesn't even support booting from USB, but I had prepared a DVD just in case. Surprise: it booted from DVD without issues and with full HW support!

Partitioned and installed, deleted Vista in the process (felt good). I went with the full blown Mint 20 Cinnamon edition because XFCE isn't as beautiful. Also, having XFCE now and then Cinnamon looking different on the other PC would be confusing.

Installation took some time, but worked. Cinnamon's RAM usage is at 750 MB idle, and at 1.1 GB with Firefox started. Once the PC is booted, it runs pretty OK with reduced swappiness and noatime on all file systems, plus unnecessary startup applications disabled. Updates took long, but ran through successfully. Installed LibreOffice and some small games, Firefox got uBlock Origin, Youtube worked OOTB.

That PC somehow had escaped disposal several times - and now has a proper OS for the first time in its miserable existence. It runs so much better than it ever has. Just wow, a "big" Linux desktop from 2020 blows a contemporary Vista out of the water on such an old machine!

I hate, HATE MYSELF!! I am an awful developer. I am an awful person.
I am trying so hard. To be a better person. To be a better developer. But, as a person I am again finding it difficult to empathize. At work, I really want to explore MERN stack but that I have to do it out of working hours. And damn! work is too much, I don't get time.
I need to work on a new project, for 2 months the discussions with MILLION TEAMS ARE GOING ON!!! NOTHING!! NOBODY HAS ANY IDEA!! THEY MIGHT FIRE ME!! I AM STRESSED!!
IT'S 1AM HERE AND I AM WRITING UNIT TESTS!! I want to cry. I want a partner maybe who can support me or maybe it's my mood swings.

First rant. 3 years in my first job as a developer. It's been great. I've learned a ton. But the past 6 months have been awful. Our client is forcing us to remote into a cloud pc, which we then use to remote into Ubuntu. All development must be done this way. Everything is extremely slow. To the point that you can type faster than the screen can update. I want to jump out of the window. I'd basically have to move to get a new job, which Im not really into. Just bought a house a year ago, family is here, blah blah. Just hoping if I ride it out, client will wise up and let us use our own computer again.

So Windows XP source allegedly got leaked... And a bunch of other MS's OS (and other) files

https://limetorrents.info/Microsoft...

```
ms_dos_3_30_oem_adaptation_kit_source_code.7z - 591.99 KB
ms_dos_6_0_source_code.7z - 10.7 MB
nt5src.7z - 2.37 GB
torrent description.txt - 6.63 KB
windows_10_shared_source_kit.7z - 74.76 MB
windows_2000_source_code.7z - 122.35 MB
windows_ce_3_platform_builder_source_code.7z - 638.69 KB
windows_ce_4_2_081231.7z - 3.44 MB
windows_ce_5_121231.7z - 4.92 MB
windows_embedded_7_2014M12.7z - 12.9 MB
windows_embedded_ce_6_r3_170331.7z - 8.11 MB
windows_embedded_compact_2013_2015M09.7z - 93.17 MB
windows_nt_3_5_source_code.7z - 101.76 MB
windows_nt_4_source_code.7z - 106.22 MB
windows_source_bg.png - 134.83 KB
windows_source_bg.svg - 55.03 KB
```

I'm astonished again. Linux isn't designed as GUI OS - where Windows has dynamic thread priorities for freshly woken up threads as to increase GUI snappiness.

Now, my CPU has four physical and eight logical cores for SMT. I'm running eight worker threads of some parallel testing stuff, and I'm glad that I chose the AMD 3400G over the 3200G. The CPU load is 100%. On top of that, MP3 audio, the browser, and I'm dd'ing an external USB3 HDD.

Holy shit, the browser is just as smooth as if the CPU were idle. No perceivable lag. I hadn't expected desktop Linux to be that great.

I'm also surprised that the CPU temperature doesn't exceed 44°C despite full load at 21°C ambient, and the cooling is inaudible. Sure, my cooler is massively over-dimensioned to achieve exactly that, but it's still amazing.

It's what I would have wanted ten years ago and only could approach somewhat, but now the tech is actually there.

What a day!!!

We all raised a concern to our management that we are spending more time on calls and that is affecting our productivity.

My manager comes up with a nice idea of No Call Fridays. Which means we avoid all calls and focus on work.

A call free day. A FUCKING CALL FREE DAY AFTER AGES. Damnnnnn!!! I felt so relaxed and disconnected.

Though I didn't have any deliverables, but if I had, I could have gotten shit done. It truly worked.

So since I had nothing to work on, I played music all day and spent a day without job hunt activity.

Nice and sunny day, calm environment, music playing, and I picked a side project to work on. I re-did the design for my portfolio website (which was pending).

Felt so good. It felt I already am into weekend and then I realised I have 2 more days to enjoy.

Wow!! With such a culture, I would be more productive and wouldn't even need burnout breaks.

Okay so what's next?

Another side project of mine which is about curation of some kind of content. I am active in some professional community and little known for my Monkey acts and the curation side project.

I am getting all kinds of emails, connection requests and messages on LinkedIn from people appreciating my work, seeking help, or wanting to associate themselves with my gig someway (community collab).

The said project is being sent to random people on random platforms and that means people know me. I don't even know what's happening.

For the records, the only identifiable place is LinkedIn and anonymous everywhere else (even in career related communities which directly impacts my career).

While this is a good sign for career progress, I am more paranoid than ever.

So now I have decided to cut down internet presence and go full anonymous mode.

(Will disable LinkedIn once my job search is settled).

Patching host on computer and mobile, and uBlock Origin on browsers.

And more importantly, masking the identity and linking to simple anonymous email as a form of communication.

I'd appreciate any more ideas you have to live a more private life on internet where I continue building Products for fun and learning.

And in between all this, @scout wants a treat because she thinks I am famous. Ugh.. whatever.. 🙄

Image context: A friend gets this message from a random number asking about my work. Lol.

I remember when an aunt met with me and I advised her to get a PC for her son.

he is just 7 years but he always wants to visit me everyday just to use my PC. even when I started using linux he still managed to find his way around. really smart for someone who didn't have a PC. I even found some Google search history of him Google weird instructions and errors and whatnot. since I wouldn't always be around since i was always travelling.

I put the PC together with the huge budget she gave me. it was waaaaay better than mine with all that rgb shit. I loaded it up with all that programming, softwares, ebooks and videos and games I could find. few weeks later he stopped calling me(usually he'd call me to know if I was at home), i felt lonely for a while before i moved out and i felt like i did the right thing. I felt like jesus, lol

at least if I dont get to become a pro at coding I know I did everything and helped him start early

about 18 years of "oh, you made this? that's nice, but don't you want to do/learn something you'll actually get paid for instead?" as a reaction to any game prototype i made and showed them. until i got my first programming job. after that, silence and pretending the previous 18 years never happened (except the since forever running "joke" of "oh, you're not going to finish it anyway").

also, the one time i begged my (dtp/graphic artist) mom to draw me some backgrounds for my game, because at least one time in my life i wanted to not have to work on a thing completely alone, it took about three months of begging and convincing, upon which she finally said "ok, i'll try", and after another month, and one unfinished image that i estimate took about an hour to make, she told me "sorry, i don't think i can make what you need".

also some years of having "maximum 2 hours of computer time per day, unless it's the weekend" rule.

I have a new boss who was hired today. Well, I guess he's supposed to be a 2nd in command to my current supervisor, but I still have to report to him too I guess.

This dude is a high-sodium seasoned dev, and the kind who thinks anyone who's been in the industry less than 15 years should be at best a test engineer or thrown into the 7th ring of Customer Support.

Ugh. I'm now out of gin, which was my backup to my scotch. And this prick expects me to have a PR ready for him to review on a whole new application I've been working on for the last 2 weeks by midday tomorrow. And today was his first day.

I'm in college now, and my mom sometimes helps me when I get stuck finding a bug in my code. She has a degree in CS, even though she barely used it, so she understands the basics. It's like a rubber duck, but better, because she can ask me questions, and answering them often leads me to the answers. She also listens to me go on and on about random topics I'm learning, even though she isn't interested... basically, she's great!

It's my end of probation and I just got demoted, from originally "Senior dev" to "dev".

My manager found it a bit difficult to tell me but funny enough, I am completely fine with it apart from the little dent on my pay check. Let me talk about the bad first: money. I believe I have been on the lower end of the market pay range anyways so this step-back gives me about 5% cut, which is acceptable and fair enough.

And the good? Quite a bit. When I got this job offer 6 months ago, it was when everything literally went to shit. I was upset with a somehow not so smart but stubborn tech lead and I desperately wanted to quit. Then I got the offer, which even after 2 interviews I still didn't recall it was a job ads for "technical lead". The manager thought I was not there yet but wanted to keep me as a senior dev. Then, this pandemic almost took away this job. My manager brought my case to the CEO and convinced him to keep me, by saying a lot of good things about me (which I think might not be true for the tech side...)

Throughout the whole 6 months I have been working remotely from home. WFH is not new to me, just this time it's very challenging as I was starting a new job. I have been struggling to keep my pace. All people in the team are nice. However if I don't reach out, no one would notice I need help. And with zero knowledge for this job, I got stuck with "I don't know what I don't know". This ranges from company culture, practice, new tech.. everything. So, that's how this 6 months feels long, but also short.

In our review meeting I think my manager finally realise this. Otherwise he would have gone for the "terminate employment" option. Taking away the "senior" title also takes away the expectation of "I should know XYZ", which I don't. I told him I am kinda happy with it because this sets me up for a more comfortable position to catch my breathe. He told me he noticed my improvement along the way. I told him yes I have been putting in efforts but just given the situation it's not as quick as anyone would expect. We're on the same page now.

So compared to my previous job, I got paid less. But in return, I get many more opportunities to expose myself to new tech. I get a good team who are respectful and open-minded. This is exactly what I was looking for and the drive for me to quit my previous job.

Not to mention I got a reality check. This is also an indicator for me starting to become an imposter, which is the thing I despise most in the industry. I don't want people to value me for how many years I have got in my career. I want to prove myself by what I am capable of. If I'm not there, I should and will get there.

And the last thing which I'm not very keen but it's 100% worth mentioning, is that my manager said I should aim for taking the "senior" role back. He said the salary raise is waiting when I get there. But... Let me just take my time.

SCREWED OVER GOOGLE WITH MICROSOFT!!!! YES!!!

So as I'm deaf, I've always had a problem with captions or lack of them.

I thought Live Captions would fix it but it's only supported on selected devices and not enabled for calls and conferences like Zoom, WhatsApp.

I tried hooking up my sound card with an audio capble to my phone which has LC and also Live Transcribe... but somehow wouldn't pick up the audio.

Then today I was like wait... I could just install a Pixel emulator... excepy seems Google thought of that...

(I installed VB Cable virtual sound card and routed sound out to mic in).

Well first apparently, the emulator does not actually identify as Pixel... it identifies as an Emulator that sorta looks like Pixel...

Which means no LC...

I installed LT and also a sound meter which confirmed it was getting the audio but no transcription...

Though I tried GBoard and it sorta worked..
But I would like continuous transcription... and so I open the app store and try all the apps until I hit MSFT Translate...

Which has a convo mode which seems pretty much designed to screw Google over lol. Just need to start a Convo with myself...