was supposed to watch a couple of my favorite (dog) clients last friday, but their owner missed his flight, so i just went and took them out for a walk. still got paid the full day rate. 😎

went to go watch a sheepdog trial on saturday morning, which was really cool! talked to several people there, including the lady who owns the farm. saw a couple of people smacking their dogs, though (including the owner), so i don't think i'll be doing any herding lessons there.

saturday evening we had our annual beer party (everybody brings a 6-pack of something to drink, and we throw them all together in a big bucket of ice). the dogs did really well up until about midnight when they started getting cranky, so i turned in early and let my partner watch the party-goers for the rest of the evening.

sunday was whiffle ball with friends followed by challengers, and oh my gosh, what a movie. absolutely loved the whole thing.

Finally made the switch to Linux. Technically I ran linux fulltime sometime in 2016-2017 so I'm by no means a novice but I've never felt linux on desktop was good enough. Alas, Microsoft has turned Windows into such a struggle that even Linux GUI is tolerable by comparison.

I'm actually very surprised at how tolerable Debian 12 + i3 has been. I only need to figure out my raw photo developing workflow and I'm basically set on everything. The very few games I care about work fine and all the software I needed has alternatives I can deal with.

Still doomed 🙃 Stressing over another talk with my host, who is... kinda difficult, honestly. I can't tell what's available to me (in any context) nor what I'm even supposed to be able to accomplish in any amount of time but I'm supposed to "advocate for myself" even knowing there's someone who needs this room so like... what the fuck am I supposed to do, beg to stay and somecritter who's in the same situation I was gets beaten or shot by their father but I get another week of accomplishing fuck-all because I need six sorts of support I'm never gonna get but what I get is a week at a time and expectations to just get my shit together and get a job without even somewhere to stay while I work?

So I went from hopeless and in danger to hopeless and about to be in danger somewhere else. Worst part is, my host has some of the same major issues that I do, so every time we talk I feel like there's some understanding there, or understanding to be had. She even recognizes it as an accomplishment for me to manage to get out and take the ten-minute bus ride to Burger King. Does not seem to recognize how screwed I am, how much of an impossible ask it is to just dump a pile of "resources" on me and think I'm gonna call them all, etc.

...I said I wasn't gonna wall-of-text you lot <.<; Sorries! Please pretend it's just a little nibble of whine 😓

One of the downsides of staying (mostly) on top of my university work, including the group project, is when it comes to a soft deadline and other people aren't done yet even though I am... that just means more work for me. I narrowly avoided getting assigned a difficult task (moving the project forward into the next stage) by proactively volunteering to take over an easy task that two of my fellow students hadn't finished. Thus, I spent the morning generating trees instead of importing dozens of 3D models at variously disorganised scales into a single scene. Which was honestly a relief because I am so drained and burned out and exhausted.

Couldn't work half the day today, because my internet wasn't working. Took me all morning to (not) find the problem and fix it. I had to reset my network drivers and restart my pc to fix it.

My personal laptop is connected to an ethernet cable. My plex server is connected to that same network via a switch in my office. Both were connected, but had no internet. The weird thing was that my work laptop was all fine, even when I turned off the wifi and connected the ethernet cable.

I even crawled up into the attic to see if no mouse had chewed on the wires or something.

It's been good, objectively, but for some reason I'm not feeling it.

My medication has been amazing for getting me through the workday. For some reason my brain instantaneously converts boredom to anger, plus I tend to fixate uncontrollably on really negative things. I don't think I've freaked out or embarrassed myself at all since starting the medication, though.

I've hit all my gym goals this week, which I haven't done in months, so that should be a good sign for my mental health, too.

But I don't know, I still feel like a sad, lonely person. My friends all have such great relationships with each other even when I have to walk on eggshells around them. I can't make friends offline because I have nothing really interesting to bring to the table.

Plus I'm dreading cutting my hair because everyone is so nice to me now that they think I'm femme. Actually I just had a lot on my plate and stopped cutting my hair and dressing up for a while.

I've gotten permission, so I'm excited to share this news with you, my Beehaw fam, the same way I told my biological fam:

Life, uh, found a way.

Maybe I'm depressed, I don't know. I feel so disconnected when everyone else has a wife and a beautiful family and a passion they're chasing, and my only accomplishment ever was leaving my mom's house.

My new medication has been wonderful, I haven't had any embarrassing meltdowns in a couple of weeks. I hoped my friends would be happy for me, but they all hit real milestones the same week, so it got swept aside pretty fast.

I feel like I'm bouncing back from losing some bad friendships, I feel happier and more hopeful

Way busier than we expected. Lunch for 16 (bachelor party...not the right fit since we are a local family joint) & Catering pickup for 22 before service on Saturday made it a good day before we even got started. Sunday we were wiped and unexpectedly filled it up for lunch.

Today is our Thursday so only 1 more day until our weekend.

Starting off my week with a crown on a molar that decided that chewing wasn’t really an activity it wanted to participate in. Heartened by how my team performed on last Friday when I took a day off, and there were some escalations/failures.

My PT starts in earnest this week so I can start going back to the gym! Nine weeks of being stuck at home was not fun

Most challenging teaching experiences of my still new career. I'm having a lot of anxiety over how students are responding in one class, if I'm getting through to them, and adjusting lesson plans and my lectures to ensure I am. I'm teaching a very difficult subject, with a history of students failing out of it. So after taking it over from the last professor, I've toned it down. It's a "why we budget" class and most of the students are either a) completely accounting illiterate but great at decision making or b) accountants and don't understand why we're talking about theory and decision making. It's a bit of both, across all major sectors, which makes it notoriously challenging for professors and students. Trying my best, but I'm loosing a lot of sleep over this class.

Am I getting through? Why did only 2 students provide mid-term feedback? 1 positive, 1 not so much? All fair critiques, and fair praise, but where's everyone else? Is anyone actually doing the readings or is my approach (you read, you research a little, then I lecture and summarize what you need to take away), not working here?

Struggles, and I also decided no scotch this week which was my "I am home now, not in the classroom" mental break from the day.

Getting a new mechanical keyboard next week. Other than that, it's been average.

Miserable, been distracting myself with homelab and Runescape.

In the case of the former, I bought two separate PCIe conversion bridges so I could plug a GPU into a PCIe x8 slot. The first didn't line up with the bracket properly (this was my fault for thinking I could somehow magically fit a card into a slot after raising it a centimeter or so). The second was intended to raise the card to a low-profile height. The card I bought required the entire shroud to be removed to install the low-profile bracket. After some cursing, I got it installed, and it didn't work! Finally at my wit's end, I replaced my server's motherboard with a different one that has actual PCIe x16 slots. Still, nothing! Banging my head against the wall, I finally realized: unRAID is currently on Linux kernel 6.1. The GPU is an Intel ARC A310, which didn't have support in the kernel until 6.2. I upgraded the kernel using an unofficial repo, and the encoder immediately showed up under /dev/dri. FML.

I'm aimlessly lying in bed most days. Apply to jobs and hear nothing back. Can't remember how long this has been going on.

Just started a two week family visit to Singapore. The twelve hour flight was exhausting and everyone was struggling with the jet lag. My kids fell asleep at the dinner table, which was both adorable to see and sad because they were clearly at their limits.
We just had a 12 hour sleep, so hopefully we can start the second day with renewed energy :)
We’re going to need it, there’s a ton of social obligations to keep. It’s been 7 years since our last visit.

finally getting more time off from work versus the 60-70 hour weeks i was pulling before, so i started participating in a game jam and trying to have a presence on fedi again.

Had a bad reaction to anti-anxiety meds, started blacking out behind the wheel, god only knows how I made it home in one piece yesterday. Guess I'm crossing citalopram off the list.

My week's been going well! On the downside my therapist who I really loved left the practice (she took a job helping sexual assault victims in the Marines, so good for her, that's some important work), and I've been put on a wait-list. But I feel like I'm in a place right now where, although I don't think it would be good for me to stop therapy long-term, I can maintain alright while I'm waiting, and that's pretty cool. Also the choir I sing with had a couple of super successful performances this weekend, and it felt really great to be part of that.

I’ve been running a dnd campaign for my wife’s cousins for the past year. I took a few months due to work getting hectic. But now that things have slowed down I’m excited to get back to GMing again. We have our session zero this Friday. The players ages range from mid teens to mid 20s. And I’m trying to prevent the party from becoming a mob of murder hobos again.

Doing good so far. Took today off because work is getting to be too hectic, but so far so good.

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.

This week is going well so far. Bought a new camera so I've been really excited to try it out. I mostly take pictures of planes, and I'm trying to experiment more with shutter speeds and aperture and yadda. I live directly under a landing pattern for the local airport, so it's not hard for me to time a plane landing and get a decent shot.

Here's a Delta 717 coming in:

As a bonus, not only am I rediscovering my adolescent love for photography, I'm getting outside more. I've actually met some of my neighbors doing this. And I think the anticipatory aspect of waiting for a plane to come in gives me something to look forward to as well, so that's pretty cool.

Final week on the final group project of the academic year. Deadline is Monday. And I am fucking pissed off.

• Team leader and sub-team leader for the production phase of the project are incapable of providing leadership, because the former is lovely but timid, and the other is just never fucking there. With just days to go and important decisions and instructions just not happening, I have simply taken over and started telling everyone what to do. But this now means that on top of my work, everyone is now coming to me with questions, including the team leader and sub-team leaders.

• The useless, obstructive, narcissistic, lazy, arrogant piece of utter shite who I had to work with on the last project. Well, it transpires he has basically done absolutely fucking nothing on this project since January, apart from 3D modelling half of a rock (someone else finished the rock) and modelling 80% of one character (it's shit and the texture job is half-arsed). But this week he actually had to do something, which was building one set and rigging one character. I got a phone call at 8:30am this morning from the person who had to animate that one scene, and... yeah, surprise surprise, it's only half done. Lighting, cameras, and rigging are not done. I hope the guy who has to clean up this mess calms down by Monday, otherwise there's going to be a murder.

• After spending all day rendering shots, after making a judgement call on the resolution because it wasn't included in the assignment brief (so I guessed based on the previous project) and we were unable to get a response from the teacher when we contacted to ask. Nope, that's the wrong resolution. So everything that was rendered yesterday needs to be rendered again in a different resolution and format. Which takes twice as long. Shots that took 2.5 years yesterday require 5.5 hours today. So while I set up the remaining shots today, I've got both my laptop and my spouse's laptop re-rendering all of yesterday's work. My desk is a chaotic collection of three computers, six screens, three keyboards, two mice, and a specialist 3D mouse.

Yeah, I am extremely fucking pissed off and if my teammate opts for murder I might just join him, because right now an awful lot of people are looking incredibly stabbable. I hate group projects.

I switched back to a very early morning workout routine this week, so I am TIRED.

BUT, I'm about to DM a party for some D&D, so Friday night's looking lit.