2020-11-18 Mandatory Update

As much as I’m a fan of the /now movement, adding updates always feels a bit strange because I’m rewriting. As a principle, I feel like restating things is a waste of time, but having children almost guarantees the need for repetition, so I guess I’m fighting a losing battle.

I’m not going to lie, I’m disappointed in myself. I’ve had several things happening at once, and I overestimated my abilities:

  1. I’ve migrated from Windows to Linux, mostly. This takes work, since almost everything is possible in Linux versus Windows (and a lot that is more possible in Windows, for free no less), but it requires finding lots of alternative programs, back-end supporting programming/drivers, and so on.
  2. Since I migrated from Linux, my dependence on OneDrive had to go. In lieu of that, I’ve now migrated to MEGAsync. This isn’t that bad, but my home network is a relatively weak mobile hotspot connection with a grandfathered-in 4G plan, so 755 GB took 2 weeks to move over, in painfully slow installments.
  3. I spent extra time on all of this hemming/hawing because of what I could do in the future. Why pay money for a cloud storage solution when you can save it in the long-term by hosting it yourself? I was getting exasperated about what I could know and didn’t right now (TL;DR it’s not hard, but takes time to learn all the stuff and has a noticeably steep startup cost).
  4. My new job affords plenty of free time alone (progress bars on the night shift, so it kinda defines “solo”), but has been having logistical issues with my transition into the role, mostly because I’m a contractor-under-a-third-party-under-Microsoft, so I’m the absolute last to know about pretty much anything I might need to know.
  5. I was given my work computer, but the management decided to consult their seashells and needed every laptop they had for server updates. So, I can’t easily synchronize and verify everything, especially since flash drives aren’t permitted in the colocation (and with good reason, but it still doesn’t explain why they permit technicians to use phones or laptops in there).
  6. The announcement about Biden’s president-elect-icity back on the 7th shook mee up a bit. I’ve recovered, but it’s been a drain on my energy as I learn a new level of not-caring-what-happens-around-me-that-I-can’t-control as new things happen around me that I can’t control.

Thus, I’ve failed quite a bit at building out my toolbox and have completely neglected TechSplained for a month.

Well, no use crying over spilled diamonds. Life is short, and complaining about it takes away additional time left that you were complaining about having wasted. Regrets are for people who can’t accept that a past-tense decision created undesirable consequences. Since reality doesn’t care about my feelings, I’m getting revenge by not caring about reality.

My ambition is to clean up the large-scale mess I’ve copy-pasted, then keep building. Good times, ho!