trdaisuke

So it's been a few months' hiatus since I've posted, let's take stock of what's been going on:

I am another year older and another year closer to no longer being able to call myself 30-something.

Work got really busy with a big event in September and then the sudden departure of the head of our office so work has been a bigger lift than usual. Many days coming home and taking a nap right after work.

FFXIV raid is progressing, we've cleared P5S-P7S and phase 1 of P8S, working on High Concept prog.

Work on my gaming backlog is progressing, although there's new urgency to play anything I want to play from years of Stadia Pro due to the planned January shutdown.

I got a 4K gaming monitor and something seems to be throttling since my already poorly-ventilated case now has more heat to try to get rid of.

I didn't get the job that I wanted but ultimately I don't think it would have been a good fit after my second round interview.

To-Do:

Might try to recase gaming PC over the holidays.

Start posting on Gopher again.

Create a better solution for crossposting Gopher to WWW since Known is still being fussy and refusing to post certain gopher posts for no readily apparent reason.

Upgrade home server to Ubuntu 22.04 or rebuild it on another base (been liking Fedora for desktop lately)

Purge things that are no longer needed from the apartment, it's getting out of control.

Various boring work things.

Consider applying to jobs outside higher ed, since the higher ed landscape seems to be continuing its spiral down the drain.

I created a #gopher hole at gopher://gopher.club:70/1/users/trdaisuke/

I'll be crossposting my posts (on a ~1 week delay) here going forward.

This post originally hit the smolweb on 13 July 22 at gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/trdaisuke/2022-07-13.txt

Title: I underestimated how long 500 words actually is...
Date: 2022-07-13

----

Phew, it took way longer than I anticipated, but I completed the written
interview for the position I applied for! Time for a beer or two XD

I think the reason it took way longer than I anticipated was because I
started by being as concise as possible. There was a word limit, so
I decided to try to try to err on the size of nice, limited prose for
each of the five questions.

But then, after answering all five of the questions they asked, I finally
checked my answers against the word limit, and damn, my nice, concise
answers were only about 150 words each and the word limit was 500!!!

In a panic, I had to spend another hour and a half expanding on all my
nice concise answers. I had thought they were great, but like... what
if they look at these small word counts and think I didn't spend enough
time on them??! What if all the other candidates used all 500 words?? :o

I didn't end up using all 500 words for any of them... but at least I
got them up to a more respectable (maybe?) 350-400 words each. I don't
honestly know if all the additional information I provided will actually
help. I personally value brevity and would rather read a concise 150
words than a boring 400 words... so here's hoping whoever is evaluating
me doesn't find them boring!

Bottom line, I guess: 500 words is longer than I thought! This post, for
instance, is only 287 words.

I sincerely apologize for the abuse of punctuation in this post. I have
had a beer and a half since I started :guilty face:

I created a #gopher hole at gopher://gopher.club:70/1/users/trdaisuke/

I'll be crossposting my posts here going forward.

This post originally hit the smolweb on 11 July 22 at gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/trdaisuke/2022-07-11.txt

I've been posting about one post a day from my gopher log, but now that I'm getting close to caught up, I think I'm going to make an intentional decision to stay about a week behind on my gopher posts. This is a manual process, however, so don't be suprised if I start falling behind. Check out the actual gopher phlog if you want everything up-to-date!

.... well, as it turns out, Known doesn't seem to want to post this for some reason. (Too long? Too long for a preformatted block? Some other reason?) So you can read it here instead: http://trdaisuke.sdf.org/2022-07-11.txt

I created a #gopher hole at gopher://gopher.club:70/1/users/trdaisuke/

I'll be crossposting my posts here going forward.

This post originally hit the smolweb on 07 July 22 at gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/trdaisuke/2022-07-07.txt

Checking up on the phlogs today, I read nm03's update about "Summer Fatigue"
or "natsubate" [1], and while I wasn't previously familiar with the Japanese
term, I am definitely feeling that summer fatigue this year.

I've heard people talk about "Seasonal Affective Disorder" as primarily
occurring during the winter, but I've always had a harder time dealing with
the summer heat and long days than the cold and dark of winter. The past
several weeks I have gotten significantly less sleep than I'd like - some
nights as little as 4 hours or so - and it's having a significant affect on
my overall mood. I feel myself being crankier, less cooperative, and
confrontational at times.

I should try cranking up the A/C more, but I hate the noise and the over-use
of electricity, pollution, etc. I read today an article about the idea of
"supercooling" your home in the evening to "chill your home right down to
the 'bones' of the building" [2] but I'm not sure that exactly works in an
apartment where the frame, walls, etc are connected directly from my
apartment to the ones above and below me. I also am not on the variable rate
by hour plan with my power company - and their bill calculator says I would
have paid over $200 more based on my last 12 months on a variable rate plan.
Still, I might try decreasing the night temperature because, if nothing
else, I might sleep better.

I also need to get back into the habit of making some nice mugicha - I
stopped that when we had our last run of cooler temperatures. It really
helps me cool off quickly, although I'm not sure if that's anything
intrinsic to the mugicha or just a natural effect of drinking a bunch of
cool liquid that's been in the refrigerator for two hours lol. Either way,
I find it refreshing and am actually going to wrap this post up here so I
can go put a litre of mugicha in the fridge to brew.

Tanabata wishes,

trdaisuke

[1] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/nm03/2022/JUL2022/entry_6
[2] https://www.howtogeek.com/814826/cut-your-summer-electric-bill-by-supercooling-your-home/

I created a #gopher hole at gopher://gopher.club:70/1/users/trdaisuke/

I'll be crossposting my posts here going forward.

This post originally hit the smolweb on 25 June 22 at gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/trdaisuke/2022-06-25.txt

There was a good thread on bboard (in the UNIX board) this week about favorite
Desktop Environments on Unix-flavored machines, and I thought I'd cross-post
and expand on my thoughts here.

My primary computer is currently running GNOME with some customizations. I know
everyone likes to hate on GNOME, but I actually find it pretty good now. At least,
up to date GNOME. I feel like a lot of the frustrations with GNOME on, say, Ubuntu
is due to the outdated packages. I've migrated most of my Linux desktop usage to
Fedora and find that I rarely have the errors and bugs that I constantly had on
Ubuntu.

Besides, I'm trying out Silverblue (and really enjoying it honestly), and GNOME
is kind of required for Silverblue. (I know Kinoite exists now, but I haven't
had great experiences with KDE, so I thought I'd start with the normal Silverblue.)

I had kind of an interesting start with DEs- my first Linux distro was Ubuntu
Natty Narwhal. Unity was new and raw and bleeding and terrible. (So almost
everything has seemed great to me after living with Unity for years lmao.)

After a few years on vanilla Ubuntu, I migrated to Lubuntu due to the age of my
laptop at the time. I ended up getting pretty involved with the Lubuntu
distribution as a result. This was all pre-LxQt (which is abominable in my raw
opinion). But because of my involvement with the distro I've always had a soft
spot for LXDE and still use it on occasion.

Since then, I've bounced around a few things and eventually found the best fit
for me with GNOME, or at least, GNOME with some personalization, and fresh and
updated as possible as long as the hardware can handle it.

I do have one laptop that definitely can't handle it. It's currently on MATE
but I don't know that I'm really a fan of MATE. I don't use that laptop for
serious productivity (it's too small for most things - I mostly carry it because
it's so small but can still fire up a nice shell to home when I'm travelling.)

I also have played with XFCE and may want to give it a shot for real at some
point.

The thread on bboard did make me want to try some of the lighter-power
desktop managers that were mentioned in the thread. I've seen cool demos of
dwm, and I've known other people who swore by i3. I don't know much about
fluxbox, which was mentioned by several people - so maybe I will also add
that to my list to check out when I can.

But for now, I think I'm sticking with GNOME at least on this main computer
while I give Silverblue a good spin.

I created a #gopher hole at gopher://gopher.club:70/1/users/trdaisuke/

I'll be crossposting my posts here going forward.

This post originally hit the smolweb on 11 June 22 at gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/trdaisuke/Another.txt

Well it's maybe time for another post, but I don't know what to write 
about.

Is there a thing I can do on gopher to automatically put my thoughts into 
words? I know this is a feature lacking on the web but I have heard good 
things about gopher, so I was hoping maybe it had this feature.

These lines are pretty long, huh. I wonder if gopher does word wrapping 
or if I'll have to come back and edit this later.

Isn't this a bit funny? How many times do I need to try to start writing 
while still not really writing much of anything?

I don't really have an answer to that, but as Dr. House said, you always 
look smarter asking the questions rather than dumbly not answering 
questions.

I'll come up with some more questions to not answer for my next post. 
Please look forward to it.