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.
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.
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.
If you’re hearing nothing back from any job applications at all, there might be a red flag on your resume you’re not aware of that’s preventing you from getting past the initial screeners. It could be as simple as the way you phrased something that’s not even necessarily a negative thing. You should have someone review your resume and look into sprucing it up. Happy to help if you’d like, DM me your resume and I can give it a look over and see if I see anything that stands out and might be preventing you from getting to the next step.
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.
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.
Something I do when I’m depressed is discount the value of my own accomplishments. When I’m not in those moments, I know that I should be kinder to myself by being proud of what gets accomplished in spite of the depression, but when those times come around again it’s incredibly difficult to follow that advice. I’m really happy that you’re making such strides on the new meds, and hope that you find the space to be happy and proud of that accomplishment. Other people’s milestones don’t detract from the progress you’re making 💕
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.
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.
Congrats on your new setup! A UPS is never a bad idea.
As for the auto power-on, check the BIOS settings. Most have an option that says somehing along the lines of “computer power state after plugging it in” and you can usually set it to on, off or whatever it was before power loss.
Good idea. I did check the BIOS and that setting was already enabled. So I unplugged the UPS from the wall to simulate and test. Unfortunately, the server didn’t boot automatically after I plugged the UPS back into the wall. And I remembered that in the past, when the power went out due to storms or something, the server did automatically boot on resumption of power.
I think I know what’s going on.
With the server and a couple small networking devices on the UPS, I get about 16-17min of battery power. After a few minutes on battery power only, the UPS sends the commands to ESXI to start shutting down VMs and then eventually shuts down the server completely. That takes about 10min. That means there’s still battery power remaining, and now with the server off, the largest load on the UPS, the remaining battery time increases to like 40min since the total load on the UPS is now much smaller. However, there’s still technically power being served to the server; there’s even a small light on the back of the server that stayed on the whole time.
Plugging the UPS back in the wall didn’t do anything, which I kinda expected. It’s not going to “send” more power to the server to “wake it up.” I think the only way the server would turn back on automatically in this situation is if the power outage was long enough to completely drain the UPS and turn the UPS off completely. So at least 40min. Then there would be absolutely no power being given to the server. Once wall power is back, the UPS itself turns back on, which sends a little bit of power to the server, which the server BIOS recognizes as “Hey, I was actually without any power at all, but I have power now! Boot!” I’ll test that out next weekend.
So for outages less than 40min, the best bet would be doing a remote desktop into a computer on my network, accessing the web GUI for IDRAC, the server’s out-of-band-management software, and then powering on the server from there. I tried this out and it worked fine.
Not automatic in all cases, but as long as I have a manual means to restart the server remotely, that’ll do.
Sorry for the long post; I wrote this down mostly for myself to work it all out!
Hmm, the way you describe it makes sense.
You’ll probably want to send the UPS a command to kill the power after shutdown is complete. I’m not sure what software you use on the server (if any) to manage the UPS, and not too familiar with them anyway, but a common concept would be: UPS reports power failure with <$minimum runtime remaining, server shuts down gracefully and sends a “kill power” command to the UPS at the end of its shutdown sequence, UPS kills power, power eventually returns, UPS turns back on, server gets power again and reboots.
I know APC PowerChute and whatever software comes with HPE UPSes can do that.
It also means your UPS has some runtime left in case of emergency or if the power returns and quickly fails again.
Ah, I have the seen that option to kill the UPS after shutdown, but I left it disabled because I didn’t understand what it did. And the documentation from Cyberpower is pretty lacking. But I’ll try that enabling that option, testing, then seeing what happens.
Sorry to “necro” this thread, but I just got around to enabling and testing out your UPS kill command suggestion. Everything shutdown as planned, including the UPS itself. Once I restored wall power to the UPS, power started flowing to the server automatically, the BIOS detected it, and the server booted-up on its own! Success! ESXi is back up and VMs are still in the process of auto-starting. This is exactly how I wanted it all to work.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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