I have a job interview tomorrow for a position as a data analyst! I’m kind of excited about this as it seems like a good fit for me. The primary tech is Postgre SQL, SQL, Tableau and Python all of which I know well so the learning curve is sort of flattened with those. Microsoft Office which I know like the back of my hand and a handful of other accounting and time tracking software which I’m sure I can master in short order.

The only issue is that they appear to use Apple hardware for workstations… They’re based out of CA so I guess that’s not out of the ordinary but I’m not sure how well Apple works with the data wrangling that I’m used to doing. But I can learn:)

I had a really spirited debate with myself on whether or not I should get a new laptop. My current one is a Dell that’s 5 years old and the keyboard is starting to go. Now that should have been about $50 or so but I got to thinking that it’s time for a new one. I know I’m between jobs but Sarondy LLC had about $3500 in an account and I decided to run with it. Picked up an Asus FA707XV-MS94 from Microcenter in Dallas along with a 32GB RAM upgrade.

• AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS w/ Radeon 780M Graphics 4.00 GHz
• 16.0 GB (15.2 GB usable)
• 1TB WD PC SN560 SDDPNQE-1T00-1002

So far it’s a screaming laptop and I’m happy with it. Doesn’t seem to have an access port to install the memory upgrade but I’m still digging into it. This laptop should last me through the rest of the decade hopefully.

So a couple of days ago, we had an issue with the NAS. It was beeping and complaining that it had a power issue and that the data needed to be scrubbed. I got that fixed and up and running again but then today, it crashed, and when it came back up, 3 of the 4 drives had error conditions and it was telling me to backup everything and click here to fix. Grrr. So I did a quick backup of the pictures and while it was doing that you could hear the sickening spin-down of the drives. With only the photos backed up, I shut it down and was going to reboot.

Fortunately, because I had a power supply crash before, I had an extra power supply at the ready. This is needed because you cannot get a Synology power supply locally. Long story short, when the new power supply was put it, the drives were reinitialized without issue and then I ran the data scrubbing operation (~16 hours) and now all is good. I need to come up with a backup strategy for the NAS.

I took some courses (well one anyways) on WordPress and I’m getting the hang of some of it. To that end, I’m going to be making some changes to the site shortly that will impact navigation, hopefully for the better.

So domain registration is just part of life. It’s right up there with death and taxes, well that may be a little exaggerated for standard folk but let’s face it, your domain is an identity. I’m asberry.org the same way I’m Aron Asberry. I have to get my license renewed every so often and it’s the same way with the domains.

In the dark ages companies like GoDaddy preyed upon both novice and experts alike. $2.99 domain registrations opened the door for up-sales and charges up the wazoo. Then Google brought it’s ‘do no evil’ to domain registration with simple yearly pricing, the centralized, intuitive dashboard, and auto privacy as well as included SSH and all was good.

That is until it wasn’t, large companies like Google can’t not be evil forever, just not in their nature. So they sold off the domain registrar bushiness with 10 million domains to Squarespace and clouds began to form and it got dark. SqSp will honor the $12 for a year so the first renewal is at the old price, but then what? I don’t trust SqSp any further than I can throw them.

A ray of hope showed up on my Facebook feel when WordPress.com says they’ll transfer and renew for a year at no charge if you sign up with them. Well why not, I already have an account with WordPress.com and they hook you up with a free year, why not?

So I transferred 7 domains leaving my .us domain behind because it’s not supported. The process was fairly simple and I’m still checking out the DNS and validating that everything is working but so far so good. Not super happy about the interface, not nearly as clean as Google but it does what you need to. There seem to be a lot more add ons like email address and such but nothing too annoying. So far I’m happy but domain registration isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon and we’ll find out if WordPress is in it for the long run. Here’s hoping!!!

My development rig lost 16GB of ram, it’s so super rare for RAM to go bad but after moving all the 8 DIMMS around, I figured out which pair is causing the issue. So it’s time to replace a couple of DIMMs to get back to 64GB and while I’m at it, let’s go ahead and put in a TPM chip so we’re ready for Windows 11 and (while the patient is open) let’s upgrade the hard drive to a 2TB Samsung PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD

We live in an amazing time that these just show up the next day. I’ve installed the RAM and I found out they now apparently have LEDs on the memory, I have no idea why but at least they modules are the same as the others. More unneeded lights sigh…

Digging out the Windows 10 Pro installation media and will start clean over the weekend so when Monday comes there will be a bunch of re-installations but should be screaming fast.

I won’t go too deep into what it is/was but if you know it, you’ll know what a loss we’ve incurred. Here was the final sign off from them:

Hello guys,
We would like to inform you that we have decided to shut down our site.
The past 2 years have been very difficult for us – some of the people in our team died due to covid complications,
others still suffer the side effects of it – not being able to work at all.
Some are also fighting the war in Europe – ON BOTH SIDES.
Also, the power price increase in data centers in Europe hit us pretty hard.
Inflation makes our daily expenses impossible to bare.
Therefore we can no longer run this site without massive expenses that we can no longer cover out of pocket.
After an unanimous vote we’ve decided that we can no longer do it.
We are sorry 🙁
Bye

Thank you guys for your time and effort and I wish you all the best!!!

Super happy to say that the issue I was having with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux server storage has been fixed and there’s nothing that should be stopping me from proceeding with the development tasks on that box.
I have to admit I really enjoy running that server, I know I’m the only one that uses it but having it running makes me feel that I’m a real computer geek:)

So I will be blogging more and hopefully getting some updates done on the photo site. More soon!!!

So when I reformatted the server to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, it was basically a fresh start as I got rid of the SAS drives in favor of SATA, there’s a rant someplace on my tech blog about it. Long story short I accepted all the defaults and got on with the business of getting everything that had been set up on Fedora ported over to RHEL. One thing I noticed was mount point / had 75GB while /home had 12TB. Odd but surely there would be a way to shrink home and add it to the root, I’ll contend with it later.

So now it’s later because I have round about 6GB left on the root and now we find XFS filesystems don’t have shrink capabilities… Nice!!! It appears that it wasn’t thought of because hey, storage is cheap, buy and attach new drives and expand the LVM2 VG.

If you have a burning desire to know how this turns out visit the tech blog for the blow-by-blow of this battle.

So the whole YouTube, Reels, and TicToc phenomenon is kind of lost on me. I can barely remember to take photos when I should let alone put up a video. So fast forward to a week ago, Sandy has figured out how to download video clips of the CCTV and stitch them together to make relatively entertaining videos. So I showed her how to use her asberry.org email (hosted by Google) YouTube channel and voila, we now have videos I can share:

Here is the channel.