Because my work is remote, whether I’m in the office or remoting in via VPN, it’s still the same. I just don’t have to spend an hour in traffic each way. If anything, things have been busier.

Yang2020.com

Я не робот

Random acts of cuteness. This is my wife’s new therapy dog. It’s a King Charles Cavalier Spaniel.

Woooo! Closed on a new home today, and it's ours. 2500 Sq ft, 4 bedrooms, huge farm kitchen. Five minute walk from a trailhead for a trail that runs along the shore of Lewisville Lake. Same commute to work. I'm happy.

Jabber and Slack... and those that walk up with a "quick question."

I was told during my midyear that I need to start working on my "AWS certification." Hmmmm. OK. Since there isn't one for a DBA, I guess I'm going to become an SA.

From Datamation magazine circa 1968. Now you can really geek out your friends. This is the kind of stuff you can throw out at a party to kill any discussion.

How to sow the seeds of panic in a dev organization. Pop up a message that your BitBucket license has expired and you can't push code changes until it is renewed. Happened today. Amazing how fast the corporate cogs can turn when productivity is on hold and you still have to pay the devs.

It is with a heavy heart that I said aufwiedersehen to my mom last night. She passed peacefully in her sleep, and is now resting in the fields and forests of heaven. She was born in 1932 in Hamburg, Germany, and at age 7 the world around her exploded into one of the most horrific wars that Europe or the world had seen up to that time. By the time it was over, she was thirteen, and had spent many of her formative years witnessing how low humanity can get in the treatement of fellow humans. She survived the post-war years, and came to the US in the late 1950's, and met my dad while in nursing school. She had four chidren, Tim, Chris, Tanya, and myself. She was a doting and caring mom, who dedicated herself to raising her children. She loved to cook, loved animals, especially dogs, and love human beings in general, and had a compassionate and kind heart. There is a small, empty space in the world that she filled, but heaven is a little brighter with her smile and her laughter. I miss you mom, but I know I will see you again some day. Aufwiedersehen, lieber Mutti! Wir sehen uns bald.

I see Amazon taking a lot of flak and being called a monopoly, but they aren't. Sure, Amazon sells branded items, but the majority of items are sold by small mom-and-pop businesses that have access to markets that they would not have without Amazon. Case in point, I've ordered items that have come not just from the US, where in live, but Europe and Asia. I just ordered some 4711 cologne, and was sort of expecting that it would come from Germany. Nope, it's coming from a small seller in Japan. Amazon is a global equalizer that enables people from all over the world to sell to people from all over the world. The politicians messing with that are going to remove that ability, and we will all be the poorer for it. Maybe this is a rant after all.

Wait. What? If Mexico doesn't control our immigration, we are going to shoot our own industry in the head? What. A. Putz.

Head a great experience today. One of my Indian co-workers stopped by and asked if I like biryani. Yep, I do, so I went to get me some. They had a sauce on the side, a pepper sauce. Nice and hot, and generated a wonderful endorphin rush. I have to say, of most of my coworkers, the South Asian are the most friendly and polite, and I enjoy working with them. I hope Trump doesn't ruin that.

GAHHHHHHHHHH! Damn USPS!!! Privatize them already! Stolen is more like it. It was a Gigabyte Aorus X470 Mobo, an AMD Ryzen 5 2600X CPU, and 16GB of memory. The postal service is a bloated, unresponsive, government run trainwreck. If people would just stop using them, they would shrivel up and blow away. ARRGH!!! 🔥☠️🔥☠️🔥

Some light reading...

I visit my mom once a year, and usually perform preventative maintenance on her computer. Scrubbing it for viruses, applying updates for drivers, etc. On one such occasion in the early days, she complained that the PC was slow, and would quit. I opened it up, and there was a 1/4 inch layer of dust everywhere, and any and all vents were completely blocked, to the point that fans weren't turning. I blew that crap out, and from that point on became her IT guy.

I've decided to set up an old laptop for my granddaughter. Top two contenders for OS are Doudou and Qimo. I thought about Edubuntu, but that one isn't really kid friendly, and it's designed by "educationists" sic.

I JUST HAD ONE OF THOSE DAYS THAT MAKES ONE WANT TO BANG TWO BRICKS ON HEAD SND END THE PAIN THE STORY STARTS YESTETDAY WITH ISSUES AFTER A MIGRSTION AND THEY ASK ME TO HELP TROUBLESHOOT EVEN THOUGH I'M A DEV DBA AND THE ISSUE IS IN QA/SAT AND I HELP ANYWAY AND THEY CAN'T FIND A VIEW AND SO I LOOK EVERYWHERE AND CAN'T DOING IT EITHER AND IT DIDN'T EXIST IN PROD OR DEV SO I TELL THEM IT'S NOT THERE, AND THEY ARE LIKE, CAN YOU RETRIEVE IT FOR US AND I'M LIKE FROM WHERE? I DON'T KEEP VIEWS IN MY BUTT AND YOU GUYS ARE SMOKING CRACK AND THE GIVE ME THEIR QUERY WHICH CONTAIN THE VIEE ANYWAY AND THEY SAY CAN YOU RUN IT AND IT RUNS AND WORKS AND THEY CAN'T MAKE IT WORK AND IT WORKS BECAUSE IT DOESN'T CALL THE VIEW THEY HAVE ME SO NO PROBLEM THERE SO I FINALLY ASK THEM ARE YOU POINTING TO THE CORRECT DATABASE AND THEY'RE LIKE OH MAN WE TOLD YOU THE WRONG DATABASE AND SO I LOOK AT THE RIGHT DATABASE AND FIND THAT THE GRANTS ARE MISSING AND YEAH THANK YOU FOR TAKING EIGHT HOURS OF MY LIFE BECAUSE WE WERE IN THE WRONG DB YOU GAVE ME AND I HOPE THE FLAG OF A THOUSAND CAMELS INVEST YOUR ARMPITS AND THE CHIGGERS OF A THOUSAND SOUTHERN LAWNS INGEST YOUR SOCKS AND UNDERWEAR. YAAAAAA!!!!

When they want to take a business critical app that is using Enterprise Oracle running on Exadata, and move it to community Postgres running on Amazon RDS, because "it will be in the Cloud, and it will save us money..." No, no it won't.

Not really a joke or meme, but not a rant or story. Go to Google search on a PC and search Thanos. Then click on the glove on the right and watch. You're welcome.

חג פסח שמח

This is why I love working where I work. I worked extra hours until 9pm to get an ITest environment ready for one of my customer teams. I came in this morning to a little prezzie and a thank you card signed by the entire customer team. This is what awesome culture looks like.

OMG, it's 00:00! Where's did the time go? Thanks devRant!

Yeeeeeeeee! My granddaughter yelled up to me, "Grandpa, I'm programming!" She was doing some kid code game thing. Ten years old. I can hope, can't I? 😁

Yep. I worked at a place where my director and manager were true mysogynists. One day the director walks behind one of my subordinates and knees her in the back of the knees to make her fall back so that he can catch her. He does this in front the whole office. I told her that I had her back if she chose to complain. We went to our CO and laid everything out, and he was forced to take action. I was pulled aside and told that I would ruin my career if I went durn this path. I told them that it was more important to me to do the right thing. The director was forced to resign, the manager was reassigned to another location, and yes, my career suffered, especially in the area of promotion. But you know what? I'd do it again, because it was the right thing to do.

"The era of self-regulation for online companies is over." UK Culture Secretary Jeremy Wright.

Look for governments, especially those without strong free speech protections, to move to control the means of communication for the masses, and control what people see and hear.

It happens... but sometimes you have to, to get to the next level. It's called stepping out of your safe zone.

I gave you a chance, Nvidia. It could have been a good thing, but no. You are still crap. About two years ago, my son's graphics card (an Nvidia) died, so I thought, I'll give him my nice Radeon card, and got myself a new card. For some reason, reason failed me, and I got a GTX 1070. It's been a nice enough card, and worked well. And then the last driver update happened. Fallout 4 started to CTD before it even booted to the main menu. Me, not thinking (again) thought it was a mod, so I uninstalled and deleted and reinstalled again, with all 120 mods. Nope. Still crashing. Then I noticed, as the game booted, the fans started to ramp up, and I could tell exactly when it would crash be the sound of fans. I was expecting the computer to taxi out the room. Rolled the driver update back to the last one that worked. Now I can log in again, and things are mostly stable. Still crashes, but not as bad, probably due to reloading the mods and missing something. When the RX 3080 hits the market, bye bye Nvidia. You haven't changed a bit over the years. We're through.

Pushing the boundaries...
http://commitstrip.com/en/2019/...?

And now a word from my spiritual guru, J P Sears...
https://youtu.be/8utmmWoBSBY

Yep, today was a Monday. Had a request to truncate some tables. Set up a script to disable constraints, truncate, and re-enable constraint. It ran flawlessly. Too bad I ran against the wrong schema, though. Ran it against a dev schema instead of the requested itest schema, because the dev schema was stuck in my head. Well, I guess I tested it in dev. Against some developers schema. But, hey, it worked flawlessly. Because, you know, when you are pointing at the wrong place, it will always work. Every time.