Imagine losing your father in a tragic fashion, only for Hollywood execs to make a marketable facsimile of appearance and voice. If they could store his corpse and make it dance like a marionette they would.

Talk about retraumatizing the poor lady.

As a person who sleeps through alarms and is approaching middle age…

It is a problem.

I wish I had some advice, but I am accepting advice lol.

Sole IT person for a corporation and was on call 24/7/365.

It was just supposed to be a help desk position.

It was for an MSP that… Well, the whole thing was a nightmare, but I had lost my IT hospitality job due to covid and the place shuttering. I was desperate.

My first thought was Grand Prismatic, just after dawn.

Cool enough that the thermal features create a fog over the water, and more importantly, all the tourists (I was a hotel employee in the park) were still in bed. Had the boardwalk area all to myself.

I think I just sat in contemplation for half an hour, which if you knew me would say is impossible. Very peaceful.

I’ve developed some PTSD like symptoms for when my phone goes off.

Notification, call, whatever. Immediate panic and I have to remember to breathe.

Even trimming every notification I can, it still happens several times throughout the day, and my phone only has audible notifications when I’m at home, most from my wife.

I left that job over a year ago and still I can’t shake it.

Proprietary formats are certainly an issue outside of Canada.

Most of the reason corporations/governments stick with popular proprietary formats is actually money.

Developing/investigating an open format is expensive. and then there is the problem of people who have only lived in a digital walled garden.

If you have to train all of your new employees on how to use it the cost rises exponentially.

Then you have your IT support folks who probably just got it dumped in their lap at the last second, and have no knowledge of it themselves, because training wasn’t an option due to time or money.

As a person who handled (solo help desk for that shift) the change over of a health networks electronic medical records systems, I receive no training and was told that they had consultants on hand to transfer them to - yeah well in 4 hours over 2000 calls came in. And of course I got yelled at by a dick hole boss (if your adult children won’t speak to you, and you’ve never met your grandchildren, you are the problem) about people who didn’t want to wait in line for one person to answer the phone and dropped the call.

That boss was ultimately the reason I left that company in favor of a previous employer who offered a lot less problems. Stayed there until the pandemic (hospitality IT) and its been a shit show ever since.

I went from hourly call center to on call 24/7 and being the only point of contact.

When my phone notifies me, just any notification, I panic. The phone rings, I panic. Its been over a year since I left.

Yes, its part and parcel to other issues of mental health, but… Man, do you know how often you get notifications? I’ve turned most off and still some days I’m ready to smash my phone so it will shut up and I can breathe normally.

I had an issue switching away from Pop!, and it may have been a one off, but when I tried to install a different distro, and it wound up screwing up my boot partition to the point the easiest thing was just to run a live distro, pop open parted, and wipe from there before I could install a different distro.

Mostly mentioning it because it was annoying to figure out and remedy - the remedy was annoying because I only had one flash drive so I had to wipe what I wanted to install, and just wasting time regarding that.

I was witness to what burnt piss does on a hot muffler.

It stinks, for miles. And months.

Did the prick die, or just get a golden parachute?

That has become the primary use for my flipper, lol.

Tell that to, I dunno, everyone else.

They certainly think so.

I’ve been wary of corporations since I first read Neuromancer.

Call it whatever you want man, whats important is that it helps you.

Could you go into detail, even just privately, that seems like a solid use for some otherwise idle storage space.

Then again, the only part of being a scout (boy) that stuck with me involved fire or survival methods, and to always be prepared is a good maxim.

Kali was built out as a penetration testing distro, though it does contain some diagnostic tools.

Not a bad place to start if you’re used to Debian, but it is a rolling release so it may break unexpectedly, or have new bugs introduced with each update.

A persistent USB with just Debian could have all the same tools installed but have a longer support scope on releases so you don’t have to update daily (bleeding edge) which is nice to reduce read/writes to the flash drive it’s on.

That being said, I keep a Kali live image (persistent) but thats becauae its home - my first introduction to Linux was 5 minutes with Red Hat, but aside from a brief intro in highschool, I really started with Linux in Backtrack, offensive security’s predecessor to Kali.

Yes, I have to learn things the hard way lol.

I’ve been on a decade long hiatus from multiplayer aspect of games - aside from games I was with people I knew in RL.

I only occasionally get a twinge for the comraderie of some epic raid in an MMO, or tight unspoken squad tactics where everyone just does their job as expected (not necessarily well lol) and came out on top.

But really, I don’t have the time to commit to either of those.

Then I hear about my friend in GW2 (RL friend) who is going through some toxic guild BS and I don’t miss it.

Everquest did this to me.

I mained a bard, and back then you had to stop a song and start a new one every so often…

Mathematically it translates to a button press ever 1.5 seconds, ignoring movement, other combat abilities, etc.

I also refused to compromise on spelling and grammar at the time.

I got real good at typing accurately and quickly.

I have lost a lot of that speed, but at comfortable pace I’m probably 80-90 words a minute, and the last time it was measured was a keyboarding class requisite. 121 GWAM for an eighth grader isn’t too shabby. As long as I fixed the printer I got to play games in that class.

I’d be happy to take one, should you still have any to give out.

Maybe they mean they will dual boot between windows and a hypervisor? I’ve never considered if that’s a possibility.

Got Shaggy and Daphne, Fred doesn’t look so good with the hairline and all, Velma apparently transitioned, good for him, and Scoob is long dead. Dogs don’t live that long.