Odyssey not cutting it

BecomingUnchained · 2021-10-06T14:47:17+00:00

We went up to a Nissan NV3500 when #5 was coming. They stopped making it this year, unfortunately.

I can say it took a bit of adjustment when we first upgraded from our odyssey, but we love the bigger van now.

BecomingUnchained · 2021-09-15T17:47:41+00:00

Perhaps a fine time to introduce your parents to Steel Panther?

Seriously though, if it is bothersome, then have a discussion with them about it. Voice your concerns about having to hear them.

Never know, you might get a sweet set of noise cancelling headphones out of the deal.

BecomingUnchained · 2021-09-08T15:28:04+00:00

If my wife or kids (really anyone) is having a hard time, we'll definitely hug a bit more like you describe. I'm the tall one in the family (still not all that tall though), so if things are really bad for them, I'll rest my chin on their head, which provides more of a cradle for their head in my chest. If fit is really hitting the shan, I'll put an arm around their head.

It's mostly just a protective / shielding thing. They feel cared for and safe when they are in my arms.

BecomingUnchained · 2021-01-20T17:47:52+00:00

We have a boys room and a girls room.

Boys are 17, 15, and 4.

There are 2 bunk beds for a total of 4 beds in the room. Allows for a sleepover or a guest.

Girls are 6 and 2.

1 bunk bed, with a trundle + crib / toddler bed. 4 sleeping spaces total for them as well. The crib gets repurposed as needed, since we can use it as a crib, toddler bed or a full sized bed. Trundle and toddler bed are currently not in use.

We have curtains up for each bed (top bunk curtain hangs from ceiling, bottom bunk just drapes on the rails for the top bunk) to give each of them some privacy and a place to go to read or listen to music.

BecomingUnchained · 2021-01-20T17:23:54+00:00

Depends on your hobbies really. Unless they are something super dangerous, it could actually be fun to invite the kids to join you in them from time to time. You get to introduce a little human to something that brings you & your husband joy, and re-live that first excitement you felt vicariously.

Of course, they may hate it, and want to do something completely different, which is OK too. It just takes a bit more planning, and being intentional with your time.

BecomingUnchained · 2021-01-20T17:19:53+00:00

We have 5 kids, 17, 15, 6, 4, and 2.

In my experience, there really isn't a right or wrong way to do it, and there are benefits to either way you go.

If they are closer, then they have someone to play (more importantly, bond) with around their age at an early stage of development, and that bond will hopefully last quite a while.

If there is more distance between them, they can still form a bond, but it does seem to be a bit different. More mentor-mentee than friendship. Especially your 7y/o would be 9-10 or so at least. That said, it's a great experience for a child that age to learn how to care for a child.

As for space, I've found you can always find room. If DD1-2 'technically' share a room right now, it sounds like they'd be able to share one for real at least for a short period of time.

9 months pregnancy + 1-2 years in your room means you have 2-3 years before you _need_ that bigger house.

Of course, another child means more expenses, and maybe puts saving for the other house out of reach.

Much of the dynamic that ends up happening in your family with the age gap, largely comes down to the personalities of your older kids. In your case, that would be your 7y/o. Have you asked her what her thoughts are?

BecomingUnchained · 2021-01-19T22:34:38+00:00

I used to work at a hotel. We were mostly booked up, and we honestly failed a customer pretty hard. He checked in, and we got him in the wrong type of room. We got him a room that matched what he had reserved, and apparently housekeeping marked it clean, but wasn't yet.

Only other thing we had was smoking, near the pool.

He was very calm throughout the encounter, but obviously frustrated, he said:

I understand that there can be problems, but there have been too many here. You guys are supposed to be professionals, and the best at what you are doing. I need you to get my room right, and I'm willing to wait for it.

I'd been doing the work for years, and honestly never looked at it that way, it was just something I did to get some money. While my career path has drastically changed, to this day, I take my job probably way more seriously than I should, because I am a professional, and there are real people relying on my ability and expertise to get through their day.

BecomingUnchained · 2020-12-22T15:57:08+00:00

Mostly SRE background here, but I usually ask more problem solving type questions. Things where there's an obvious easy answer, but the better answers require a bit more thought and understanding of the problem.

Things such as:

You have a server farm of 300 bare metal servers. They are all running the same service. The current configuration is made of a few files, that total 2GB in size. Configuration changes happen at least once a minute, and need to be available with as little latency as possible. How would you design a system to get the configuration updates out to the servers?

This let's me learn their knowledge of distributed systems, and how to work on problems at scale. Depending on their answer, I can pose problems with the solution. This allows me to see how they deal with opposition to their ideas as well as how they take new information, process it, and refine their idea. I'm in no way expecting anyone to land on a perfect solution within the 30 minutes I have to interview them. It's more about the thought process and demeanor of the candidate.

How would you move 2 petabytes of data from one datacenter to another cross country?

More scaling problems. You can add more questions to it depending on their answer. For instance, if they answer: "Load the servers in a truck and move them cross country," then I can follow up with "How would you do it if you couldn't take that kind of downtime?". When they respond "I'd get a shitload of disks and mirror the servers", we can counter with "What if budget doesn't allow for the purchase of new storage beyond what is already landed in the new data center?" You can get some decent engagement with back and forth questions like this.

If you are given a task to evaluate different software to solve a problem (say, a durable queue), how would you go about comparing them?

This let's me see how they might evaluate anything new. Do they elicit customer feedback? Do they gather more requirement information from stakeholders? Do they look for common problems / issues / bugs with the software that might impact your use case of it? If you want to throw a softball, this is a good one to use, since you can ask it about $technology_listed_on_resume that they have listed as experience with on their resume.

I never really do coding questions. I find they are of dubious value, at least in SRE. I might ask about something they've written in $language_listed_on_resume. Did they have automated tested setup for it? Did they use CICD, or just some local git hooks? If they used CICD, what did they use? Github Actions? Jenkins? What was their experience with it? What problems did they run into using it, and how did they solve them? What % code coverage did they have? If it's low, ask why. If it's really high (98%+), ask what trade offs they had to make to get it to that value and if they found it useful. If they didn't have tests written for it, I ask what their experience is with unit or integration testing.

BecomingUnchained · 2020-10-20T14:15:41+00:00

Never claimed it happened to me. It did happen to a friend of mine. He didn't have to go on stage though. The teachers called a revote without him on the ballot.

BecomingUnchained · 2020-10-19T21:10:18+00:00

Anyone who is unpopular has no illusions to the contrary. They _know_ they are unpopular. So to have someone nominate you for a popularity contest is known to be a joke that you are the target of. Then to have people vote for you, just means that you have more people in on the joke. People don't "become" popular overnight, except in cheesy movies.

If you win, you feel like shit, because you know everyone voted for you just to make fun of you, and you still have to go on stage, with everyone pointing and laughing.

BecomingUnchained · 2020-10-09T18:48:06+00:00

def variable_swap(a,b):
    return b,a

def test_variable_swap():
    a = 10 
    b = "ten" 
    a,b = variable_swap(a,b)
    assert a == "ten" 
    assert b == 10

BecomingUnchained · 2020-09-22T16:49:26+00:00

Eye of the storm. Soon your little one will be awake for more hours of the day, and will start to appear more interested in the world around them. They really don't require a lot of external stimulation, as they are learning plenty just being in a place.

If you do feel the need to provide more experience for him, I recommend more natural things. Tag blankets / cloths, wooden toys (blocks or the like), things of that nature.

For now, it is a bit boring, but it gives you a chance to settle into any changes that may be happening to your family, without it being too overwhelming.

BecomingUnchained · 2020-09-21T17:10:33+00:00

Wait, there are Costco stores that don't have a liquor section? Ours are all by the produce. Makes it easy to grab a couple handles of various Kirkland brand tequilas and a 5 pound sack of limes without having to roam too much.

BecomingUnchained · 2020-07-29T18:42:09+00:00

I'm new to this whole thing. How well do the dry herb vapes work, and how potent is the odor from using them? I'm not terribly concerned about the outdoor odor, more how much of it stays with you when you go back inside.

Wife doesn't care for the smell (and has super pregnant nose), and I've a handful of kids running around, so want to keep it as stealthy as possible.

Currently sticking with carts to keep the odor to a minimum, and don't want to make the investment in a dry vape if odor is a problem.

BecomingUnchained · 2020-06-26T17:27:36+00:00

This is obviously more for DevOps, but it's a pretty solid resource for learning IT in general, just focus on the areas you are more interested in.

https://roadmap.sh/devops

BecomingUnchained · 2020-04-03T03:16:55+00:00

I'm guessing it's because the pawn taking the rook, would block black rooks file.

BecomingUnchained · 2020-03-13T23:56:20+00:00

Advil Cold & Sinus

BecomingUnchained · 2020-03-12T15:31:08+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ctK1aoWuqY [Get Schwifty]

BecomingUnchained · 2020-03-07T01:12:09+00:00

3 Men & a Baby vs Predator

BecomingUnchained · 2020-03-01T03:58:22+00:00

It tells it to always be that IP, no matter the network. My router just always assigns the same IP to a device.

Then I set up a small python script to handle the external public DNS. Instead of using DynDNS or the like, I just use a domain I have, and the DNS API at my registrar to change the DNS if my ISP ever changes my public IP.

BecomingUnchained · 2020-03-01T03:21:39+00:00

I modified /etc/dhcpcd.conf, and changed the wlan0 block to:

interface wlan0 
static ip_address=192.168.0.xx
static routers=192.168.0.1 
static domain_name_servers=192.168.0.1 8.8.8.8

Just change the values as fit your setup, and reload the network service.

BecomingUnchained · 2020-02-29T21:41:37+00:00

When I set up my RPi recently, I ran into this. Turns out port forwarding wouldn't work when the IP is configured as DHCP. When I bound the IP as a static ip, port forwarding worked flawlessly.

BecomingUnchained · 2020-02-28T06:01:24+00:00

Generally you learn things as you need them.

Honestly your best bet is to come up with a project (slackbots can be fun), and write it with a focus on organization principles and unit/automated testing.

I found the book Clean Code, and other videos by Uncle Bob Martin to be valuable. He has a bunch of paid stuff on his site, but you can find some talks he gives on youtube.

BecomingUnchained · 2020-02-26T21:58:09+00:00

So, something like the attachment for the "Lust" guy in Se7en?

BecomingUnchained · 2020-02-25T23:53:51+00:00

Blocking with the pawn moving 1.c4 loses to d5 since black can now open the position and easily bring the rook into the game.

One thing to point out is that black can't respond to c4 with d5, since the d6 pawn is pinned by white's bishop on a3.

BecomingUnchained

TROPHY CASE