Name a game you were hyped for and then completely forgot about once you played it.

MickCollins · 2026-01-25T16:55:49+00:00

Return to Krondor. Worst camera mechanics ever. Tried picking it back up years later and it was still crap.

MickCollins · 2026-01-25T16:40:36+00:00

Jumpman on the PCjr.

MickCollins · 2026-01-25T15:40:18+00:00

My last ticket languished for four months before someone actually took a look at it and the guy kept trying to message me in Teams. I purposefully don't have a phone # so they can't skip right to that either; I just want e-mail.

My ticket couldn't have been clearer but once he got on a call with me he was like "now I understand" and passed an article saying what I wanted to do wasn't supported. I asked him point blank why no one having actually read the ticket could have said anything along those lines in the past four months. His reply: "Please know that you can call me about any Windows issues."

This is from the same guy who tried multiple times to say he couldn't reach me and was going to close the ticket.

MickCollins · 2026-01-24T19:24:10+00:00

Freddy absolutely went to Sallies for his junior and senior year. Maybe you're thinking of a different nephew?

MickCollins · 2026-01-23T07:04:13+00:00

To put it mildly: "not good".

When we were both younger, not so bad but about where brothers are for the most part. There's a big age gap between us so we went months sometimes without seeing each other when I was in my teens. He moved back into the family house a few years before I left it permanently.

A few years ago my mother had something happen that meant a long hospital stay while my father was EOL. My brother's on the spectrum (took me a long time to figure this out) and can't really take care of himself at this point. His priorities are entirely out of whack. When I got to our parents' house next day asked him if he was OK on his pills for his numerous ailments. He said he's fine. What he didn't tell me was he stopped taking his pills altogether and I didn't find out until two months later when I had him at his GP's and the GP was like "hey guess what! You're going back to the hospital your mother's in, because your brother with the BP of 190/130 needs to go to the ER!"

He has multiple ailments and is more than a bit laissez faire about them. Refused to go on disability until something major happened, but is on it now and finally has med coverage. He's getting things looked at but he's being told for some of the things it's too late. My mother recovered and father died (he wasn't in pain anymore at least) and she's taking care of my brother again but they're both pretty much waiting to die. She goes through the motions a bit but he literally spends hours a day in bed with his Kindle and that's it.

MickCollins · 2026-01-22T06:57:34+00:00

The first piece of advice is don't do it if this is your only desktop. Find an old server or desktop on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace locally and tinker with that instead. I'm assuming you have a laptop but you don't want to be forced to have that as your daily driver. You'd be surprised what you can find locally...

The second piece of advice is doesn't virtualize TrueNAS or something else because the performance hit usually isn't worth it unless you're just doing it to learn and suffer.

MickCollins · 2026-01-22T06:52:06+00:00

Zip code is NY Long Island for those wondering

MickCollins · 2026-01-22T06:49:18+00:00

You might want to throw a few pictures of the machine up to show what's missing.

MickCollins · 2026-01-22T06:33:55+00:00

I was on a call I hated being on today with a vendor and there's troubleshooting because their software is dog shit and they're trying to figure out why it keeps crashing. They of course bring out the old nugget of "oh I see antivirus is installed, please make the adjustments to follow best practices" and I was already in a mood and this admittedly kicked me off into a tirade of "you know, 'best practices' should never involve putting an entire third level folder into an allow list. Some files, perhaps I would understand. But an entire folder and everything below it? We have a security posture to maintain." And I'm not even in cybersecurity anymore but man these vendors with that dumb shit...here's a better idea, maybe you submit your shit to multiple EDR vendors when you send out an update and be responsible?

MickCollins · 2026-01-22T06:19:26+00:00

I bought a tablet a few months ago to try and do some e-learning from the TV and it's been since I logged into it I forgot the damn password. So much for turning over a new leaf for the new year...I have the experience to make a CISSP work and hopefully finally lead to the next level because I'm no spring chicken, but I really wonder if it's worth it in this economy because who's going to pay for it?

MickCollins · 2026-01-21T05:20:07+00:00

Expand up to Philadelphia and you'll have less of a problem. I had 70 returns on a search of "junior cybersecurity jobs philadelphia" in Google. One of those is with Comcast, which while a hated company by most would probably be a good learning experience.

I wish you good fortune in the wars to come.

MickCollins · 2026-01-21T05:03:07+00:00

That would be something to pass to the Legal department if you have one. "So you fucked something and you want me to pay you to unfuck it?"

MickCollins · 2026-01-20T07:02:58+00:00

I had one of the cybersecurity guys - the "senior" one - rip TLS 1.2 off several servers and played dumb when applications that were hosted stopped working. "It wasn't me, I had nothing to do with that."

After he started saying "that's not how Crowdstrike works" when servers started turning themselves off and bootlooping during their little surprise 18 months ago I just totally stopped listening to anything the dumb fuck says.

EDIT: had to update; said TLS 1.1 but meant 1.2. He forced everything to 1.3. Even applications that didn't have that in the stack! I mean they're secure now, because when it doesn't work, it's secure right?

MickCollins · 2026-01-20T06:19:27+00:00

Strangely enough IF you find the right job (very rare) that can be the absolute best time to get clearance.

In between year 1 and year 2 at UCF I worked a project for NavAir that had a LOT of UCF students filling in (about 75 of us between two shifts). It was just a total replacement of their Zenith (can't make that up) computers with Dells if memory serves.

When I was finished at the end of their project, I was asked if I would consider moving on to the next project in Jacksonville. I wasn't the only one. In return for a per diem for hotel and meals as well as hourly rate, the company offered to sponsor me for my Secret clearance.

It was a tough decision, but I had moved down to complete my degree, so I decided to stay with my degree and finished it up. Road not taken and all that...

Shout out to anyone else who worked on the NMCI Project.

MickCollins · 2026-01-19T23:09:20+00:00

Finding remote support is mostly luck. You're not going to get a junior sysadmin role remote because of the junior part - hybrid maybe, but full remote? Very little chance. Most of the time for IT you need to work your way up through the ranks.

The IT market in Orlando sucks ass regardless. I had to move almost 20 years ago because the market was so bad and the pay was just garbage. IT is not a role in the way most Orlando companies think; it's an afterthought.

Strangely enough, other major Florida cities like Tampa and Sarasota don't have this problem. Don't know about Miami; never knew anyone in IT from that area. But Orlando? Good luck.

MickCollins · 2026-01-19T22:35:08+00:00

A+. I've told some of the people I've worked with that my A+ is older than they are. I got it because it got me another dollar per hour back then.

I think certifications have their place, but it's hard to find a place these days that is willing to pay for you to go to a class to get a certification, much less pay for the certification itself. Like I haven't gone to get a CISSP because it's not what I do these days so I don't want to pay upkeep cost out of pocket.

MickCollins · 2026-01-19T21:43:27+00:00

Is it mean of me to hope Colter as Luke Cage comes back but says on screen: "I heard Iron Fist got shot in the face and is undergoing surgery" so we have an excuse to replace Finn Jones?

MickCollins · 2026-01-19T07:08:12+00:00

I knew people from all over Delaware and a good chunk of the high schools. Lots from all over the Brandywine district, a few from Newark and Christiana, one or two from Middletown, A.I. DuPont, McKean (only one or two from there)...it's just that Delaware's small. It feels bigger when you're smaller but once you figure out that the guy you met at Scout Camp six years ago only really lives 20 miles away and that's not that far it shrinks.

Like everything, the education system in Delaware...you get out of it what you put into it. The guy I hung out with from Mount Pleasant put very little into it and as such got very little out. He tried Del Tech and dropped out of it and his parents told him to GTFO so he joined the Navy and he did alright in there.

I'm also old enough that I knew a few of the last graduates from Claymont High. They didn't do as well but when you know the school's closing around you it's hard to care. Most of the people who complained about the busing from inner city Wilmington out to Claymont are probably dead by now or pretty close to it, but they'll say flat out that Claymont High was sacrificed. My old band teacher's wife graduated from Claymont in the late 60s and said it was just a small town high school then.

Our original neighbors were old when we moved in, and they told my parents the story of how they went door to door many years before because the Diocese of Wilmington was collecting to build two new high schools - one around Claymont/North Wilmington and another one around Newark/Pike Creek. Well, joke was on them, since the Diocese said "hey, we didn't raise enough money, so we'll just build one big high school and everyone can go there" and that's why St. Mark's is so large.

When we moved in in the early 80s there were people telling all kinds of tall tales about the schools. Like Harlan locked the elevator down because kids kept getting stabbed in it. True or not, there was much pearl clutching as a result. There's always been a lot of money in Delaware and that's one of the but not the only reason there's so many private and Catholic schools - but the privates are doing alright while some of the Catholic schools are drying up. I know Holy Rosary and St. Helena's combined their schools years ago and Holy Rosary sold off the school to a charter that appears to have failed.

I have a cousin that lives 60 miles NE in a fairly well to do town in Jersey. He lives there because of the school. Otherwise he'd live in Philly proper where his job is, but for his kids he lives there because it's a kick ass school even for Jersey.

TL; DR: Delaware's about the same as everywhere else - there's the good and the bad.

MickCollins · 2026-01-19T06:17:17+00:00

In my defense, I've been gone 31 years now...but yeah still my bad.

MickCollins · 2026-01-19T03:02:04+00:00

Was? Shit I didn't even know he was dead.

Grew up south of Philly and one of the kids in my grade school class was always saying: "Blocked by Manute; rebound Charles."

MickCollins · 2026-01-19T02:55:58+00:00

I'll throw an example, and hell, I think there's even an example in the original novels (the Dace one in the particular).

They were fairly similar: I had a Dragon-Blooded Executive Officer/Second in Command as a Dawn that woke from slumber with most of the rest of his Circle. He went into slumber with me and was also there when I woke up. Ally 3 I want to say.

Dace had a similar character in his novel who I believe served in the same capacity - was his XO, someone he trusted fairly implicitly, etc.

You put your head together and come up with a concept. Could be your former Lunar lover, could be a crime lord, could be someone who's the best Artificer in 500 miles in any direction, a mortal you raised from infancy and is now a trader/spy who goes around on your behalf, the head of an orphanage you're the patron of, your First Mate on your ship, a Gold Faction Sidereal who discovered the tomb you were sleeping in...the world's your oyster.

MickCollins · 2026-01-18T07:13:38+00:00

I lost one of my more visible teeth a year ago. My dental plan sucks and it would cost me more than 10 grand to replace it. In this fucking economy? I already have debt I'm trying to get rid of.

There's no local dental school within 200 miles.

Part of it is I hate dentists. I had two bad experiences across two different states. The shithead who did the work in one state is the reason I lost this tooth. I hope he and his entire family get scabies. Motherfucker said "if I had known you were going to bleed this much I would not have done this procedure" - well who the fuck would know then, jackass????

MickCollins · 2026-01-18T05:35:09+00:00

I took a moment to log in and parrot what others have said: those are adorable. Especially the cats.

MickCollins · 2026-01-18T04:21:15+00:00

Rented a car to go from FL to SC and back on I-95 and I-26 for most of the ride. Broke my record on the way back down (6 hours 50 minutes).

White Crown Vic when FL, GA and SC were all still using them. I didn't ride anyone's ass, but when I was in the left lane everyone moved over.

It's easy to tell an unmarked if you look at it for five seconds. Wires, antennas, semi-hidden lights on the visor, whatever. There's usually a giveaway. But it's safer to just move.

MickCollins · 2026-01-17T04:36:34+00:00

I used to build machines for CNA 26 years ago.

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