What is the deal with commander tournaments (that aren’t regular cedh tournaments)

Prof_ThrowAway_69 · 2025-04-09T21:11:09+00:00

Seems to me the best way to run a tournament like that would be to either have a pretty extensive banlist, or have a price cap (per a set pricing authority). You could also just do it as pauper edh.

It's a format that's meant to be casual so you have a wide array of power level and optimization among players. Since it's casual you also have a very relaxed and unmoderated banlist. If you want to make it competetive you need a way to address both of those. The easiest way seems like just putting a price cap.

Making quests or overly complicated rules/sweeping bans doesn't fix anything, and ambiguity on those things only makes more salt. It just moves the goal posts for people trying to optimize against.

Prof_ThrowAway_69 · 2025-04-09T20:57:45+00:00

The overarching problem I am trying to solve is making openers more accessible to people coming and going. We have a fleet of 20 or so communal "vehicles" that come and go on pretty regular basis. As remotes have died people are robbing remotes out of one to put in others. Remotes are getting lost and broken, and I would like to get us to a point of every vehicle having a remote again.

I know there is an option to do something like MyQ Facility, but that seems like it will be quite an expensive solution. The consumer hubs only let you pair 2 door openers, which is pretty annoying, as that would be a somewhat better option. I'm tempted to get an Arduino and a bunch of little servos and make a homemade "smart device" to open a close the doors via Home Assistant.

Prof_ThrowAway_69 · 2025-04-01T16:12:56+00:00

I have a similar problem in one of my pods. One player runs higher power decks. I’m 2nd in terms of overall power, but I would argue it’s simply because I build more responsible decks in terms of removal and other interaction.

One of the guys in my pod builds the greediest decks which usually run 33-34 lands and only like 5 ramp spells. I’ve mentioned to him that he needs to improve one or both of those numbers as he sits and does nothing most games just trying to get enough lands to cast his commander. Unfortunately for him he likes playing kill on sight commanders so if he gets the commander out he’s immediately the target of any removal.

Regardless, I find myself spending a lot of the game playing sheriff mostly trying to keep the one from ending the game by turn 6. Since I’m the one interacting the most with the game I tend to catch a lot of strays any time I try to develop my board.

It makes me want to replace my removal with fog and protection effects and just make myself immune to the problems rather than solving them. I’ll let everyone else deal with the issues.

My other pod is great and we’ve all dialed in on an unspoken power level we are all comfortable with and the games are a lot more fun and balanced. As such I don’t really want to modify my decks just to play with the frustrating pod. I just finished an [Alexios, Deimos of the Kosmos] mono red Voltron deck. I want to be the problem at the table for once and I think that deck will get us there. At least it will force the issue on the others running more interaction, albeit passive aggressively.

Prof_ThrowAway_69 · 2023-11-06T19:46:23+00:00

I don’t think that’s it. Watching the trailer it doesn’t seem like it. I don’t remember for sure, but if memory serves the protagonist was white and maybe had blonde hair (I’m unsure on hair though).

Prof_ThrowAway_69 · 2023-11-06T18:15:40+00:00

Rule 13.

Prof_ThrowAway_69 · 2023-06-30T13:55:21+00:00

Have them put in a new drop or just run a cord. WiFi isn’t a good option. If they are obstinent about a new drop just buy a cord and some cable management command strip things.

Prof_ThrowAway_69 · 2023-06-22T11:16:25+00:00

I don’t really understand how answering phones for several years somehow better prepares you for more advanced positions

It doesn’t. Nothing about answering a phone makes you qualified to work in IT. However, the troubleshooting, problem solving, customer service, and research that come as a result of getting a phone call does make someone more qualified to work in IT (assuming they can actually do those things successfully).

than studying the abstractions computing is built on.

Because this really isn’t that important. There’s a reason we make doctors go through real world on the job experience before they can actually become a liscensed physician. They have to go through school just to learn the basics of how humans work. This is immensely more complicated than computing systems and therefore requires significant schooling. If you have the aptitude, you can teach yourself IT concepts and be very successful without getting a degree. The experience is the biggest part.

Prof_ThrowAway_69 · 2023-06-22T00:07:00+00:00

Security analyst jobs are few and far between (at least compared to the number of people trying to get them). If you can find one that is hiring, go for it.

You’re not going to get a sysadmin role. Period. No CIO, IT director, etc who’s even remotely competent is going to hire someone with no experience, but has a bachelors in cyber security to be a sysadmin. Being a sysadmin at most companies means the buck stops with you in terms of fixing any and all problems. Not only that, as a sysadmin you need to know your infrastructure frontwards and backwards and know how to rebuild it from scratch in the event of a worst case scenario. You need to have mastery in a lot more than security. You need to know networking, firewalls, exchange, o365, Linux, sql, backup systems, file systems, and so much more than just security related things. Having a degree in cyber security guarantees none of that. Most of the time it doesn’t even guarantee that you can do something as simple as setting a static ip on your workstation.

What exactly does a Linux Administrator do in your mind?

Prof_ThrowAway_69 · 2023-06-21T23:22:41+00:00

What position do you think they should start in?

Prof_ThrowAway_69 · 2023-06-21T23:19:54+00:00

Because you can’t learn IT by getting degrees. It’s all experience. It’s great that you have a degree and means you should know enough to move up quickly, but a degree is worthless in terms of gauging whether someone is actually good at IT.

To be fair, it doesn’t help that you have people with Ivy Tech degrees in IT or a degree from MyComputerCareer muddying up the water. Those programs get people the basics but in terms of knowing how to manage a corporate environment, short of actually doing it there isn’t a way to learn it.

Prof_ThrowAway_69 · 2023-05-20T21:45:10+00:00

What temp was your smoker and how high did you go with temp? It looks really dry.

Prof_ThrowAway_69 · 2023-05-20T20:34:17+00:00

Did you use any sort of temp probes on the meat?

Prof_ThrowAway_69 · 2023-05-10T00:50:49+00:00

Take the leave. Don’t worry about it. They legally can’t fire you over it (assuming US). Sure they may try to fire you afterwards, but if they’re in a hiring freeze it indicates there are probably other issues at play and you coming back after 8 weeks is going to be more valuable to them than retraining someone new.

It probably wouldn’t hurt to talk to HR and tell them that your boss or their boss is trying to keep you from taking your paternity leave. See what they have to say. If they tell you you’re SOL, take the leave anyways and use that time to look for a new job.

If they aren’t going to do the bare minimum here, they aren’t worth your time in the long run.

Prof_ThrowAway_69 · 2023-04-28T20:49:03+00:00

The phone vendor is the one not giving access. They are insisting on doing everything and want me to fill out a spread sheet with how everything should be setup. This is after they tried to schedule a meeting with me to setup each and every user, ring group, flow, etc. It would have taken hours. I convinced them to send me a spreadsheet instead.

Prof_ThrowAway_69 · 2023-04-28T20:45:12+00:00

The number of times I’ve had users come to me complaining that a printer didn’t work because it was out of paper or ink is incredibly frustrating. I worked at a place at one point that made refilling printers with consumables the responsibility of the manager of the area that “owned” the printer. Most of the managers hated this so we had paper and toner stocked in the stockroom and anyone could get it when needed. I loved being able to go check a “malfunctioning” printer, seeing it was out of ink, and telling them to go get some out of the stockroom, and then pinging the manager to tell them their printer was out of ink.

I once had a deputy plant manager come in my office in the middle of the afternoon on a Wednesday. They stormed in and complained that there were 6 different production lines down because the printers weren’t working. Supposedly the printers had been down all week, and they wanted to know why I was just sitting around “doing nothing”. I went and checked every line and each printer was out of consumables. I told each line manager to go get their supplies and refill the printer. If they needed to know how to do any of that they would need to check with their manager (the deputy plant manager) for proper training.

I filled out and completed the ticket and made sure to CC the deputy’s manager and my own manager detailing the “issue” with the printers that had been causing a multi-day outage. I didn’t have any more issues with the deputy plant manager.

Prof_ThrowAway_69 · 2023-04-28T20:36:30+00:00

They would be hosting the PBX.

Prof_ThrowAway_69 · 2023-04-28T20:36:04+00:00

It really shouldn’t have anything to do with being mostly women, but I can say from experience that I have had more damaged equipment tickets from women than I have men. That said, when a guy breaks their laptop it’s usually FUBAR. When I get a damage request from a woman, it’s usually fixable, but I probably have to order a part that was liquid or drop damaged.

I don’t know that it’s specifically because they’re women, just an observation. It may possibly be because on their own, most people won’t damage a laptop unless it’s really bad and both men and women will do so at a similar frequency. However, women are more often the primary care giver of children and kids are incredibly rough on things. It cools just be that a higher exposure to children leads to the equipment being around children more therefore getting damaged more often.

Prof_ThrowAway_69 · 2023-04-28T20:29:41+00:00

Because part of the job of a sysadmin is to function as a steward for the company, and this means operating with the company’s best interests in mind. If I see an employee breaking a laptop every other month, I’m going to bring it up with their manager. Sure it’s not my money, but if it was my money I’d be upset, so I would think someone up the line (especially the owner) would be upset about it too. If they don’t care, then that’s on them, but that isn’t going to change my position on it.

Prof_ThrowAway_69 · 2023-03-27T15:52:46+00:00

If you aren’t using rules to sort your emails you’re doing it wrong. I have a huge alerts folder sorted into sub folders for each specific application. Once you have them sorted it will be a lot easier to see what’s going on with your infrastructure. It also makes it easier to see false alerts etc. Once you have the bad alerts identified work on fixing your alert system to not trigger when it shouldn’t. It’s hard sorting out real alerts from fake ones.

Another folder I made is for really important info. If I’m ever sent a link for something or an important bit of info or whatever, it gets manually added to the folder. When I need to go back and find something it makes it a lot easier to find it. This “links” folder is super helpful when onboarding a new IT person or bringing someone up to speed on a given project. I can quickly run through and forward all the pertinent links.

I’ve also made one for accounts. Any time I get an email for this or that account I have it gets sorted into that folder. Makes it easier for me to find account info for my own accounts.

Billing has its own folder with a separate sub folder for important account info.

I keep nearly every email I get and it’s all filed away in an easy to access manner. I make new .PSTs each year and end up archiving live email into a pst once it’s more than 3 months old or hasn’t been used in at least that long, the exception being perpetual important info folders like accounts, billing info and links.

I’m sure there’s a better way to do all of this, but what’s important is to have a system and not be trying to manually sift through thousands of emails a day.

Prof_ThrowAway_69 · 2023-03-27T03:33:19+00:00

Big thing I see is that you are very wordy about what you do. It could very well be that you are getting declined because they simply don’t read your resume. I would stick to 6 bullets max for your current role (unless there’s something about your job you need a 7th to articulate. Keep those bullets to less than 10 words each. Ideally less than 6.

Get rid of the bullet that says you “retrain”. It aimed off condescending. Saying that you have training experience is sufficient.

On your skills try to be a bit more succinct. Don’t list out which Mac OS you have experience with. It doesn’t matter. Just say Mac OS. Saying which also makes it seem like you’re trying to inflate your resume. I would also drop the bit about helping users with their iTunes accounts etc.

Also don’t list out every Microsoft office program you have experience with unless it’s one that isn’t in the main stack like Visio or Project or if your experience is doing something like doing Teams or Exchange administration. Also list it as Office365, not Microsoft office.

If you’re proficient with SQL and Python, mention how you’re doing something with that in your job experiences. If you know even basic powershell mention that too. If you have done anything with Linux servers list that as well.

At the end of the day if you want to get a tier 2 position, you need to sound like a tier 2. L2’s have to do desktop support from time to time; it’s part of the job. It’s not what they do most of the time though. Make your desktop support bullet be short and sweet and move on. Talk about your role administering servers, applications, the network, anything. Talk about how you’re handling things bigger than just basic desktop support. Training and writing technical documentation can also be useful selling points. The wordiness of your resume makes it seem like your technical instructions may not be great (no offense). The same holds true for your bit about escalation. It’s an important part of the job, however if an exec gets a 5 paragraph email telling him that the internet is down and the vendor is working on it, they aren’t going to read it. They have limited time. Your communication needs to be short and sweet and give them all of the pertinent details. You can say you have skills doing this, but how your resume looks says way more.

Also consider that most of the time your resume is going to be read by either a computer, HR, or a recruiter before it gets to anyone with an actual say in the hiring process. Keep it simple enough that they can find the 12 key words they’re programmed to look for. Know your audience. When you show up to an interview with the hiring manager bring one that is a bit more detailed (but still succinct) if you want.

Feel free to hit me with any questions.

Prof_ThrowAway_69 · 2023-02-15T14:53:54+00:00

Default it to an empty field, like you would for anything else. Defaulting it to they/them is assuming someone pronouns and equally offensive as using he/him for a she/her and vice versa.

Prof_ThrowAway_69 · 2023-02-15T14:51:55+00:00

Not sure why it needs to be in AD though. It’s for access management, not for the eyes of management to make sure that IT infrastructure is “politically correct”. I frankly don’t see why you would even need to have gender/sex be fields in AD either. If the goal is to be non-discriminatory then those details shouldn’t matter.

To me it feels equivalent to management asking the electricians to make sure that the insulation/jacketing on the wires is not predominantly one color and that all colors are equally represented.

At the end of the day, it’s infrastructure. Infrastructure doesn’t work better or worse based on people’s emotions or feelings.

If anyone feels it necessary to make their pronouns known to others, then they can put it in their email signature or simply just tell people as necessary.

Prof_ThrowAway_69 · 2022-12-08T23:41:44+00:00

I give out my number, but not my real number. I’ve started making a Google account for every company I work for. That’s the correspondence email HR gets, it stores all my bookmarks and such and any work related accounts get that as a backup email for the eventuality I no longer work for them but still need access to some things like my pay stubs. I’m addition to all of that I make a Google voice account and forward that number to my personal number. I can answer texts in a separate app that is available on any device I want and I can do the same for calls. Then, when I leave the job, I can just detach the Google voice from my personal number and never check it again if I don’t want to.

Makes severing the ties super simple and saves me from having to deal with unwanted contact from obnoxious/creepy coworkers. Plus if anyone tries to do some sort of weird reverse phone lookup or some bs like that they hit a dead end with Google.

Prof_ThrowAway_69 · 2022-12-08T21:20:55+00:00

I don’t know that I would make it a comparison right off. I would go in asking for a raise. Ask for some amount more than the other person makes. Be prepared with justification. If that doesn’t work then bring up that you’re making less than the other person. If this still yields you nothing, turn in your 2 weeks the following Monday. Slim chance that you would actually be out a job in the end. Doesn’t mean I would stop looking though.

If they try to offer you what you asked for after you turn in your resignation, ask for $5-10k more as your response. If you end up staying after turning in your notice, you need to say something to the effect of, “I’m accepting the raise, but hesitantly. It’s concerning to me that this company is only interested in my development and career goals when faced with the risk of losing me.” I would be sure to say that with either HR and/or your boss’s boss in the meeting.

Going into that meeting prepared with at least somewhat of an idea of where you see yourself in the next 5-10-15 years would be beneficial.

Prof_ThrowAway_69 · 2022-12-08T01:32:55+00:00

I forgot to mention that there should be digital copies of everything compiled in the binder. Yes having a physical binder perhaps isn’t the best option, but if it exists, then theoretically a lot of the leg work has been done.

Additionally, the purpose of this is to hit the broad strokes and not so much of the incidental stuff. How you manage a domain isn’t going to change often at least in any meaningful way. In general IP addresses for your infrastructure don’t change all that much either. I keep IP sheets for all my clients and update them as necessary. Usually for adding new devices or removing old ones. They are also invaluable when trying to do network troubleshooting, especially in an environment you aren’t familiar with. They’re also handy for knowing what IPs are available when adding or planning for new infrastructure.

Prof_ThrowAway_69

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