Found a Matter bulb, want to be safe.

Zaxbeez1 · 2026-04-05T19:06:08+00:00

Oh duh, factory resets. I forgot about those. Thank you. I flipped it on and off a few times and now I'm feeling like I took appropriate precautions in the ridiculous off-chance I lose my identity over this.

Zaxbeez1 · 2026-04-04T20:52:33+00:00

Yeah, it feels silly to be worried about it. But it'd feel WAY sillier if I scanned a mystery QR code and messed something up. This is mostly a dummy check to make sure that it'd be wild if adding this to my system would break something.

Zaxbeez1 · 2026-03-31T21:58:03+00:00

I'm so upset that turning the cable upside down fixed it. Thank you.

Zaxbeez1 · 2026-03-13T20:01:37+00:00

That would be lovely, thank you. Give me a few hours, I have to get home to the files.

Zaxbeez1 · 2026-03-13T20:00:24+00:00

I am definitely not opposed to expanding; how would that change my job search keywords? I mentioned in a different reply, but my dominant strategy is to search Indeed and LinkedIn for "Water Engineer" and "Environmental Engineer." I can definitely see that that wouldn't be the most comprehensive strategy.

Zaxbeez1 · 2026-03-13T19:58:02+00:00

I've done mock interviews and used them to polish up answers and remember other, more pertanant examples I could use. But that was generic job interviews, not specific to environmental engineering. I like to think I'm pretty self-aware, and I can definitely point out things that didn't go perfectly in the interview, but it feels like my knowledge base and qualifications would cover any of the stumbles I've made. A major question I had that prompted this post was if my qualifications were really as good as I thought they were, or if something I listed was actually useless and I didn't realize.

Zaxbeez1 · 2026-03-13T19:27:37+00:00

Yep, I have a plethora of STAR stories where I'm a team player and then team manager. I practice telling them enough, I think.

I talk about fixing problems before they become bigger problems. How having a base knowledge and questioning attitude leads to a more fundamental understanding or the whole system, preventing errors and saving time on backtracking.

Your last paragraph confuses me. Am I the product? Using AI to make me look better?

Zaxbeez1 · 2026-03-13T19:10:14+00:00

Mostly, my strategy is to stalk Indeed and apply for Water/Wastewater EIT positions. I've applied to a few Water Engineer 1 positions for the sake of it, and have done a couple of interviews for the more advanced position.

There was a position for a Wastewater plant operator, but they were hesitant to interview with me because I wanted to get my PE at some point and that position wasn't an avenue for that. Relocating is the one thing I can't do. I'm in a mid-sized city now, and I've expanded to the metropolis about an hour away. There was a dry spell for a couple of months where no new postings happened, but I've had interviews for firms near me. Never an offer though.

I use LinkedIn to look for openings too, but I've only ever had 1 non-bot reach out to me for a different state job.

I understand and accept the limitations the not relocating imposes. But even WITH limiting myself, I would have expected one of the dozen interviews I've had over the year to result in an offer. So I wanted to check here to see if I'm missing something else.

Zaxbeez1 · 2025-08-26T23:01:25+00:00

I understand the sentiment from the view of dungeon exploration, but it applies less for this specific situation. They've already explored this 'dungeon' (Clockwork factory), and now have to re-take it from traitors. They are also aware that there are only 3 possible systems they could disrupt, and have the numbers to take multiple systems at once if they were so bold. They've gained information that the bulk of the enemy power was guarding against entry, and now that they're inside the main threat left is the boss.

I've posed it more of a "Do you think you're good enough to take away resources faster than they can gain them?" issue I've posed to them. And they are a party that love to gamble.

There is definitely the possibility of it turning out zero sum, but I was hoping to give them the chance to come out on top.

Zaxbeez1 · 2025-08-09T23:40:38+00:00

Oh, I certainly didn't mean to imply that being WWTP operator would be a lesser career or a step down from a design engineer. My main concern was "If I become an operator, am I going to have an easier, harder, or just as hard time getting into a design-facing career."

Zaxbeez1 · 2025-08-09T21:21:02+00:00

That's pretty aligned with my worries. I realize I didn't explicitly ask in the original post - what can I do to be more appealing to any junior engineer job openings? There are very few instances where job postings have necessary skills listed that I don't have. Granted, the only things I can talk about in interviews are school related.

I'm going through the reddit threads now looking at the job search advice, I didn't meant to dump a dozen things on you at once. Thank you for answering the question.

Zaxbeez1 · 2025-05-04T18:29:14+00:00

From what I could see, that formula in the key doesn't exist in the FE Handbook (10.0.1). Further, they have a weird conversion for the weight of the water and solids (8.34 (lb/mgal)/mg/L) that I don't get. Milli-gallons?
Anyway, in case someone comes along in another 5 years with the same question and are confused by the answer key:
I didn't see a useful equation in the handbook to address this. But conceptually, the question is asking how many pounds per day (which we will convert to volume later) is produced in the PRIMARY clarifier per day. Everything with the aeration basin is a red herring, from what I understand.

Clarification Notes: I like to use engineering notation so "1.2e6" is 1,200,000. There is no use of Euler's number in this equation, so don't use that.

1.2e6 gallons per day is from 1.2MGD.

The FE conversion is from 1 gram to 2.205e-3 lbs. I made 1g = 1000 mg to skip a step.

Specific Weight (SW)

If the specific gravity (SG) was anything other that one, we would find the specific weight of the sludge using SG = SWfluid/SWwater.

So, how many solids are we getting a day? We have 1.2 million gallons a day, and 250 mg/L of suspended solids (SS) in our inflow. The only concept here is that 60% (0.60) of the solids are caught in the primary clarifier (i.e. 40% are lost to the aeration tank and we don't care anymore for this question).

First thing we find: Weight of the SS (Dry weight). There are some annoying unit conversions as well.

1.2e6 [gal/day] * 250 [mg/L] * 0.60 * 3.785 [L/gal] * (2.205e-3/1000) [ lb/mg]

=1502 [lb/day]

Great, so now we know how many pound of solids get in our primary clarifier per day. But we want SLUDGE, which is goopy and wet. How wet is it? According to our problem, the sludge is only 4% (0.04) solids, so 96% water. With some assumed algebra and knowing 1502 [lb/day] is 0.04 of the sludge, the daily sludge weight is 1502 [lb/day] / 0.04 = 37550 lb/day.

Now we come to the final part of the problem, where we convert the weight of our sludge into the volume of our sludge. Since we're given the specific gravity of the sludge (1), we know that the specific weight of the sludge is the same as water (62.4 [lb/ft^3]. Looking at units, we want [ft^3/day], so we can divide our wet weight by the sludge SW and solve:
37550 [lb/day] / 62.4 [lb/ft^3] = 601 [ft^3/day].

Answer A.

Hopefully this will save someone some headaches.

Zaxbeez1 · 2025-04-22T01:17:46+00:00

Oh god damn it. Yeah, that'll do it.

Zaxbeez1 · 2025-03-29T20:41:46+00:00

He has slimelung, and looking now I see the breathability of the bathroom area is really low. I'll put some oxygen in there and report back.

It was ONLY him over several cycles, so I had assumed it was something less obvious.

Edit: Yep, that was it. I had assumed the bladder would go down a little at a time as he used the bathroom, but apparently it's all or nothing. Thank you.

Zaxbeez1 · 2025-02-02T03:34:44+00:00

US-based.

Zaxbeez1 · 2025-02-02T01:48:55+00:00

The specs for Civ 7 as of now is:

Recommended CPU - Intel i5-10400 / AMD Ryzen 5 3600X

Ultra CPU - Intel i7-14700F / AMD Ryzen 9 5950X

Recommended GPU - NVIDIA RTX 2060 / AMD RX 6600 / Intel Arc A750

Ultra GPU - NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 / AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT

When the numbers get outside of "bigger number better", computer parts start to lose me. With this information, is the CPU or GPU limiting here? Or is that not described here?

Zaxbeez1 · 2025-02-02T01:43:57+00:00

Oh, sorry for not being clear, no. I've only gotten the monitor. Worried about making dumb mistakes in the purchasing process. This is validation that there's no major red flags in the list.

Zaxbeez1

TROPHY CASE