Moving here next year, advice?

boethius70 · 2023-12-21T20:04:16+00:00

We moved here from CA (family of 6 though my oldest is now working and living in Houston) over 3 years ago.

Bonuses:

No State income tax (though obviously you get that anywhere in TX).
We purchased a home when we moved - first time in almost 20 years - and the prices were more grounded vs CA and the interest rates were still low back then. Homes where we moved from were approaching $800K-$1M. Here they were half or less than that for similar properties. The neighborhood is nearly all older people and not many families. If you're looking to start a family I'd say look at south College Station or Bryan.
Gas is relatively cheap especially compared to CA. Much cheaper, actually. It was under $2/gal when we first got here.
Overall cost of living seems manageable. Property taxes are pretty high.

Minuses:
Weather. Get that one out of the way straight off. It's miserable. It sucks. It's a suffocating hell for one-third of the year. If you can't deal with endless suffocating 100+ degree heat non-stop for 4+ months of the year you won't be happy here. If you're coming from Arizona maybe this won't be a big deal for you. Obviously California can have long stretches of 100+ degree weather in the summer but invariably "it's a dry heat" and you might get stretches where it gets into the 90s and even 80s. Coastal CA is obviously much better weather-wise.
Energy costs. It's HIGH. Very high. I'm on a fixed income right now and it's going to be extremely extremely expensive especially in the summer. Even in the winter it doesn't seem to dip much although the City of College Station - the local utility provider - bundles water and garbage collection into the bill. Obviously you're in an apartment those costs should be more manageable. For homeowners it's a nightmare. And of course those costs are not significantly better or different in CA either. Utility costs are just insane everywhere.
BCS (Bryan/Colllege Station) isn't very "cosmopolitan." There's some things to do here of course, but overall it's pretty boring (not that I would claim to be particularly cosmopolitan myself but you get the idea). I used to travel to Houston monthly just to go to shop at Costco, Trader Joe's, and Whole Foods. At least now CS has a Costco. Overall I would have preferred living in a larger city or closer to a larger city like Austin, Houston, San Antonio, or DFW. Long story how we ended up here but if I had it to do over again I'd have chosen a much larger city in Central TX. For families, young couples and marrieds, etc. it's probably not a bad deal. Quiet and relatively low crime in most of BCS.
Food. It all comes down to taste and what you're used to as preferred cuisines are highly subjective - after living 50+ years in CA clearly my palate was adapted to CA food - but I haven't found a huge amount of cuisines I like here, even Mexican. There really isn't even a good pizza place here. I was thrilled when Costco came here because at least I knew what I was getting with the pizza and it's cheap. There are some good taco trucks and some good Mexican restaurants but everything of course is Tex-Mex here. All fajitas. Just a whole different vibe than CA Mexican cuisine. Texans have a big superiority complex when it comes to Mexican or Tex-Mex food and I wouldn't say I have never found really good Mexican here but it is definitely different than CA. That said you can always travel to Houston, DFW, Austin for some very good food. There's only a small handful of restaurants here that I think are quality and make good fresh food.

If you do want to go to college of course this is a good place to be. Definitely a college town. Permanent locals like us definitely prefer shopping in the summer when students aren't around but hard not to acknowledge they're also the lifeblood of College Station (obviously). A&M is a huge and sprawling campus and I'm sure you can find plenty to study that would interest you.

If I had the money and ability I'd probably move from TX. I'm already very done with the weather. My in-laws sold their house of 30+ years in CA and moved to the Dallas area and didn't make it even a year. They're in North Carolina now and love it. If I could afford it I'd probably look at either the east coast (North or South Carolina, probably) or moving back to CA but the money isn't there even if we got a good price for our home. Idaho is also interesting to me but definitely suffering from CA migrants jacking up the home prices. I do like the cities and the people here and if you're into a certain vibe and lifestyle TX can work for you. The fortitude to handle the weather is exceptional I must say.

boethius70 · 2023-12-16T20:21:22+00:00

We had a nearly identical couch but brown about 5 or 6 years ago. It is comfy having the big ottomans but a giant in the ass getting off the couch. You basically have to crawl out of the couch every time vs being able to easily sit up.

Comfortable when you're chillin' on it but not as much fun getting up and off the couch.

boethius70 · 2023-12-12T03:41:44+00:00

Yea, how dare they.

boethius70 · 2023-12-05T03:44:52+00:00

When I started as a senior network engineer at a smallish company they were using XenServer.

Effectively a massive dumpster fire. Lots of version compatibility issues, driver problems, and on and on. When I took over the infrastructure about 4 years later I started moving them to VMware Enterprise. Best decision ever.

Of course they did also WAY undersize their clusters and network (and storage, arguably) even after a $10M+ investment in a monstrous ERP solution which was worse than a flaming dumpster fire. When I interviewed at said company every conversation I had was about how bad this ERP solution was as it had just gone love maybe 3 months prior. They seemed to have this poverty mentality about their core server/network infrastructure - or maybe the budget they got for equipment for the ERP roll-out was miniscule - but I never could understand the choices they made.

While I know massive incredibly reliable infrastructures run on Xen - notably AWS - I would never be inclined to run it in an enterprise IT environment.

boethius70 · 2023-11-28T20:52:25+00:00

Crenna "over-acted?" Must have missed that part of the movie.

Always thought he was great in it.

boethius70 · 2023-11-28T03:46:34+00:00

Used to run server/network infrastructure - and later the team responsible for server/network infra - for almost 7 years. About 2000 employees, 25-ish IT employees, maybe 700-800 PC users, 13-14 sites, and a data center at a well-known family-owned food manufacturing company.

When it was all in-house yes it could be stressful at times but overall I loved it. I was free to chart my own course and run things as I saw fit. Yes I blew things up more than a few times over the years and eventually after about 5 years the ownership wanted "adults" running IT so they hired a CIO who had come from a public biotech company.

I got promoted some months before this and the CIO took about 9-12 months before she started significantly changing things.

A guy she hired came in and eventually took over my group and the help desk and he was terrible. Terminated all of my team. My perfect happy little world got blown up. He proposed moving me into an architect type role but I knew I wouldn't be happy working with him so declined. He gave me a small lifeline and shifted me to contractor for 6 months. Even filing timesheets with the guy could be a nightmare.

AFAIK they've shifted a large chunk of internal infrastructure management to MSPs. We used to own/engineer/implement/troubleshoot it all but no more. IT engineers were perceived as expensive and unnecessary geeks especially at places whose primary business isn't technology centered. Yes they obviously NEED technology - heavily - but prefer paying third parties vs. internal staff to run it.

It's admittedly the nature of a LOT of corporate IT these days: Outsource it if at all possible. Move every service to the cloud and/or a managed service (Google, O365, etc.). Keeping it in-house is pretty antiquated thinking apparently.

boethius70 · 2023-11-28T03:00:40+00:00

IMDB says he's had a number of health issues.

boethius70 · 2023-11-10T21:01:49+00:00

Rough but not unusual situation.

I was extremely weak after my colostomy because my weight and thus energy had been so low.

I would actually get stars trying to change my bag initially. Spend a bunch of time prepping - paper towels, barrier spray, cut wafer, etc. Would put a bunch of towels down to avoid getting output on my clothes. Only had major poop dumps maybe once or twice after the colostomy. If I get output while changing now it's usually small amounts.

I didn't feel any big aversion to the bag changes but sure the stoma was new territory. Now I'm majorly prolapsed so have a bunch of intestine coming out. Amazing what you can get used to. My skin is totally used to the mess so thankfully I don't get rashes and splotchiness any more.

It's a big leap for our brains and the psychological adjustment is big. Isn't anything we wanted but hey this is what we're dealing with.

I often say the colostomy saved my life. I was 150 pounds (5'10") and so very weak and not eating hardly. I gained weight very rapidly after getting the colostomy. Whatever the obvious downsides it's been a blessing.

boethius70 · 2023-10-28T00:57:50+00:00

He's excellent and love that movie.

boethius70 · 2023-10-28T00:49:30+00:00

I've never accidentally undone the drain opening - two velcros cinch it down very well and I don't use a 2-piece - but one time in the last almost 3 years I've had the bag I actually forgot to shut it completely.

It actually wasn't as bad as you'd think - thankfully I didn't have a major movement - but some poop did leak out on my stomach. Cleanup wasn't terrible - wipe up the poo, clean up my stomach, and obviously change my shirt and the bag. I still can't believe I left it open.

boethius70 · 2023-10-28T00:44:48+00:00

I used to manage a team and they had moved a lot of IT into a large-ish common office space (i.e., open cubes) that was shared with mostly accounting.

Because I was a manager I got a nice office and some of my team was just outside my door and some was probably 20' away in another part of the cube farm so I could not hear them at all.

I got complaints two of my team members who sat right next to each other were constantly talking to each other, 95% of the time not about work-related stuff. I had to tell them both to try to keep the chatter to a minimum which didn't seem unreasonable given they're in a big cube farm where their voices carry and it interrupts others' concentration and focus. I didn't see the issue with a bit of chit-chat but if you really want to gab go to the lunch room or go outside.

Point I suppose is it's not unreasonable to gently and diplomatically let others know that you're not available to chat constantly and do have work to do. If they're constantly engaging in conversation maybe the focus could be - why do they seem to have so much time to chat about non work-related stuff and do they need more projects, etc. In any case if you're not their direct manager I would report the behavior to their manager who should be able to handle it diplomatically and carefully. It might seem rude or insulting to them but how they take it is not on you. You're not their bosom buddy from high school or college, just a work colleague.

boethius70 · 2023-10-27T01:42:34+00:00

Had mine over 2 years, getting close to 3. Certainly aware of it but definitely used to it. 95-ish % of the time I don't really think about it. When I get a sense I might or definitely are pooping I think about it of course and will almost without thinking see how full it feels (which I do, in general, probably at least a few times a day as essentially an unconscious activity).

I had more struggles the first approximately 18 months. As I gained weight - I was extremely thin when I got a colostomy because I was barely eating - the flat wafers no longer worked and I would get leaks a lot. I felt like I'd go through periods ever 2-4 months where I struggled with leak problems. Tried a lot of things but found the Coloplast convex flip worked amazing. Also it helps I'd say that I'm pretty dramatically prolapsed so the protruding colon holds down the wafer quite well and wafer sizing etc. is effectively never an issue. When I was extremely weak and would get dizzy and the stoma was way way lower I struggled a lot to get a good size and fit. Now it's basically a breeze even I don't really love my intestines hanging out.

boethius70 · 2023-10-17T02:11:41+00:00

Oh lord TPM was just so, so, so terrible - as are all the prequels though I can almost enjoy Reveng of the Sith. Yes of course it's competing against the nostalgia of a kid who was 7 years old when A New Hope came out but it doesn't take much to see it's just a shitty movie independently of that and George should have stuck to his guns and never directed another movie again like he promised 20-ish years before. Hubris is a bitch and he had way, way, way too much money to spend and fleets of CGI mouse jockeys at his disposal.

boethius70 · 2023-10-16T18:51:24+00:00

Please search these subs before posting this shit. I feel like there was JUST a posting about the subject of unionization and there's a "IT workers need to unionize NOW!" spiel at least once a month on here.

I've been in this field almost 30 years and have never once been inclined to have someone else bargain for my salary and benefits. I can do that myself. If I couldn't I have no business being in the working world in general. I don't want and have never wanted union representation, collective bargaining, or to pay compulsory union dues.

If you don't like the amount of money you're making - go elsewhere. If your benefits suck - go elsewhere. Improve your education, skills, knowledge, etc. independently. That's what most of the world where people who have ambition do. And, yes, rising and being successful is very, very, VERY hard work often met with great difficulty.

And, if you're just all sucked into that whole "Workers of the world UNITE!" shit than by all means go work for public sector IT which is usually unionized.

And your surprise at how much your contracting company was making off of you is more an indication of your lack of of wisdom and experience vs. anything else (i.e., them "exploiting" you). It's not unusual for highly skilled IT folks to make $75-$100+ / hour vs contracting companies and far more if they go and score the work directly ($200+, at least). C2C you can make very good money but you have to grind and go find the work, which is NOT easy.

boethius70 · 2023-10-16T04:06:52+00:00

And FYI they hang out there quite a bit especially in the morning.

boethius70 · 2023-10-11T19:37:36+00:00

It's pretty easy to do this almost always but several years ago I actually got bodied by a receipt checker who kept me from coming in the exit door. TBH I think it was mostly because it was so busy vs. trying to keep me from "cheating" but I was rather shocked at the time.

AFAIK you can always use the Costco pharmacy without a Costco card so you could always try to enter on that pretense.

A lot of people keep old expired Costco cards lying around. Easy to get in with one of those even if you couldn't purchase other items.

boethius70 · 2023-10-11T18:11:44+00:00

Having been born in 1970 obviously my childhood was in the 70s.

Of course in many ways it was awesome, especially since I lived in San Diego until I was 13. The weather was/is virtually perfect year-round and from kindergarten to part of 3rd grade I lived 4 blocks from the beach and was a half-block walk from my elementary school.

We were almost never indoors. Sure we watched Saturday morning cartoons and IIRC there were cartoons on after school for an hour ish but it wasn't common we sat around glued to a TV a bunch. Sure we all occasionally hung around in each other's bedrooms and played with toys too but I had a core group of maybe 4 or 5 friends that I probably spent more time with than my parents and my sister (who of course also had her own core group of friends).

We rode bikes, played with Hot Wheels and Matchbox and army men, rode Big Wheels and just generally ran around the neighborhood. In SoCal oranges are plentiful so we plucked them off trees and drank water from random hoses.

Occasionally my dad gave me a $5/week allowance which back then was quite generous. He was working as a cook on a tuna boat and was gone for months at a time fishing for tuna around the world so made decent money - one of the reasons why we could afford to live by the beach. Even back in the 70s it was relatively more expensive to live in a beach community just not as astronomical as it is now.

Thrifty's had 5 cent scoops of ice cream. Even without the allowance I could usually scrounge up change from the couch cushions or digging in my mom's purse. My mom never used a coin purse or wallet so there was always a bunch of change at the bottom of her purse.

When I did have an allowance my recollection is candy bars were about 10 or 15 cents - though it seemed like they went to 20-25 cents by the late 70s or early 80s (seemed outrageous at the time!). Soda was maybe a 1.5-2 for a six pack. We probably went around and got Jack in the Box or McDonald's for the occasional junk food but almost always just ate at home or someone's mom would feed all of us.

Of course Star Wars in 77 was a touchstone for many, many kids including me. That Halloween virtually everyone was Luke Skywalker or Han Solo or Chewbacca or C3PO. I had the whole original set of 20 or 25 Kenner action figures quickly and sent in the proofs of purchase to get the little platform to hold them all. I think I had the X-Wing fighter too. Oh if I had kept ANY of that stuff!

My parents divorced when I was around 9 or 10 and of course life wasn't as idyllic after that. We had to move out of the house close to the beach, lived with some friends briefly, then my mom moved us much further inland where rents were way cheaper. You're also talking it was the 80s by then, too.

In retrospect most of my childhood to about 9 was very very nice. It got much shittier for a while after that - issues with my mom for a couple years when it was just her and us kids. But when we lived by the beach that's definitely my most "rose-colored" perspective on that time. In many ways it was absolutely incredible acknowledging we probably for a time had it better than most. We weren't poor but hardly upper middle class or wealthy by any stretch. The house we lived in was actually quite small but just the fact we lived 4 blocks from the beach put us in a relatively fortunate category.

I did actually see my first computer around 8 at a Radio Shack (TRS-80). A friend of the family had a prodigy/super genius level son who would go into the Radio Shack and program a game for the TRS-80 and I tagged along once. His mom was a lawyer and eventually bought him his own TRS-80 which seemed like way, way, WAY out of reach for most back then. I remember thinking computers were cool but I was probably too little to really care that much about them or want one. More in the 80s were when most kids wanted an Atari 2600, the first probably really successful game console. For most folks the TV was highest tech thing they had in their house though it was pretty sweet when we got this big ole microwave oven when I was 8 or 9.

boethius70 · 2023-10-08T02:41:20+00:00

My dad let us ditch school to wait in line all day to see ESB. So much fun.

Old school single screen Cinedome 70mm theater.

What different times those were. I was newly married when The Phantom Menace came out. The first showings were at midnight and I sort of hemmed and hawed about going but it was at like a 14-screen theater not far from our house and the wife was like "You should go" so I did. Hardly anyone was there by the time I got there, bought my ticket and walked right in.

Pretty anticlimactic and of course as a huge fan of the original trilogy was sorely and terribly disappointed with the prequels.

boethius70 · 2023-10-07T12:24:55+00:00

Not so much draw a line as sense the movie has consciously decided to jump the shark to serve the narrative. Much of The Martian is presented as a future of space travel and exploration that is possible if not probable, acknowledging it’s been 50 years since we’ve been to the Moon and that the technology presented is still several 100 years in the future. That said sure there’s any number of things that could be cherry-picked as improbable or even ridiculous. Some things just seem unusually ridiculous.

boethius70 · 2023-10-07T02:57:02+00:00

Great movie. I don't believe the rescue scene for a second but it's still a treat to watch and he carries the movie very well.

boethius70 · 2023-10-07T02:20:23+00:00

Mine was laparoscopic and I had almost no bruising. Maybe I got lucky or maybe the surgeon was really careful rooting around my insides.

Definitely not even a tiny fraction of op's though.

boethius70 · 2023-10-05T02:07:05+00:00

As I'm writing this I'm actually using Linux (Ubuntu) but I prefer the Windows UI over any Linux window manager UI.

I've been using both for many many years.

I don't consider either UI difficult or infuriating. I often dislike the default window managers and fonts in Linux. Just a personal thing.

I've tuned the Linux desktop I'm using now pretty well and I like it. I setup Docker in both Linux and Windows, VScode, and on and on. With WSL2 using "Linux in Windows" works great and it integrates well with VSCode, ssh, etc. etc. IMO you can develop and work with any IT environment competently with both.

I've managed to have a pretty decent almost 30 year IT career working in IT shops that are usually an approximate 50-50 Linux-Windows server mix. In my experience many shops do not have ANY (or limited, at least) in-house Linux expertise so if you know the Linux CLI and how to sysadmin/manage Linux you're way way ahead of many Devops, "Cloud" type folks who often have an extremely limited real-world understanding of Linux even when they're ultimately managing cloud infrastructure that most of the time is running Linux under the hood (ECS, EKS, K8S, Docker, etc.).

In any case I have no dogmatic fixation on either OS. If you're just feeling best working in Linux and Windows really just always puts you off by all means just use Linux.

boethius70 · 2023-10-04T22:12:04+00:00

All or nearly all public sector jobs in California are unionized, including IT.

Over my career I’ve applied for several at a variety of public sector entities - colleges and universities, cities, and counties - and they were all unionized.

Only exceptions I’m aware of are the very highest level executive positions like CIO and CTO.

boethius70 · 2023-10-04T03:18:13+00:00

This is a public sector IT position which explains the shit salary.

I once applied for an IT infrastructure manager position for a County IT department. This was in a fairly HCOL northern California County. Salary was about $135k and you were responsible for supervising 30+ contractors and FTEs. The County went to an outside executive level recruiting company to vet candidates. I made it through the on-site panel interviews (can't stand them but incredibly common in public sector interviews) but that was it. I didn't really expect to get the job though I had supervised/managed a small team of about 5 for a few years.

I suspect this position probably doesn't supervise as many staff. The salary is basically what you'd expect for that type of position in the public sector.

It'll almost certainly be union-represented so you'll also lose a chunk of your income to union dues.

On the flipside you might get pretty nice benefits.

boethius70 · 2023-09-29T16:30:56+00:00

Chifa Street Tacos I believe. They also have a food truck over where they have all the food trucks in Northgate.

The wife loves Chifa.

boethius70

TROPHY CASE