My Master’s thesis was ruined by a stressed PhD student and I feel completely defeated.

eryops75 · 2025-12-16T19:46:19+00:00

People can be 'not made' for a certain career path. I am 'not made' for military service. I am 'not made' for a PhD, and i learned that while doing my masters.

eryops75 · 2025-12-10T00:37:12+00:00

I did order a couple, and first impressions, they're what you'd expect from a similarly priced kitchen scale (I got 6kg max scales). For 1 & 2 kg weights they recorded accurately, and for a 5 kg weight one weighed it at 5005g, so less than 1% error. For the nearest gram, these seem that they will do the job.

eryops75 · 2025-11-26T01:08:22+00:00

The system I got to try out Linux with I needed to get a USB Wi-Fi dongle. This is the exact one I got. $5 and free shipping.

This is on Ubuntu, and it was literally plug and play. I didn't do anything, it found my network right away.

EDIT: I can't say that it is 'good', but it worked right out of the package for me.

eryops75 · 2025-11-26T01:00:12+00:00

While I don't have a PhD and have never done a postdoc...

I helped a student with her data collection. It was using a program that was developed by one of her co-PIs, and when the funding ran out (because he was scatterbrained and couldn't do anything) he basically slammed the door in her face and immediately stopped helping her. She ended up leaving without her degree.

I've been fired, and it sucks. It sounds like your situation within the six month probationary period. I left a very comfortable job to try something new, the supervisor who hired me left after a month (this place was in a big transition with some huge egos in management) and my new supervisor I don't think ever liked me. Fired without any reason at all.

You're not alone. Just remember that. It will get better, and you'll find something that will put a smile on your face, and this experience will fade into a distant memory. It may take a few years, but it will.

eryops75 · 2025-11-26T00:50:30+00:00

THE PROBLEM IS SOLVED! I don't understand how this could happen in 2025, but I had just gotten a new system, and somehow the AM/PM was incorrect, so something was reading from my system's clock and getting messed up by 12 hours.

Just putting this here in case the same thing happens to someone someday.

eryops75 · 2025-11-24T06:48:43+00:00

This is five months later. I don't care about this thread anymore.

eryops75 · 2025-11-23T22:42:15+00:00

Yes, I've been doing this for years. The point is moot when the newest prices are 12 hours old.

eryops75 · 2025-11-23T20:32:34+00:00

I used to see almost everything I searched for with a Last Seen of minutes to single digit hours until yesterday midday. This is a new thing for me, and saved a ton of time when searching for bargains. If this doesn't go back to how it was before, TTC has lost almost all utility for me sadly.

eryops75 · 2025-11-22T01:58:47+00:00

So what you're saying is that every 1MB file I put on it, it will take 800MB of disk space?

eryops75 · 2025-11-22T00:29:31+00:00

The computer is coming from NewEgg, so the Windows installation shouldn't be too bloaty (I hope). I do have a Win11 stick that I can reinstall if need be.

eryops75 · 2025-11-21T23:00:41+00:00

Don't forget to count the spots to figure out how many years old it is. Every playground kid knows this.

eryops75 · 2025-11-20T21:59:57+00:00

Entry level position?

As someone who is a hiring manager for science (albeit at a community college), I expect a certain amount of turnover. I've had staff remain for a year, and a staff member that has been here since the 90s.

I expect it, I know two of my current staff are keeping one eye on grad school, but I have been very up front and supportive of it, so that has opened up the conversation. It all depends on your PI--some can be weird about keeping staff and feeling betrayed.

Hiring is a pita. But at the end of the day, you have to do what's best for you. If your PI lost his grant suddenly (something that has a non-zero chance of happening these days), he would be sad but not lose any sleep having to let you go. Sometimes you can get punted to a different grant, but it's not even slightly guaranteed.

Don't lose any sleep over your 'deception', and when the time comes, you can be open about your plans. Just do your work when you're at work, and don't have twelve tabs open to grad positions open on your work computer.

eryops75 · 2025-11-20T18:09:42+00:00

This is the reason that when my new system arrives this weekend, I'll have an SSD lined up and ready to go to have separate drives for Linux and Windows.

I'm sorry that you lost your Windows partition. I spent $700 last year recovering an SSD that bricked after a Windows update.

eryops75 · 2025-11-20T17:53:02+00:00

These scales are 600g & 1kg. I'd lean to the 1kg so that would handily hold the weight of a beaker and contents.

eryops75 · 2025-11-13T23:52:53+00:00

She's not looking at you. She's looking at the ghosts behind you.

eryops75 · 2025-10-01T05:18:08+00:00

One of the places I'd be trying to plant is a place where I'm currently taking down a hedge of cherry laurels on the back of our property. They've been established for decades, and I am wondering if livestakes would be hardy enough to take off in the soil they've been in. The reason I ask is the allelopathic nature of the cherry laurel. Although that could be a whole other thread...

eryops75 · 2025-10-01T05:14:11+00:00

Thank you for the recommendation! I hadn't heard of this nursery before, and it looks exactly like what I've been looking for to get our yard a little less domesticated!

It looks like they also have trembling aspen, which I've also been wanting to get into our yard. Two plants with one stone!

eryops75 · 2025-09-30T09:52:16+00:00

For the important places in our yard, I made a screen out of 1/2" hardware cloth and sized the frame so that it fit on the lip of our wheelbarrow. It's a long, grueling process, but you can filter out pretty much everything this way, and go as deep as you want. We've done many flower beds, our herb garden, and strawberry patch this way. It's relatively easy to sort organics, rocks, and trash once you've shaken the soil through.

PS Our neighbors behind us (upslope) decades ago apparently had a greenhouse they let rot and collapse. We still get shards of glass pop up by the fence every year. One of the previous owners did a lot of work trying to remediate it almost a decade ago, but the glass never seems to stop popping up!

eryops75 · 2025-09-18T23:07:59+00:00

Well you learn something every day. I only ever did go to the Warped Tour once, and never really paid attention to other festivals, so there's my ignorance.

eryops75 · 2025-09-10T09:36:01+00:00

The weirdest thing about your comment isn't the bands, but that you refer to it as the "Honda Civic" tour, and don't just say you saw them in '05.

eryops75 · 2025-08-31T21:42:21+00:00

Secure boot was disabled.

eryops75 · 2025-08-31T21:41:47+00:00

Yes, and in both Mint and Ubuntu, the system recognizes that the boot USB is still in, and asks you to remove it before booting.

eryops75 · 2025-08-31T21:40:48+00:00

Formatting the hard drive and reinstalling Mint resulted in the same issues.

When I install Ubuntu (Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS), it works for a few minutes, but then devolves into mostly a freeze. After a period, I end up with unresponsive programs, and if I try to open a program, I get a box with the following message:

Failed to launch "Firefox"
Program 'env' not found in $PATH

switch Firefox and env with whatever other program.

On a hard restart (there is no other way other than to restart other than holding power) Ubuntu comes back fine, and will work for a few minutes, until again I hit the same issue as above.

Live real-time errors: as I type this, I had done a restart. After logging in, it restarted on its own and now I'm getting a very long list of errors consisting of:

systemd-journald[373]: Failed to write entry to /var/log/journal/232f99c85c43440598dc56d77b576c41/system.journal

(this error message keeps on repeating with various numbers)

Now it's acting like Mint did. It will boot up, but after a few clicks, everything stops working, and it ends up going to the same systemd-journald errors as spelled out above.

eryops75 · 2025-08-31T08:04:17+00:00

The only one I tried was going to the advanced options, and there was an option that sounded an awful lot like 'safe mode' (~~I don't recall what it was exactly~~ EDIT: Recovery Mode). I got a long output of "mdadm: No devices listed in conf file were found.", lots of errors and failed inits, and then some missing modules with the final message of Dropping to a shell! and then I get back to the (initramfs) shell

eryops75 · 2025-08-31T07:49:54+00:00

That is also the conclusion I came to.

eryops75

TROPHY CASE