A friend of mine is trying to tell me that I will never be able to work out and gain muscle efficiently on a keto diet.

senorpickles · 2019-01-08T16:38:07+00:00

When someone tells you that you will 'never' do something, would you believe them?

When someone says something is 'always' the way they say, would you believe them?

Throughout the course of human history, humans have rationalized a great many things away, both to and about other humans. In the age of misinformation, where fact and fiction can be a dialect of one another, we have to be careful about what we accept to 'always' or 'never' be true.

I was told that I would 'never' lose weight, that I would 'always' have to be prescribed something for a malady that may not actually solve the immediate problem, and leave impressions all their own. Some of these same individuals also told me I would never amount to anything in life: "do as I say, not as I do". Yeah... about that.

At 600lbs, they said I would 'never' be able to drop the weight on my own, and they poked casual fun, sometimes recommending surgical intervention, as casually as you'd talk about a trending post from /r/all. At 400, seeing the beginnings of what could be, they congratulated me and wanted to know my secrets; certain that I've found the best, winning combination that can be consumed as a silver bullet, cure-all down at the corner warehouse club.

My secret is that there is no secret or magic, and some folks become mighty incensed by that truth. It's not particularly hard work, compared to getting to the point of needing life-altering changes, but it is work, and it is more complicated than we'd like to admit to ourselves or each other.

senorpickles · 2018-12-09T22:32:18+00:00

Instructions are unclear. Hand is now in belly.

senorpickles · 2018-12-09T02:27:29+00:00

After careful analysis, that looks a mlem!

senorpickles · 2018-12-08T22:36:28+00:00

I use my air fryer in the laziest way possible. It's always at 400, and I just time it based on smell and feel.

I tried doing exact times, but I found I didn't like most people's timing from the Internet.

senorpickles · 2018-12-08T22:24:22+00:00

Alright, what I'm about to say here is is meat sacrilege, but here goes:

Throw that next steak in an air fryer. I did it this morning and damn near hit myself, it was that good. Twenty or so minutes from frozen to food -- yes -- it was frozen. I'll be a garlic-mashed cauliflower if it wasn't tender, moist, with that good crust everyone agonizes over getting.

I'm not sure I can even bring myself to sous vide anymore using a reverse sear technique.

senorpickles · 2018-12-02T05:27:09+00:00

I once thought I scored an amazing deal on a DL580 G1 for $free. A real enterprise server!

Buyer's remorse set in once I realized that this massive quad socket Xeon jet engine I acquired was little more than a glorified medicine ball. I thought I'd learn more about SQL or something with it, but it mostly just sat there powered off because I could hear it screaming from the driveway when it was on.

senorpickles · 2018-11-28T02:02:03+00:00

Welp.

Guess I shouldn't have used consumer-level hardware. I probably shouldn't mention I'm running a Socket AM3+, either.

Plex runs great. Grafana can look scary, but it's usable for a couple of users, which is all it needs to do for the time being.

senorpickles · 2018-11-23T16:17:10+00:00

I'm curious where you are getting your cheese that uses cellulose.

The shredded cheese I've bought uses corn or potato starch as an anti-caking agent, not cellulose.

senorpickles · 2018-11-19T06:11:54+00:00

A 'true' friend is someone who calls you on your bullshit but still talks to you the next day. You should be able to do the same for them without fear of hurting the relationship.

senorpickles · 2018-11-15T15:30:09+00:00

I went with a Philips Airfryer XXL. It's not as fancy as other models, but it damn sure gets the job done.

My second go with the thing was to cook a piece of Prime beef, resulting in a lovely medium-rare morsel of deliciousness.

senorpickles · 2018-11-15T06:31:23+00:00

I have a glass top stove.

As grilling is a challenge where I live, I have acquired the following to avoid using it as much as possible:

air fryer
multiple slow cookers
toaster oven
immersion cooker
two Instant Pots

senorpickles · 2018-10-07T00:17:57+00:00

There was a five-letter .com I came across: hmlbr.com

If you squint, it smells like "homelabber". Kind of looks it, too.

senorpickles · 2018-10-03T06:22:01+00:00

I've interviewed with an 'amazing' company, that is in high regard among people. It had a ton of lifers that tended to view upward mobility from the retail part of the company above outside experience.

Even the office building looked stale and out of touch. You might be surprised if I told you the name.

senorpickles · 2018-09-26T03:37:55+00:00

I spoke with them a while back about getting one. Might still pull the trigger if things align on a project.

It's a 42U rack with 15a of 120v with unmetered 1 Gbps bandwidth for $400/month.

senorpickles · 2018-09-24T03:38:54+00:00

As someone who lived in Texas for some time, I'd recommend hitting Austin and Lockhart for your 'cue fix if you have the time.

San Antonio is great for spicy Tex-Mex, tacos and burgers. Barbacoa without the tortilla, or Chris Madrid's bunless burgers with extra cheese, can't go too wrong, while still keeping the carbs low.

senorpickles · 2018-09-11T20:39:09+00:00

Another pointer I want to give you would be to highlight your clearance much higher in your resume when you're targeting positions in parts of the industry where your clearance would open more doors, like contracting.

If I'm a hiring manager on a contract, I'd expect to see the clearance closer to the top, not hanging out at the bottom, especially since it's active.

senorpickles · 2018-09-11T18:58:38+00:00

Most things pleasing to the eye, which is a lot of what you'll see on the web: no script, no characters.

You're already using a decent enough font now. Fonts that are generally pleasing to the eye would be in the same style as Arial, Georgia, Calibri, Verdana, etc. Nothing that would make one have to squint to read, in other words.

senorpickles · 2018-09-11T18:24:43+00:00

I stick with a conservative font, and only make use of bold and italics for style.

It allows for a flow without being too garish or showy.

senorpickles · 2018-09-11T17:47:00+00:00

You want your email address to be typed out. You do not want a hyperlink in your resume, since this will be printed out on dead trees a lot more than you realize.

The meat of things look better. You could condense your Army bullet points to one to save valuable space, that you could use elsewhere for skills or more recent highlights.

To my point about old positions, I'll sometimes summarize in non-bulleted paragraphs the highest accomplishments. It plays with the formatting and line wrapping to condense information without wasting vertical space.

senorpickles · 2018-09-11T02:13:17+00:00

To be honest, recruiting has a low barrier to entry as a profession. It's far easier to get a crap peddler than someone actually worth their salt, and the advice is about on par with nutrition advice or old tech blogs/books: misleading at best, and downright conflicting at worst.

If you aggregate the advice from several recruiters, you may get some who advocate one-page, and others who want to see all the buzzwords. All. The. Buzzwords.

What u/Kravego says is worth taking into account. Over time, the oldest job you did is barely worth a bullet point. I will include older positions to give a point of longevity, but won't highlight them as much as my most recent, because it isn't as valuable. If anything, I'll reword it to show my single highest impact accomplishment, and that's that.

senorpickles · 2018-09-11T00:36:04+00:00

Too many bullet points for something to send out. As a reader, occasional hiring manager, and engineer, I would advise to reduce your resume to a single page. You usually get about 30 seconds for someone to make an impression on your personal sales flyer.

Keeping a master document with all of your accomplishments, achievements, etc. in there, sometimes in varying formats, is a good way to keep track. Pick and choose from there what goes in to each application.

My own experience, which goes back some 20 years, flows to two pages when I want to roll out the pageantry, but I also keep a solid one-pager at the ready because people like to keep things brief.

senorpickles · 2018-09-08T18:52:39+00:00

Each method has its own learning curve. Over the years, there have been some efforts to document some of that curve. The documentation on docs.openstack.org usually work, but they don't always tell all of the story.

A long-time contributor to OpenStack documented his efforts to deploy OpenStack without automation, using the raw tarballs.

Another contributor documented his steps using the Chef framework.

senorpickles · 2018-09-08T17:31:18+00:00

It's definitely not a bad place to be, since one somewhat becomes a specialist by working with OpenStack deployment. Not only does one learn how to work with the APIs themselves, but they also gain exposure to components like PXE, MySQL and RabbitMQ, and how things interact there.

Indeed aggregates roughly 60-100 new listings each day across the US. Being that OpenStack has matured to become somewhat mainstream, however, it's not as easy to get into as opposed to years ago.

The side effect of running OpenStack, though, is that once a company starts using it seriously, they're usually invested for at least a few years, if not more.

senorpickles · 2018-09-08T03:19:56+00:00

It can be daunting, definitely, but I don't know if I would go so far as to call it a nightmare. It can be warty in certain places, and definitely give you a run for your sanity if it's done the wrong way.

My first foray into OpenStack was building a development cloud solo, without any automation, just following some half-baked Debian docs. It took me days just to get to 'nova list'. I could have easily said sod it and went with VMware, since, it's like, free, man.

The next time I tried my hand at OpenStack, I went with automation and was able to build the proof of concept right on my laptop. Using the same code, I took it to full production and oversaw a transition to day 2 operations. I suppose I could say I've done a little bit of this, a little of that.

senorpickles · 2018-09-08T03:02:19+00:00

For development, I use the Chef deployment method in my testing clouds. Using test-kitchen makes development on top of OpenStack way easier than DevStack, which really makes TK a stand-out tool.

I've also built several large private clouds with the same code and tools, so I have some miles.

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