ah the scream.today lives

ahem

aaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaAAaAaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH oh my god why is 2020

#having a career

I keep going back and forth on staying with the company I'm with or moving on. I think myself and our QA team member are going to leave this year, but no one else really knows that.

I have the chance to work with a start up a previous coworker works at — and I think I should take it. It's a pay cut, though, and not an insignificant one. The catch I guess, is work does profit sharing.. and that's almost like a trap. If you know you can get a large chunk of money at the end of every year if you can just tough it out, it feels like a sunk cost fallacy almost. If you don't find that new job in January, or the first half of the year, it feels like you might as well stay until that bonus comes.

So, I kind of worked out with them that I'll start next year if I pass the interviews... hopefully it works out. scream.

uh oh, it's October 2024 now!!

It's wild to go back and read this draft because two months after drafting this, I accepted the job at the startup, four years ago! We also recruited some folks from my old company after to join us, too.

I can say that four years on I definitely miss the benefits and pay at the prior company, but knowing how it changed I would probably be really depressed and miserable, but I also would probably be rolling in dough if I had stayed.

I don't know if I really love the place I switched to, but I met some amazing people and got to work for a time on a team that had people my age and also lots of women and fellow queer folks. It has changed since then... but I don't know if I totally regret the experience.

Kitchen fun

So I'm in the process of getting the kitchen redone because it's straight up just falling apart in every way, which has been great :F. I am working with a contractor 'cause I am a little handy but I am not that handy. You have to make so many fricken choices about everything and it's super overwhelming, like standing in the jelly aisle of the store and there's like 50 different types of jelly, and you gotta pick which one. I'm mostly just like, damn I just want a useable kitchen. At least so far the professionals i've encountered are pretty decent? Unlike previous projects....

I keep going back and forth on staying with the company I'm with or moving on. I think myself and our QA team member are going to leave this year, but no one else knows that yet.

I have the chance to work with a start up a previous coworker works at — and I think I should take it. It's a pay cut, though, and not an insignificant one. The catch I guess, is current work does profit sharing.. and that's almost like a trap. If you know you can get a large chunk of money at the end of every year if you can just tough it out, it feels like a sunk cost fallacy almost. If you don't find that new job in January, or the first half of the year, it feels like you might as well stay until that bonus comes. But I also realize that I have enough money saved up I could take time away from working — since I live in one of the few US states where you don't get fucked healthcare-wise if you are unemployed... I don't think I'll do it but knowing that's an option kind of makes me feel like I have some kind of option/escape route.

Anyway I guess for now I need to come up with project ideas for python... maybe I'll do some mastodon stuff or something. I dunno. Just have to keep my skills sharp and my options open.

On non work-related things, I actually understood a few words of Finnish reading, of all things, the McDonald's finland site lol. I guess studying a little every day is paying off already!

I'm setting up #misskey as a test. This blog entry is basically scratchpad/notes I take while I'm doing setup stuff. Mostly this is for me, but if it helps anyone else, that's cool too.

First off I'm going to set this up on a base $5/mo digital ocean droplet. I'm going for ubuntu 19.04. Misskey's docs say you need redis, node, and postgres with optionally elastic search and ffmpeg. I am also going to be using nginx and certbot.

There also appears to be a docker image but since there is not english doc for it in the setup I don't think I will go that route!!

create DO droplet I added my SSH key so I could SSH in with it immediately as root@ip Add a user for yourself and disable SSH for root — look at this if you don't know what i mean https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-ssh-keys-on-ubuntu-1804 if you set up an SSH key when you made the droplet then do the manual version. Add PermitRootLogin No to the ssh config file mentioned once you're sure that you can login as your new user.

Before proceeding, I ran sudo apt-get update and also upgraded ubuntu to latest.

Update node: https://github.com/nodesource/distributions/blob/master/README.md#debinstall

Install postgres https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-and-use-postgresql-on-ubuntu-18-04

Install redis sudo apt-get install redis

install elasticsearch https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/deb.html (optional) — follow the instructions for adding it to systemd

install ffmpeg sudo apt-get install ffmpeg

install build-essentials sudo apt-get install build-essential (needed for some node dependencies)

follow the steps to clone the repo.

now setup ufw and nginx follow these: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-a-firewall-with-ufw-on-ubuntu-18-04 https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-nginx-on-ubuntu-18-04

now we can add nginx's config file for the server block, following the steps in the “how to install nginx” tutorial. start with this for a sample: https://gist.github.com/mei23/317b4dbdbaa5f71607e6a208003136d1 run sudo nginx -t to test your config! now we can do a certificate: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-secure-nginx-with-let-s-encrypt-on-ubuntu-18-04

update your nginx config and add the correct lets encrypt info.

From here on out I switched back and forth between user misskey and myself. When running the steps provided from the misskey team, i did sudo su - misskey to switch, and exited back to my own account if i needed to run sudo.

now follow the build steps in the misskey install steps I ran into this issue: https://github.com/syuilo/misskey/issues/2918

Then I ran out of memory when web pack was running lol, so i needed to make a swapfile https://linuxize.com/post/how-to-add-swap-space-on-ubuntu-18-04/ which i allocated 1gb for and then add this node variable export NODE_OPTIONS=--max_old_space_size=4096 see: https://www.npmjs.com/package/increase-memory-limit

great!! almost there..

Create a postgres user and database see documentation for createuser here: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/app-createuser.html enter postgres by typing sudo -u postgres psql after you've created your user do this in psql: CREATE DATABASE yourdb;' 'GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE yourdb TO youruser; \q to quit

switch back to misskey user... run the npm run init command as user misskey.

now you can follow the steps in the GitHub instructions to run and then create misskey as a service!

reload nginx after misskey is started, and you should be set! GL!!

For email I am using mailgun and I followed their instructions for domain setup. I also added it within the admin interface with SMTP authentication.

DO spaces has an issue where you cannot set default file privacy https://github.com/syuilo/misskey/issues/5023 https://qiita.com/tamaina/items/3395cfac4fe03d89e8f8 https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/how-to-make-my-spaces-public

However, if you pick up the line of code tamaina points out in the GitHub issue you can add the header you need to make everything public by default

This post is entirely a boring af recounting of my furnace breaking down and why I #love being a #homeowner.

So last week I woke up to it being cold as fuck on the first floor of the house. Granted, that’s kind of normal because the basement is particularly terribly insulated, but this was accompanied by an ominous message from the Ecobee along the lines of: “the thermostat has been calling for heat for the past 3 hours, but the temperature has dropped by 3F, check that the equipment is functioning properly”

Oh boy. this has happened before and usually just means maybe I waited too long to change a filter, the pump tripped the gfci, or the air intake got blocked somehow. So I go down there and start pulling shit out and resetting it. That’s all fine and good, but when I cycle the furnace on and off it just starts flashing a diagnostic LED. helpfully, that’s on the door: open limit switch. Open limit switch? The hell does that mean? Google doesn’t enlighten me much. Could mean any number of things, but it might just be a bad switch. That doesn’t sound terrible, time to call an HVAC person because I have exhausted my furnace knowledge.

So I’m going to go back for a second to explain, when I bought the house it was pretty clear whoever installed the furnace was a hack, it was sitting on some bricks in a dirt pit and the duct work was a total fucking disaster left over from the octopus furnace days of olde. And none of it was insulated. My ex roommate did wrap the ducts up which helped but they were full of holes and in some places just totally blowing up into the floor, with no duct boot or anything.

Anyway I called the HVAC person and he spends a good like, 30 minutes trying shit before he gets out a camera and starts poking around the insides and oops, the heat exchanger cracked, which he was kind enough to show me on camera and then offer to take apart the furnace and show me to be 100% sure if they did replace the furnace. He thought maybe the blower motor was struggling because of poor air flow if I hadn’t changed the filter often enough but it had been running for a week on a brand new filter... so..

Now I’ve got to get a new furnace, and I’m talking with their sales guy and he’s like “you know this is a 100,000 BTU furnace?” which I kind of laughed and was like “what the fuck?” because the first thing I did was dive headfirst into reading about new furnace shit, and my house is like... 1400sq feet. That’s like, a 60,000 BTU furnace or so. So the working theory is that the overkill furnace cycled on and off so much it just self destructed, along with the undersized duct work.

While they’re in there, I’m like, you know what? Just do the duct work too. This whole thing sucks and there’s no point in getting a nice new furnace if the duct work is a steaming pile of shit.

So they ripped out fucking everything in the basement and replaced it: new intake/exhaust, new furnace, new ducts. It's more comfortable already, and way quieter than what was there before. Also it looks actually professionally done instead of just heaped into a pit like the old one.

I ended up taking financing but I'm just going to use it to boost my credit score by paying it off with the HELOC I have.

yo for real I fucking love this uncalendar planner thing I have.

@olympiaxylaige@meemu.org had one for a while so I grabbed one, and I’ve been actually pretty consistently using it and filling it out. I don’t think it perfectly solves all my scheduling and inability to prioritize stuff but it does help me remember the schedule for the week and ideas I’ve had.

I split the left hand into a shopping list, work notes, and house chores to-do, and scribble ideas in around there. The days area on the right hand, I pencil in the dog medication schedule (it’s a little complicated) and my meetings, appointments, and work tasks for the day. It has a month schedule where I write in appointments for the month and bills I need to pay. And over in the notes section in the back I put in like, plans for bigger stuff. Long vacations, Christmas gifting, complicated house projects.

I decorated it with washi tape and stickers so I feel like it’s personalized and something that’s mine. It does make a difference, if I decorate the weekly section nicely I’m more likely to use it that week!