Pneity

My last entry didn't go very hard into any sort of actual stuff I usually get into on here. I explained a lot of the things weighing on my mind, but not much about what I've been doing. Let's correct that.

Erica and Alex, dear friends, got married last weekend. I spent days in advance of it sweating bullets. A wedding surrounded by friends is a great time but I still felt awful. Something about having to put forward so much social energy while feeling as bad as I have was too much. I was shaking with anxiety while I drove my car across the city to the venue. Of course, the wedding was wonderful. I had a wonderful day. A friend of mine later texted me and said I was a bit off. She knows me well and she was right. I'm just not very much myself right now.

Same thing for this weekend just passed. I sweat bullets in the lead-up to a hockey game with friends in West Virginia. Adam reached out and asked what time I'd be over the night before the game. I usually do stay the night but hadn't remembered talking about that. So we had decided earlier this year to swap out some hardware inside our servers. My old server I don't use anymore had the exact CPUs upgrades he needed and I had plenty of extra RAM.

I showed up Friday night. Zeke arrived after I did. We talked politics into the wee hours and went to sleep. Nobody really slept well but that morning, more friends joined us and we did the hardware swap after a quick breakfast. His CPUs worked in mine, my CPUS worked in his. Everything was a huge success, and swapped really easily. Had some lunch at the fast food place next to their house. I ate so much this day, I can't get over that.

We all drove to Wheeling, West Virginia for the opening day for their minor league hockey team, The Nailers. We ate at an Italian restaurant. We were seated in a dark tent outside the restaurant. It was a chilly evening and the lighting was awful, but we were heated by a large heater pointed to our table. The food could be best described as "ok."

We parted ways with our other two friends and the four of us went to the game. A packed crowd didn't know they were about to cheer for 58 minutes of the worst hockey they'd ever seen. The rust was strong, even in minor league context. I think I got too used to watching The Penguins years ago at their peak. We made fun of how bad the game was. The only good play was a goal by the away team and that happened while I was having a piss.

Our team pulled their goalie for the ol' 6 vs. 5 and I joked to Zeke that The Nailers would still lose if the opposing team pulled their goalie. They had no chance. Moments later, they went on a power play. So now it was 6 vs. 4. They scored 30 seconds later. A minute and a half left in the game and the crowd was going nuts. This would only be one upped a few moments later when there was a face off called on the side close to our nosebleed seats. They chipped it back to a Nailer player who took the most casual slap at the goal-- it was in and it was a lead. Some nine seconds left of the game.

That's a win. The crowd burst into the first verse of Country Roads completely unprompted. It was a cool moment of unity. Crowd going wild but it was time to go. I had eaten a lot of concession food and was feeling pretty bad. Probably lucky that I spilled my nachos trying to open the door to the rink seating 30 minutes prior.

Friends drove me to my car across town, I paid them for the tickets and went on my merry way. Drove to a nearby charging station at a car dealership and ate some Sheetz chicken. I haven't had an EV for long, but these charging moments can be pretty zen. Got home without event.

Slept good on the auspicious daylight savings end night, but stayed up beyond the repeated 2 AM hour. Slept well, though. Woke up late to a bowl of cereal and started farting around on The Internet. Sadly short lived since my Internet died 20 minutes in.

I get used to internet outages and wrote it off. I'll just do offline things until it's back online. 20 minutes later, I lost power. I lost power while writing the first draft of this entry, which was lost since my computer isn't on a backup. Fayette County is a nightmare which nobody should be forced to endure. I love the idea of this place, but it's lack of variety and failing infrastructure is killing me. My friends don't understand how I could have so many power outages.

The power was not just going to flash back on, this felt like one of those long outages. Battery backups keep most of my equipment online for long enough for me to take action but in this case, I had given Adam my managed network switch so I didn't take the time to plug my smaller, faster network switches into the battery backups.

I turned on my laptop to use its remaining power to remote into the server. But the network was down. I swapped cables and set IP addresses manually. Still couldn't connect. Connected the monitor the server hooks to into the battery. No output. No obvious reason, just no output. While pissing with that, the network decided to start working. Managed to get everything shut down.

At that point, sitting in the dark, quiet basement, I gave up and drove to town. I was able to go to the local ultra-grocery-store and take the time to find anything I may ever need to buy. Spent way too much money and drove home. Power was back on. I spent the next hour pissing with my server, getting everything started back up, hooking things correctly into the faster switches. It's not done yet and it's really not pretty. But it's something.

Spent the evening playing Cobblemon with Wade and Po. Another night of chilling in the Discord. A good end to a good, sometimes frustrating weekend.

I'm going to have a lot to say tomorrow and Tuesday. I have such conflicted emotions towards these next few days. I should really just bury myself into my work and spend time with my family. We'll see where this goes.

Been a bit stressed this week. Last night, I had a narrative dream. I get wild, vivid dreams when I'm stressed but this was different. This one wasn't bad. This one was weird. I loathe when people describe their dreams, but I feel like I want this one written down somewhere, so please allow me to indulge.

I was on vacation with my family in London. For some reason, we were staying with my local family there, which was my real life family in Florida. Me and my dad were drinking, I was frustrated making him drinks at this house. Some conflicting problem, I had time to take a walk in town. My awake brain knows this isn't how London works, but I walked around some broad, sprawling stroad type roads and spotted my old ex's sister. We opined about how I constantly run into her when I'm traveling (this is not a thing, not sure why this happened) and she pointed out that there was a Youtube event going on.

I walk into this park/lodge type situation and see what I can only describe as a choreographed music video being filmed with four nameless people I excitedly recognize (awake brain does not know who they are) and continually interrupt their shots walking across the frame. It seems like a hedge maze but I end up inside this lodge which is too small for a convention or event, but I keep running into Youtube faces I'm parasocial with. None of them are real ones, though. Approximations. I feel welcomed, I feel like a part of the experience.

I end up in a room where they are selling heavily modified GPUs. I accurately gauge where my bank account sits in real life to see if I can afford getting one home. I begin to stress about how to tell my dad I won't be back in time for... whatever. It becomes me fumbling around contacts through my phone to see how I can roundabout manage to contact him.

That's about all I remember. It's all so very strange. Again, I hold as describing a dream as the lowest form of conversation. When generative AI become a big thing a few years back, I described people posting AI representations of things as bad as people describing dreams. That was before I picked up on the ideas that really make AI evil.

I'm doing it. I'm working through the list.

I've been incredibly busy. 40 hours a week feels so much worse when it's five days a week. I don't know why but a year of doing four days a week was ruining, I loved it too much. But I worked my 40 hours, then had an on call weekend. Three separate eight hour shifts over 48 hours. Somehow, all of my shifts ended up busy and awful. I worked very hard. Things worked out ok but it was exhausting. Our apps are shit. Back into it for another week.

It's a holiday weekend. Thanksgiving will be a savior as long as things stay laid back. I just have to survive another day and a half. I'm on lunch break from a rough morning. The afternoon will be roughing through some really unfortunate cases that won't go away.

But the "doing it" bit. The progress. I became overwhelmed again by Maddenbot and wanted to take up an easy win. I decided to start sorting through the music folder I got from a friend. All automated downloads, lots of bad tagging. But the folder is huge and we are restarting that project so I wanted to go through the whole thing to see what I wanted to keep. But the more I keep, the more I have to manually tag.

I copied through each artist folder, put the files into mp3 tag. Got rid of duplicates and cleaned up the tags, albums, and made it all consistent. As best I could. I filled in huge swathes of my collection. I assumed it would take a day at most. After two days, I was only on the "B"s alphabetically. Uh-oh.

A week later, it's all done. I managed it, I finished it! I pressed delete on the big folder. 2.5 TB of data flushed down. Don't need it anymore! Loaded Foobar2000 and started looking at the new tagged music among my already perfectly trimmed collection.

Uh-oh. Lots of small problems which look like huge problems in my grouping and sorting systems. Only became obvious looking at it in Foobar2000. I had to go back and spend a few hours finding and fixing those.

Seeing it in Foobar also got me realizing that there were some artists I didn't think to grab. So I logged into my NAS and restored about 1,000 songs from a dozen musicians from the big delete. I'm now working through tagging those. Only then can I claim victory over that project.

But I'm still taking that as a win.

But I needed another win and I'm not sure I did the right thing. I was working on Friday and my main monitor broke in a way I'd never seen before. Little rectangular boxes artifacting what was on the screen at that moment over top of whatever was currently displaying. It started fading after an hour or so, but it was already too late. I'd purchased two ultrawide monitors to replace the old ones. And they arrived last night.

I spent two hours looking for some picture hanging wire I'd bought a while back because these things are way too heavy for my cheap monitor mounts. But they are up and running now. One as my primary monitor, one sideways on the side. Ultrawides are very strange to use as a sideways monitor but here I am.

These are small victories. I guess we'll see.

As for everything else... my dad had his biopsy surgery and it went well. He was roughed up day one but has seemed to bounce back quick. My sister visited from Florida for a few days. She came early to spend time with the family before she joins the rest of her family at their cabin way north of us.

It was good to see her, and briefly her daughter. I get along with that side of the family really well. I hate they are normally so far away.