First Leclerc attempts to punt Norris off the track. Then a fire breaks out at the McLaren hospitality suite?

Better keep an eye out for Ferrari…

I just don’t go outside. AC running throughout the day, though I do set max temps at different levels throughout the day to take advantage of lower electricity rates or avoid higher rates.

This past week I did have to do some rare outdoors work for work over a few days. My team elected to do it in the evenings and early in the mornings. Was still quite warm, but not sun glaring down on us, we’re gonna get heat stroke from this, afternoon sun.

Wow, I feel dumb. I’ve been here for a year and never looked closely at the bee (old or new). Never noticed the cowboy hat!

So I thought I was good to start a new job (though I’ve yet to set a start date), as the HR person assigned me said it was all good about a month ago, but then today he me tells me there was “a problem” with my drug test. A drug test I took 3 months ago. So I need to take another.

While I’ve only taken a few drug tests for employment during my career, they’ve never taken 3 months to get results. Like 2 weeks at most. Something tells me my HR person screwed up (which isn’t surprising), got this notice a couple month ago, yet just now noticed this. Hate to say it, but typical government. The irony is that I’ll soon be a govt worker. If we can get this straightened out.

On a more positive note, I just paid off one more student loan! After 19yrs of paying and thousands of dollars in interest on this one – more than the principle at this point – it’s finally done. I had to get a hefty loan from my parents, but their terms are much better: 0% APR at the Bank of Mom & Dad versus the current variable 10.02% APR with the bank. Though I still have lots more students loans to go. Such a shitty, shitty system. At least I’m lucky enough my parents can help in this manner.

Stay in school, kids. But only if you don’t fuck it all up like I did. I may be paying student loans til I die.

Maybe it’s my doomerism at play, but even one year house arrest I’d be OK with. Keep him in NY in his Trump Tower penthouse. Don’t let him go out to campaign.

Obviously jail would be better. I just don’t think fines alone are going to cut it. He’s not going to pay them.

You could also add toxic glue. It’s edible! Probably only once though.

This is now going to be added to some LLM-generated answer in the probably near future.

Congratulations to you and your spouse! If you’re doing a honeymoon after (or even if you’re not), I hope you both get some quality R&R!

I finally passed the checks for the job that I got offered 11mo ago. So now they’re asking when I can start!

Which, right now, is like the worst time for me to leave my company. We have our big all-hands-on-deck event in like 5 weeks. I have a massive project I’m leading up that’s supposed to be finished by end of July. And there’s another project I’m assisting with heavily that’s supposed to be finished by July/August. Even a couple months ago would’ve been better, to an extent.

While I’m usually one who’s like “Welp, gotta go peace, here’s my two weeks!”, the organization I work for has treated me excellently over the years; about 17 of them. And the big project I’m working on is something that I specifically got invited back to the company to work on a few years ago. So I want to see it to completion (or as far as I can take it within reason). As far as the event, we are literally in the thick of it with preparation, so I don’t want to unload all my tasks, last minute, on my team either. Lastly, my boss knows I’ve had this offer on deck for awhile now and he’s been very cool with it. I don’t want to burn this bridge (I’ve burned others elsewhere before). Because if this new job doesn’t work out, there’d be a very, very high chance that all I’d have to do is ask and my boss would say, “OK, when do you want to start?”

So I’m thinking I don’t start til late August, which my boss is very appreciative of. Plus that gives me time to find an apartment and move. I’m hoping my new soon-to-be employer will agree to that, especially given my circumstances, and that they’ve had me waiting for this long. I feel like that’s only fair. I also have a friend who works closely with the team I’ll be on; he says the team is probably not even ready for me anyway.

Either way, it’s exciting. But also a bit scary, as I’ve never moved for a job, and I’ll leaving a city I’ve spent practically my entire life at. I’ll also be even further from my family than I already am. But I’m ready to go. I’ve been waiting for this for a long time, and it’s finally happening.

Sorry to “necro” this thread, but I just got around to enabling and testing out your UPS kill command suggestion. Everything shutdown as planned, including the UPS itself. Once I restored wall power to the UPS, power started flowing to the server automatically, the BIOS detected it, and the server booted-up on its own! Success! ESXi is back up and VMs are still in the process of auto-starting. This is exactly how I wanted it all to work.

Thanks again for the suggestion!

My parents were the ones who pointed me to the high seas. I was a kid (12-13yo) when Napster came out. Being the family geek, they told me to look into it since they heard about it on the news and wanted free music (early case of the Streissand Effect before it was termed as such). So I did. And we got free music. Even asked them to get me a CD burner for my birthday after that and they did.

As a kid on the earlier days of the Internet, I came across all sorts of ways to get free stuff. Games and Music at first, especially game cracks/warez. Then once torrents came on the scene, movies and shows.

I actually don’t pirate much anymore. Rarely pirate music since I’ve had Spotify for like 10+yrs now. Same with games since Steam and all the other digital storefronts have so many sales. I still pirate emulator ROMs once in a blue moon. Movies/shows would be where I pirate the most (though like once a month if that), even though I have Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hulu, and Crunchyroll. Even between those 4, I can’t find everything I want to watch.

But yeah, 99% of the time, I just don’t want to pay for things. The other 1% is that I can’t pay for something (mainly in the emulators/ROMs space). That’s all.

I’m back in Vegas visiting my folks for Mother’s Day, which was yesterday; Happy (belated) Mother’s Day to the mothers and caregivers out there! Anyway, it’s a nice change of scenery.

Work has been crazy last couple of weeks. We’re getting close to launching a project I’ve been working on for two years. So lots going on with that to get everything completed on time. We’ve started vendor-led staff training on it, which is taking up a lot of time. In addition, we purchased another service, so we have training on those as well. So practically everyday, I have like 3-4hrs of trainings. We also have our big annual event coming up, so I need to start focusing on my responsibilities there. It’s normally busy this time of the year, but I’m not normally juggling three big projects at once. Maybe I’m just a baby, but I’m not used to it. Either way, its not unmanageable. Yet. Hopefully it won’t be at all.

The nice part of being in Pacific time zone is that I finish my day around 1-2p local time (I’m normally Central time zone). The downside is that I’m having to wake up at 4-5a local time to get going, get ready, have coffee, etc. Oh well, at least I can still roll out of bed over to my laptop.

I’ve tried to recommend Beehaw to others, but I don’t think I’ve gotten a single bite. Because when they visit Beehaw, they also see content from the other parts of Lemmy – both posts and comments – that Beehaw still federates with, including .ml, and are turned off by a lot of it.

A big part of it is not understanding how the fediverse works, but that’s to be expected; it is confusing. But even having heard my explanation, they’re often still like, “Meh, I’ll just stick with reddit…” because, as you mentioned, first impressions are everything.

Thanks for the reminder; always forget that’s an option. Luckily Beehaw already defederated from Hexbear and lemmygrad.

Indeed. I enjoyed the asklemmy community over there, but lately there have been some “questions” posted that clearly have an agenda. Basically begging the question. I’m not saying I’m some free-market, anti-regulation libertarian. Far from it. But like you said, not every post has to be about that, and that we can discuss other things other than the downfall of capitalism. So I unsubscribed from that community, and even considered leaving Lemmy altogether since I feel like those types of posts/comments are so pervasive lately.

There are some lemmy.ml communities I lurk, but yeah, the toxicity that comes out of the instance is ridiculous. I think Beehaw has defederated lemmy.ml in the past due to lack of moderation issues.

I don’t pirate very often anymore, but when I do, I use whatever computer I happen to be on. I just turn on a VPN and bind the torrenting client to the VPN only. This is how I’ve torrented for years, since the late 2000s. I’ve gotten a couple strikes from my ISP several years ago, but that was before I had a commercial VPN. Otherwise, I’ve no issues.

What are the potential security upsides of doing it on a VM/container or a dedicated machine? I can imagine some performance upsides, but that’s about it.

It’s certainly a fan theory, but that’s not a confirmed thing by any means. The location of the last battles does look the inside of a vagina, looking towards the cervix, but that’s supposedly only a coincidence.

That’s a bot, right? That can’t be real.

I’ve met plenty of idiots. Some days, I’m probably one of them. But I don’t think I’ve ever come across someone who’s pro anti-piracy. Usually people are just neutral about it. Even the most law-abiding people I know, when I’ve told them I can download movies for free, are like “Oh, are you able to get this movie for me? Thanks!”

Earthbound was probably the first game I was ever really enamored with. Even today, it’s definitely one of my favorite games ever. And it’s probably the first JRPG I ever played, and it’s what started me down a long path of JRPGs.

My parents got me a subscription to Nintendo Power magazine, and I remember reading about the game there and wanting to play it. They didn’t buy it for me when it came out, but I did rent it from Blockbluster a few times. And they did eventually buy it for me for Christmas. It even came with the strategy guide!

Everything about the game was great. I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but it was insanely accessible, even to a then 7-8yo kid like me. JRPGs tend to be darker and complex (though not always). But Earthbound still had complexity, but it wasn’t darker. Yes these kids were having to save the world from destruction, but the story was told in an upbeat, fun way. And it was just the right amount of complexity.

Earthbound is also probably the first game I ever beat. Certainly the first JRPG.

I did try the fan-translation of Mother 3. I didn’t end up finishing it. I got close, but it was far too depressing and different from EB. The game was beautifully done (as was the player-made strategy guide!), but I just couldn’t really get into the story and characters. Just wasn’t for me.

It’s definitely quiet around here. But you know, reddit or any other social media wasn’t built in a day, so Lemmy/Beehaw won’t either!

Thanks for posting so much though. You’re not the first person I’ve seen make comments about the seeming lack of activity, but you at least try to change that!