April 5, 2016

BTYBTL6?

By Daniel

Well, I feel quite a bit better today. I don’t know if I was fighting some kind of illness yesterday or just didn’t get enough sleep, or perhaps the anticholinergic wore me out, but I spent most of yesterday in an exhausted fog. Felt rather useless at work to say the least. I’d have started to really worry about myself if I had to miss today, not because I might be sick, but because that would mean I’d missed every other Tuesday for the last 8 weeks, and that’s suspicious.

After some discussion on my fears, however unlikely it may be, that we would buy a house and then I would not be retained at work, I think we’re going to hold off on the whole process until the probationary period is over around Thanksgiving. It also lets us keep saving up money which is wise, if we can do it for a year it’s probably going to put us in a position to pay off the credit card debt, maybe pay off Diana’s car, and put us in better shape overall.

There was also some discussion on future plans involving spending money, and how I was a little put out that while I’m bringing in a lot of money, I’ve been really good in not spending it because the house was coming quickly. However, there were still projects coming up that didn’t involve me getting to buy those things that I want. I’m oversimplifying but to Diana’s credit, she heard me out and understood. So she wants me to get the list together of the stuff I’ve had in mind to upgrade.

I’ve been wanting to get back to other forms of media creation, in particular either a podcast, a radio show, or a screencast. My concern is the time investment. It’s not something I can really do on the train, you know?And if it’s not happening on the train, it’s happening either at work or at home. Work seems improbable on account of actually needing to work, and when I’m home there’s probably other more enjoyable and/or necessary things to be done.

A podcast would take the most work in audio post, and I’m not entirely sure what it would be about, and it would probably need a second person, right? Very few people seem to like the solo format. A radio show would take the least work and be the most familiar, having done it for two different audiences in the past with TLoM Radio and later the 3-hour block on Shoupz Radio. But both of those audiences are gone. The screencast could be either Twitch-style gaming, or teaching on a topic, likely sysadmin stuff. I actually have done some work on an outline for this course, and have been working on the lab piece to make sure I understand the concepts I’m trying to present and explain. I don’t know what else I would be able to cast and still be remotely interesting to people.

I upgraded my Surface Pro 3, which I use to write these posts, to Windows 10 yesterday. 8.1 has had some weird issues involving the machine totally locking up, so it felt worth trying the upgrade. This isn’t my first encounter with 10, I ran the Technical Preview in a virtual machine, and then in-place upgraded my workstation at my last-job so I used it on a daily basis in a professional setting. There’s this camp of junior admins masquerading as sysadmins and MSPs masquerading as competent human beings acting like any company that isn’t already on Windows 10 may as well be running Windows XP SP0 with the firewall off and addressed in public space. And I don’t know if they forgot that even Windows Vista is still supported for over another year, much less 7 (2020) and 8.1 (2023).

If you don’t think 10 is going to change significantly before 2020, you’re crazy. There’s also the matter that we need to write a check to Microsoft for about $170,000 just to license 10 Enterprise. That’s not couch cushion money, particularly when our budget has been slashed until July ’17 at the earliest. I am not endangering my users by leaving them on a supported operating system for a little longer. Get over yourself.