obsidian

Here be what’s went on with us this past week. We got our asses kicked.

Work

• bartendJerb is basically gone. Business levels have dropped below what’s sustainable for the place mid-term, but management won’t adjust labor, nor menu, nor open hours. They keep waiting for the weather to get cold. Guess what! It’s cold now! And it’s still slow!
• mgbarJerb: Getting ever busier. We don’t think the corpos expected our location to come out swinging this hard, and yet here we are; getting no support from them while they try to tell us how to do our jobs. There is no institutional knowledge at the corporate level and they don’t provide mechanisms to keep it at the location level. Very little of the two weeks-long training I went through has actually been useful.

Personal

We got mamasha, our storage server, back online. She was offline for nearly three months cos we didn’t have to deal with an entire failed raidz2 pool. But it’s back online and so far, no issues. I have a bit more to say on this since a well-administered ZFS pool is not supposed to fail like this but here we are, restoring from a backup made two years ago, right before I mostly lost sentience.

Today the criminal president-elect announced 25% tariffs on all products coming from Mexico, Canada, and China. Better start a garden so you can have tomatoes, avocados, lettuce and jalapeños (they come from Mexico). If you’re building a house, you need to have your contractors finish ASAP (most lumber is imported from Canada). If you need electronics, you need to buy them now. Service industry will see the price of tequila, mezcal, beer (Modelo, Pacifico, XX Lager) go up.

Myself I’m starting the build-out process for a new storage server. mamasha’s hardware is from 2012 (Xeon E3-1220 V2, SuperMicro X9SCM-F) with the motherboard already getting replaced once. It’d be nice to have something with just as many PCI-E slots so we can put a nice GPU and see what’s what with self-hosted LLM tooling. We don’t condone the use of genAI for artistic purposes but that’s where tech is going so we need to learn how to deal with it even if it’s from an adversarial standpoint.

Bringing this server back online was my win of the week. We’ll take it.

Learning

We need to start learning new stuff. Picked up a copy of Meehan’s Bartender Manual and honestly we think it is helping us understand more about bartending as a profession.

Today we think we’ll go to the library and renew our library card. If it all goes to shit in the US it’d be useful to know another language. German, French or Czech would be nice.

Rebuilt our nextcloud VM since it died when out zpool crashed. It’s been okay to re-learn all of these things, the first time I configured the VM we didn’t keep much in the way of notes.

Speaking of notes… we’re now using obsidian instead of vim+wiki.vim. We don’t spend that much time on our workstation anymore and we need our notes available on the phone without having to fiddle on the command line on the phone. It’s a pain in the ass honestly.

Intersections

Now, on the intersection of work and personal… my phone scrobbles to last.fm whatever songs are being played in my environment. INXS is picking up steam as it is on the playlist at mgbarJerb.

They are also starting to push hard on the Christmas music and that’s going to be messy; had the displeasure of listening to an EDM remix of little drummer boy. Just… no.

This week we get an additional day off because of Thanksgiving. From here until the end of the year it’ll be madness at work.