shmick/blog

Fork 0

Files

shmick 6bda1fbbdc Inital commit - splitting blog files from Docker repository

2021-11-09 23:03:04 +02:00

17 KiB

Raw Permalink Blame History

layout, title, category, date

layout

title

I Like Video Games.

Always did. Still do.

As a kid (of around 8? can't quite say) I received my grandparents' old hand-me-down hunk of junk excusing a PC, which was the very first machine I personally owned.

I remember absolutely nothing of this system - only the grey, plasticy China made chassis and the loud whir of the HDDs, likely added to this memory much later. I played simple, 2D or web games on it on occasion, and life was good, I guess.

As a fourth grader abroad, our family shared the latest-tech laptop, which I remember more firmly - it was a big, black, shiny plastic HP which that got seriously hot without one of these lap cooler-fan things. It had a fingerprint reader (which we were *demanded not to use because none of us could understand it) and we played Runescape on it for way too many hours. By the time nothing but its' long dead husk was around, I knew enough to retroactively recall it as a Windows Vista machine, and that's about it.

For my Bar Mitzvah, I received the first proper PC I ever had, and was becoming aware of what it is, what's inside and how it works. It was a Core i5 650 - first generation Core! with maybe 4GB of RAM, some cheap Chinese power supply, that default black InWin ATX Chassis, and Nvidia's not-latest-and-really-not-greatest GT610. Even that early on, the GT did not make it long - more on that later.

By that point I started picking up some serious 3D gaming - games actually installed on your machine! I remember some Dawn of War RTS, some Age of Empires II and even Minecraft. Within a year or so, I dared my first technical feat with it: overclocking.

I Like Computer Hardware.

Thinking about it today, it's amazing to realize I attempted overclocking at all, and twice as amazing to realize I did it responsibly, and have never fried, force shutdown'd or (seriously) harmed a computer. I started raising the clockspeed and voltage of that old yeller, which quickly entailed my first hardware upgrade - a new CPU cooler! (the budget CoolerMaster Evo 212).

Me and my already disgruntled dad disassembled the whole thing, put on a backplate and even put it back together, only to put in the motherboard front chassis pings wrong, screw up the booting and ask dad's computer technician friend for help. I wouldn't be too upset to make that mistake today - those are ferocious little buggers!

Later on, father went off to the United States, and with the very first of my summer job savings I asked him for a new GPU - the GTX 650Ti. I already had the i5 650 running a full Ghz ahead of spec, with a higher base clock to boot. As time went by I bought the GTX 760, alongside the oldest part still in my machine today - the Seasonic SSP-RT 550 Gold PSU - to support it. Now I had some ragtag rig and started proper gaming. This was the very first computer I made and planned, and upgraded, and much of my hardware knowledge today stems from those days.

I Like Building Computers.

_{I was really excited about all those bits and pieces in a proper motherboard}

Some years later, the 650 was becoming unbearably slow, which is when I went for my first full upgrade - the i5 4670K, with 8GB of budget Corsair XMS3 1600Mhz RAM, a too-expensive Z-series Gaming motherboard, and a grey metal ATX Corsair Chassis. The core of that computer is now my little brother's, alive and kicking!.

I sank into another round of overclocking - receiving a subpar sample just shy of the mythical 4.4Ghz (from 3.8).

This is when things began to get wild.

_{This picture, from late 2015, is about the point I was first proud of something I planned and assembled}

Going Monkey

By this point, I started referring to myself as a hardware monkey, already realizing I fail to understand the intricacy of computers, but can sure as hell beat the shit out of them with voltage and cooling. I got a massive water cooler (an Arctic double-thick 240mm, which was cheap and quickly disappeared from the market) - so big I had to sandwich two of the fans outside the computer!

_{Younger me had no shame - only determination. Bigger, Faster, Stronger!}

I got the cooler solely for overclocking, and was disappointing when it:

Failed to deliver better clocks (hard lesson in the 'Silicon Lottery' there)
Died within a year (it was the pump, and no other such cooler existed ever again)

Before the water cooler leaked its soul back to its lord, there was - you guessed it - yet another upgrade. This time, it was my wisest purchase as a hardware monkey - the R9 390, bought with the explicit intention to undervolt it.

_{Things got pretty messy at times}

Cooling? I'm a fan!

That's right - I bought a part intending to modify it, and it worked out far, far better than I deserve.

The R9 390, then relatively cheap despite sporting more powerful hardware than the competing GTX 970, was a brilliant purchase - I quickly got it down from 275 Watts to 140, as well as running it about 10% faster. It is now almost six years old and still serving me wonderfully.

_{Naturally, I took the GPU apart at some point.}

To this day, I am far to aware of minute details about cooling fans entirely at fault of this episode.

_{I came looking for thermals, and I found... Indium?}

Here, drunk with my undervolt's success, my smug character struck me down in perhaps the worst fashion I would ever be struck down in my life. I was being processed for the military, and the the ripe age of 16 and a half I was sat down in Tel Hashomer, where a pretty, bored soldier asked me what I do.

I Build Computers.

"I build computers", I answered smugly, perhaps aiming to impress her. These memories are heavily repressed.

"So like coding?" was her bored reply.

Back in those days, I was (and still am, to a degree) wary of realist professions, chiefly including maths and coding.

" Noooooooooo hu hoooo", I replied. "I do NOT know coding".

Naturally, she sent me off to communications, which drafted me after some testing as a Computer Systems Infrastructure Manager. I am absolutely certain I failed those tests spectacularly, despite it being vehemently denied throughout my service.

To this day, I'm not sure how I feel about that. Perhaps I would have been better off. Perhaps it saved me from much worse misery, and maybe I owe much of my good fortune to that misunderstanding.

Monkey Meets Penguin

I did take my assigned role very seriously, and one of the most important steps was then taken - I bought a Raspberry Pi (2, model B - which only died last year!).

_{I took this picture to show all my friends how awesome this little 25$ computer is. I'm still blown away!}.

This was my first contact with Linux - a field previously unknown and unrelated. I can only guess whether I'd have stumbled onto Linux on my own, but I'm grateful for it either way - it's been an unstoppable force in my career and greatly accelerated my hobby.

Similar experiences of my peers suggest I would never have encountered it on my own, but I'm certainly unwilling to give the military credit.

So where was I going with this? Right, the Linuxing.

The Linuxing

Right after boot camp, I was enrolled in the Communication Corps' supposedly top-tier computing course. We were often told we were picked out 'from the top 10% of many thousands of applicants'.

Well, I'll put it bluntly - I failed the course quite miserably. It was deeply centered around programming (in PowerShell of all things!) and very specific technologies no junior sysadmin has any business of knowing.

I have yet to use MongoDB in my career. Is it great? probably. Is it absolutely essential for a new army recruit? probably not.

Now, the fact that I failed did not come as a surprise. Within the first week I became acutely aware of this scenario, and within the first month (out of five) I was certain I'd fail quite a few subjects. My worsening mental health was falsely attributed (by me, as well as my commanders) to these uninspiring results.

You're giving up on yourself!

I was told constantly, by both commanders and - at times - peers. I never felt this way, and told them as such. My talents lay elsewhere - so I'll focus on those rather than programming, and that's just fine and dandy.

If you fail any subject, you'll fail the course! you're giving up on yourself!

By this point, I became engrossed in Linux (and, I'll shamefully admit, Windows and VMWare - don't judge!), and accepted failure as the price of fluency. I was down on my luck and I stuck to my strengths, despite greatly increasing threats from command staff to flunk me to a shaming service of (gasp!) IT support personnel. This happened anyway, but never mind.

The big day came around - I was tested in PowerShell, my worst subject and greatest nemesis. After a great deal of effort and much consideration from my commanders, I achieved a brilliant score of 21 points out of 100.

And you know what? they said I passed the course. And I wasn't surprised.

Even as a lean, green army recruit, I called them out on their bluff.

So what was it all for? it was arbitrary. The requirements were arbitrary, the subjects were arbitrary, my talents were arbitrary and I passed... arbitrarily.

Still had a great time with my Raspberry Pi, though.

_{It lives! It lives!}

The Linuxing!

Where were we?

My first post was as a call center operative and had absolutely nothing to do with anything I'd learned or failed to learn. My disappointment quickly led to much hostility, and I was rather quickly reassigned to Air Force HQ as a different type of call center operative and had absolutely nothing to do with anything I'd learned or failed to learn. My disappointment quickly led to much hostility, and I rather quickly found myself unassigned and drowning in free time, because HQ was much slower in kicking me out thanks to its rich bureaucratic ecosystem.

Being unassigned was deeply humiliating - and while I still had some shred of social awareness left, I wanted to do something with my time to avoid the shame. The tables have turned, and now I wielded the subject that made me take my post seriously as my sword of defiance. I put up a virtual machine (named Greg and Larry after the Brooklyn Nine-Nine bit) and studied Linux vigorously.

By now, I quite liked Linux, but it was still an army thing - I wouldn't go as far as to describe myself as a Linux sysadmin, or even claim it as a hobby or an interest. I had a Ubuntu install running at home for the novelty, but didn't really use it.

I'd only chosen to study Linux because it felt slightly less oppressive than the other subjects (it is free, open source software, is it not?).

As I sank into the worst period of my life, my memory becomes blurred. I don't quite remember if I had anything to do with Linux over the next year or so. By the time I was reassigned again to a lowly IT support post, I'd already flaunted my Linux experience - so there's that.

Goin' lean and mean

I was seriously tired as I drew into my final, year long posting. It should have been of great comfort to me that the work was lowly, uninspiring and greatly prone to technical exaggeration - I could claim the simplest 5 minutes job took me hours and no one would bat an eye.

Today, it strikes me as utterly bizarre just how much of that time I continued pouring into the Unix world, under quite dire circumstances.

_{For some reason, I was booting DragonFly BSD on a different department on that Sunday morning. What was going on?}

Unix projects at this time were numerous, desperate an mostly explainable even to me:

I re-purposed an extremely old, useless server (dual core, 256MB of RAM) as a FreeBSD machine, aiming to run it as a Chess server
I gathered dozens of old 1TB drives and tested how violently I could erase them using said server and much worse machines, often on the floor of the storage room
I put aside a perfectly good computer in a special spot in our 'lab' and dedicated it entirely to testing exotic Linux distros, under various false pretenses
I booted a specially formatted, carefully considered and fully encrypted Linux install in places I had no business booting Linux in for the sole purpose of gaming at night. The machines assembled for this were irrational, monstrous anomalies of human engineering.
I carried around a Linux laptop and did a bunch of things with it all while checking just where I could get coverage.
At my commander's request, I created a series of Unix lectures which were quite good, I think. Obviously never got to use them, but kept researching long after things dropped.
I tried my hand at C and Python. It was bad. _{Late nights with no commanders around were a frenzy of strange Unix abominations}

Aftermath

Upon my release, I had quite a bit of functional Linux knowledge in store, and kept tinkering and experimenting at home. Just shy of a year after my release, I landed a job as a Linux sysadmin - full time. The military gave me the stamp of society to knowledge I've learned almost entirely on my own, and can now claim as my profession.

When I just started my service, I proudly claimed I would never work in the IT industry - as 'computers are lifeless and working with them is a cold, soulless job'.

I studied computers just to get past my service and escape shipping to some shithole down south - and ended up a professional just out of spite. Life really sneaks up on you.

To summarize:

I like computer games
I bought a computer to make games faster
I bought and installed part to make games faster
I messed around with the parts to make games faster
I bought parts that would allow me to buy parts that I could mess around with to make games faster

Everything is nice. I am having fun. Life is great.

Society barges in

I said something stupid because I was 16
Instantly deemed a coder despite all evidence to the contrary
Realize I hate IT
I failed coding and infrastructure training because I am not a coder and hate IT
I was still assigned to an IT role
It was bad and I got pissed
Learned IT out of spite

Conclusion

Warning: the below is my personal opinion of what I know - I do not claim it to be true for everyone, everywhere.

I ended up where I am despite having no natural talent, no success and no love for the field because I like video games and maybe wanted to impress some girl I didn't know because I was 16 and slightly stupider than today.

I did all bunch of prep stuff to get to pick my army role, which supposedly is the pathway to a career and a degree. I got good grades. I had a favorite subject. I even went to an institution-prep thing. I was drilled, instructed, trained and prepared. It had no effect whatsoever. I succeeded solely out of spite.

I got my career because I studied on my own. And, as the cherry on top, I have no hope of ever getting into the degree that teaches my field, which I already practice, unless I pay a lot of money, which I can earn by practicing the field I cannot study for. Intensely ironic.

The tests don't mean anything. All the talk around those things is useless. Stuff happens for no reason. Most things socially demanded of you are void of substance. Don't take it all so seriously.

Go do what you love.

17 KiB Raw Permalink Blame History