160 lines
14 KiB
Plaintext
160 lines
14 KiB
Plaintext
---
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layout: post
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title: "The Path of PC: Adulting is a Quickdraw of Arrogance"
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category: [Lerler]
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date: 2021-09-16 22:33:00 +0200
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---
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<sub> *Mean, Lean, Linux machine* </sub>
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> In Progress
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I'm currently in a phase of life rife with decision - where would I live? what would I do? what drives me in life?
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As I sink (characteristically for me, far far too deep) into these questions, there's a certain inert arrogance to the process I find I can't stand.
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What does that mean?
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There's a form for everything. Every path you take presents you with a list of demands, definitions and some deep-rooted philosophy aimed at picking the absolute best for you.
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I think of these things very seriously, until suddenly reckoning with my own professional path thus far.
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At this point, I dare call myself a Linux Sysadmin by trade, albeit a novice. I have a steady, long term job, a unique set of skills, interesting employment prospects and a clear career path, just shy of 24.
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Sounds nice, doesn't it? I answered the demands, fit with the definitions, and think in that same deep-rooted philosophy as the path I've chosen.
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Only I... don't. In this latest Ler, I'll make a case (for myself mostly) on how all this mumbled flurry means nothing, and people end where they are by chance, by prejudice, or by the mere entropy of the universe. I'll present this using the path I went with to start this career: the path of the PC.
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# I Like Video Games.
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Always did. Still do.
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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.
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I remember absolutely nothing of this system - only the grey, plasticy China made chassis and the loud whir of the HDDs (which was likely added to this memory much later). I played simple, 2D or web games on it on occasion, and life was good, I guess.
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As a fourth grader abroad, our family shared the then-latest laptop, which I remember more firmly - a big, shiny black plastic HP which was seriously hot without one of these lap cooler-fan things. It had a fingerprint reader (which we were demanded not to use) and we played Runescape on it for too many hours, likely the cause of my need for glasses today. When it's long dead husk was around, I knew enough to retroactively recall it as a Windows Vista machine, and that's it.
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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.
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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.
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# I Like Computer Hardware.
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I only recently realized I do things with much more intensity than most - at each turn of my journey, people are always surprised by the depth and intensity of my knowledge in the field (yes, yes, r/Iamverysmart - my mistakes were colossal to match, and I was just as stupid, do not worry). 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 cooler (the budget CoolerMaster Evo 212 - still in service!). 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 friend for help. I wouldn't be too upset to make that mistake today - those are ferocious little buggers!
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A few months later, 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 760. I already had the i5 650 running a full Ghz ahead of spec, with a higher base clock to boot. Very shortly after, to support the new GPU, I bought the oldest part still in my machine today - the Seasonic SSP-RT 550 Gold PSU - and now I had some ragtag rig and started proper gaming. This was the very first computer I *made* and planned, and most of my hardware knowledge today stems from those days.
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# I Like Building Computers.
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<sub> I was *really* excited about all those bits and pieces in a proper motherboard</sub>
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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 and a likely overly 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).
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This is when things began to get wild.
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<sub>This picture, from late 2015, is about the point I was first *proud* of something I planned and assembled</sub>
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# Going Monkey
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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. A mere year after the upgrade, I got a **massive** water cooler (an Alpine 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!
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<sub>Younger me had no shame - only determination. Bigger, Faster, Stronger!</sub>
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I got the cooler only for overclocking, and was disappointing when it:
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- Failed to deliver better clocks (hard lesson in the 'Silicon Lottery' there)
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- Died within a year (it was the pump, and no other such cooler existed ever again)
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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 intention to undervolt it.
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<sub> Things got pretty messy at times</sub>
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# Cooling? I'm a fan!
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That's right - I bought a part intending to modify it, and it worked out far, far better than I deserve.
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The R9 390, then relatively cheap despite more powerful hardware, was a brilliant purchase - I quickly got it down from 275 Watts to 140. It is now almost six years old and is still serving me wonderfully.
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<sub>Naturally, I took the GPU apart shortly after.</sub>
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Drunk with the undervolt's success, that whole stint led me to thinking about *efficiency*, rather than just going big and loud. To this day, I am far to aware of minute details about cooling fans entirely at fault of this episode.
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<sub>I came looking for thermals, and I found... Indium?</sub>
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Here, 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.
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# I Build Computers.
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"I build computers", I answered smugly, perhaps aiming to impress her. I do not remember - these memories are heavily repressed.
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"So like coding?" was her bored reply.
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Back in those days, I was (and still am, to a degree) wary of realist professions, cheifly including maths and coding.
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" *Noooooooooo hu hoooo*", I replied. "I do NOT know coding".
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Naturally, she sent me off to communications, which drafted me after some testing (which I am **absolutely certain** I failed spectacularly, despite it being vehemently denied throughout my service) as a ***Computer Systems Infrastructure Manager***.
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> In all the lerring I've spewed thus far, this is my first piece of evidence against the rat race - I built computers to add more anti-aliasing to my games, and they made me a *sysadmin*.
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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.
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My point still stands - how is it okay for me to not know whether my current profession is a misunderstaning?
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# Monkey Meets Penguin
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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!).
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<sub>I took this picture to show all my friends how awesome this little 25$ computer is. I'm still blown away!</sub>.
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This was my first contact with Linux - a field previously unknown and unrelated.
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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.
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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.
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So where was I going with this?
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Right, the Linuxing.
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# The Linuxing
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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'*.
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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.
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I have yet to use MongoDB in my career. Is it great? probably. Is it absolutely essential for a new army recruit? probably not.
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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.
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My worsening mental health was falsely attributed (by me, as well as my commanders) to these uninspiring results.
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> You're giving up on yourself!
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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.
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> If you fail any subject, you'll fail the course! you're giving up on yourself!
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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.
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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.
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And you know what? they said I passed the course. And I wasn't surprised.
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Even as a lean, green army recruit, I called them out on their bluff.
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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.
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Still had a great time with my Raspberry Pi, though.
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<sub>It lives! It lives!</sub>
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# The Linuxing!
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Where were we?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?).
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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. |