Sorry no. I was not a part of the workforce when working remotely involved dial up connections.

I was in highschool when DSL and cable internet became the norm. From then on out, it was all VPN.

Not in the USA, I’m not sure that we have a similar law. Any agreement that may or may not have resulted from the above story, which I cannot confirm nor deny, would have been examined by a legal professional whom is familiar with local laws and if such an error were to have been included in such a document, they would have surely pointed it out.

I’m not saying that’s what happened, but if it did, I certainly would have had any such agreement looked at by a professional who is familiar with the laws to the point of knowing if such a thing were not enforceable.

I wish I could say more specifically what happened, including my opinions, or name and shame the company involved but I am compelled to not disclose any such information. I also cannot elaborate on why or how I am limited on what I can disclose.

I feel like I’m walking a tightrope. The chances that someone is going to even care enough to trace my username to my identity, then do something about it, is pretty slim, even if I were to disclose everything, and name and shame as I would love to do… But I’m more honorable than most I suppose.

That’s quite the lesson you just laid down.

It’s actually made things a lot more clear for me. To put it as tersely as I can, UTC is the international time, GMT is a timezone, which also happens to be UTC+0.

So GMT is a place/zone/region of earth, and UTC is a time coordination, with no physical location (beyond the prime meridian, which is where it is tracking the time of).

Awesome.

Oh probably. From everything I saw it was impossible for me to meet their demands.

Partway through my employment I moved to a new home, after a few months my SO got a job. She doesn’t have a license but needed to travel about 15 minutes to work (30m round trip). I was basically the only person who could, or would, help her get to work. I worked 9-5, her shift was 2:30 to 10:30.

For a while, my brother would drive her to work and I would drive her home, even that was stressful, because I’d wake up at 6:30 to shower and get ready to leave by 8AM so I can be at work for 9, then I had to stay up to bring her home, which she wasn’t out at 10:30 promptly every day, so I’d frequently get home after 11:30. Going to bed at, or after midnight, to wake up by 6:30 AM, five days a week isn’t fun, even at four days in the office per week, it was not great.

Thought-out this time I was asking for more wfh, since then I can at least sleep from midnight to 8 AM or so. They wouldn’t budge.

My brother ended up having a medical issue that caused him to be unable to drive her to work, so I told my employer I had to work from home, since I have to take care of getting her both to, and from work, and that, at most, the situation would last around 10-12 months (she was working on her driver’s license, and that’s the minimum waiting/learning time for new drivers, before they can drive without a chaperone); I also informed them that I could attend the office once per week, since she had one weekday off per week as part of her shift rotation. They “compromised” by basically telling me to follow their schedule or be laid off. Their schedule was: in office every day from 9-1. Travel home between 1 and 2pm, and do what’s needed to get my SO to work. Once I’m done that, I can work from home when I return from dropping her off (usually 2:30 or 3 PM to 5 PM or so… Whatever our quitting time was), with one day (her day off) fully in office, and one day fully from home. So 3 of 5 days was this insane in-office then drive home and finish at home thing, one day was fully remote, and one day was fully in office.

Needless to say, I burned out fast. Got a note from my doctor saying I was disabled (he didn’t specify why, but if push came to shove it would be something mental health related, he never needed to AFAIK), and I wasn’t able to work right now, and currently the recovery time needed was unknown. So I went on disability.

I also want to mention that through all the half day nonsense, they expected me to log 6.5 hours in their time tracking software, which is something I struggle with at the best of times. When I’m stressed, the first thing that suffers is my ability to correctly log and account for my time in any system. So I had 4 hours in the morning to work from the office on my “split days” (as I called them), plus, maybe 2.5 hours at most during my work from home time. Totalling 6.5 hours. I couldn’t so much as take a shit or I would fall behind on my time tracking. Normally over an 8 hour shift, the 1.5 hours of missing time in the day would be for breaks/lunch. It’s hard to take lunch when I’m barely able to make it home in an hour, and barely able to get to/from her work in 30 minutes. I usually work through lunch because I tend to have time where I have no idea what I was doing, so I can’t really account for it in the time tracker. With the 1.5 hour block of driving in the middle of my day, plus all the distractions and unaccounted time I know I’ll accrue from co-workers pulling me away from my work to ask asinine questions about things that don’t have a presence in the time tracking system (all ticket based, and they would ask me about prospective projects that wouldn’t have a ticket for months), I knew that what they were asking as an impossible task.

After I felt up to the task of returning to that insanity, instead of keeping my seat warm for me, they laid me off before I was set to return to work. I only felt up to it because it would have only been a matter of a few months before my SO was able to take her driver’s test to be able to drive solo, and after 6 months of being off I wasn’t suicidal from the stress anymore, but the bills were starting to pile up.

I was able to determine that they hired a new person in the same role I had, who was on probation at the time when I wanted to return.

I’ll let you conclude what you want from that. I’ll legally bound not to speak poorly of the company, or what happened after my layoff. Everything I’ve said here is simply the facts of the matter.

In any case, after some thought, I’m glad I don’t work with people who would force me into that kind of position for a paycheque. I have a new job now and I’m slowly paying off any accumulated bills from my time disabled and/or laid off. The new company, as I believe I’ve mentioned, is entirely wfh, and I’m certain if I ended up in a similar spot, they would be vastly more empathetic to my plight. I’m even earning a small amount more per year, not enough to write home about, but it’s still a bigger number than I was given at the last place. I’m happy where I am, and I’m largely not stressed, apart from the normal stresses of my job. I no longer need to pay for gas to get to the office, nor parking, since the previous job was located in a nearby city in the downtown area, with no free parking for employees, so I had to get paid public parking out of my own pocket. I estimate the change will save me around $6000/yr or more. On top of my small bump in pay, I should have a bit less than $10k/yr more money to myself. Right now all of that is sunk into repayments, but long term, its basically free money.

My previous workplace was like this. It didn’t get to this point, I left before it got to the point of being told you’re not allowed to wfh under any circumstances, but I was very confused why I needed to go to the office, to do my IT job, helping people with their computers remotely. I go to the office, to work remotely. Which doesn’t make any sense at all.

What is special about the office that allows me to work better/faster/more effectively/whatever? Nobody could give me an answer. I can easily run the tools at home and work fine from there, but I’m not allowed.

My specialty is in network operations, if they want my work to 100% go through their equipment and firewalls and stuff, I can make that happen. With little effort, I can setup a system on a VLAN, and VPN that VLAN to work, blocking it from all other traffic apart from the VPN. It would be the only system on that VLAN (apart from the firewall/VPN device), ensuring no possibility of cross contamination between my equipment and theirs. They even had an openVPN host already configured, which they would only need to generate a connection file for, in order for me to get it working. I can then proxy 100% of my traffic through an office system and it would be identical to being present in the office, apart from me being physically there.

At home I have a dedicated room for my computer activities, where I can close the door and lock it if required, so I can remain undisturbed.

I made sure they understood all of this but they still wanted me in the office at least 4 days a week. I’m still not sure why.

I left that job, and my new job doesn’t even have a physical office, so I’m permanently working from home.

IMO, the biggest problem with timezones is that the people who initially created them were fairly short sighted.

That and there have been way too many changes to who lives in what timezone. The one that boggles my mind is that apparently there’s a country in two timezones, not like, split down the middle or anything, but two active timezones across the entire country depending on which culture you’re a part of, or something. It’s wild.

I still don’t know if there’s any difference between GMT and UTC. I couldn’t find one. They both have the same time, same offset (+0), and represent the same time zone area.

I use UTC because I’m in tech, and I can’t stand time formats, so I exclusively use ISO 8601, with a 24 hour clock. Usually in my local time zone, via UTC. We have DST here which I’m not a fan of, but I have to abide by because everyone else does.

My biggest issues with time and timezones is that everyone uses different standards. It drives me nuts when software doesn’t let me set the standard for how the time and date is displayed, and doesn’t follow the system settings. It’s more common in web apps, but it happens a lot. I put in a lot of effort to try to get everything displaying in a standard format then some crudely written website is just mm/dd/yy with 12h clock and no timezone info, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Version 1.0 released in 2016. I’m pretty sure my process pre-dates this tool.

Looks good, but my collection is already ripped and converted, so I don’t have a need for it anymore.

I’ll keep this in my pack pocket if I happen to ever buy physical media again.

I use a private streaming application. I don’t want to say which one, but popular examples include Plex, jellyfin, emby, and Kodi.

It’s not really compatible with the DVD menu systems, though, that would be really fun if it was.

My bad, it’s been a while.

No lie, a large amount of my digital media was pulled from physical disks.

I set up a system with a ton of space and two optical drives and just cycled through, disk after disk, pulling the content off. Once I had it, I ran it through handbrake and converted it to H.264 (AVC/AAC), and then put all the disks away and forgot about them.

Whenever I see a SATA optical drive that someone doesn’t want, I grab it and tuck it away. Shit is rare now.

I’m sure I could go to a shop and just pick one up, but honestly, I don’t have a reason to. Give me an opportunity to snag one for free and I will not pass it up.

I have an external Blu ray drive at this point.

I’ve always wanted a good quality 3.5" external drive. I rarely have an internal disc drive (cd/dvd/BR) on any of my computers. A few years ago I had the need to pull some files off of a 3.5" floppy, I had to boot up an old Dell PE 2850 server that had a 3.5" drive on it to get the files off the drive. Luckily the copy of Windows server 2003 still booted, and the raid array was operational. It was like a miracle getting that stuff off that disk.

It was late at night and I couldn’t wait until morning to go buy a USB 3.5" drive to get the data.

I work in IT and people question my sanity when I’m walking home with SCSI interfaces and corresponding SCSI tape drives. I even picked up a zip 100 usb drive at some point.

I never used it for it’s intended purpose, but as soon as someone needs data off of some archive, on an outdated storage format, I become the MVP.

Iron man.

I think the third one?

That’s Tony’s dad, in a message he recorded for Tony.

Candles?

Why not gas mantles or something?

No. I know those areas are kind of playing by their own rules. I’m located in southern Ontario, well outside of the GTA. I don’t want to be any more specific because I don’t want to dox myself.

I expect that for most mid sized cities/towns or rural areas nearby mid sized cities (within an hour or so), the pricing is similar. For the GTA, GVA, or even other large cities like Montreal or Ottawa, the prices are much higher

I agree, I always feel that pride is about being open/honest/proud of who you are and who you love, and being accepting of others, in who they are and who they love.

The specifics of who you are and who you love are not important.

Minority or not, all are welcome as long as you can accept others for who they are and who they love.

… With the obvious exception of relationships that are illegal… I’m specifically thinking of pedos here, but I’m sure other illegal relationships would also be unwelcome, like bestiality, I guess. IDK.

I feel like that’s what I was trying to say.

To simplify, to be at pride, you need two things: a pride in who you are and who you love, and an acceptance of others, who they are and who they love.

In that, the OP in OP’s picture would not be unwelcome, as long as they can accept others for who they are and who they love.

I’m generally more of a Debian user, when I use Linux at least, so anything red hat based doesn’t even occur to me to recommend. I generally don’t get involved in distro discussions though.

My main interaction with Linux is Ubuntu server, and that’s where my knowledge generally is. I can’t really fix issues in redhat, so if someone is using it, I’m mostly lost on how to fix it.

There’s enough difference in how redhat works compared to Debian distributions that I would need to do a lot of work to understand what’s happening and fix any problems.

I dunno if I’d say any distro of Linux is really beginner friendly.

It takes quite a bit of learning the ins and outs of operating systems before Linux makes sense in any capacity.

If you’re just looking to run a few basic apps like discord/slack/teams/zoom, and run a browser, then sure, just about every distro can do that without trouble, and can be configured to be as “friendly” as Windows, with a few exceptions.

But anybody who wants to do intermediate/advanced stuff with little to no prior Linux knowledge? I’m not sure any distro is much easier than others. Again, with a few exceptions.

The exceptions are distros that are almost intentionally difficult to use, or that require a high level of competency with Linux before you can attempt to use it.

There’s always a learning curve, that learning curve is pretty much always pretty steep.

I’ve been using Linux for dedicated servers for a while and I don’t use Linux as a desktop environment, in no small part because despite having a fairly high level of competency with Linux, I don’t feel like I know enough to make Linux work for me instead of the other way around.

AI in the current state of technology will not and cannot replace understanding the system and writing logical and working code.

GenAI should be used to get a start on whatever you’re doing, but shouldn’t be taken beyond that.

Treat it like a psychopathic boiler plate.