[Raion]

What's new with your life nowadays? I've recently decided to quit my job, I will be leaving for good at the 18th - I have decided to exit the job on my own volition without anything lined up because the job has begun to suck, my health has taken a turn for the worse, I need to have a job that gets me more physical activity and I'm just sick of being the only competent network admin on staff at odd hours of the night and expected to fix things that a three man team fixes during the day.

[BackPlaner]

I recently turned my part-time teaching gig into a full time faculty position (at the same university). They had an opening for a full-time faculty member in the digital media Department teaching the same classes and it only involved about a day and a half more work a week, so I decided to commit and went for it. I was up against about 16 other people but I stayed the course and after a few months of interviews and stuff I finally got the job. First time in almost seven years of freelancing that I finally got a real gig with health insurance and a retirement plan, so that's cool...

[jan-jaap]

Been working with the same company for the last 13 or 14 years, so I guess both me and my employer must be doing something right. Being a father of two young children, having a solid and steady flow of income is also one less thing to worry about and I appreciate that as well.

When I have the time and the energy (in the evening hours), I still have work to do to finish all the wiring in my computer room. Right now I'm busy making adapter dongles for serial console cables. I have an 48port Cyclades console server, and (RJ45 network) console cables to every system. Every system needs an adapter: RJ45 <-> miniDIN, or RJ45 <-> PC-DB9, or RJ45 <-> IRIS4D-DB9, etc etc. That's a ton of dongles so a lot of work. Also, as a long term goal, I want to reduce the amount of spare parts I have to a relevant and tested subset, and sell or get rid the rest. I also tinker with home automation, raspberry pi or arduino projects, and I recently upgraded my file server (Linux/ZFS) from 4x4TB to 4x8TB with encryption. Encrypted ZFS means I can do incremental off-site backups to a backup server which doesn't need to have the keys to decrypt the volume. Since this backup server is hosted at work, I prefer to avoid potential conflicts of interest and the risk of nosy wannabe hacker colleagues.

I'm also working on a new website to showcase my collection of SGI systems, with a page dedicated to every system. Some of it's history, pictures, upgrades, plus a sort of blog roll of what I'm up to SGI-wise (repairs, upgrades, tips and tricks). I have a lot of systems and little time available, so it's going to take a while before it's ready to go live.

[JackNet]

I'm halfway done with university. I should expect to finish by the end of 2021 (Have to cram in two more semesters since I decided to ease the pacing of my studies after my first few semesters were really packed). This semester I'm going over some C programming and Maya modeling basics, along with some cyber security stuff. The cyber security prof has quite an eagle eye; was able to notice my DamnSmallLinux VM was set to Bridged networking instead of Host-Only by just the IP address alone when verifying the installation (I followed what the video said instead of the text; either way, I already have VMware installed as I was using it for a few years now).
My O2's still working a-ok, but I haven't had any luck with setting up the Wacom drivers. Dexter1's willing to help me out, but at the moment he's looking at how it was installed on his Indy.
Hopefully, I get around acquiring a new cable modem and re-arrange how things will work from now on with the service provider soon enough to alleviate costs as they kept creeping up our bill. Things started to get really really bad since Charter acquired Bright House (AKA Central Florida's TimeWarner Cable but was actually decent). Spectrum service can suck it.

[Intuition]

As posted in other threads.

I work in Visual Effects, Computer Animation, Etc. Have been in Los Angeles doing this since 1995 and the early era SGI time.

Today I am working in Venice back from the beach area on a well known street in Venice called Abbott Kinney. A little place called KevinVFX.

Only a couple weeks ago I was working Downtown LA at a place called Drive Studios.

Most of the time I am working at one place for between 3 months to a year. Lately I have been getting month long projects but they are all near where I live so I don't mind changing scenery. I have a very long connection list so I always have offers and have been very lucky in that regard.

On this gig I am primarily relegated to Lighting and Rendering. Last gig I was put to the simulation tasks for fluids and fire. The one before that in June was as a Technical director creating the shot from model, animation, fx, lighting rendering etc. The gig before was a long 8 month gig where I was lighting/animating a lot of Google products. I did the Pixel Phone 3d Animation that you have probably seen on tv or facebook/youtube ads. Also did an animation for the Google assist computer for a few of their ads.

[VPCII]

New? Ha. 5 years+ at the current job, 9-5 grind, mortgage, wife and 3 kids... the only thing new are the additional gray hairs every morning. What can I say though, this is like a dream compared to how I grew up. Real happy every morning to be around, feel like I made it, rags to riches as it were.

[...]I'm just sick of being the only competent network admin on staff at odd hours of the night and expected to fix things that a three man team fixes during the day.

When you do so much for so long with so little, they start to expect you to do everything with nothing, forever.

[pcar]

Trying my hand at some non-computer/tech related things. I've been metal working and welding for awhile but never did any work with wood, so I thought i'd give it a shot. I took my time, learned techniques, and built this epoxy river table, I'm super happy with the results and have started on the next one.

[commodorejohn]

Well, I spent five or six hours today working on repairing my car. First time I've ever gotten that in-depth myself...of course, it's still not back to working yet :/

[Irinikus]

Trying my hand at some non-computer/tech related things. I've been metal working and welding for awhile but never did any work with wood, so I thought i'd give it a shot. I took my time, learned techniques, and built this epoxy river table, I'm super happy with the results and have started on the next one.

Very cool! That looks awesome!

[jwcotejr]

Well, I'm back to school now. Just entered my third year of university; I'm finally at a point where the majority of the courses that I am taking are courses that actually interest me & pertain to my major, so that's pretty cool. It's almost hard for me to believe that I am this far into it; doesn't seem all that long ago that I was a freshman.

I also (finally) managed to get into the game studio courses here at my university, which are fairly new courses that have been in the pilot phase since the game studio was built around two years ago at this point; so technically, I'm also a part of that pilot phase. The game studio courses are meant to replace other game development related courses that I have to take at some point before I graduate, but because they aren't officially integrated into the program evaluation yet, it's been a lengthy process to get that all sorted and not have them take up my free elective courses. It's definitely worth it to me, though, as it's designed to not really feel like a traditional university course; it's designed to feel like we are working in an actual game studio. So we have actual assigned projects that we are working on in teams with external clients & such. My team is currently working with our university's innovation center, which technically is an external client, to help them create VR & AR tools that can be used to demonstrate what the future learner might experience. It's also a paid position, so technically it is my job as well. Pretty neat stuff!

Aside from academics, I am still working on acquiring some more SGI hardware; at least one machine that actually is able to boot to an IRIX desktop, as that is what I am mainly after. My Indy would work, if it had a working power supply, but it's current power supply hasn't been working out for me. Being that it is not the original power supply, it doesn't make much sense to me to try & repair the current custom power supply, but eventually obtain an official power supply & make necessary repairs to that as needed. Not entirely sure how to approach that yet, though, so currently I am still on the lookout for something like an O2 that is at least functioning, so I can play around with IRIX, which was my initial goal.