There’s a old joke about this from Jack Parr, told on the Tonight Show:

An English lady, while visiting Germany, was looking for a room to rent. She found a suitable one owned by a local schoolmaster. After returning home, she remembered she hadn’t seen a “W.C.” (water closet/bathroom) on the property. She wrote a letter to the schoolmaster asking where the W.C. was located.

The schoolmaster, not knowing much English, was puzzled by the initials “W.C.” He took the letter to the parish priest, and together they concluded that the lady must be asking about the local Wayside Chapel.

The schoolmaster wrote the following reply:

Dear Madam,

I take great pleasure in informing you that the W.C. is situated nine miles from the house, in the center of a beautiful grove of pine trees. It is capable of holding 250 people and is open to the public on Sundays and Thursdays.

As a large crowd is expected during the summer months, I advise you to arrive early. This may prove an unfortunate inconvenience to you if you are in the habit of going regularly. Rest assured, however, that there is plenty of standing room.

Many people bring their lunch and make a day of it, while others arrive at the last minute and can only find standing room. A special feature is the organ music, which accompanies all proceedings. The acoustics are excellent, and even the most delicate sounds can be heard by everyone.

It may also interest you to know that my daughter was married in the W.C., as it was there that she met her husband. I can still remember the rush for seats. There were ten people in every seat that day!

My wife is very delicate, so she cannot go regularly. It has been over six months since she last went, which is naturally a great trial for her.

I shall be delighted to reserve the best seat for you, where you can be seen by everyone.

Yours faithfully,

The Schoolmaster

Something about this doesn’t seem right. An ordinary router shouldn’t be the power hungry device that breaks your UPS setup. I have 3 Lenovo M910Qs, an HP T640, a switch, an external USB SATA drive housing, and two MODEM/routers hooked up to a cheap Cyberpower UPS and it tells me I’m drawing about 100W and should run for over an hour.

Us that technically a missing Oxford comma, or just a missing comma?

Hmmmm…

I give you Mark Carney.

He was one of Jeff Healey’s sidemen?

Last time I heard this joke it was a racist slur. It wasn’t funny as such, but it made more sense. There’s no value in trying to revive this in some non-racist form. Let’s just forget it and move on.

The most important technique to master: The Ping and Wiggle.

I despise the idea of a hiring process that treats the applicant as a supplicant. As a manager I once attended a training session on “Behaviour Based” interviewing. The approach itself - the idea of asking situational questions - had some merit, but the process they taught depending on keeping the applicant in the dark as much as possible and concentrated all the power in the hiring side.

To me the process needs to be two way. The applicant needs to know if the company, and the position itself will be a good fit for them. I can see an applicant asking the same kind of questions, “Can you describe how you would handle a situation where an employee behaved inappropriately to a female coworker?”. That kind of thing.

It’s beneficial to both sides. The applicant doesn’t want to land in a bad fit, and the hiring process is expensive and dealing with the vacancy has its own costs.

Taking the attitude that every applicant is simply wants to get the offer, and will lie and cheat to get it sets a bad tone right from the start, and the approach makes it difficult for the applicant to make an informed decision.

I realize that the OP example is the way that the world is going, but having an AI interview would just be a giant red flag for me. I would be tempted to just set an AI of my own to interact with the company’s AI directly and just sit back and watch.

I say, “would be”, because I’m retired, and will never have to deal with this BS. However, I hope that the people that I interviewed in the past appreciated the cooperative approach that I tried to take.

I think that as you move towards replacing cloud services with self-hosted ones you take on the responsibility of providing the same reliability as the cloud services.

Just installing a UPS will let you ride through 99% of all power failures because most of them are only a few seconds long. My UPS says that my entire HomeLab, including Internet modems runs at about 100W, and it will last for the better part of an hour.

The question then becomes about longer outages, that run the UPS dry. There are two issues.

The first issue is system shutdowns, if they just crash when the battery ends, then you run the risk of data corruption and disk buffers that haven’t flushed. But in truth, this is probably a minor possibility. Your servers were up, but the rest of your house was already down. No feed from the cameras, no events in HomeAssistant, no WiFi, no nothing. This means virtually no activity on your servers for an extended period of time.

This doesn’t eliminate the possibility of corruption, but it makes it less likely.

The second issue is getting the servers back up and running when the power returns. This can be a bit more complicated, what if the power is up and down a bit before the UPS has some charge built up?

Maybe your best just leaving them off for a bit until things have stabilized and the UPS has a charge.

NUTs deals with both of these issues in an automated fashion. It can shut your services down in a controlled manner so that they don’t crash when the battery dies. It can bring your servers back on line when the power is restored and stable.

For me, my main concern is for when the power failure goes past he battery life when I’m on vacation. I won’t be able to go and push power buttons on the server. NUTs can get a bit tricky if you are looking for 100% hands-free operation. I can deal with anything when I’m home, but away in problematic.

I’ve decided to leave NUTs out of the mix for now. All of my servers are configured to turn on when power is restored, and all of the services are configured to start up automatically when the server boots. I’m content to let the UPS drain dry, crash the mostly idle servers when that happens, and then reboot when power is restored.

There’s a risk, but I think I understand it.

The Cold War, the threat of “Mutually Assure Destruction” that hung over all of heads for decades until the USSR dissolved, was “fairly minor”???

There’s a fair number of lawyers in northern Ontario who also do a lot of work in Manitoba. Winnipeg to Kenora is something around a 2 hour drive.

The Cold War. Transfer of Hong Kong to China. The collapse of the USSR. Arab/Israeli wars. Vietnam and the Peace Movement. The oil crisis. 9/11. End of Segregation in the US. Womens’ Rights especially after the Pill Gay/Trans Rights The Korean War The Beatles

It’s pretty much constant.

Describe a time of geopolitical non-change please.

“With a fucking dildo!”