Next Career Move

The company I work(ed) for has been planning a division sell-off for most of the year.  Weeks after that division spin-off into Private Equity, I was notified that my last day will be 29 October.  The last time I was laid-off, it was similarly driven by a corporate action.  Upper management had been talking about a flatter organization, and cutting out management levels, so I was well prepared mentally.  I actually expected that I would take it much worse than I did....

20 Oct 2018 · 1 min · Gary Allen Vollink

[Book Spoiled] North American Lake Monsters

The book, North American Lake Monsters, is a collection of short stories that I reviewed here.  Read that first, without it, this will have little context. Seriously, the following is absolutely full of spoilers, and I don't want to hear about it.  Well, for the stories that I actually like, I still try to keep them a little spoiler free, but the first story ... that one I lay out ALL the main points....

13 Oct 2018 · 5 min · Gary Allen Vollink

[Tech/PC] VirtualBox, Windows 7 and a new CPU

As I've done from time to time, this blog serves as a bit of a bench-notes of what I did.  However, maybe someone else hits the same problem, and finds my blog via search. About a month back, the new nVidia 2080 Ti card was announced.  I decided to hit up eBay to see if anyone was selling off a 1080 Ti, and I was not disappointed in the price drops....

15 Sep 2018 · 3 min · Gary Allen Vollink

[Shopping] eBuyer Beware

I know this.  Read the fine print.  I didn't do that.  The rest is geeky details having to do with rack-mountable servers. I have a 12U rack.  Sort-of an end-table next to the couch.  I have two servers.  One of them is happily racked.  The other one is awkwardly sitting sideways across the top of the rack. I jumped on eBay a week ago, looking to find the rails I need....

25 Aug 2018 · 2 min · Gary Allen Vollink