Mixture Posture: March 2022

Thursday, March 31, 2022

I hadn't been out to the Techwr-L site in months so I was pleasantly surprised to see this article: How To Interview a SME

Top 10 Metal Albums Of March 2022

https://youtu.be/4kRF9trkqiQ

Video Editing... I wish I Knew How...

https://youtu.be/TjA3xLjKuMA

BMG is Coming to CR on 4-26

https://www.vulture.com/article/blue-man-group-oral-history.html

I'm thinking about TV shows like Lost or movies like any in the MCU and how these TV shows or movies that make you pay attention to what you are seeing. When I watch that type of show, I expect to be given clues to help make me, as the viewer, understand what I am seeing. If a TV show or movie doesn't do that for me, then I am less likely to enjoy the experience.

Case in point, the new Disney+ series "Moon Knight" which was released yesterday and so, like a good MCU fanboy <grin>, I watched the first episode last night. First of all, I am tired of "heroes" being odd people. Steven, the main character, is a bumbling man who allows his manager to berate him. He also attaches a harness to his leg so that he doesn't leave his bed in the middle of the night.

However, I would like to have more information about who is talking to Steven about what is happening to him as I don't know if I can trust him. Steven does and, in one funny incident, asks Steven, "Did you just throw a gun?"

I will say that I will watch the next episode, which is definitely different from my reaction to WandaVision. For WV, I never returned to the series, even after hearing from friends that you have to get through the early episodes to get to the meat of the series. Maybe I'll return to WV prior to the Doctor Strange movie that is coming out in May - I know Wanda is going to be in that movie.

EE's Words are S C A R Y

https://ewerickson.substack.com/p/the-biden-recession-is-coming

Missed and Missing

I didn't see BuckCherry and Alice Cooper last night at the Adler Theater in Davenport and I am not going to see All That Remains / Miss May I (& others) in Dubuque on Saturday.

I would love to see Shinedown on 4-12.

I would love to see Blue Man Group on 4-26.

I would love to see Megadeth and Lamb of God on 4-27.

I would love to see Breaking Benjamin and Seether on 5-6.

I would love to see Bayside on 6-17 [Kansas City], which I think is the least likely to happen in this list.

I also would love to see Weird Al - I don't have the date for that in my head, but it's in Cedar Rapids.

I also would love to see Primus - I don't have the date for that in my head, but it's in Cedar Rapids.

I need to establish priorities for these concerts and make the highest priority happen!!

Wednesday, March 30, 2022

Classic TBBT

Kelly McGovern - Nobody Sleeps Here

What is this band Winterfall? Apparently, I am under a rock because I'd never heard of Winterfall until just now.

Winterfall was holding auditions for a drummer and this guy (below) auditioned and didn't get the gig.

This is the drummer who got the gig:

And this is a cover of the Boston tune "Long Time" by Winterfall.

Wish This would Have Been in the Movie

HOLY [Censored]!!

Nearing the Century for the First Time Since 4-2020

While I had 100 thoughts in April 2020, apparently I have not since April 2020... until this month when I'm knocking on 100 posts. This post is #93 so if I can squeeze just 15* more thoughts out of my head before the end of tomorrow, I will reach the most posts in a month in just under two years!

*7 to get to 100 posts for March 2022 and another 8 posts to get to 108 posts for March 2022

Always Will Be a JT Fan

Good luck JT - I wish you nothing but the best in your future pursuits!

Tuesday, March 29, 2022

Moon Knight is Released TOMORROW

Editor's Note: Publishing this video the day before the release of the first episode of the Disney+ series "Moon Knight" with the hope that this post is viewed on Tuesday, 3-29-2022, and that it reminds to watch the first episode tomorrow morning.

https://youtu.be/2x83j7usWMY

Monday, March 28, 2022

Fresh Prints

Friday, March 25, 2022

Rockin to the New Shinedown!

https://youtu.be/ghrrjUz0qNw

Loving this Video about Batman

https://youtu.be/nZcArO7rD8o - Evolution of BATMAN - 83 Years Explained

After 3 Weeks ZERO Applicants Through LinkedIn... Why?

Just so I don't forget, Meta = Facebook

Another SRE Job - at Pearson?!?

This must be the week for SRE jobs. This one is at Pearson, where I worked from 5-30-2011 --> 1-26-2016 1702 days (4 years, 7 months, 3 weeks, 6 days). As I mentioned the other day, no, I'm not qualified for this role so no, I'm not going to apply.

However, I do have the following simple questions:

what is the standard for including hyperlinks as actual hyperlinks in a job ad - should they be an active hyperlink, as designated below in red or not an active hyperlink, as designated below in purple?
what does #LI-POST mean, as designated below in green.

I don't have an answer to either question and it doesn't matter as I am not even applying for what might be an awesome job.

Site Reliability Engineer Iowa City, Iowa
We are the world’s learning company with more than 24,000 employees operating in 70 countries. We combine world-class educational content and assessment,powered by services and technology, to enable more effective teaching and personalized learning at scale. We believe that wherever learning flourishes so do people.

The Cloud Infrastructure Services team is seeking candidates for a Site Reliability Engineer. SRE’s play an integral role ensuring that our customers have a highly available and reliable platform. The role supports the deployment and customization of our ERP Platform. As a Site Reliability engineer, you will scale systems sustainably through mechanisms like automation, and evolve systems by pushing for changes that improve reliability and velocity.

As an SRE, you will:

Design scalable, robust, secure systems using cloud architecture
Build automation using industry tools (like Jenkins, Ansible, etc.) to deploy hundreds of different services
Ensure a high degree of availability across all of our service offerings.
Identify bottlenecks and problems throughout the infrastructure.
Drive projects/technical initiatives and architectural/technical service improvements .
Build automation to scale infrastructure based on forecasted demand.
Develop custom tools as necessary.
Document system design and procedures.
Maintain applications and services once they are live by measuring and monitoring availability, latency and overall system health.
Practice sustainable incident response and postmortems.
Partner and lead internal and external technology resources in solving complex business needs
Participate in an on-call rotation.
Provide architectural recommendations
Ensure SLA obligations are met.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

4+ years' hands on experience managing, maintaining, and automating infrastructure in AWS.
4+ years' hands on experience managing and maintaining Linux systems.
BS degree in Computer Science or related technical field involving systems engineering (e.g., physics or mathematics), or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications:

Advanced problem-solving experience involving leading teams in identifying, researching, and coordinating the resources necessary to effectively troubleshoot/diagnose complex project issues; prior success extracting/translating findings into alternatives/solutions; and identifying risks/impacts and schedule adjustments to facilitate management decision-making.
Hands on Experience with Oracle Database and Middleware Infrastructure.
Good understanding of standard networking protocols and components such as: HTTP, DNS, TCP/IP, ICMP, the OSI Model, Subnetting and Load Balancing.
Fluent in at least one scripting language, Python experience highly preferred.
Strong experience using logging and monitoring tools (ie: Splunk, Cloudwatch, NewRelic)
Experience with Ansible or other configuration management systems.
Strong familiarity with software configuration management systems and/or source code version control systems
Excellent English communication skills

The anticipated starting salary range for Colorado-based individuals expressing interest in this position is $100,000.00-$107,000.00. This position is eligible to participate in an annual incentive program.

Benefits available to eligible employees can be seen at: https://pearsonbenefitsus.com/
Learning is the most powerful force for change in the world. More than 20,000 Pearson employees deliver our products and services in nearly 200 countries, all working towards a common purpose – to help everyone achieve their potential through learning. We do that by providing high quality, digital content and learning experiences, as well as assessments and qualifications that help people build their skills and grow with the world around them. We are the world’s leading learning company. Learn more at pearsonplc.com.
Pearson believes that wherever learning flourishes, so do people. We are committed to being an anti-racist company in everything we do. We value the power of an inclusive culture and a strong sense of belonging. We promote a culture where differences are embraced, opportunities are accessible, consideration and respect are the norm, and all individuals are supported in reaching their full potential. Through our talent, we believe that diversity, equity, and inclusion make us a more innovative and vibrant place to work. People are at the center, and we are committed to a sustainable environment and workplace where talent can learn, grow, and thrive.  

To learn more about Pearson’s commitment to a diverse and inclusive workforce, please click here:  http://www.pearson.com/careers/diversity-and-inclusion.html  
Pearson is an Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity Employer and a member of E-Verify. We are committed to building a team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. The more inclusive we are, the better our work will be. All employment is decided based on qualifications, merit, and business need. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, ethnicity, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, national origin, protected veteran status, disability status, or any other group protected by law.
Job: TECHNOLOGY

Organization: Corporate Strategy & Technology

Schedule: FULL_TIME

Req ID: 2109432

New Ignite Album Comes Out TODAY!!

https://youtu.be/jNpAeI9lrxY

Thursday, March 24, 2022

Random Metallica Concert I Decided to Play in the Background as I Work

https://youtu.be/yWqwi6iGR4Q

So I wanted to point one thing out about this video, which is that it was recorded in 2007, which means their latest album was "St. Anger" and of all the tunes they played, zero are from that album and, from both Load & ReLoad, only 1 tune ("The Memory Remains") was played. I have to wonder if Metallica didn't think fans wanted to hear tunes from those 3 albums or if Metallica, collectively, had decided to put tunes from those 3 albums in the vault because *they* didn't like playing them live?

0:00:00 Creeping Death
0:06:38 For Whom the Bell Tolls
0:11:51 Ride the Lightning
0:19:05 Disposable Heroes
0:28:41 The Unforgiven
0:35:52 ...And Justice for All
0:46:11 The Memory Remains
0:50:56 The Four Horsemen
0:57:23 Bass Doodle
0:59:38 Orion
1:08:33 Fade to Black
1:16:26 Master of Puppets
1:25:09 Battery
1:33:54 Sad But True
1:40:17 Nothing Else Matters
1:46:16 One
1:55:16 Enter Sandman
2:05:58 Am I Evil?
2:15:45 Seek & Destroy

SRE is Intriguing

As my interest in Business Continuity Planning (BCP) and Disaster Recovery (DR) evolves, I find myself wondering what life would have been like if I had, in the past, tranistioned to being a Site Reliability Engineer. No, I'm definitely not qualified for the position below!

Site Reliability Engineer, Trello

SRE | New York, United States | Remote Americas | Full Time
Apply for this job

Atlassian can hire people in any country where we have a legal entity, assuming candidates have eligible working rights and a sufficient timezone overlap with their team. As our offices re-open, Atlassians can choose to work remotely or return to an office, unless it’s necessary for the role to be performed in the office. Interviews and onboarding are conducted virtually, a part of being a distributed-first company.
As a Site Reliability Engineer at Trello, you’ll work on keeping everything running efficiently as we scale our infrastructure to support our more than 90 million Trello users while maintaining our 99.99% uptime target. The code you write and deploy into production will directly contribute to the scalability and resilience of Trello, and you will directly improve our user’s experience with the product.

Key Responsibilities:

Comfortable owning the infrastructure and pragmatically solving problems dealing with complex systems.
Working with developers to support the latest features that we have in development, like Power-Ups, data pipeline improvements, and scalable microservices.
Contributing your insights across the team to help us improve or re-architect existing systems for scale and extensibility.
Contributing to new and existing compliance initiatives.

On your first day, you will have expertise in:

Engineering microservices and tools across one or more programming languages (e.g. Go, Python).
Automation and Infrastructure-as-Code projects and tooling (e.g. Ansible, Puppet, Terraform).
Building and maintaining a continuous integration and delivery pipeline (e.g. Bamboo, Bitbucket Pipelines, Github Actions).
Observability tools and methodology (e.g. logging, metrics, tracing) for highly available web services.
Designing and delivering AWS cloud-native infrastructure solutions.
Incident response and management in on-call rotation.
Focus on operational maturity and reliability with microservices.

It's great, but not required to have:

Experience building and managing large scale, high impact systems on AWS or other cloud infrastructure.
Experience with large MongoDB cluster deployments.

More about our benefits
Whether you work in an office or a distributed team, Atlassian is highly collaborative and yes, fun! To support you at work (and play) we offer some fantastic perks: ample time off to relax and recharge, flexible working options, five paid volunteer days a year for your favourite cause, an annual allowance to support your learning & growth, unique ShipIt days, a company paid trip after five years and lots more.
More about Atlassian
Creating software that empowers everyone from small startups to the who’s who of tech is why we’re here. We build tools like Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, and Trello to help teams across the world become more nimble, creative, and aligned—collaboration is the heart of every product we dream of at Atlassian. From Amsterdam and Austin, to Sydney and San Francisco, we’re looking for people who want to write the future and who believe that we can accomplish so much more together than apart. At Atlassian, we’re committed to an environment where everyone has the autonomy and freedom to thrive, as well as the support of like-minded colleagues who are motivated by a common goal to: Unleash the potential of every team.

The Middle Rules

https://youtu.be/cmJhej5dWaI

Looking forward to Hearing this Tune on Monday night!

https://youtu.be/zHtcvQAI000

The Band I am Seeing on Monday Night

https://youtu.be/9G5mvU8gz60
https://youtu.be/o2zfzNmDmds?list=PL-K1HfAYErhRPt99e79MiWj_1AGfMtrs-

A quick, but valuable, shell scripting lesson from Jason Cannon

I believe that there will be a day on which I dive into LInux. When I do, I think this post will be helpful.

From: Jason Cannon <support at linuxtrainingacademy dot com>
Sent: Thursday, March 24, 2022 7:00 AM
To: Me
Subject: Here's a quick, but valuable, shell scripting lesson.

Hello!

In this email I'm going to teach you a quick, but valuable lesson on shell scripting.

First off, a shell script is simply a file that contains a series of Linux commands and shell statements. When a shell script is executed, it in turn executes the commands listed in the script. It starts at the top and executes the commands on each line, one line a time, until the end of the file.

By the way, the script's filename doesn't matter. You may be used to a different operating system where files have to have a specific file extension before they will be treated as an executable. (I'm talking about ".exe" files in Windows, for example.) That's not the case with Linux shell scripts.

By convention, shell scripts end in ".sh", but it is not a requirement. The following are all valid shell script names:

·         use-the-force.sh

·         do_or_do_not_there_is_no_try

·         ThisIsSomeRescue

What IS important is that your shell script has executable permissions. (We'll get to that in just a second.)

If you remember the advice from my previous email, it's best to start with the end in mind. So, the goal for this shell script is to collect and display some basic information about a Linux system.

If you want to follow along, open up a terminal on a Linux system and create a new file named "sysinfo.sh". If you have a favorite text editor, use that. If you don't, I suggest that you use nano as it's simple to use and always displays help at the bottom of the screen.

The very first line of every script you write should begin with "#!" followed by the path to an interpreter. We're going to write a bash shell script, so we'll use "#!/bin/bash". If you were going to write a Python script this line would be "#!/usr/bin/python"; a ruby script would be "#!/usr/bin/ruby" and so on.

One very common task you'll perform in your shell scripts is displaying messages on the screen. To do this, use the echo command followed by whatever you want to display to the screen and enclose it in quotes. Like this:

Now save your changes and exit your editor. If you're using nano type Ctrl-X to exit, then type "Y" to save your changes, and finally press ENTER to write the changes to your script.

The next step is to add executable permissions to your script. You do this with the chmod command, which stands for "change mode". There are different ways to add executable permissions to a file, but the simplest is chmod +x FILE_NAME.

Now you're ready to execute your shell script. You do this by typing "./" followed by the script name. In this example, you would run "./sysinfo.sh":

You'll see the text you supplied to the echo command displayed on your screen.

Now that you have a working shell script with the proper permissions, you can continue writing your script. Let's add some commands that will display information about the Linux system.

First, display the current date and time when this information was collected.

Next, display the hostname of the system.

Next, display the kernel release followed by the architecture. You'll need to use the uname command to do this.

Display the disk usage in a human readable format.

Finally, end the script by letting the user know that it's done.

It's time to see what your script does! Save your changes and execute your script.

Now you have a script that displays some basic information about the system you're on. You could easily expand this to show information about the CPUs, memory, networking configuration and more.

If you would like to write even more in-depth and practical scripts, reserve your seat in the upcoming shell scripting class. Registration closes a week from Sunday and class runs for 4 weeks. I'm limiting the number of students, so I can give individual attention to everyone in the class.

Hope to see you there!

Jason

P.S. The shell scripting class is currently being offered at a deeply discounted rate, so now is a great time to enroll. ;-)

Evaluating Justice League Movie

I like videos with in-depth analysis of what it takes to make a movie.

https://youtu.be/58zGtp8pDns

Natural Childbirth

This was filmed in 1984-ish and he mentions he has a $17,000 Ferrari. In 2022, a Ferrari costs between $200,000 - $400,000...

https://youtu.be/UEwPy31vWZ8

Wednesday, March 23, 2022

Scott Hall - A Tribute To The Bad Guy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xE4MLH0292Y

Kevin Sullivan Shoot Interview with JJ Dillon

https://youtu.be/grZpEuekE_I

Hart v. Austin at WM 13

I read this article on Friday, September 1, 2017, (4 years, 6 months, 3 weeks, 1 day ago), about Stone Cold v. Brett Hart at Wrestlemania 13 and after I read it, I knew I wanted to mark the 25th anniversary of it today, 3/23/2022.

Tuesday, March 22, 2022

Good Reminder

From https://vanschneider.com/blog/weve-always-done-it-that-way/

Here is how the experiment went:

Start with a room containing five monkeys. In the room, hang a banana on a string and put stairs under it. You don't need to wait long and a monkey will go to the stairs and start climbing towards the banana.

Now, as soon as the monkey touches the stairs, spray all the monkeys with cold water as punishment. After a while, another monkey gives it a try with the same result – all the monkeys are sprayed with cold water.

Next step, turn off the cold water. If, later, another monkey tries to climb the stairs, the other monkeys will try to prevent it even though no water sprays at them.

Now, remove one monkey from the cage and replace it with a new one. The new ape sees the banana and wants to climb the stairs. To his horror, all of the monkeys attack him. After another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to climb the stairs, he will be punished.

Next, remove another of the original five monkeys and replace it with a new one. The newcomer goes to the stairs and is attacked. The newcomer takes part in the punishment with enthusiasm.

Again, replace a third original monkey with a new one. The new one makes it to the stairs and is attacked as well. Two of the four monkeys that beat him have no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs, or why they are participating in the beating of the newest monkey.

After replacing the fourth and fifth original monkey, all the monkeys that were sprayed with cold water have been replaced.

Nevertheless, no monkey ever again approaches the stairs, but no one really knows why. All the original monkeys who experienced the water-spraying punishment have been replaced. What we're left with are five monkeys who know that they can't touch the banana, but they don't really know why. Because that's the way it's always been done around here.