I live in a very diverse area so that workplace was very diverse. I got to witness and experience a diverse range of hate. A lot of that hate was subtle to the point where it was easy to mistake it was a playful joke.

It was COVID that broke the walls down. Asking these guys who put all their personality into being “men” to care for their community (in this specific case, their coworkers) was taken as a personal attack and so they stopped being subtle with their hate. Standing back and reflecting, it was always hate. They were holding back because they didn’t feel embowered to speak their hate before COVID and the changes it brought.

Some guys absolutely hated that one project manager was a woman and had to take instructions from her. All the Chinese people were hated on because of COVID. So many guys were clearly threatened by the one openly gay guy working there even though the dude was minding his own business in the shipping department.

I have had so many guys attack the quality of my work but it was never about the quality of my work. It was because I worked by myself without their help, I worked efficiently because I focused on one task at a time, I put attention into the presentation of my work and because I was able to put boundaries down when it came to dealing with authority. It took me zero effort to make them feel insecure about themselves. Unsurprisingly, they lashed out at me.

That workplace was so toxic. I could live a healthier life in the wilds of Chernobyl compared to being there. I’m glad I kicked over the flaming garbage can on the way out.

I used to work in the trades. So many guys made a huge display of themselves to prove they were “men.” Often that included hate. They hated women, queer people, younger people, people from different backgrounds, people they considered beneath them or people who were brave enough to be their true selves.

They made all their insecurities everyone elses problem. It was easy to identity their insecurities because they were so simple and basic that whatever they complained about was actually a huge insight into how they viewed the world. If they complained about women being whiny, emotional and manipulative, it’s because that’s how they acted themselves. How else would they know intimately know about what it is to be whiney, emotional and manipulative?

I had to quit the trades and my apprenticeship. I received so much hate and they were all convinced I was gay and hated me for the assumption they made about me. It’s so strange that they focused on my sexuality when I never spoke word of it to any of them. Even stranger that they went straight for the gay thoughts immediately. Well… Maybe not that strange…

If you happen to choose OpenRC, I found this useful site for converting SystemD to OpenRC: http://openrc.run/

I only use Alpine Linux which comes with OpenRC so I don’t have experiences with anything else to really give a reasonable suggestion. Just wanted to share what I found.

Since last time, I’ve finally learned how to make rootless podman work on Alpine Linux and it’s been pretty smooth so far.

My Pi4 is quietly running HomeAssistant and I like to leave that untouched so I don’t have to worry about pooping in the dark. I learned that the container requires root in order to access the Zigbee USB dongle through dbus so I can’t really run it as a rootless container. It’s not web facing so it’s locked down to my local network which is good enough for me.

My Pi5 is finally up and running again. Got a new, shorter domain name, managed to get the TLS set up in one go with Caddy which was nice. Right now I just have a bunch of wiki’s hosted with Kiwix and a file server using Caddy.

I’m putting the final touches on my series of scripts I wrote meant for automating backups. rTransfer for the actual backup, remoff for rotating backups (I plan to keep 1 backup a week, over a months time), and containers-util(work in progress) to automatically start and stop containers in preparation for a backup.

A bit crazy but I’ve been working on this whole backup process on and off for about a year now. It’s all POSIX portable except for a few commands like rsync and podman. Once I finish the last script, I’ll set up a blog and then my server will be secure to my liking and very low maintenance (my keep-alive script I also wrote has been working better than expected).

I also wrote a Dynamic MOTD script which updates /etc/motd with some basic information about the machine so I can get a quick look at the machine I’m ssh’ing into. I’m quite happy with how it turned out too.

I’ve been trying to use as few programs as possible and building my own when I can. It’s been quite the adventure this past year and a bit.

I had the opportunity to live in Berlin for a year. I made friends with a group of Yemen students. All of these people had friends, family or relatives bombed to death. Over the course of 2 weeks, one person lost 3 relatives to the bombings…

These people were sent to Germany to study and be as far away as possible from the horrors at home. Away from friends, family, everyone.

I was told that after flying to somewhere near Yemen, it would have taken another 16 hours to travel by road to get home. Their parents refused them coming to visit because it was just too dangerous.

I don’t know how they managed to hold their shit together and carry on even as their families were getting bombed back home.

It broke my heart and I felt powerless to even attempt to comfort them. I’m sure they felt a sense of powerlessness that’s beyond anything I could understand at that time.