Interview.

Posted on October 22, 2026 by murphy

So, the first interview with the actual employer went well.

I hit all the notes, and they seem like they’re gung-ho to fill seats. Which could be a red flag in and of itself, of course. Got an interview with the actual manager proper set up, and joy of joys, with it being a second-shift job I talk to him on Monday evening after I get home. I’m actually kind of confident I can land this.

The diceroll is going to be whether this is going to be a high-stress job or what. Now, working from home in my jammies will of course offset a good deal of that, as will the two and a half hours I’ll get back out of every day, and the ability to just fuckin’ relax at home.

But I could be jumping into the proverbial fire here, so I’ve got to get as good a vibe off the manager as possible. I don’t want to sign on and then find out it’s some bullshit where they time you down to the minute or snap pictures of your desktop every 30 seconds or some shit like that. (Not that I’m planning to slack or anything, mind you, I just hate being fuckin’ micromanaged.) The fact that they’re remote-first and they’ve gotten at least some attention for being a decent place to work helps, but it’s going to be a tricky choice to make.

Because one, where I am is an absolute skive. I’d be able to focus a lot on certs and school. But the pay and benefits are kind of n’awesome and it’s a commute each day, five days in the office. I don’t actually mind going in because it’s fairly chill, but man, remote would be better.

But two would be second shift, which dovetails with my own biological rhythms well; it’s working from home so I’d get to save tons on eating out and gas and wear and tear and all that, and I’d get to be a corpo decker for a zaibatsu. (Well, to be fair, it’s not actually a zaibatsu, but you get it.)

Monday we’ll see.

In the meantime, having an eye issue that’s bugging me. Every time I get a new floater, it’s panic mode for a bit. Had one pop up and it had me considering a run to Callahan, but I think I’ll see how I’m doing tomorrow. Been getting bad sleep this week so maybe some rest will make me feel better. Of course, a spot of annoyance right before landing a good job would be perfectly on-brand for muggins here so… who knows?

(Drew some good songs from the algo on the way home, so maybe someone’s still lookin’ out for me.)

So maybe I’ll win (saved by zero)

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The job thing.

Posted on October 21, 2026 by murphy

So one thing that gave me pause with this potential job offer is that it’s six months contract to hire, and unlike the contract I’m currently on, the agency doesn’t provide access benefits for those six months.

I figured that was a no-go out of the gate, but out of curiosity I decided to go back to the marketplace and just see how dire my health insurance would be. And yeah, pretty dire, like in the $500-ish vicinity.

Felt glum for a while. Then I looked at my pay stub and realized I’m already paying more than $360.

So yeah, maybe we do this thing after all. I can manage six months.

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Land mines.

Posted on October 20, 2026 by murphy

So I keep putting a few things off. Not just school and work type things.

When I found out Sid was gone, I immediately dug up my copy of Until the End of the World to sit down to watch it, because we were the only two people we knew that loved that movie. I made it like five minutes in. The movie opens with this monologue about Solveig Dommartin’s character, about how she drew people to her despite her flaws, and holy shit it knocked me on my ass. I forgot there was a big reason Sid loved that movie; Claire reminds me of her in a lot of ways. Since then, I’ve tried to go back multiple times, and it’s always an emotional roller coaster and I tap out.

The other thing is I’ve tracked down a copy of The Fool’s Errand, which is the old puzzle game she used to play when we’d sit up after game sessions and talk for hours. I figured I’d play through it in honor of her; I’d never done more than tinker with it back in the day. But again, every time I wheel it out, it’s a bit of a gut-punch.

The third is that bottle of applejack I’ve got in the cupboard. That one I’m actively trying to avoid, though, because I don’t want to do myself the mischief. It was originally going to be my blackout drunk on the anniversary, but as I stated, I ended up in the hospital so now it’s something of a talisman instead. I figure as long as I keep it sealed, I’m on the right side of this thing.

But sometimes it’s not easy to do that.

When the people you love most are all gone, it’s hard to maintain a healthy interest in one’s own well-being, I guess. It does, however, make it damn easy to disconnect from everything. It’s vastly easier to be a nihilist when one has no people.

Maybe for my birthday I’m going to muster the fortitude to venture into the film or the game—and I’m also planning on eventually going down to Panama City to sit overnight on the beach and look out at the sky. I was originally going to be doing that this weekend, but the job shift changed all that. I still want to see if I can manage it, though. Orion’s up in the sky for a while yet.

(Incidentally, I signed up for Slooh, which is a cute little service where you can book time on remote telescopes around the world. The very first missions I set them to capture were images of Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka. Miss you, lady of chaos.)

I walk like a ghost among the living and the born free

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Huh.

Posted on October 19, 2026 by murphy

So, I kind of blew off that one-way interview thing and forgot about it, and figured that scuppered my chances for the remote role.

Surprisingly, I got an email solicitation for an interview today.

Apparently they like what they see. This could get real interesting.

Set the interview for Thursday afternoon and started reading up on the company a bit more. It’s the American arm of a Japanese firm, one that does business and tech consulting. It’s fucking humongous with a market cap in the tens of billions all told, so this would be some serious resources. And, y’know, remote and second shift and all.

This is gonna be an interesting week.

It was worth it just to learn some slight of hand

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The Deck of Many (One) Thing(s).

Posted on October 18, 2026 by murphy

So one of the big marquee artifacts in Dungeons and Dragons is the Deck of Many Things. Anyone who’s played the game knows what I’m talking about. It’s a diabolical artifact of chance and randomness, a deck of cards you activate by drawing, and whatever card you draw can have reality-warping effects. Some are good; you can gain wishes, become more powerful, or acquire other amazing advantages. Some of them are bad; you can be imprisoned or utterly destroyed. Usually, its appearance in a campaign means all hell is about to break loose.

A while ago, though, I was running a campaign that was based around magic going wrong, and so I created a bunch of broken magical items for the characters to encounter. And one that I foisted on my players almost immediately out of the gate was a Deck of Many Things. But, as I said, it was hideously broken.

With this version, no matter what card you drew, there would be a puff of smoke and brimstone, and a demon would appear and deliver you a God-almighty kick in the nuts before vanishing. That is, unless you drew the Moon card, which typically gave you one to three wishes. In that case, the demon would appear, ask you what your wish was, and then deliver you a God-almighty kick in the nuts before vanishing.

That’s it. Dumb one-off joke, right?

I underestimated my players.

The rogue fucking weaponized the thing.

He insisted on keeping it, and he began using it to get out of scrapes. Caught by the city watch? “Hey, look, if you’ll let us slide, I’ll give you a draw.” The deck came out more and more frequently, and so the demon bound to it started to make small talk with the party while the victims writhed on the ground. He’d light up a smoke and take a break before heading back, chatting amiably and offering his opinions on their current quest. It became a running gag.

Much later in the campaign, the party was dealing with the aftermath of a gnome tinkerer’s reality bomb, which when set off fused bits of the realm with other D&D worlds, melding together big chunks of Krynn, Oerth, Toril, et cetera. This led to an extended adventure through the planes enlisting the help of extradimensional beings (including an avatar of wrath whose right hand was always covered in blood but never left marks on anything he touched, a profoundly sad woman with feathers for hair, a mute and terrifying Pierrot clown, and a large and friendly Corgi) and at one point they were fleeing through the Abyss, hunted by hordes of pursuers. Nearly cornered, they ducked into a nearby dwelling.

“Oh, hey, guys,” a familiar voice said. “If you’d told me you were coming by, I would’ve baked something. Come meet the missus.”

You call on me for powers clandestine

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Whiffed it.

Posted on October 17, 2026 by murphy

So I kind of expected it, but I didn’t pass the AZ-104. I came close, but not close enough. The exam’s way more fiddly than the AWS equivalent, and requires a lot more hands-on, which I didn’t really do. I was kind of expecting it once I got a better sense of the exam, so it’s no big deal; I got the voucher for free, so it was useful in terms of a fact-finding mission. And I know what I need to work on for the next go-round.

It actually works out decently, because if I had aced it, then I’d have this free retake sitting there and I’d be tempted to blow the next month studying for some cert I haven’t even begun yet; maybe an AI cert or another unrelated cloud one. This way, I know what I’m spending that retake on. I’m going to schedule another go at the AZ-104 for the 17th of November, and if I fail that one, I get a free retake that can be burned between January and April of next year. I figure with two more bites at the apple, I for sure land it. So I’m going back into the CCNA and labbing for Azure in my free time.

In the meantime, I threw together a dinner of barbecue brisket, mashed potatoes, and corn. Absolutely in love with Kinder’s seasoning blends; every time I go to Sam’s I tend to pick up at least one. The last time I went I goggled at the fact that they had chicken salt and had to pick up a jar; it’s not replaced the black truffle steak or the buttery steakhouse blends as my go-to, but it’s damn nice for certain applications.

Also speaking of food and drink, the capuccino machine at work is messing with my head. I’d much rather be switching back to tea, but it’s more of hassle. The temperature’s not right so it’ll be sub-optimal, and the only machine-made tea they have there is Earl Grey or some herbal stuff in K-Cups. (I explained to the guys the whole bergamot thing and got looked at like I was nuts.) So I can either take five minutes extra on the break to make a cup of so-so tea, or I can just push the capuccino button (or in the afternoons, a chocolate one) and be done with it. It’s getting so bad I actually bought some Peet’s Big Bang K-Cups for my machine here, just have to dig it out of mothballs.

Tomorrow I have to record a godawful thing for the remote position I’m applying for. Grates on my nerves that it’s one of those jobs, but at least I guess they’re not making me talk to a robot and the questions are all straightforward. Just focusing on the fact that if I did get it, it would be a) a raise and b) a second shift position and c) fully remote. Willing to put up with corporate culture issues to be able to work in my jammies.

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Fub Fact Friday: The Great Chiseler

Posted on October 16, 2026 by murphy

So when Egyptologists started trying to parse out the history of Egypt, they ran into a really weird set of discoveries. Throughout the country, they kept finding all these monuments that essentially said “Ramesses II made this.” The problem was that these monuments spanned hundreds of years, so it was impossible that a single pharaoh had put them all up. It was a mystery for some time, with many assuming there were a series of kings with the name name and number, until they pieced it all together.

The reason Egyptian pharaohs were fond of huge monuments was two-fold. One was tied to the economy of Egypt. Egyptian society revolved around the flooding of the Nile. It was how their agriculture worked; you had these very brief periods during the year where you needed an enormous workforce to handle planting and harvesting. If you didn’t get enough crops planted during that window, or you didn’t get them harvested in time, you’d be looking at a famine.

Of course, once the planting or harvesting was done, then you had a bunch of unemployed workers sitting around drinking, and that’s a really good way to get yourself deposed. So the pharaohs decided enormous construction projects, designed to keep the proles busy during the off season, would be a great way to get things done. (A lot of people have the mistaken belief that these monuments were built by slaves; while slavery definitely existed in Egypt, these were public works projects akin to the things the American government did during the Depression.)

This dovetailed nicely with a fundamental tenet of Egyptian theology. The Egyptians believed in essentially a physical afterlife, where you would live on with your stuff, which is why they’d preserve bodies and bury kings with their loot. But you only maintained that afterlife as long as you were remembered. So to ensure they spent a long and happy afterlife, they’d put their names on enormous monuments. “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.”

Ramesses II was crafty, though. He built his own monuments, sure, but one day it occurred to him that all these other monuments were just sitting around not serving any purpose. So he sent his craftsmen out to chisel off his predecessors’ names and put his on instead. So he got the credit for all their works, and each one was yet another way of ensuring his remembrance and his afterlife.

And so that’s why Egyptologists tend to call Ramesses II by the sobriquet, “The Great Chiseler.”

I learned this from Professor Bob Brier’s wonderful Egyptology lecture series from the Great Courses. Highly recommend it; I wasn’t an Egyptology nerd before finding his lectures, but I am now. He’s famous for being the first modern human to mummify a corpse using the traditional methods, and my favorite part of that story is finding out how the brain hook really works. He even said all the right prayers over the donated corpse, in the hopes that maybe thousands of years later some rando would wander into the Egyptian afterlife and confuse the fuck out of Anubis.

If there’s no one beside you when your soul embarks, then I’ll follow you into the dark

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The final countdown.

Posted on October 15, 2026 by murphy

Coming up on the last day before the exam. Still absolutely not confident I’m going to pass it, but eh, fuck it. The retake’s going to cost me 90 bucks for two more bites at the apple, and I’ll have a month and then at least two more to study if I need it. Who knows. If I bite it, it’s going to be the Powershell and command-line stuff. I have the theory, but the fiddly bits are giving me hell.

I’d honestly be kind of relieved if I have to burn the retake, because if I don’t then I’m going to be tempted to cram in another cert and I have no earthly idea which way I’d want to go. I deffo don’t have time to convert on the expert Azure stuff, so it would be a tossup between AI or security. And that would be more time away from the CCNA, since I’d have to do my first attempt in a month (and I wouldn’t want to just waste it again).

Gettin’ my learn on is getting complicated.

You told me something wrong, I know I listen too long

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The hits just keep on coming.

Posted on October 14, 2026 by murphy

I swear when I first started out on the whole IT journey, it seemed like the market was totally screwed. It took me forever to get my first “official” IT position and it wasn’t a very good one. But nine months of that, then 14 or so at the MSP and a resume revamp later, and it’s like I can’t get headhunters to leave me alone. I’m less than a month in at the internal job at the energy company, and I’ve got one headhunter submitting me for a hybrid role and another just pinged me today for a fully remote position. It’s more MSP work, and the company has something of a rep, but it would be working in my jammies again and a second shift role to boot so I could get away from mornings.

So despite the fact that I’m pretty happy with the skive I’ve got now and how much time it gives me to study, I told her to put me in, coach. The weird thing is I know I’m not this good. But I guess I’d rather be lucky than good any day. Who knows, maybe I’ll land a remote role and be back to my freelancing heyday, but actually making money and being able to relax.

Hope continues to spring eternal.

I’m heavenly blessed, worldly wise

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VisionQuest.

Posted on October 13, 2026 by murphy

Took a break tonight and watched the two-episode VisionQuest premiere. I knew I was going to dig it—I’d watch James Spader paint a fence—but I forgot how some of the writing in this particular arc speaks to me. “What is grief, if not love persevering?” has no right to hit as hard as it does, and there’s another great line in the beginning of this show that lands as well. Whenever they tell a story about darkness of the soul or loss it always becomes my favorite.

Melancholy is my Free Bird after all.

K’abé éfè, ko né tè k’alé té sigui

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