Q. Marchi: A Blog

My name is Quinton, though commonly shortened to “Q”. I’m an engineer, and a aspirationalist.

I enjoy long walks on the beach, avoiding doing actual work, and being a troll on the internet. Currently based in the Greater-Denver area, though open to working from anywhere.

This blog will try to document my shennanigans, and maybe some neat things along the way, and a broken device or two while I’m at it.

The theme used here is a lightly modified version of terminal with some small tweaks for performance and accessibility improvements.

Great for making static website like this one, and they’re super easy to cache.

This is a “living post”. I’ll be updating it when I hit another stage. I’ll remove this note when I consider it “done”.

I’ve noticed, as I’m going through this process myself, that there’s a significant gap in coverage in the English web on the “little” things that happen when investigating working from another country. For all I can tell, it’s a pretty well covered segment in for other countries, but I couldn’t find anything that properly covers this in detail in English/American context.

This series is on pause as I reevaluate how things are built and maintained in my cluster! It’s still probably a valid read, but it could be a while before I end up updating it.

In classic “Q.” fashion, I came up with an idea, started implementing it, and then realized how far of a rabbit-hole that this was going to be. So rather than just doing it and then trying to remember all of the details myself. I figured that I should start by documenting it, and then work through the various steps as I go.

The eternal delimma of having a “home lab”.

• “Why do I do this?”
• “When am I done?”
• “Who thought this was a good idea?”
• “What caused me to do this?”
• “Where do I even put this hardware?”
• and more questions I won’t be answering.

Following a similar format to last time, we’ll recap the decisions that were made in the last post.

On January 20th, 2023, at about 4:34 AM Mountain Standard Time, I received a phone call from Kevin, a close friend of mine.

“You have corp access on your phone?” “Yeah” “Check your email”

And so I did, and I read the latest email that I had received, “A Notice Regarding Your Employment”.

This was not going to be a good day.

In stark contrast to a lot of my peers, I wasn’t shocked. It was more a state of acceptance. My mother, now a Senior VP in Human Resources, has seen this happen from both sides. Impacted by the financial crash of 2008, and delivering the harsh news to hundreds of employees. She, whether on purpose or not, showed me that this happens to people, good people.

Unfortunately, it’s quite annoying when they don’t.

Back in 2020, I made a blogpost about setting up my great new home lab, full of grandiose and excitement for a new build with more storage. I even said “It’s a fun adventure that’s just getting started!”. Oh, young Q, you have no idea what you were in for, but present Q does, so let’s talk about it.

So recently, I got a new Dell R720xd (from TechMikeNY) to compliment my Dell C2100 that I’ve had for a few years. The new server was promptly christened “Irminsul” (following the C2100 as “Yggdrasil”, a “World Tree”), and begun a full disk test to make sure everything was spotless. Unfortunately, a disk ended 99.97% with bad sectors, so a quick email to Mike (Seriously, shout out to the team over there.) and we were off to the races.

Decided to setup a blog to track some of the things that I wanted to work on, and maybe hold myself accountable.

Stack:

• Engine: Hugo
• Hosting: GitLab (Pages)

It’s actually surprising how easy it is to use the WebIDE inside of Gitlab. Means I don’t have to maintain an actual work environment, though, I may end up to just keep using Gitpod instead as state is maintained inside…

Who knows what lays ahead…