So, it’s no secret that I’m very much into PC gaming; and with it, the hobby of essentially running LAN parties or gaming communities.

Recently, with the growth of the pandemic, I’d been able to grow my own little community to about 120-odd people on Discord. There’s a core group of about 15-16 of us that play games together, and the rest sort of float in and out of discussions and various gaming releases.

September’s been a pretty crazy period; and I’ve started taking stock of the hobby I call “Only Snacks” and gaming. Not only is it a gaming community of close friends and family, it also ties into an enterprise level server rack, and internet connection. Granted I get benefits out of it in terms of business and capabilities; but it opens doors for our small group that didn’t exist before.

It’s pretty expensive. I don’t mind, there are others out there with wackier and (far) more expensive passions. I’m still within my means, but I did note today that it eats up almost all my time and energy.

The group is something I consider close friends – and among them a circle that I’d consider family. They honestly saw me through a rough time (that I think everyone went through) yet here we are, still together and thick as thieves.

So what’s going on? Nothing really, I’m actually just putting down some musings into the blog to keep things going.

My sister and her partner have been on a weekend getaway and I’ve been at home working and looking after Panko.

During such a time I’ve been pretty busy and Panko has been stuck amusing himself and moping outside my home office.

The guilt has finally hit me and I’m going to clean up my office so that Panko can hang out with me and chill in my home office. This means I’ll need to clean up all the computer bits, cable manage everything and make sure the room is doggo safe for him to chill in with me. I won’t proof it tot the point that he has free entry but if I’m in the office (I usually am) he can come in and chill too so he doesn’t let his anxiety get the better of him.

The things I do for this dog.

Just a short little update to myself that I’ll keep. I’ve acquired:

• Dell R330 – R330-1
  • 4 x 500GB SSD
  • 2 x 350w PSU
  • 1 x Rail Kit
  • INSTALLED AND READY TO GO
• Dell R330 – R330-2
  • 4 x 500GB SSD
  • 1 x 350w PSU (need to order 1)
  • 1 x Rail Kit (just ordered)
  • Awaiting PSU, and Rail Kit

These are going to help me decommission my Dell R710 servers. Trusty as they are, they’ve reached their end of life, for sure. I’ll keep them as absolute backup machines; but will not be using them on active duty anymore.

R330-1

• Websites

R330-2

• Rust (Fortnightly)
• Project Zomboid (Fortnightly)
• Minecraft (Active Version)

It’s actually been pretty tricky keeping a decent track of everything; so I’ve recently signed on for some Free Plan tiered Atlassian services using Jira and Confluence. Something a little formal for my use.

I’m moving all the blog posts I can from my old custom written blog, to this site. So weird posts might start appearing going backwards in time haha 😛

It’ll be nice to have everything in the one site, though.

Update: After 5 hours, it’s finally all done D:

Chatswood has really changed a lot! There’s a whole new shopping centre along Victoria Ave now called Chatswood Place – which has heaps of great places to eat. A few days ago I got to enjoy an all-you-can-eat Japanese BBQ place called Kuro Sakura.

The pricing was pretty reasonable, and depending on the time of the week you were paying either $55 per person (Monday through Wednesday), or $59.90 per person (Thursday through Sunday, and public holidays).

There were additional bolt-on packages you could get with Seafood/Sashimi and Beef Tongue + Wagyu Karubi (Kalbi to the Korean fans), as well as an All you can Drink package for the soft stuff, and the alcoholic stuff. It should be noted though the packages didn’t include Coke Zero or anything diabetic friendly; so it wasn’t the most worth it for me.

The three of us ended up getting the basic $55 package.

The service was fast and prompt – it was actually really great. We were seated in a weird part near the back of the restaurant; and even then any dishes we ordered took only a couple minutes to be delivered to our table. The grill was nice, hot and powerful and I loved the interesting side-mounted exhaust that took in the smoke around the edges of the cooking area.

All in all, I felt this was a pretty great dinner. We ate copious amounts of food, the company made it way better than I think I’d have enjoyed it myself; and the really bizarre, yet funny mini domestic the front of house lady and husband duo had when I went to pay the bill capped the night off.

Also, the Black Sesame Ice Cream was the best after sitting in front of a grill eating meat for 90 minutes. 👍😋

For some bizarre reason; WordPress has decided to start hyphenating my posts. I don’t recall it ever doing this originally when I used to use WordPress all those years ago, but it’s ridiculous now. It’s not really a great way to present readable content (at all!)

Luckily it’s also much easier nowadays than having to hack apart the style.css in the theme files editor in the Settings section.

Now, I can just customize stuff > add additional custom CSS and paste in…

.entry-content,
.entry-summary,
.widget-area .widget,
.comment {
	-webkit-hyphens: none;
	-moz-hyphens: none;
	hyphens: none;
	word-wrap: normal;
}

et voila!

It’s been an entire year since mum passed, that I didn’t update this blog. I kind of let things fall by the way-side, and to be honest – looking back with some hindsight, the last 3 years had been the toughest of my life. It had been utter chaos looking after my mum with failing health, juggling duties at work and a personal life that had been imploding (an ex who had issues and we just toxically made each other way worse for it).

So I’ve relaunched this blog onto https://jtiong.com

This is a personal blog to just float some ideas out there. It’s more to keep track of things that interest me. I should’ve started this at the start of the year, but things got away from me. So the promise as I start this, is that I update it at least once a day.

We’ll see how that goes, heh.

I think, it’s quite safe to say that 2020, has been an insane year.

I didn’t do my usual post at the end of 2019; and I didn’t do much for the start of this year either with my blog. There’s a lot of reasons for it; but on both a personal level, and indeed a global level – I think 2020 is a year that my generation will remember for quite a while.

It’s a year in which, the global markets stopped, then through sheer force of will, continued on. The age of the internet and remote services & tools were forced into a level of maturity that up until now, were only something the novel few could dip their toes such waters. Indeed, my own blog post (this post you’re reading now) is all about figuring out being able to work from anywhere, at any time.

2020 brought with it, COVID-19; which brought with it – significant health risks, and significant situations to my life that honestly, I never thought I’d see.

2020 was actually going to be a rough year for me anyway, as I moved towards focusing on caring for my elderly mother. I’d moved back home, and have been deciding what to start discarding in an almost Marie Kondo-esque fugue state. My home has always been filled to the brim with old knick knacks and gadgets, not to the excess you see on Marie Kondo’s show, but still – quite impressively full of old tech, clothes, and furniture.

There’s a lot to keep track of, and I’m in the process of decluttering my life. To do this, I’ve turned to a really interesting application that my friend and colleague, Matt, has pointed me to — Notion (https://notion.so). It’s kind of an all-in-one workspace style data collection application, kind of like Evernote.

It works across iOS, PC, Linux – it’s a web based application that’s very responsive. It provides a great way to take notes and keep organised, especially in the current hellscape of things in life right now.

Previously one of the projects I mentioned in my last blog post was Project Stronghold – where I build basically something akin to a games room/home office. I quite enjoy retrogaming – and a good deal of modern gaming (on consoles or PC, or in VR) as well.

I just thought I’d post here to present an inspiring picture of how I’d like to attach most of the controllers in this situation:

Obviously, the cabinetry in my own home is not like this – with different shelving and configurations to consider. But I’d like some form of storing these controllers in the room I intend to utilise, for the next few years.

It’s a new year – and really, time to move on from my previous lifestyle of just working and hardcore gaming.

I’m looking into removing the errant Cat5E cabling around my house, both for safety reasons (I have an elderly resident who can’t always avoid the cables and might trip up) and just general home pleasantness. I’m also left with a lot of computer hardware that – thanks to Project Cloud Citizen, I’m no longer in need of, such as massive servers in my house…

To that end – recently, I bought myself a Christmas present — a Google Wifi home mesh setup; and implemented it around the house. It’s my hope that I can transition the household to a wireless fix, instead of having everyone on a cabled solution.

2018 was a year that was very focused on improving my workflow on-the-go and out on my day-to-day work commitments. I ended the year by turning to Linux as my main operating system on my laptop; and I must admit – yes, the change in operating system has been disruptive – it’s actually had far less disruptive impact than first thought. I’m able to do the vast majority of my work with Linux, using a system that is much better suited to coding, Docker environment development, and overall lets me just get elbows deep into productivity.

2019 – is going to be a year of improving my ‘home base’. I find that due to the nature of my work over the last 12 months; I find the need for always-ready access to my code a necessity. However, I occasionally need to do a couple extra things which my laptop-centric workflow doesn’t allow as yet:

1. I need to engage in creative work; Photoshop, etc.
2. I need to unwind with a bit of fun, too! (going to the gym is more a physical release thing)

So after the events and results of Project Cloud Citizen – and the revival of my laptop as my core workhorse; I’m declaring 3 projects for 2019 on a personal level!

• Project Stronghold – designing the perfect space(s) at home for Rest, Play, and Creativity!
• Project Fortify – building up my health, and shoring up against future complications
• Project Foundation – My laptop proved its worth this weekend with both Windows and Ubuntu – tweaks to improve this 🙂

2019 will be about good ol’ hard work, growth, and improvement. We’ll see what the year brings!