Dickens Faire is a wrap for the year.
2019-Dec-23, Monday 19:04![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
texxgadgetFirst 2 weekends a kid each weekend walked into the booth, looked up at me and asked
"Are you SANTA ?"
I answered no, I just look like him.
Dad asked "You mean you didnt tell him that you were Santas Little brother?"
People see Dad and me together, thinking we are brothers, they are pretty sure Im the older brother.
Being mid 80s, Dad finds this hysterical. Admittedly, I do smirk.
If you have been keeping up, In 2012, I was apprenticed to the ghost of newspaper typesetter
Gordon L Sullivan, founder of the Dickens Faire Print Shoppe.
Every year, there is some skill I get obsessed over and manage to master.
I really dont realize it untill it happens.
This year, I finally mastered the art of tying up blocks of type for future reuse.
I didnt think i would ever get the knack of it.
We have a lot of misc oddball paper sizes and we finally started matching things to print to
some size stack we have in the cabinet.
The problem is that the freebies we give away its seems silly to only run 100.
Its tempting to go cut more paper to match this oddball size to make a full run, but that creates even more oddball stuff till the paper cabinet is overflowing with oddball.
We finally mmanaged to get everyone in the shop to come around on this and halfway through the run
we made progress.
Final Saturday, I ran out something we had ties up "Ive given up on pessimism. It doesnt work."
I printed it on 7 different sizes of paper, stopping and slightly tweaking the typesetting to fit the next
size. I think i did close to 1000 images of it but I used a LOT off oddball paper sizes.
Standard calling card size is 2x3.5in. We have a quantity of 1.5x3in.
People need the email address for submissions to "The Bulletin" (We produce a victorian scandal sheet)
We have to direct them to the right spot on the Bulletin to find the address.
I finally ran a batch of cards with the address so we could just hand it to someone.
Don was out weekends 3 & 4 with the "Cow Palace Crud". I presented him with a box of cards upon his return.
Closing day, I found a stack of rust colored cards about 2in square.
I ran another batch of cards to use up that stack. It needed something more.
After pulling a proof, I reset the form with a line above and below the type clock.
Then I inserted a a strip of brass 6 points above the upper lins and 6 points below the lower line.
Then I centered and even shorter line above and below those and ended up filling the extra space with
the graduated length lines.
I cant reproduce it in ASCII here, but it actually turned out nice.
I intend to fo a lot more brass line work next year.
I found a pkg of 4x4 Astro Parche about 50 sheets from a job done over 10 years ago.
I found a copper block cut with an ornate "Christmas Greetings.
I dont know what posessed me, but I cranked out 50 xmas cards.
I dont really care for the holiday, but I made a stack of cards anyway.
The printjob I didnt get to was this:
"Those who can make you believe absurdities will get you to commit atrocities"
This was to follow up
"When small men leave large shadows, the sun is about to set"
and
"Raise your voice! Even if it quavers..."
Our understudy for Scrooge is the older bro of someone I went to HS with.
All of this has helped ndistract my from a lackluster job search.
The demain for sysadmins is going away and the par rate is dropping, both due to automation and cloud.
Id be OK if I had several years more of AWS but I dont.
Im coming to grips with the fact that I am going to have to transition to Python developer if Im to
stay on in the industry.
Obviously, financially, I wont be doing xmas or new years.
"Are you SANTA ?"
I answered no, I just look like him.
Dad asked "You mean you didnt tell him that you were Santas Little brother?"
People see Dad and me together, thinking we are brothers, they are pretty sure Im the older brother.
Being mid 80s, Dad finds this hysterical. Admittedly, I do smirk.
If you have been keeping up, In 2012, I was apprenticed to the ghost of newspaper typesetter
Gordon L Sullivan, founder of the Dickens Faire Print Shoppe.
Every year, there is some skill I get obsessed over and manage to master.
I really dont realize it untill it happens.
This year, I finally mastered the art of tying up blocks of type for future reuse.
I didnt think i would ever get the knack of it.
We have a lot of misc oddball paper sizes and we finally started matching things to print to
some size stack we have in the cabinet.
The problem is that the freebies we give away its seems silly to only run 100.
Its tempting to go cut more paper to match this oddball size to make a full run, but that creates even more oddball stuff till the paper cabinet is overflowing with oddball.
We finally mmanaged to get everyone in the shop to come around on this and halfway through the run
we made progress.
Final Saturday, I ran out something we had ties up "Ive given up on pessimism. It doesnt work."
I printed it on 7 different sizes of paper, stopping and slightly tweaking the typesetting to fit the next
size. I think i did close to 1000 images of it but I used a LOT off oddball paper sizes.
Standard calling card size is 2x3.5in. We have a quantity of 1.5x3in.
People need the email address for submissions to "The Bulletin" (We produce a victorian scandal sheet)
We have to direct them to the right spot on the Bulletin to find the address.
I finally ran a batch of cards with the address so we could just hand it to someone.
Don was out weekends 3 & 4 with the "Cow Palace Crud". I presented him with a box of cards upon his return.
Closing day, I found a stack of rust colored cards about 2in square.
I ran another batch of cards to use up that stack. It needed something more.
After pulling a proof, I reset the form with a line above and below the type clock.
Then I inserted a a strip of brass 6 points above the upper lins and 6 points below the lower line.
Then I centered and even shorter line above and below those and ended up filling the extra space with
the graduated length lines.
I cant reproduce it in ASCII here, but it actually turned out nice.
I intend to fo a lot more brass line work next year.
I found a pkg of 4x4 Astro Parche about 50 sheets from a job done over 10 years ago.
I found a copper block cut with an ornate "Christmas Greetings.
I dont know what posessed me, but I cranked out 50 xmas cards.
I dont really care for the holiday, but I made a stack of cards anyway.
The printjob I didnt get to was this:
"Those who can make you believe absurdities will get you to commit atrocities"
This was to follow up
"When small men leave large shadows, the sun is about to set"
and
"Raise your voice! Even if it quavers..."
Our understudy for Scrooge is the older bro of someone I went to HS with.
All of this has helped ndistract my from a lackluster job search.
The demain for sysadmins is going away and the par rate is dropping, both due to automation and cloud.
Id be OK if I had several years more of AWS but I dont.
Im coming to grips with the fact that I am going to have to transition to Python developer if Im to
stay on in the industry.
Obviously, financially, I wont be doing xmas or new years.
SRE
Date: 2019-12-24 04:07 (UTC)Re: SRE
Date: 2020-01-04 01:20 (UTC)The way we used to do it,
we would log into each machine and
do what we needed doing.
Updating the sudoers file on 1000 machines could take me a day or two.
Now I feed several commands to ansible, get a cuppa, and the job is done.
Dev ops is the act of writing a piece of code, or a script,
and have IT do all the work.
Ansible being one of the tools in the devops toolkit.
SRE is determining that the file needs to be updated, and devops is how the SRE accomplishes the task.
The snowflake snots in the NOC who pretend to be monitoring,
are quite another issue.
I do have a problem explaining this to teenage recruiters who cant even read a resume.
"You must be a Sr Java developer because my wordsearch says the word java is in your resume"
Re: SRE
Date: 2020-01-04 01:47 (UTC)Too many people think DevOps is a job, that only deals with "The Cloud™" and containers. So wrong. Half of these "DevOps" don't get pages - no ops at all. But they sling bad terraform and docker code and think they're hot shit.
SRE is what sysadmin used to be. The "ops" that these DevOps pretenders neglect.
Re: SRE
Date: 2020-01-04 02:26 (UTC)Its the fact that they are a bunch of kids.
By the way, a bachelor degree in CS in India is only 2 yrs and is all technical with none of the humanities that we require for the underclass years.
Re: SRE
Date: 2020-01-04 07:44 (UTC)CS grads don't know much sysadmin, if any. They only know the dev side - no QA, no build/release, no ops. Most companies only want CS grads - until their half baked college cowboy projects fall over. Then they hire "DevOps" or SRE - to fix the unscalable, badly coded shit from the kids.
I have 200 semester units, not all in one major, but no degree. Still more education than some of these CS grads these days.