Just changed the way I relate to the world.

Lonnie is a liar. TLDR.

You could try searching for “msp,” but also just look for “helpdesk” and IT in general, as you said, and review company details. I haven’t tried to find an MSP job, I just landed at one that wanted IT people. Good luck!

Look for a MSP (Managed Service Provider) for your first gig, if you can. MSP’s contract IT services to small to medium businesses that can’t / won’t hire or budget for full-time IT. You get exposed to a lot of stuff this way. Maybe half of clients use Google cloud services and the other half use Microsoft cloud services. You learn and become an expert in both.

Same with different VOIP services, different app suites, different security software, different network hardware, etc. It’s a great way to speed-run IT and get exposure to a lot of tech. Bonus points when you later move to a dedicated company. The complexity goes way down. My job post-MSP is cruising and easy compared to what I did for the previous five years.

Good luck!

iPhone 1.0. I was notoriously good at getting lost cause I’m not great with directions. A couple days after I got it, I was going somewhere in a city that isn’t my own. I stepped off the train and pulled up the map app, looked at a couple of street signs, and said, “I’m going that way.”

I thought to myself, this changes everything. Younger people who never had to rely on paper maps will never understand how profound that moment was.

There is a correct answer to the question. It’s a math problem.

Nope. I have used WordPress on a blog or two, but I didn’t know what WP Engine was until a couple of weeks ago.

I’ve spent a lot of time hating life and wanting to die but not being in a place to make it happen. I tried once, in a manic state and, thankfully, it didn’t work out. I was genuinely mad that I woke up in a hospital ER. When you’re down, it seems like you’ll never be able to enjoy anything again. It can, and does, shift. It seems like it’s never-ending, but it will swing upward again if you can just hold on. I’m sorry that you’re having a bad time. It’s terrible when that happens. Please just keep putting one foot in front of the other. You don’t know what might happen in the future that you wouldn’t want to miss.

Redbull. It’s not quite what was asked, but it’s about the only thing that is always stocked.

Well said.

I just tried it out using the same search string that I’d, just prior, run on the goog:

how many permutations of 9 digit number

Results were not encouraging.

Nothing. There would be no replacement and the pledge would fade from memory.

I meant general computer backups, I just had trouble phrasing it correctly. As in, you and I probably didn’t backup our computers properly until we lost something. That’s how most of us get into backups. Similar here.

Agreed. You fucked up and now hopefully you learned from it. The reason any of us have (typical local) backups is because we lost data, whether a little or a lot. This is no different.

Good at google. Which should be easy for everyone to learn, but a lot of people don’t.

Get a barebones mini-PC (no OS so you aren’t paying for a wasted license) to install Linux. Bring questions to the community (after doing your due diligence to show that you put in some effort on your own by asking questions that show that you’re trying). People are generally pretty willing to help out. Start with figuring out which distro is the right fit for you. Check out r/homelab and other homelab resources.

If all this is too overwhelming, take other advice from someone who makes a better pitch than I did. Good luck and welcome to the hobby that is known to take over your free time and money in a deeply enjoyable way. Cheers!

Time to plug one of my favorite podcasts: Stuff the British Stole

Most people are probably pretty passive, so yeah, I think there’s a subset of posters who are highly visible. But even over at Hacker News, where there’s a much larger audience commenting, I recognize specific names because something they said in the past got my attention and I start piecing together their personality a bit at a time.

I had a habit of letting the spellchecker alert me to misspellings but didn’t allow it to correct them. This was to teach me to figure out the correct spelling of difficult words. But now that so much typing is with thumbs on glass, I let it fix things for me (as well as incorrectly modify the word I intended) all the time. Still doing it the old way on a physical kbd, though.

404media is one of the best independent journalistic sites available. They started one year ago, so they aren’t especially well know, but they are a four person org that came from places like Vice.com and wanted to get out of the corporate bullshit. You should check out their non-paywalled articles.