Everytime Mommy cant eat I’ll kid her that I’ll buy her a blender/osterizer so she can ingest her food through a straw. She will vigorously shake her head and respond with an adamant no because she has memories of my grandmother’s last days where she can only consume liquefied food.
Now I am eating rice congee using a straw. I had a molar extracted and I need to avoid getting food particles or have hot food in it to avoid preventing the wound from clotting. I have the choice of eating through a straw or going hungry. I chose the former.
Gist: When paying via your online wallets then make sure to take a screenshot before payment.
My internet provider bill (from PLDT) is nearing its due date and I was paying the last few month’s bills via my Maya.ph wallet to take advantage of the crypto coin “cashback” feature. I logged into my Android app and saw that I still have more than 6000 pesos in the wallet which is sufficient to pay for my internet bill. I proceeded with paying for the bill using the saved template and adjusted the amount to Php1900.
Upon submission, the app encountered an error that it didn’t receive a response from the provider and to try again a few minutes later. When I refreshed the app home page my wallet balance dropped to Php4200 but there is no transaction listed for it. I waited for 5 minutes to refresh the Maya app but everything remained the same.
The Maya chatbot is useless and doesn’t want to connect me to a human helpdesk agent so I called up the Maya hotline. The agent who answered it is helpful enough but she does not have any ability to view my prior day balance to confirm the deduction. She can only confirm that there is no new transaction logged to my account since what she saw is the last payment I made a few days back. She suggested to call the PLDT hotline instead and to email support@maya.ph to do a deeper check and to request for an online receipt if needed. It has been 2 days and yet there is still no response on my request except for the automated ticket number.
I dont have any tangible proof other than this claim so it will be very easy for Maya to say it didn’t happen. This is a very costly lesson in proper documentation, and a very negative experience that will prevent or at least minimize my use of the Maya payment system in the future.
AWS Transfer Service comes with a Bill Shock. Life lessons from not reading the fine print. I cant believe it costs that much to run a relatively passive service. ?
No time to read through contexts? Jump to the TL;DR; section.
There are use cases that require the secure wiping or deletion of files. There are already a lot of available utilities available in most modern distributions such as srm, swipe, etc. These however entail installing an additional package which is fine for work machines. The use case I had is to securely delete a transient file after it was generated and used in a Continuous Integration server. Installing the secure-delete package is trivial but a base Linux system already has the tool that can do the job: dd
Happiness is an elusive treasure for most but in reality it is hiding in plain sight.
Happiness is located at the crux of being content with what you have and what you are willing to forego.
Getting more means exerting additional effort and taking on more responsibilities. If those start being a burden then it is a good sign your personal inflection point is already known. The question now becomes “are you ok to maintain this as your status quo, or do you still want to achieve more?”
I prefer training my team using the pavlovian conditioning, with a slight bias in negative reinforcement. This has drawn the ire of the Human Resources department in the past.
The reinforcement that I usually employ is done via penalties. The penalties are monetary in nature, and increases in severity if the infraction happens close to each other. An example is a first violation is worth Php50, but any violation in the next 2 weeks will incur a higher penalty of Php100, and so on until a set limit (normally Php500 per infraction). If there is no violation after 2 weeks then the penalty goes back to Php50 as the next violation will be treated as a first offense. The reinforcement is only effective if the team sees that I have my skin in the game too. If the violation is something that applies to me then the same penalties cover my violations. Usually I also sweeten the pot wherein if there is no violation for 2-3 consecutive periods then I automatically contribute the highest penalty amount to the collected funds. I “lose” either way but my goal is not to collect funds but to make the team learn a certain behavior.
The funds collected do not go to my own pocket. The team decides what to do with it. Normally the team spends it on a lunch-out or a series of snacks. I had one team donate the collected funds to charity.
The whole point of negative reinforcement is to make sure that the subjects do not deviate on the prescribed behavior as it will be too inconvenient. Positive reinforcement on the other hand makes it pleasant to meet the prescribed behavior. I just prefer the former because I find it more effective in getting results in a much shorter time.
I am not a handy man as I never inherited that skill from Daddy. I am very of wary of powertools even if I am fascinated by them. I always treat the tools with respect whenever I use them. Much like today.
I am glad to say the powertool I am using today (portable impact drill) didnt cause me harm. It was the underside of the monoblock chair that did me in and caused a mini red fountain in my foot’s second toe. It was a perfect storm of carelessness, stupidity and timing.
I did see Daddy again in that brief 30 seconds of pain though. I squealed the same way I imagined he would have. Murmuring self-directed invectives while brimming with pain.
If the Linux VM was running at the time the host OS (Windows) hibernated then the clock in the guest VM will be left at the time of hibernation. If NTP is configured then the clock should resync gradually but most systems do not apply a big chunk of time correction by default.
If the Linux VM was configured with a VPN that implements a system-wide configuration then the DNS resolution might be unable to resolve the NTP server since the DNS of the VPN session will be unavailable. The alternate and work-around presented hinges on two things:
The guest VM has internet access at the time it was resumed.
The google.com domain name is already resolved and cached.
sync-clock() {
echo Current time before sync: `date`
echo Current time after sync : `sudo date -s "$(wget -qSO- --max-redirect=0 google.com 2>&1 \
| grep Date: | cut -d' ' -f5-8)Z"`
}
The work-around uses the time in the google headers to provide an anchor for the correction. This is provided as a bash function to provide user feedback if a correction was done.
The GNOME control center in my Manjaro system crashed while I was tweaking the details of the mouse settings. After it crashed, I was unable to bring it up again even after a reboot.
The solution was to reset the configuration files for it using the following command:
$ dconf reset -f /org/gnome/control-center/
After that, the control center UI is up and running again. Based on the search hits, visiting the details pane can sometimes caused the state that results to a segmentation fault whenever the control center initializes.
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