Centroid.EU Blog

My former job got aquired again

December 18th, 2019

Up until August 2015 I worked for EnhancedVOIP Inc. aka EasyOfficephone.COM. It was a nice job and it gave me a job for 8 years if you count the years past 2015 until 2018 that I worked for Jive Canada the company that emerged when Jive aquired easyofficephone.com. Then 1 week after I handed in my resignation (it was really bad bad timing on my part) Jive was aquired by LogMeIn a company out of Boston. This was March 2018. I guess it didn't take long because LMI was aquired by a Private-Equity firm. So had I stayed with Jive Canada, this would have been the 3rd aquisition in 4.5 years, or roughly an aquisition every 1.5 years. I read a little on y.combinator.org (HN), that the 4.3 billion dollars are going to be tried to be recovered. Someone used the example of "You are an orange, someone aquired you and is trying to sell you as Orangejuice". There is likely a lot of pressure on individual employees there. I'm not sure if I got out OK. I know I can kiss all the savings I made at Jive and easyofficephone.com goodbye (because I lived on it for 1.5 years while looking for a new job), and the job I went to didn't work out unfortunately. I caught a strain of bad luck in 2018, and now I'm working to make amends with what I got and with help from the german (un-) employement office. I'll be keeping tabs though to see what happens to LMI, I know they dissassembled the network I was system administrating sometime early this year. It lasted about a year after I left. The remnant of that network are still found on the internet for example if you did a dig...

; <<>> DiG 9.4.2-P2 <<>> @a.gtld-servers.net enhancedvoip.net ns
; (2 servers found)                                                             
;; global options:  printcmd     
;; Got answer:                          
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 13279
;; flags: qr rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 3, ADDITIONAL: 3

But other than that the network is dead as a doorknob. I guess Jive Canada was integrated into Jive USA technology wise. Which is really a good thing because we had software from 2010 and before running on it. It was patched all along on the servers (that was my job) but the core functions weren't changed.

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Some politicians want longer nuclear life

December 18th, 2019

Angela Merkel already said that we're abandoning the nuclear power plants. Are you gonna make her a hypocrite? She'll go down in history as a farce.

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I have created my first X11 application in 18 years

December 17th, 2019

I did this in GTK+. It was painful but here is a screenshot for the sha256 calculator (same output as sha256 -b). You can also specify a number of rounds which will feed the output back into the SHA256 function. Here is a screenshot.

I'm stoked right now.

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Identifying my conflict by names

December 16th, 2019

When I was working I had a conflict of interest. Always. The conflict was IRC chat, Open Source programming and Knowledge Seeking. In 1997 I would literally lead the life of a junky. Computers were my drug. I'd work my afternoon-night shift and then go home to IRC about two hours. In the morning I'd maybe program for two hours before going to work. Back then the programs were tiny, it was more knowledge seeking than programming.

In 2017 I would literally lead the life of a junky. Computers were my drug. I'd work the afternoon-night shift and then go to bed. In the mornings I'd program on my open source program.

I've always felt a pressure sorta like a split personality when doing work and when persueing my hobbies. Obviously there was little time for exercise and that's why I'm 400 lbs now (the meds helped too). I'm offering this information for free for anyone because perhaps someone has a solution how to manage these things on a timely manner, so that I lead less the life of a junky but rather the life of a human being. Every problem has a solution.

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First day of snow for 2019/2020 Season

December 11th, 2019

I just looked outside and it's lightly snowing.

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Christmas in two Weeks, Solstice in eleven days

December 11th, 2019

I'm looking forward to this, I got all presents already.

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I'm fourty-four and fat, setting up computers is for 20 somethings

December 05th, 2019

Just turned down a job because I refuse to set up computers for a job. Crawling under desks is for 20-somethings who are physically able to do so. I've gone through too many pairs of jeans that I've ruined doing that in the past that I know this isn't a job for me. Next.

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Three Months left for SolarScale.DE

November 30th, 2019

I'm letting this domain expire. I've had it for around 10 years. Just gotta update my contact addresses on my registrar as I believe this domain name always finds it back as the owner address. I'll contact my registration agent soon.

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Slashdot turned Anonymous Coward postings off

November 28th, 2019

And there is a story that I commented on.. it was in regard to a Go player quitting becuase "AI cannot be defeated" Well here is my Reply:

A human brain is about 20cm by 20cm by 15cm give or take 5 cm on each end.  
It is said to consume around 35 Watts.  Can a computer beat that?  We know 
a computer can beat a human mind at gaming...but how large is this computer 
is it a super computer, a quantum computer or a single little SoC computer?  
This is what's important nothing else matters.  And.. we dream!

Dreaming.. because we cannot explain it, oughta rock the sockets off a computer.

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Christmas is exactly 1 month away

November 25th, 2019

Other important dates include the december solstice on the 22nd of december. The major thing keeping me busy currently is putting the final codes in for delphinusdnsd 1.4, which is expected to be released on or before december 31st. Next week is the 1st of advent. Have a Merry Season!

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