What went right today...

Let's try not to make it a short thread then :)
Trying to think about all the little things that went right (and not taking those things as a given) is a helpful exercise - especially when the times are dragging one down.

Last week the weather forecast for this long weekend was flat out "Rain" for all 3 days... Turned out it got sunny around Sunday noonish and been wonderful all Monday.
(And - a long weekend is a cool thing in itself :) )
 
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Didn’t go into work Monday. Que the deluge of emails in my absence. I do have a phone to check emails but decide not to as getting an angry message 9.30pm or anytime really, eventually causes anxiety. So I ignore them. Yet the phone over the weekend still shows 127 unanswered emails. And these are the ones that got through to the phone, there’s loads more on the computer at the office. Well I came in today and faced them all - and it was alright!
 
Despite God having fun making me drop and lose things all day, the garden tables got built and the corn planted and the transplanting was done, and there was even time for helping a friend. :) Oh, and God and I had a good chuckle about how easy it is to make me drop things, and bump things, and stop for a close-up of an interesting plant - which is always Her cue to kick up just enough of a breeze to make shooting a close-up a real PITA.
 
2020 Quarantine House Chores!

Phase 1: Deep cleaned my backyard, re-stained my wooden fence, re-painted my porch and planted a small garden.
Phase 2: In the process of backing-up, updating and streamlining my network and computers.

Today I setup my wifi dual band network, prioritizing all wifi devices on the faster bandwidth that's streaming content. I've also got around to setting up my Apple Time Machine backup drive, which I needed to do since I'm running a RAID 0 setup with a pair of 1TB SSD drives. I've been a bit worried that if my RAID ever crapped out, I'd be screwed. I also manually backup my photo archive on two separate hard drives every month or two.

Next on my list is to update my desktop Mac OS which I was lagging on due to the OS update not natively supporting RAID 0, but I found a software patch that will allow the update to happen without having to clone my drive and then copy it back to my RAID drive!

On a less technical note, my dishwasher outlet valve was overflowing and I was worried it might be broken, but I cleared up my dishwasher drain and loosened up the air tube which fixed that problem! :D
 
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Yesterday, some foreign kids (from another local school) managed to sneak into a virtual classroom my class had a lesson in and wreaked havoc; they did so with the unwitting help of one of my students. It all caused one hell of a stink. However, we were able not only to track down all culprits and perpetrators, they also chose - in their more sensible majority - to cooperate in efficiently clearing things up. It was amazing - and my students helped all they could, yet still managed to stand together and not tell on their unfortunate colleague who came forward on her own account.

A surprisingly uplifting outcome of quite a nasty situation. I'm very relieved - and just a little bit proud as well.

M.
 
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Yesterday, some foreign kids (from another local school) managed to sneak into a virtual classroom my class had a lesson in and wreaked havoc; they did so with the unwitting help of one of my students. It all caused one hell of a stink. However, we were able not only to track down all culprits and perpetrators, they also chose - in their more sensible majority - to cooperate in efficiently clearing things up. It was amazing - and my students helped all they could, yet still managed to stand together and not tell on their unfortunate colleague who came forward on her own account.

A surprisingly uplifting outcome of quite a nasty situation. I'm very relieved - and just a little bit proud as well.

M.

Exactly what did they do to disturb a virtual class? Glad to hear the students worked together to clear things up. My eldest really likes her virtual classes now, I think having those daily sessions helps for their socializing. I'm a bit worried about my younger one though, because their social development is just beginning.

Thankfully my kids' school has been very good about updating logins and passwords. We haven't had any disturbances in their virtual classrooms.
 
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Exactly what did they do to disturb a virtual class? Glad to hear the students worked together to clear things up. My eldest really likes her virtual classes now, I think having those daily sessions helps for their socializing. I'm a bit worried about my younger one though, because their social development is just beginning.

Thankfully my kids' school has been very good about updating logins and passwords. We haven't had any disturbances in their virtual classrooms.
Microsoft Teams (our installation at least) is preset to make each attendee of a MeetUp a "speaker"/"presenter" - sorry, I honestly don't know what the actual terminology in English looks like, our software uses a German UI -, which means that students can:
a) kick other students out of the channel,
b) mute other students,
c) demote other students (see below),
d) mute teachers,
e) invite outsiders to join a MeetUp,
f) use the file upload feature.

There's a simple solution for stopping such nonsense (in fact, there are several, but this is the most "impromptu" one you can use at all times, without any further precautions): Whenever a student joins the channel, "demote" her or him to "participant"/"member"/whatever. They keep their right to speak, but can't interfere with the workings of the channel or other participants. They can't change their status by themselves after that, not even by leaving the channel and rejoining.

Now, one of my students invited outsiders (e) who were then capable of inviting others (e again), which they did. Some of those went on to ask off-topic questions, mute other students (b), mute the teacher (d) and, when challenged by some of my students, started to demote those (c) in order for them to be able to keep the disruptions going.

Unfortunately, my colleague wasn't aware of the solution described above (which, to a degree, is her own fault - I myself documented the solution a couple of weeks ago for all to see after something similar, though much less disruptive had happened in one of my MeetUps).

Had this happened to me, I'd have had the perpetrators cry "uncle" in three minutes (at the latest) while at the same time documenting the whole thing (screenshots), including all names, and I'd also have let them know they were screwed, and than I'd have phoned their principal within the next quarter of an hour, with all the facts and names sent over in a neat little package afterwards. All over in an hour (not the aftermath, though). But then, I handled unruly chat rooms already thirty years ago, with dozens of members of - truely! - all sorts ... though, to be fair, IRC offers much more sophisticated tools than Teams - you can't easily ban and de-voice people in Teams after they got invited, for instance, and in IRC, keeping open twelve channels and chats doesn't really wear you down, whereas the constant click-n-jump routine in Teams is a pain in the behind because it's so tedious and slow ... keeping up more than four parallel conversations is unthinkable.

The fact that outsiders came in (breach of trust and privacy protection) and then disrupted everything (severe disciplinary issues) made all this quite an ominous case, really. But we did our best to get the students (all of them) on our side - and all but the worst offenders have come forward and cooperated. The two who did the most damage and now are stubborn - will suffer heavy consequences (others, like my student, will feel it, too, but far less harshly because they helped right the wrongs).

M.
 
I'm back to my weight lifting routine...well sort of! I'm utilizing 5 gallon water jugs for high rep makeshift deadlifts, jug squats, farmer walks, jug back rows, etc. I'm now trying to figure out how I can make a should/bench press setup with the jugs. I'm also doing body workouts like pull-ups, push-ups, dips, etc. until I can get access to a proper gym. I think the goal right now is just to maintain and let muscle memory do it's job once I can go heavy again!

I'm super envious of those with full garage gyms. Though I don't think my wife would be too happy if I blew $$$ on a full workout station! :roflmao:

Also I updated my Mac OS while retaining my RAID 0 without having to resort to cloning my drive or other elaborate methods! I did have some quirks with the latest security updates, but I was able to patch up my OS last night. My computer is operating rock steady! (y)

If anyone is interested, I'm using DosDude1's Mac OS patcher meant for updating legacy hardware with newer OSes, but it also works for circumventing Apple's lack of OS update support for RAID 0 drives.

 
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@Jonathan F/2, I use Windows. But with a RAID 0 setup I'd make an image of the setup and keep it completely offline so you can restore quickly if you need to. I use to have a set of WD Blacks in RAID 0 before SSDs. Also I hate to ask, but are the SSDs RAID class? Not sure if SSDs are the same as HDDs in regard to RAID, but the Blacks were not a good choice for RAID as it turns out, they don't support time-limited error recovery (TLER)* among other things.

For backups to externals I use FreeFileSync and have a task that runs every day or 3 (different schedules for images, LR catalogs, documents, etc.).

* WD Se 4TB Enterprise Hard Drive Review
 
@Jonathan F/2, I use Windows. But with a RAID 0 setup I'd make an image of the setup and keep it completely offline so you can restore quickly if you need to. I use to have a set of WD Blacks in RAID 0 before SSDs. Also I hate to ask, but are the SSDs RAID class? Not sure if SSDs are the same as HDDs in regard to RAID, but the Blacks were not a good choice for RAID as it turns out, they don't support time-limited error recovery (TLER)* among other things.

For backups to externals I use FreeFileSync and have a task that runs every day or 3 (different schedules for images, LR catalogs, documents, etc.).

* WD Se 4TB Enterprise Hard Drive Review

I have a Mac Mini that was configured this way when I purchased it. I'm using 2x Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500GB drives in RAID 0 and I also have a 2TB HD running Time Machine backups nightly. I mainly got this computer because I wanted something fast while taking up very little desk space. My setup has been very stable the past two years since I've owned it. It's just a shame that Apple makes it so hard to upgrade new OS versions with RAID. I only upgraded my machine because Adobe was cutting support for older OSes in Adobe Camera Raw.
 
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I have a Mac Mini that was configured this way when I purchased it. I'm using 2x Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500GB drives in RAID 0 and I also have a 2TB HD running Time Machine backups nightly. I mainly got this computer because I wanted something fast while taking up very little desk space. My setup has been very stable the past two years since I've owned it. It's just a shame that Apple makes it so hard to upgrade new OS versions with RAID. I only upgraded my machine because Adobe was cutting support for older OSes in Adobe Camera Raw.
I don't know the ins and outs of Time Machine, but any nightly backup also backs up any flaws (driver / system updates, accidental deletions, system updates that break other programs, etc); so a working offline backup can be a good safety net.

If it was configured that way from Apple I guess it's not an issue with SSDs or at least with the models they installed. The blacks I used use to give me an error every now and then requiring a rebuild, maybe every other year or so.
 
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