Alaska

Still waiting to hear back from the Government on my job app progress. This is pretty normal, but they haven’t been completely silent.

Weeks ago, I got an email from someone at the agency I applied to. In basic terms, they were confused with one of the forms I had to submit, as a part of the tentative offer. The issue, my city of birth.

How is that confusing you might ask? Well I was born in the capital. Washington, DC. The normal way to fill this in on an electronic form, is to put Washington as the city, and DC as the “state”. After all, that’s how it is on both my birth certificate, and passport. However, the fed was somehow confused. They emailed me, asking me to “fix” the error. I just resubmitted the form as it was and responded

I have resubmitted the requested forms. I would like to clarify that I was born at the [REDACTED] in Washington, DC, USA, our nation’s capital.

Their response?

You will need to put for city of birth “ Washington DC, not just “ Washington”. Thank you

…

The form required me to select a state. So it ended up saying “Washington, DC, DC, USA” for birth place. I haven’t heard back on it in weeks. So I guess that fixed the “issue”.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had this issue (it’s pretty normal for us DC born), nor will it be the last.

Server Update

I moved both of my web servers off of Digital Ocean, and over to RamNode. Don’t get me wrong, Digital Ocean is still a good provider, but Ram Node caught my eye.

In short, my main VPS now has better specs, at a lower price. They support VPS installs from standard non cloudinit ISO file. And they give you a discount if you prepay.

To explain the last one, when I last added $20 to my account, I was given $25 in credit. To better explain it, here’s their page on it.

The Cluster

Upgraded the cluster to ProxMox 9. Again. This time things have been going pretty well. Except for one weird day, when PVE3 just, stopped. For no real reason. My uptime container started sending notifications that it, and the VMs on it, were down.

This was actually a pretty good test of the cluster. As I got to watch it react to a node failure, for real. All the VMs with a fail over plan, failed over to other nodes correctly, and started back up.

Looking at PVE3 itself, nothing seamed off with it physically, so I turned it back on. Things have been fine with it ever since.