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The server has been in a few different places over the years. It was initially hosted in my dad's shop on a Pentium 166 upstairs when we had 1.5 Mbps ADSL. After a time, it was too taxing on the anemic 128 Kbps upstream such that it made our connection crawl in both directions so I had to face the prospect of shutting it down. At that time, a guy named Iron Maiden who hosted stuff on the side in Texas offered to host us and provided an old, retired Pentium 3 server and remote access. I set up shop on his machine for a few years until I managed to get through college and land a job. Once I had income, I rented a virtual private server and moved the server onto it while thanking IM for having been so generous. We hopped to another, better VPS later on. After a couple years of that, I had a server in a datacenter that I owned and we moved onto it. We've been on that for about a decade. The dedicated server itself has been refreshed twice (we're on the third incarnation of the server hardware) and moved once to in that time.
For the record, I was never and am still not anything close to being rich. lol As chance would have it though, I do have a third refresh being spun up literally in my basement right now. It will eventually be swapped with the current server.
Congrats KoRo! That's awesome. I imagine it feels amazing to finally accomplish something you've dreamed about your whole life. On the flip side, it comes with the realization that usually the fantasy is better than the real thing. Hope you find happiness there or that you can move on to the next thing when it's right.You hit the nail on the head. Yeah it's been a mixed bag. It barely pays the bills because the COL is so high here. I have no chance to purchase a house here anytime in the future, so I'll likely not be sticking around forever. But hey it's a great learning experience, and I'm hoping it'll open a lot of doors in the future. At least some employers hold NASA in high regard still, lol.
I never really dreamed about a specific career path. I ended up in Accounting and now I'm the Finance Director for a mid-size company. Pretty much the type of job you would think of when you think 'boring office job'. But it pays the bills and has a lot of flexibility and good benefits. Great work/life balance which I've realized is important to me.Do what makes you happy. And if having money and work-life balance makes you happy, then do what you do! Personally I feel like accounting could be fun. I enjoy numbers and spreadsheets (i assume that's what your job entails). Congrats on finding stability!
In other news I logged on today and saw 12 people online. Now of course those 12 online are probably only 3 different people multiboxing but it's cool to see we've still got some players after 20 years...It's about 4 or 5 people, but yeah. And actually, we talk pretty regularly throughout the day, but we've migrated to the Tribes 1 RPG Discord. So...the game runs in the background while we all chat sans the You damaged Gar'Pero for 191 points of damage! messages spamming your chat window. You should drop by if you're interested! Particle, myself, Astal, Omnicide, bungle, Bovidi, rj, and a bunch of others who were on other RPG servers are all hanging out there and it's active daily. I gather they're sort of working on their own RPG side project together, otherwise the rest of us are just working on scripting stuff for TRPG, among other things. Pretty much like old times. That link won't expire so whenever you see this, drop by and say hi!
I got into cyber security and am doing pretty well for myself. I definitely picked the right job market to be in. I definitely agree with you on the topic that work is 'work' but if you enjoy what you do, it makes it more bearable.I imagine the money's gotta be pretty nice
me I'm just trying to come to grips with the fact that despite all the hard work i put in I'll never be able to afford a house in the area i currently reside.But damn that's quite the resume, 'interned and worked on the perseverance rover'. Maybe next you can help them create a rover to explore Saturn's moons?Currently working on Mars Sample Return! APL will be doing Dragonfly though (The quadcopter that'll be flying around Titan). There's tons of good stuff to explore around Saturn. The decadal survey was just released last week and it is directing us to 1) continue Mars stuff, 2) do more New Frontiers and Discovery class missions, and 3) do more Moon stuff. So of those things, the Discovery class missions might take us to Saturn's moons! Dragonfly is actually considered a New Frontiers class mission since the vital technology has been proven with Mars Helicopter
I remember in high school physics class, we visited NASA at DC, was pretty cool and saw some cool experiments, but definitely could tell they're all just chill engineers that don't get paid enough.Damn straight. Also, damn straight
did i already mention never being able to afford a house in the area i reside in?But hey, if the government sector isn't for you, maybe you can apply at TESLA and get some of the private sector moneyOver my dead body! You couldn't pay me enough to work for Tesla. I could maybe do SpaceX since their work weeks are getting a little less crazy, but at the end of the day they're just building rockets -- personally I prefer the R&D bent of science missions. Blue Origin has some potential with Orbital Reef on the drawing board, but I won't be excited for them until they do something more substantial than launch a few people on sub-orbital trajectories. I heard a rumor that they're beginning to investigate in-space heavy industry (like mining rocky bodies). That would be very interesting to work on!
