Been a minute or two since I've written up one of these. Looking around the world after my last 5 days and it feels like a HUGE seismic event's happened that's changed the very landscape out from under us.
Personally, I've been working a new job since the start of February, in case I missed updating you all here - That's been a HUGE difference in my life. The pay is awesome. The coworkers are awesome and the company appears to be a good one, esp after what I've witnessed in the last 5 days. I've been putting in 14 and 15 hour shifts for the last few days because the company is doing what it can to keep 500 something people able to work from home during this health crisis. To that end, the overtime? Has gone to 4 IT people working in heavy rotation with some help from other departments to collect, stage, image, update and configure and then deploy those 500 something desktops and 40 or so laptops with fresh installs, new proxy rules and software . . . And a wing and a prayer as we find out the quality of the average home internet in these parts when heavy duty proxy traffic gets involved.
Now, I'm sitting glued to an open Zoom conference waiting for folks who have those devices at home who need tech support.
Why am I at home instead of in the office helping with the final push of devices and handoffs? My body decided that it was fed UP with the OT and I came down with a mid-grade fever last night. It COULD be our new buddy, the Covid-19, but I'm thinking it's more likely that I'm just exhausted and my body just said "Nope, we're done with that for now!"
I'm not ashamed to admit that I grinned when I got the 'You're banned from the site until the 7th of April' e-mail from my boss. I'm happy to spend more time with my family during this.
So, that catches us up with me . . .
I'm blinking, bleary eyed as I survey the world around us, tho! Folding has become nearly unrecognizable! I was expecting Default to come roaring back to life because the average consumer when told that they can help with their technology doesn't either WANT to deal with plugging in too much information, or, if they aren't specifically recruited by a team, just don't care to search out a team to fold for.
Linus' Tech Tips numbers? Was a surprise. Dude's got a huge exposure surface through his Youtube channel, and while I've not watched him with regularity, I'm sure based on what I've seen him do in the past that he has been using that platform to spread the news/word about Folding's targeting of the disease. And good for them as far as the folding volume goes. It's good for the program to have those juggernaut capabilities helping out.
And I get the frustration that we're going through with getting work ourselves. I've been unable to fold at full power for a couple of reasons (Namely now, the new WUs are beefy enough that if I DO unleash my main system to full capacity, it draws more wattage than my UPS can really handle, let alone what the poor PSU was rated for - Yes, updates are in the works, I just need the money to do so - Until then, I'm only folding on my two beefiest cards at once.) and seeing my systems flounder with a lack of work is frustrating. Just keep on trucking and trying for more work.
My only recommendations are Do NOT dump work in the name of trying to fill your queues up - You WILL get caught out at some point and possibly CAN get banned from the project. We've seen it happen in the past. If you feel you MUST shut down and restart, the best thing to do is to pause the work you have currently going, then do the reboot so that work will continue as the other cards attempt to pull in WUs. And keep trying. It's a PITA to babysit, I KNOW this with DEEEEEEEEP awareness after the last 4 or 5 days, but it's worth it. A little restart of the client from time to time does help reset the download attempts.
The clever among us with the time may even be able to come up with a command line script that we can use with an hourly timer in Windows Task Manager (Or a chronjob if you are in Linux Land) to pause current work, stop and then restart the client and unpause. (I will look into this later, but if someone else can/wants to do so and can paste the command line magic in a post below? That'd be AMAZING!)
Ok, I need to stop this before it becomes VERY MUCH tldr. I'll close with my wife having suggested I update my Amazon wishlist with goodies she thinks I definitely deserve after this weekends push to keep 500 families who'd otherwise be completely unemployed working and paid so, if you'd like to see the list, let me know via PM and I'll share the link. It's also my birthday coming up on the 9th of April, so if you want to know what your stats pimp wants? Anything off that list or cold hard cash (Soft squishy monetary bits in Paypal work too, PM for details for that as well).
Keep yourselves and your loved ones safe. Wash your frigging hands. Don't hug up on strangers. Tip your service folks. (I MEAN IT! Restaurant workers, delivery drivers, whoever, if you can give it, they NEED it. AND they freaking well DESERVE it for keep us in the goods we need.) Hydrate. Take your meds. WASH YOUR HANDS!!!!
And take care of yourselves and each other. We're all that we have in this great big scary world.
d
