I ordered some Gorilla tape and got way more than I thought I was getting!

Car crashing and camera rebuilding

Adminisk8or

03/05/2023

And blog rewriting. I accidentally messed up the first time I wrote this blog, and this is the second time I'm writing it up by hand... but with what I'm going to say, it fits right into this week.

First interesting thing this week was that I got into a car crash for the first time in years.... well, not exactly, actually... I was leaving for work the other morning, and a nice blanket of snow graced this valley, as it has quite a bit over the last weeks; and my brain being what it is, I stopped thinking about the slick roads for a moment. I was approaching the intersection to get onto the main road, and there was a car stopped turning left, and one stopped turning right. As I began to brake, I was sliding towards these cars with less than ideal speed. Were I more clever in that moment, I would've veered right and used the curb to try and slow myself down, but in a moment desperation, as I came very near these cars, I veered left- thankfully with no oncoming traffic- but I veered just a little too late and tapped the car turning left. We both found a nearby parking lot and assessed the damage. Thankfully, there was none, and we both went our ways- but talk about a waker upper for a casual weekday commute!

And then, on another day this week, I was casually doing a little at home server maintenance on a few small things, and accidentally caused one of my three bare metal servers to crash. My server rack is inside of my super tiny utility closet in my apartment, and naturally, it was the server on the bottom of the stack. So, I had to unplug and remove my other two just to get to it. The cause ended up being because I forgot to replace the bracket that holds the PCIe cards in place, and one of them got partially unslotted. As the old adage goes, "All this for a loaf of bread?" But the experience ended up being somewhat good, because it gave me the opportunity to organize my cables, replace a couple that were bad, and eliminate a few unnecessary ones.

On top of that experience, my camera server also died this week. Running on an all-in-one computer, the SSD in it decided to spontaneously kick the bucket, and so I had to rebuild it from the ground up. But this, too, was a blessing in disguise, as I finally realized iSpy was an inferior platform to AgentDVR. I had been running under a false assumption about their licensing model, and this experience gave me the opportunity to see how I was wrong. On top of that, the all-in-one is going to one of my mom's friends who needs it for school, so it's a blessing that affects more than myself!

And that's kind of the theme of this week, seeing the good that can come of misfortunes. Naturally, there are innumerable occurrences in my life where this is the case, but it's very easy to forget sometimes, because it's easy to remember the pain and the suffering of the event, but not as much the way it changed me for the better. I admit this with some amount of regret, as I know it's easy to write about these things with grace and simplicity from the comfort of my quiet blog site, but when the rubber meets the road is the moment where the real test returns. I won't pretend every bad experience of my life has been strictly something that made me better or helped me, but I would be willing to bet a greater amount really has been. Rebuilding my camera server helped me by making me recognize I was too stubborn to try something newer; re-racking my servers helped me see there were a few things that needed taking care of that I didn't yet know were problems; and even the crash helped me wake up and remember I'm no perfect driver, and I need to pay closer attention when weather is foul.

So, look for these moments in your life that are meant to teach you, and build you to become better. It's not easy- ESPECIALLY in the moment, but looking back helps build your courage for future adversity to come. Until next time, see ya!