Virtually Benevolent

Deprecation Notice

At the end of the day on Tuesday, June 30, 2026, the Mastodon instance vmst.io will cease operations after nearly four years. Between now and then, users will have the opportunity to export their account data, migrate their social connections, and find a new home on the Fediverse. Effective

3PAP

Wife: Did you buy another CPAP machine?! Me: Maybe Wife: So now you have three? Why do you need three?! Me: Home, travel— Wife: You already got one for travel a few months ago! Me: Well that one was really too big for serious travel, this is an actual travel

Air Quality

Installed an Ecobee thermostat, and one feature is an indoor air quality sensor. When our windows are closed, it almost always reports our home is "poor" despite two other Eve sensors saying everything is fine. The ppb level of the Eves (at their worst) yesterday were 116 in

Sleep Apnea

I went to an ENT a few weeks ago because I have been getting tonsil stones for a few years now, especially bad in the winter months. He said "yep your tonsils need to come out, this is going to be terrible, plan to be out for at least

Classic Ordering

Elan Hasson asked in a Matrix chat group of Mastodon admins how he should go back and watch classic Star Trek. It got me thinking about a list of episodes to help jumpstart your knowledge without having to watch every Original Series episode (of which some haven't aged

Gravity Sync

I just got on the Pi-hole bandwagon a few weeks ago, and boy do I love it. Really, who doesn't love DNS? And what is better than a Pi-hole? Two Pi-holes! With the release of Pi-hole 5.0, I wanted to rig up a

Resume Deletions

There are some things that just aren’t worth putting on your resume. This was the reminder that came to mind during replies to Owen Williams on Twitter. "I once joined a company that announced on my first day that they had very little money left, and that all

Skip Day

It turns out that finding something to write about every day is really hard. Shocking, I know. You may have noticed (or maybe not) that January 1-4 there was a new post here every day. I skipped yesterday, but I blame my participation with this tweet from Jehad. "

Nonsense Awareness

Jessica Joy Kerr, in her blog post titled Open your eyes to the nonsense shares a great anecdote from a friend about the software development process at a utility company: “We make power, not sense.” But she goes on to make a wider point about evaluating the existing culture and

Thirty Eight K

I've historically been pretty terrible at two things: negotiating salaries and promoting my own skills. As someone who freely admits the movie of his life story could very well be titled The Imposter Syndrome, when it came time to discuss with a recruiter or hiring manager what I

Resolution Delusion

I'm not one for making New Year's resolutions. They always get broken, and then you're disappointed in yourself. However, Brent Simmons posted something on Inessential which I think is a good goal for anyone this year: "My resolution is to try harder to

Feeling Helpless

For a while, what transpired in the aftermath of that night left me feeling betrayed by some people that I thought I could trust, and feeling helpless. Like so many times in life before, I was told by those who had the power to stop what was going on, that

Kernel Panic

I’ve been thinking for over two years about how to talk about this, how to talk about the day I couldn’t process anymore. The day where my bullshit buffers overflowed. The day of my internal kernel panic. When starved for resources, my brain finally threw up a PSOD,

Excess Battery

I recently picked up an iPhone XS Smart Battery Case for my iPhone X. I’ve previously owned the 6S battery case for my iPhone 6 and the iPhone 7 case. Let me first say that even though Apple has designed the case for the XS, it worked on the

Certified Expert

I’m pleased to announce that yesterday I passed the VCAP6.5-DCD exam, thus earning the VMware Certified Implementation Engineer – Data Center Virtualization “milestone” after elevating the VCAP5-DCA exam that I earned back in 2014. The DCD exam has been on my list of things to do since

VMware TAM

I have accepted a job with VMware as a Technical Account Manager (TAM). To say I’m excited about this would be a gross understatement. VMware has been the company I’ve spent the majority of my technical focus on up to this point, and since announcing this change on

Blueberry Lover

Occasionally I’ll wear my “blueberry” VMware certification shirt to work. Some people in the community love these shirts, some people don’t. I, do. Blue also happens to be my favorite color. Occasionally, someone I work with in my current workplace will comment on it. Before the last year,

Define Essential

Two weeks ago, after regretfully trying to use the iOS 11 developer betas on my primary devices, I was forced by general instability to roll back to iOS 10. Unfortunately, there’s no great way to do this without doing a restore and fresh install. I had a backup from

Reasonable Salary

The process of looking for a new job is stressful. If you already have one, you’re a bit like a secret agent, sneaking around town trying to complete the mission of getting someone new to agree to sign your paychecks, without the old boss finding out. If you don’

Beginnings End

This morning I gave two weeks' notice to my current employer, a Kansas City-based VAR, where I have been a senior data center engineer for the last six years. I’ve enjoyed many aspects of my current role; becoming certified in new technologies, learning new skills, and solving

Choosing Electives

I'm going to start this by saying something that might seem strange for a post like this, but is no surprise to my closest friends: The last two months, and especially the last two weeks, have been very stressful and mentally draining. Without getting into the details of

EMC Elected

On Wednesday morning, during my morning Starbucks cold-brew run, I received a shocking message from my friend Jon Hildebrand. “Congrats on EMCElect” I seriously thought he was kidding. But then he sent me the link to the announcement, and there was my name, just a couple under Michael Dell.

Neowin Retrospective

Most of the people who know and interact with me professionally, or on social media, know me as “vmstan” — and if you asked most of those people, they’d tell you I only pay attention to two things when it comes to technology: VMware and Apple. They’d be mostly

Leather Wrapped

I have an on-again, off-again relationship with iPhone cases. I put them on. I take them off. I generally don’t like cases. I’ve only broken my iPhone one time and that was when my 6 Plus came out of my pocket attached to my hand, unintentionally,

Pant Lover

I have some strict requirements around work pants. My wife hates the “I can see your socks while you’re standing up” hipster look, so they have to be full length. Honestly, it’d be a great look since I’m 6’4” but as a result, I’m at