Loud & Abrasive

Today is my last day at Accenture, fka Headspring. I’ve worked here for 11 years; near a third of my life, near the length of a primary and secondary schooling. And what a schooling it was.

It’s 2022 and the Yuletide is already upon us. The Game Zone is open and Professor Subzero has locked all stereo dials to horrific holiday radio. Follow me, dear listeners, as we run to victory, exposing our oppressors for their greed and manipulation, and reveal to the world that not all Christmas music is the worst thing you’ve ever heard!

I am currently working on my “home server” which is more or less a couple hard drives in an old gaming computer. Some of the parts have fun RGB (red, green, blue) lights which can be seen through the case. They have a nice rainbow default but can be controlled to show colors or patterns, most robustly through using the OpenRGB application. This is very cool, but my server is just a ProxMox hypervisor: a host for virtual machines (VMs) that do specific jobs, so there’s no desktop to run OpenRGB on. Also, since the VMs are virtual they aren’t aware of the lights on the physical hardware. Sheesh! Thankfully the solution wasn’t too difficult to set up, and maybe you need this, too.

A recent exchange between coworkers revealed a confusing but important distinction in .NET runtime nomenclature. These folks were looking to reproduce the same behavior on their individual machines, but just couldn’t stick it. One of them was running the application “in Production mode” and the other “with Release build.” The terms “Release” and “Production” seem to go together naturally, similarly with “Debug” and “Development,” but in practice these keywords refer to distinct elements of a running application.