=================================================================== DATE : 2020.12.24 TIME : 14:17 AUTHOR : dsyates@lottalinuxlinks.com TITLE : 2020 YEAR IN REVIEW =================================================================== It's been a while...since Feb. 29th; that was pre-COVID. What's happened since then? Work-related: I worked from home; I worked on-site; and I got a promotion. I do not enjoy working from home. I end up working more, and working harder to get the work done. I am just more productive on-site. I can get more done faster compared to working from home. I also sort of feel the need to be hyper-available when I work from home, and usually end up working longer days than I do on-site. I just feel like I get more done, with less effort, during the day working on-site. One disadvantage working from home is that it is a routine change. In my case, this change in routine has led to more eating, less exercising, and 25 extra pounds of weight. I completely stopped running right around the first time that my employer started having us work from home in March. I have recently started back running, and will lose the extra weight. Non-work-related: Because of Covid restrictions, the wife and I have had to cancel a couple of previously planned vacation trips this year. Vacation trips are a big deal for us. We have a separate budget just for travel and we make vacations a priority. Canceled vacations due to travel restrictions has been the worst part of 2020 for me. That being said, if that is all I have to complain about, then I have had a pretty good year. My immediate family did all end up getting Covid in late November, but we all survived that just fine. My 92 year old mother in law even had a mild case. Computer-related: I was gifted a used Dell Poweredge R710. The R710 replaced my old Dell Poweredge P1950 server. The P1950 was doing it's job just fine, but the R710 was a nice upgrade, so I retired the P1950 and migrated my plex, gopher, minecraft, web, and ssh server from the P1950 to the R710. The R710 was performing just fine until my house was hit by lightning and it wiped out several USB ports on the R710. After the lightning strike, I bought a new server just for plex, a Dell Poweredge T40. The T40 is a great plex server and the Intel UHD Graphics 610/630 Series card and the Xeon E-2224 handle transcoding just fine. I am very happy with this purchase. Now that the T40 is just doing plex, the R710 has been upgraded with a Nvidia P2000 and in addition to being my web, gopher, minecraft, and ssh server, it's now a steam streaming server too! Both of these servers run Debian stable, and the server migrations went off without a hitch. When Debian 11 is released, both of these servers will upgrade without a hitch as well--just like each release's upgrade that I have performed since Bo in 1996. I love Debian! I am also running Debian stable on a raspberry pi 3, and old thinkpad T520 (which is now my wife's computer). I am running testing on a $20 acer aspire that I bought at a thrift store. I am running Debian sid (as I have for years) on my daily use computer (a thinkpad T590). Did I mention I love Debian? Also this year I replaced my 2015 Nvidia shield with a 2019 Nvidia shield. I moved the old shield device to the upstairs bedroom. Overall: 2020 was a pretty good year. 2021 should be too, as long as Thom Tillis is unsuccessful in overhauling copyright law or making streaming a felony. -dsyates (o\_!_/o)