Yesterday I got the key to my new house, something that’s been in the works for 4 or 5 years or so. If you lose count in years how much time you needed to get there once you made the decision to go there, that’s too long.

So, working with impossible deadlines I got 1,5-2 days to paint and then I start moving stuff in. Luckily the house is in good shape so I can skip a couple of rooms. And energy to spare because I’m awake at 6 and ready to go. Can’t drive there yet because I have to watch Xam but as soon as he’s heading towards school I’ll be painting. Or cracking my head on what colors to add to the living room and bedroom because this time around I have to make the choice.

Luckily I had plenty of help on the first day

But it’s also the dawn of new era for me, having my own space.

This is a good write up on the problem, though I disagree with the whole “battle” and “family suffering” bit.

https://english.emmaclit.com/2017/05/20/you-shouldve-asked/amp/

For those that don’t want to read, the gist of it, women do A LOT of work. And yes that’s bullshit but there is ZERO effort in this article on the why and how to resolve the issue. So, I’m going to fix that. I’ll use gender neutral writing because all parties need to chip in.

Edit, when I initially read this on my phone I thought I scrolled all the way down, but at a second view there was more. So taking back the ZERO effort, the article tries to remedy it with a few things I feel very strongly about. Like equal paternity leave for male and female and of course less working hours. So see the rest as a more practical view on it.

Mindset

If you want equal work done you have to accept a few things,

• The household sits together and divides tasks.
• The person getting the task is responsible in full.
• Do not ‘cycle’ tasks, find a clear line. Trash, Vacuum, Dinner on Tuesday, Laundry, Groceries.
• Write that stuff down!
• The other party accepts that the way to the result might be different. It’s about what needs to be done, not how it’s done.
• Read that last line again

Because it’s not always the “family that suffers”, very often it’s “the person that used to do it that suffers”. Because things are done differently, or not as efficient, or not as clean. Yes, you will deal with clothing in the wrong color. That’s not suffering, it’s embarrassing but you will survive.

Also, don’t forget, if you did something your whole life and the other is new to it, chances are, like most things, they are not very good at it. This requires something called “practice”.

It’s just like raising kids, doing it yourself is easier/quicker on the short run, but in the long run explaining it and letting them make mistakes is the way to go. It requires patience, but there is a payoff.

And anyone that goes, well it should be obvious, let’s sit down and compile a Linux kernel, that one is quite obvious to me.

Systematic Problems

People should work less, the 40 hour work week was setup in a time when just the man was working. You can’t both work 40 hours and then just add “household” to it. Work less, or accept that you need a maid or a nanny to fill the void. That is a solution for this problem, there is a separate problem about underpaid workers that are mostly female there but I could fill a whole blog post about that.

Work expects men to be there 40 hours a week, woman less. Guys, if you got kids, work less! Demand a day a week for kids and household. This change is fully on us.

Bad unequal communication, very often one person is seen as management as the household. If you want to change that you need to change communication to be based on equality. A few tips, have a requal retrospective where you evaluate how things are going, make sure you write things down and read up on communication like “Non Violent Communication” and maybe both read something on how to provide positive feedback.

Conclusion

Lot’s of work to be done here, but in the end if we want to see improvement for everyone we need to start at the basics and that is to rethink how a household is run. As a team of equals where everyone makes mistakes and learns new things.

I’m going to improve this article over time for myself and others

Please note, this guide assumes you are already able to email with this alternative address, if not, after doing this go to “GMail Settings” and “Accounts” and add your email there.

This doesn’t work for Google Apps, it’s possible but your Apps administrator will need to add the full domain to the system and add the alternative email to your account. If they can’t figure it out, forward them to me.

The problem

The Fix

Adding alternative email to your account

Go to account settings,

Then click “Your personal info” and select “Email”,
 

And your email to “Alternate emails”,
 

You should receive email to verify you own the account,

Now, pick the calendar you want to use for your alternative email

 

And now you can accept

WP-FOAAS

When done right I will grief and cry, break a little inside.

Because after that, I’ll share Kratos his hate, I’ll be him, stopping at nothing to get my revenge.

That’s the experience I hope for.

It’s mostly for one on one chats but they work with group chat’s most of the time if you use common sense. Available at any large retailer near you.

To me a chat session is a permanent line between us, there are no goodbye’s just long AFK sessions like goodnight. It’s perfectly fine to suddenly stop in a conversation. It’s still there, if the other party really want’s a reply they can just send a question mark.

Working hours

During working hours my phone is on silent to keep my focus, I usually check for messages once every half our. So expect a delay. If I’m running pomodor’s then you will get a /afk – pomodoro from me meaning I’m away for 25 minutes.

The ping

Checking if you are there for friendly chat, just ping.

Me: ping
You: pong
Me: Hey I just figured out a large problem...

The magic .

It’s a lighter version of ping, mostly used to get a conversation going again when either party is distracted.

Me: <is typing for 15 minutes>
You: .
Me: Oh, sorry got distracted, so as I was saying....

The puzzled look or ?

When I send just a question mark there are two options, either you just wrote something I don’t understand and I would like you to rephrase it or go into detail or I asked something and didn’t get a reply yet and I would really like to know.

Me: I'm sapiosexual
You: ?
Me: To be aroused by intelligence

You: Do you have time this friday?
<time passes>
You: ?
Me: I'm a bit busy, I believe so will get back to it within the hour

Dealing with real life or AFK

The real world doesn’t care about our chat session, so if you suddenly need to pay attention to the real world just drop an AFK in the chat. Optionally you can put a reason behind it.

Me: /AFK - Meeting

So after a quick read of the code I found the following switches.

./vmware-install.pl --default EULA_AGREED=yes ISC_COPYRIGHT_SEEN=yes

BOOM, hand’s off install. Now to package this stuff with fpm, add the above line with full path to installscript.sh and make package

fpm -s dir -t rpm -v 6.0.0 -a x86_64 --after-install installscript.sh /opt/vmware-vsphere-cli-distrib

This can be cleaner by adding an uninstall switch

Best would be a good fix to avoid needing so much, but since we also want to get stuff done we are cheating our way out, by increasing the maximum.

First check the value on your current box, login as admin with ssh

# cat /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches
65536

Nice, but a bit low, you can quickly raise it by updating the file

# echo "655360" > /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches
# cat /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches
655360

So that’s great, but on reboot it will reset. To make it permanent we will add it to the autorun.sh in the config partition. This example is for the P419+ but you might want to check the wiki about other versions.

http://wiki.qnap.com/wiki/Running_Your_Own_Application_at_Startup

# mkdir /tmp/config
# mount -t ext2 /dev/mtdblock5 /tmp/config
# vim /tmp/config/autorun.sh
## This is where you add the above line in a small shellscript
# chmod 755 /tmp/config/autorun.sh
# umount /tmp/config

Now reboot and check if the value remains but repeating the first step.