It’s President’s Day in the US and I have a day off, where I’m coaching volleyball up in Greeley, CO. And slightly worrying what maintenance might be waiting for my back at the ranch.
You get to re-read (and re-comment) on The Change Failure Rate. Interested to see if people view the world differently after a few years.
I started a short thread on Twitter/X and Bluesky recently after leaving the Tesla at home recently. A few people asked me about it, so I decided to do a short update, as this is my computer on wheels.
This is part of a series that covers my experience with a Tesla Model Y.
A few weeks ago, we traveled to Greeley, CO to coach in a tournament. My wife and I coach two teams this year with our daughter and it’s very busy. This particular weekend, we were coaching the afternoons on Saturday and Sunday and Monday morning in Greeley. The catch was our second team had a Sunday morning tournament in Golden.
We had booked a hotel in Greeley and decided to take two cars as we knew the Sunday morning event might run long and we needed to be back in Greeley. Our schedule of places, times, and drives was:
Around this, there likely are a few short trips of a few miles. Dinner, etc., so these are estimates.
The other caveat on this weekend was the weather was predicted to be in single digits (in the F scale) overnight. Either positive or negative, but cold. The highs were 11F Sat, 15F Sun, and 8F Mon.
We already knew we needed two cars, so the question was: is the Tesla one of the two cars?
Some snow was expected, and I didn’t worry, but my wife had a bad experience heading to the mountains one weekend in heavy, wet snow and the Tesla defroster didn’t work well. Neither did the wipers.
That was a minor concern for me, especially as I learned how to get hot air rather than the default cool air for the front defroster.
The bigger issue was time. In trying to get up to Greeley, we would be tight on time. I’d be asking to go over 200 miles without a charge in very cold weather, across 2 nights.
Or we’d be looking to stay up late one night to charge at the Loveland supercharger, which is a 20 minute (each way) drive from Greeley. There are some chargers in Greeley on a map, but when we tried them last year we found:
These were separate locations in the town, where businesses had set up fast charging. This isn’t a knock on Greeley, it’s just the reality of EV charging in some places. This is an unfamiliar place and I don’t trust most charge stations owned by various companies.
At least not when time is a factor.
I didn’t want to be stressed about charging, so we decided to leave the Tesla home. It wasn’t that important, certainly not to worry about charging time or having enough charge in a very cold environment. I took our old Suburban and my wife took her diesel truck.
There ended up not being much snow, just a few flurries, but it was very cold, and we were racing from place to place. In coming back Sunday to Greeley, we had a 10 minute cushion according to Google Maps and lots all that trying to get a cup of coffee and some lunch from a stop. Even if we’d have aimed for the Supercharger for 10 minutes, they don’t have food service nearby. There is a hotel at the supercharger, but they’re a) slow and b) expensive.
I’m happy with the decision. I missed driving the Tesla, but it made sense to skip it for this trip.
SQL Server on Linux was released with version 2017. Since then, I’ve seen some deployments of SQL Server on Linux, but many of the customers I work with still deploy SQL Server on Windows. While there are limitations and unsupported features, most of what we need is available in SQL Server on Linux.
I assume most of you out there work on Windows machines against Windows servers. Maybe some of you run containers, but that’s likely a minority. Windows seems to have won the desktop and for most of us running SQL Server, the server room as well.
However, if you use containers, you likely use Linux ones since SQL Server isn’t supported on Windows containers. I know I do, and I like them, but overall, I find I need to know very little Linux to do my job, or even work with the containers.
I like Linux. As someone who learned Unix early on and installed Linux 0.8, I thought at one point I’d spend most of my career in that world. Especially as I worked with DOS and Windows 3.1 in corporate work and found them much less capable. I still remember writing grep.bat and awk.bat files to duplicate some of the things I did in Unix on DOS machines.
For doing database work, most platforms are ported to Windows, but even if you connect to an Oracle/PostgreSQL/MySQL/MongoDB/etc. system running on Linux, do you need much linux? I find that ls, pwd, and cat get me through most of the things I need to do. When there’s something more complex, like sudo systemctl restart mssql-server, there are plenty of code snippets in the docs or some website. These days, you could even ask an AI how to do many simple tasks.
If you don’t use Linux, then you don’t need any, but if you deal with any sort of system running on Linux, how much is important to know? What’s your top ten list of things a newbie should learn? Let us know today.
Steve Jones
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Life gets better as you replace transactions with relationships. – from Excellent Advice for Living
This is incredible advice. I think that much of the complaints about the US from the rest of the world is how transactional we are. Whether this is with stuff we buy or neighbors or how we eat dinner or how we treat sports, we’ve often become transactional. What’s the best, fastest, easiest, most convenient, etc. We often want a quid pro quo for things we do.
When you spend more time with others, when you value the experience and what you get from it, life is better.
It can be harder, slower, etc., but I think it’s better.
I’ve been posting New Words on Fridays from a book I was reading, however, a friend thought they were a little depressing. They should be as they are obscure sorrows. I like them because they make me think.
To counter-balance those, I’m adding in thoughts on advice, mostly from Kevin Kelley’s book. You can read all these posts under the advice tag.
Voice of the DBA 