Tonight, after a failure I had migrating a database, I was reminded of an incident that occurred in one of my past jobs. I had recently awarded a new job with about 33% more pay. It was really nice to be able to receive a better salary and I hoped that the work environment would have been better.

Anyways, so one day I come to work and you know people talk. Some of it true, some of it not so true. Anyways I thought I was okay with the administrative staff at the time and one of them decided to share that someone high up in management mentioned that they weren't sure if I knew what I was doing.

It really got me but I think I understood why. I had received higher level jobs at a young age and you must understand that when you're not aged, it's really difficult to get older people to respect you as an experienced person - they can respect you for being a good person but not necessarily experienced.

The thing about IT is that people think that everything is understood. I suppose now that I think about it, I always think that medical science knows everything related to health - but if we think about it - I guess that isn't really true right? Same goes with the most experienced IT personnel out there.

You'll find a lot of professionals that stick to best practices but I realize that best practices is supposed to be for doing something properly yet it also gives the impression to the person hiring you that you know what you are doing. But sometimes, there's no best practice for venturing into a new territory. So you just have to try and hope for success or you try and fail and try and fail unto you find where the failure is coming from - then you get wisdom and then you can make a best practice based on success or experience.

Today was a day like that. Working with a 2TB database is far different from a small wordpress website like this one. In fact, the database today was 2.1 TB database and the VM disk was exactly 2.0 TB. There's a whole 100 G of data that just couldn't fit. This sounds like a foolish thing but I was so focused on trying to get that db unto the test server, I made the assumption that postgres was reporting the correct size - it probably was EXCEPT there were a few additional databases in there that I didn't cater for. So during the copy of the actual database files - it ended up being 2.1 TB.

It absolutely sucks to miss something so small yet important. It absolutely sucks when you're afraid of losing the confidence of your boss and colleagues when you make a mistake. And I know it's not the end of the world in this case, but I serious hate failing at things.

It really bothers me when I complain about something but I usually only complain (especially about companies) that should know better. This isn't a complaint being made to a small company who may not be able to afford talent - this is about a multi million dollar profitable company you all already know about.

So I have invested in a lot of Amazon / Blink related devices. I have more than 5 echo devices (from echo dots to echo shows) not to mention amazon tables, 5 fire sticks AND the blink mini cameras (a whopping 12 of them) AND I pay the yearly subscription to record the camera footage.

ISSUE 1: Even with the 100 USD subscription - I can't watch a camera on my fire stick for more than a few minutes at a time (I think its like literally 1 minute and then it closes off)

ISSUE 2: Even with the 100 USD subscription - I can't watch more than one camera at the same time on my firestick

ISSUE 3: THIS COMPANY LACKS VISION AND INTELLIGENCE. The firestick has a voice remote. When I'm viewing a camera I cannot use the voice remote to speak (the cameras has speakers and you can speak to whomever you're watching via the app) BUT NOT THE FIRESTICK. It's like they don't even use their own devices to figure these ideas out.

It's really frustrating - enough for me to vent via my blog. I just want technology that works and makes my life better / easier / convenient / purposeful!

ISSUE 4: Support is just support, they have no power to fix this stuff and I guess their developers aren't as good as I thought they were.

Love is beautiful because true love is able to understand even when you're not on the same page.

Yup, meditate on this and I hope you realise and understand what I mean.

So recently I discovered the power of Elementor. The one problem was, it gets expensive quickly especially if you need Elementor for multiple websites. I was once again sad because I had just found a reason to build websites again. I did some googling to find out whether there was an alternative. I found Oxygen Builder which seems similar to Element - a bit, it's not an exact replacement. Either way, I was able to get an unlimited license which I paid a fairly high price for but still overall much less than Elementor. I miss a few drag and drop features with Oxygen Builder but it's actually more powerful when it comes to customizations via CSS and Javascript. This site is using it and this is what I've come up with so far. Stay tuned!

I'm super happy to report that my new website is up and running! When I first began blogged, I used WordPress but through the years I switched to a few content management systems including Joomla, Drupal and even Laravel. I thought Laravel would allow me to build out an awesome website but I just don't have the time to spend coding each website feature and reinventing the wheel. This basically means I needed something that was already built - so I jumped back into the WordPress ecosystem. So far so good!