I thought about leaving, even went to 3 days a week IT, and 2 days something else. I was making some serious headway, but in the end...
In IT, people are pretty chill. We share open source, we create new things all the time, we get to solve interesting problems. It's fun! The rest of the world is full of people with a... different outlook on how to interact with the world around them, to put it mildly.
Now I'm back on 4 days a week, and I absolutely love it! Two afternoons off per week. It's not too much of a strain on the budget, yet gives me a lot of free time. It's really the best.
Find a good team, stick with it. Do your job during office hours, and then do your other stuff on your side. We're lucky to have a stable, high paying and relatively ok for your (physical) health job.
If you're really set on leaving, I'd highly encourage you to switch to 3 days a week and start a side business in anything. You can sponsor it with your IT salary, and then figure out what you want to do when you're ready.
There's an alternative solution: update everything, but limit your dependencies.
Example: for my (personal) projects, I only use whatever is available in the debian repositories. If it's not in there, it's not on my dependency list.
Then enable unattended upgrades, and forget about all that mess.
It was a nice monitor stand though, the pizzabox style.
You're right on the sudden change! I remember our 386 was sitting flat on the desk, and the (huuuge) 486 tower was upright below the desk.
Maybe something to do with the noise? Must have been quieter to hide the monster below a wood plank on a carpet to dampen the vibration, rather than on a resonating wood plank right in front of your face.
My favorite part about these old computers is that they didn't have an auto shutdown yet. You had to flip a big mechanical switch on the back, and that was very satisfying!
I loved having the computer flat under the monitor. I could access the drives, and power / reset buttons easily. However, I didn't like having to move the monitor to get inside my case. Once I got a tower, then I ended up using a stereo receiver under the monitor, which gave me easy access to volume and audio controls. I also remember having those big power "strips" under the monitor with the flickering orange toggle switches so you could control power to everything. Those were also glorious. Something nice about having all these controls right in front of you...
Now, having anything under the monitor drives me crazy, probably because it sits so much further back now that it's not a big honkin' CRT. The CRT was so big that it benefited you to have something underneath of it. Now I have all this empty desk space, which is really nice too.
There was a brief time when the best setup was a keyboard drawer that was sturdy enough to have the PC on top of it and the 14" monitor on top of the PC. So, when you were done typing you pushed the drawer closed and reclaimed the desk surface in front of the PC.
I have a so-called "intelligent speed limited" in my 2 year old car.
It's absolutely terrible.
On the highway it picks up the 50km/h panel intended for the bus lanes.
Close to where I live it hallucinates a 5km/h limit.
In random places it will miss limitations.
Right now it simply decreases engine power. On a highway that's already dangerous enough. Can't wait till they use the same visual/audio warnings as they do for the pre-collision assistant...
By the way, that's bullshit too. Triggering for no good reason and scary enough to take my eyes off the road. Love it.
glinet routers are amazing, but their file sharing lacks authentication sadly (well, mine does, at least). So anyone getting access to you network also gets access to your files.
It's mostly fine, until one of you devices gets compromised. Then it's not fine at all anymore.
In IT, people are pretty chill. We share open source, we create new things all the time, we get to solve interesting problems. It's fun! The rest of the world is full of people with a... different outlook on how to interact with the world around them, to put it mildly.
Now I'm back on 4 days a week, and I absolutely love it! Two afternoons off per week. It's not too much of a strain on the budget, yet gives me a lot of free time. It's really the best.
Find a good team, stick with it. Do your job during office hours, and then do your other stuff on your side. We're lucky to have a stable, high paying and relatively ok for your (physical) health job.
If you're really set on leaving, I'd highly encourage you to switch to 3 days a week and start a side business in anything. You can sponsor it with your IT salary, and then figure out what you want to do when you're ready.