Is Working harder really the best approach to keeping your Job?

Paul

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Why do some employees work harder?

This is going to be a little bit of a rant for me because of what is happening at work. Understanding the concept of working harder isn’t beyond me. I actually do that when the time calls for it but I have to wonder what goes through people’s head.   I’ll give a little bit of an explanation of what I mean,  We have a new employee, and I was trying to show him how to do something smarter.   He comes back saying, “He’s going to do it the right way!”.   I’ve really thought about this all day long and wondered what is the right way to do our jobs.   Are the higher up security people really watching us that closely to worry about doing it the right way?   I work for a really security focused place but I also know that there is NO way they can be watching us that closely.   Let us not forget we are the IT support so we may have to come up with unique ways to solve problems.

Understanding Business Justification

Some people think they have to work harder because they don’t understand this concept.   What is Business Justification, according to Wikipedia:

A business case (business justification) captures the reasoning for initiating a project or task. It is often presented in a well-structured written document, but may also come in the form of a short verbal agreement or presentation. The logic of the business case is that, whenever resources such as money or effort are consumed, they should be in support of a specific business need.

This isn’t difficult concept, I beleive, it just tries to get people to think about how much money the business may or may not loose if we do it this way or that way.  So why do employees think there is the right way and other ways are wrong?  If the business justification makes it harder for us to work then they aren’t saving as much money as they could by allowing the IT depart to do things a little differently.

They give us tools to use

The tools we are allowed to use are already present and we should be able to use tools, such as programs or Windows access that not everyone has.   Why give us these tools if we aren’t allowed to use them?  That is the really question in my mind right now.   I think the most problems we are having is people are just afraid to use the tools that we have access to because of the idea that big brother is watching us.   I can’t see that happening even in a good day at our place.   If you are doing your job they could care less how we do it.   That’s the real issue I think because most of the time you never really know who got hired until it is too late.   No matter the amount of background checks, or stuff like that we’ll always going to have someone get through those checks that shouldn’t be there in the first place.  Yes I can see that may be why we do some things this way but if you really are doing your job then you shouldn’t need to worry about big brother.

Work Smarter, Not Harder

This has been my motto since I started working,  I am sure there are other blogs out there that even talk about working smarter and not harder! So Why working smarter is better for you than working harder.  The easy answer is that if you really think about your job and how to make your just easier than you have just started working smarter.   However if you do things to keep the same output than you aren’t working smarter but working harder to seem like you are more busy than you really are.   Office people are notorious for this because it keeps the boss of their backs.   I’ve seen some of this at my current work but I don’t think it as bad as other places.   I’ve heard about the toxic places that do worse than where I work at.    I guess this rant is about over with but I just want people to consider that working harder does not help you but hinder you and make you more tired at night when you go home.   Think about how you can make your work life better and you will find that you are much happier than you were few weeks ago.

Have you had this type of issue before with employees or do you work harder?  let’s start a discussion and hear how you have handled it in the past.

 

How to install Steam Games faster than ever on the Steam Deck!

Paul


The Steam Deck Rocks

I first got this today but I have so many games on Steam, You’d think it would take very long.   The problem is that you probably don’t know this little tip to help you get your steam games onto the steam deck quicker.   I am going to talk about a few ways you could increase your download speed on the Steam Deck.   This won’t be a hard lesson for some but it will be an eye opening lesson for others.    The real question is how I did it and how can you make downloading your games much faster and easier.   The simple truth is I used a USB-C Dongle From Amazon to do that.   Most of the time downloading from WIFI can be fast but it can also be slow due to the limits of bandwidth on the WIFI network.  You can download way faster on wired than you can on wireless.   That will always be the case.

Disconnect from WIFI

This is something else I found out is that if you didn’t disconnect from the WIFI in the steam settings it would still be slow to download while connected to the dongle.   After disconnecting from the WIFI my speed downloads jumped up and I could get those really big games installed in half the time.  This is one of those little tips no one told you about with the Steam Deck.  To disconnect from WIFI when you are using a USB-C Dongle or a USB-C DOCK. A USB-C Dock is just a bigger and bulker version of the dongle because you can plug in keyboards and mice into and use it like a computer. This is definitely something I will be trying later on. I am quite curious to see if I can plug in a joystick or use a Bluetooth joystick to play games from my television set in the living room.

Streaming Games

If you plan on streaming games to another part of the house with your Steam Deck, you’ll want to also plug it in and make sure that you have enough bandwidth to stream games from your computer to the Steam Deck.   I think this one will also apply for the Logitech G Cloud Gaming Handheld also, if you plan to stream with the Logitech gaming handheld it will work a lot better if you can get a hard connection with that like you can with the Steam Deck.  

Download speeds

The only draw back I can see right now is the download speeds are limited to how fast the NVME or the SD card you are using can be written to.  So that may be a draw back from some people who got the slow SD cards that are barely able to keep up.   The best kind I can suggest are the SD cards that are designed for quick read and writes the ones that are in the 160MB/s are probably you best bet but you can use the 100MB/s read and write speeds if you like.  It will still be fast enough to play games on and will make your gaming experience better no matter which one you uses.

These are just a few things I’ve noticed once I got my Steam deck.   I will talk more about it in the coming weeks but I thought this would help other install their games or stream their games faster.   What else do you want to know about the Steam Deck, why not comment below and let me know what you interested in knowing or finding out?

 

No more Stadia says Google, and user have a chance for a refund!

Paul
Google Stadia

Google calls a stop to gaming

Google told developers and other that the gaming service will end at the beginning of 2023 and all user can ask for a refund of the the gaming system. This comes as a shock to most because no one saw this coming from what I am seeing around the the internet.    My son even both the Stadia when it came out and now he is going to ask for a refund after the 2 years he’s been using it.   I feel like this was due to the cost of constantly fighting all the other gaming consoles out there.   From Nintendo, to Xbox, to even PC gaming that people were doing.    Developers couldn’t keep up from my understanding and even if they did the customers were there to buy the Stadia as much as they bought other gaming consoles because of the wide variety of games available.  In their blog post about this, they say:

We’re grateful to the dedicated Stadia players that have been with us from the start. We will be refunding all Stadia hardware purchases made through the Google Store, and all game and add-on content purchases made through the Stadia store. Players will continue to have access to their games library and play through January 18, 2023 so they can complete final play sessions. We expect to have the majority of refunds completed by mid-January, 2023. We have more details for players on this process on our Help Center

Logitech Launches G Cloud Streaming Hand Held

I’ve talked  about this last week about the new G cloud streaming hand held system.  I am unsure how this will evolve or how well this will work, but I still believe the Steam Deck is better than the Logitech version.  I’ve got the Steam Deck coming my way and I will talk about it even more to tell you what everything you can do with the steam deck.  According the Logitech:

CLOUD requires a cloud subscription service sold separately to work as intended, such as NVIDIA GeForce Now or Xbox Game Pass.

Each cloud subscription will cost you depending on where you you go and who you are using.   Steam can be streamed to the Logitech hand held but I am dubious as to how well this will work with the current needing to be connected to the internet to do that.

Steam Deck will like last

I don’t know about any others, unlike the Nintendo Switch, or the PSP there will always be those who will play those.  There is the OnexPlayer but that seems like paying to much for the the player at least on Amazon.  They have so many different players and other thing you can you do with these systems but I am not sure if the price would be worth those gaming systems.   You can visit the OnexPlayer Official Site but I am more interested in a gaming system that can be bought for the ones who want to use it.   There are many different hand held gaming systems that rang from 300$ to over 1,200$.   Steam Deck is right in the sweet spot for people who might want to play around with the system and use it for what it is for.  You can play offline and still use the online stuff for when you can get a internet connection.   I’ll be talking more about this in the coming weeks, hacks and how to’s for those who might want to use the Steam Deck to it’s highest potential.  You can do a whole lot more than you can with any other Hand Held gaming systems for this price range.   I know I will enjoy this system immensely.

What would you like me to talk about the Steam deck?  Want to know how to hack the steam deck and install even more games?  Want to use Steam Deck as a portal computer?  These are where I am thinking of going to do?  What games would you like me to try to do?  Minecraft, Or maybe Epic Games, Or even Battle.net Games.  Wouldn’t that be nice to do?  Stay Tuned.

The CPU Battle Zone, AMD VS INTEL

Paul
Amd 9 Vs Intel 13 Generation

AMD Launches 7000 Series

I’ve been watching this development for the past week and I wanted to talk about some of the things I’ve seen on YouTube and other video platforms about the 7000 series. AMD has said that it will be the fastest yet. I have to wonder just how fast this CPU will be and just how hot it will be. On many videos they are claiming that it will be a constant 95 degrees Celsius and that it was designed that way. I am not sure how much I’d like my CPU to stay at the high end of the heating curve. It could just make the CPU die quicker but If AMD has thought this out then they would of made sure the CPU will live for a very long time. Some of the things I’ve seen with the AMD 7000 series are:

  • 5.7 GHz peak clock speed
  • Ryzen 9 7950X, Ryzen 9 7900X, Ryzen 7 7700X, and Ryzen 5 7600X at launch
  • 6nm I/O die, DDR5 memory controllers, PCIe 5.0 interface
  • DDR5 only (no DDR4 support), up to 125% more memory bandwidth per core
  • RDNA 2 integrated GPU (present on IOD, very basic and low power)
  • Zen 4 architecture has a 13% IPC gain
  • up to 170W TDP, 230W peak power
  • AM5 Socket LGA 1718, backward compatible with AM4 coolers

This means that anyone who has an old motherboard will be required to upgrade to the newest and higher end mothers to use their new CPU.   I’ve not seen all the prices but this seems to range anywhere from 200 US Dollars to 400 US Dollars.  These prices will come down over time but for the near future they aren’t exactly going to be cheap to get.   The Prices alone for the AMD CPU’s will also add on the cost of upgrading your system.   If you have DDR5 then there will be not cost but you most people only have DDR4 memory chips and that will mean you will have to invest in DDR5 to even use this AMD series.   All in All, this could run a simple computer upgrade into the 500 dollar range or more even with the cheapest AMD 7000 series the Ryzen 5 7600x series for 324$ right now on Amazon.  Now let’s also consider people will want to keep their new CPU as cool as possible but even then you’ll never be able to stop from get to the average 95 Celsius.

INTEL launches 13th Generation

All this being said about this isn’t as much as we know about the AMD Ryzen series but we have heard from people about this CPU is that it will be backwards compatible with DDR4.   It looks like they aren’t going to force people to upgrade their motherboards if they don’t want to or cant’ afford to.   It however doesn’t mean 13 gen is going to be anywhere as friendly as before.  They’ve talked about the power requirements and also .  Intel isn’t’ being exactly very upfront about some of this because I think they had to announce this just to compete with AMD.   Some of the press release talked about more E-cores and being designed for gaming.   These cores will start releasing on Oct 20, 2022 but I am currently curious as to what types of speed they will be getting.  I’ve heard up to 6 ghz of speed but was that just fluff or can they actually do this.  Will it make computers even hotter because of the heat that it will create.  We will have to wait and see.   I am quite curious as to the speeds and heat that it creates in benchmarking.  I’ll be watching those to see but I am sure that it will be fun to watch.

Final Thoughts

Seeing what AMD and Intel are doing is making for a great time in my life because I get to see what they are trying to do and maybe one day, we will  get past the ghz speeds and be able to do much more than we thought we could ever do with computers.   I know that I will probably never be alive to witness this but if I could be, I surely would love to see the speeds and what we could do with them in the future.   I think in order to get past the heat limit we will have to come up with other ways to manufacture the CPU’s to do just that.   I’d love to see what they come up with next and we may have to just keep betting on one of them to always innovate.   I will not be upgrading but at least when I do it will be nice to know that I will have choices.   I still have a Intel 10850 CPU and that I am really happy with but it never hurts to see what’s being made.   Happy Friday all.

Will you be buying the CPU in the future or waiting until you need to upgrade?  I’d love to hear your thoughts on this?  I would love to know which one you want more AMD or INTEL?  Who is the current winner AMD or Intel?  Why not leave and tell me your thoughts.

What quiet quitter really mean, and why you should care!

Paul1 Reply

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Quiet Quitting maybe complicated for some.

Most of the time we don’t really understand what it means to be quiet quit, and we see all these terms flying from around the media about the term. It however is something we all should understand because of the need to understand the idea behind it. Some still don’t truly understand the idea because they never really worked in the office environment. This is where the problem becomes more complicated. I’ve seen many people say the quiet quitters have always been here but it only recently became a thing because of the media hype. I suspect that much is pretty much true. We never really not had quiet quitters because of the companies idea of not paying people for the hard work they do has always been the problem.

So what really are quiet quitters?

Let’s try to explore the real meaning behind the media hype. According to techcrunchmouse.com:

“A quiet quitter is someone who turns up for work and does the bare minimum and limits their activity to that which is in their job description. They will turn up on time, do the basics and nothing more. This type of person is often focused on their role and will not allow people to take advantage of them in the workplace. They will embrace more work if they are rewarded for doing it.”

Most of the time, employers will want the employee to get the quota or do so much a week. These quite quitters are often not meeting the company expectations because of the no reward for do so. This is most often due companies not willing to give people raises or promotions that they deserve. I will say this is a very common tactic with employers to try to give the employee more work for the same amount of pay. This is not a quite quitter or someone who is in it for just money. If someone says that then they dead wrong, you deserve to get paid for extra work or work that you originally wasn’t hired to do. I have seen this where I work and other places, if the company can get you do more work for the same amount of pay they will always take advantage of the employee.

My thoughts on quite quitters

I’m sure we will always have quite quitters and that is something that will need to be considered when it effects other employees or associates who work with the “quite quitter”. They will try to do the bare minimum to get by because they just hate their job or don’t see any future in the job. After all, If you really hate your job shouldn’t you try finding a job you will want to do and make yourself happier. Even if you can’t change your job find ways to get motivated to make your job even more better for yourself. Work life balance is something that everyone struggles with even now because people need to work to pay bills or do the things they love to do. I know more about this than I did when I was just 20 years of age. It seems that we get better at knowing how to enjoy our work and come in with some resemblance of respect for ourselves. When companies work towards employees being taken advantage of then this will stop. It however will never stop because companies are always going to try to make as much money as they can. The only thing you can do is fight for what is right and make sure you are compensated for everything you when you work. Never be afraid to ask for a raise or a promotion when you know you have the right skills or work ethic. They can either say yes or no but each of them will show you if you need to find a new job if they are not willing to do so. At least that is my opinion but I am sure people have done the same thing.

What’s your thoughts on this or do you think it will change? Why not leave a comment and let other know your thoughts on this subject. Let’s start a discussion on this and make noise about what companies have done to you. I’d love to hear your experiences and hear your stories.