@PixysJourney @Waitnwallflower Yeah I still need to upgrade to the latest major version. I need to do some test runs first, but things have gotten suddenly busy for me. All I can say is the update is coming relatively soon.

@mayintoronto I'm seeing it too. I've been in New York for the past few days so haven't been checking in as regularly. I'm traveling today but I will take a look tomorrow. I suspect the web server needs some fine tuning.

@ItsThatDeafGuy @billinkc I'm not entirely sure but the alt text thing might be fixed in version 4.5. I'm a bit behind in my versioning as well because the jump from 4.4 to 4.5 requires a Postgres version upgrade as well. I've been doing some testing on this since I have never tried it on a production database before and the database is the heart and soul of the instance. I'm hoping to have the upgrade done sometime within the next two weeks.

The drinking bird is Drinky, our unofficial mascot, or maybe official, I guess I'd be the one to decide. He started out as a Raspberry Pi project to measure the frequency of drinks he took and correlate it to ambient temperature and barometric pressure, though the real point was to take these measurements and transmit them to my friend who would do the analysis in the most inefficient way possible. So I hooked him up to Twitter bot that would tweet a date stamp every time he took a drink. Unfortunately, but probably fortunately, this ran afoul of the spam filters and got shut down fairly quickly.

So then he evolved into a bot that composed haiku based on a user's tweet history (with permission and attribution). Initially I used a basic mad libs style method to make him say depressing things whenever he took a drink because part of his back story was his existential angst at having the sole function of drinking but being unable to actually drink anything. This evolved into a more sophisticated Markov Chain program that would generate original text based on sample text.

My plan had been to bring him over to Mastodon, with the conceit being that the entire instance was his next evolution, but around that time LLMs started pumping out mass plagiarized AI slop, and while Drinky never worked that way, it seemed better just to keep him on as a figurehead and a mascot. So that's why he's in the corner watching you toot :drinky:

@bedast best of luck🤞

Got the offer letter! I start next month.

Thanks for all the positive vibes everyone. I got a tentative offer today!

@Tattooed_Mummy Thank you! I thought about putting this on my resume because it involves a lot of technical experience I don't have from my day job, but then I considered that would essentially be giving potential employers my social media account and it felt like a bad idea.

Had a good interview today for a job that would be perfect for me. So naturally I have entered a fresh doom spiral.

@jmax Nope!

@CuriousMagpie Thanks, yes I plan to reach out for some some help with the moderating load. It's getting to the point where I can't keep doing it all myself.

But I will keep on trying regardless

Pleased to report that I still have no idea what I'm doing

@ratcatcher Yeah I ran a reindex on Saturday

@OhOkayKay @Devils_Rancher All pending new accounts should be approved now

@cobalt123 @samiamsam @ndrwy all pending new accounts should be approved now. Apologies for the delay.

@ratcatcher my major obstacle here has been the Postgres upgrade. I did a successful test on my local machine so the next step is to do the same on a copy of the database server. I'm going to try to take care of that this week. I just want to be really cautious because if the DB gets corrupted then the instance is dead.

Good stuff fellow beigers, let's keep it up! And no yay-beige post without also thanking @theropologist for looking after this lovely little corner of the internet ❤️

Beige bless :bb: https://mastodon.social/@AltTextHealthCheck/115859423638098805

:bc: Attention Beige Party-goers! :bc:

Slight change of plans. Part of this update requires upgrading PostgreSQL to a later version. This is more of an involved process than upgrading the Mastodon version, so out of an abundance of caution I am going to test the Postgres upgrade in a test environment before I try it on the production server. Once I'm comfortable with that process I will post a new announcement to schedule the upgrade to Mastodon version 4.5.2.

In the meantime I have upgraded us to version 4.4.9, which gets us up to date with bug fixes and security patches. I also noticed we were having an issue with Elasticsearch so I am running a reindexing process that will probably take a few hours. Once that's completed, search should be fixed.

Beige-Bless :bb:

@NickGates Drunk Shimoda stacking isolinear chips is a fair representation of how I do these updates

:bc: Attention Beige Party-goers! :bc:

We are overdue for a Mastodon update so I will be upgrading us to version 4.5.2 this Friday evening/Saturday morning, depending on where you live. This will be a major upgrade because we are moving from 4.4 to 4.5, so I am scheduling the maintenance window for 4 hours to give myself plenty of time to complete all the upgrade tasks.

The maintenance window will begin at 4AM UTC on 12/6 and continue until 8AM. If you are in the Western Hemisphere, that's 11PM EDT on 12/5 until 3AM on the 6th.

Since this is a major update I will be taking the servers offline to make full backups. You can expect the site to be down for about half an hour while I complete this process. I'm addition the site will be down briefly several times while I restart the docker containers. As always, please be prepared for the site to go down at any time during the maintenance window.

On a personal note, I know I haven't been around much lately. I was looking forward to things getting back to normal after my dad's memorial, and then a week later I got laid off. Since then, I've been frantically trying to find something else but it has not been going great. So I'm faced with the reality that getting back to normal is out the window and I've just gotta keep moving forward however I can.

All of this is to say I am not abandoning Beige Party, and the instance is not shutting down. I've built up a pretty big backlog for myself but it is also the only real work I have at the moment, other than marketing myself to strangers, so I will be making more of an effort to prioritize the maintenance of this instance, because it is important to me and is one of the few things in my life right now that's actually working. And to the extent that it is working, that has always had more to do with the party-goers than it has with me, so thank you for that and thanks for bearing with me, as always.

Beige-Bless :bb: