Hey everyone, I know I’ve been extremely inactive everywhere for the past few months but a lot has been going on — allow me to explain. If you’d like to get the TLDR, you may scroll all the way to the bottom of this blog post.
So, as some of you might already know, I started a new job as a computer enginner again but in a different company at the start of 2022. There were so much for me to learn as I had to adapt to the workflow and different types of work in this new company.
But unfortunately, things started getting really bad here in Hong Kong as the COVID-19 pandemic exploded once again and started getting out of control after the Lunar New Year, which was around early February. The total positive cases went from around 15000 (early February) to over 745000 (as of 5th April) in about a month. This has been the biggest COVID outbreak we’ve ever seen here in Hong Kong.
As the pandemic goes on, I am working at the same time, sometimes from home, but most of the times in the office, which is also putting me at a very high risk of getting COVID. So, I finally decided to take the vaccine after contemplating about it for well over 2 years as the pandemic was getting out of control and our government was forcing everyone to get vaccinated. I finished my first 2 doses on the 5th March. For those wondering, I got the BioNTech vaccine, which is known to have a lot of side effects but is more effective against COVID (The other vaccine available in Hong Kong is CoronaVac / Sinovac, which is not as effective but more popular among the elderly due to its side effects being more mild). The side effects were pretty strong on me to say the least, especially after the second dose. The day after my second dose of vaccine, I was completely paralyzed in bed with my left arm being in extreme pain, and I also had a pretty nasty fever. Luckily, it was gone after a day with the help of some painkillers.
While I’ve been super focused on work, I haven’t really touched much on Minecraft modding, and didn’t even stream once this year so far. I did had a look on updating some of my MC mods on 1.16 before porting them to newer versions of MC, but my modding completely broke while it was setting up, and I couldn’t be bothered to fix it for now, so, it seems like I might not be able to work on anything related to Minecraft modding until I have a substantial amount of free time on hand, sorry for the wait guys!
As for streaming, I don’t even know what to do about that anymore at this point. Even if I have the time to stream, I don’t know what content I can stream that is considered entertaining to my audiences. Life’s pretty harsh right now and I definitely don’t feel like streaming is a priority of any kind for me, not until everything starts settling down.
One more thing I would like to mention in this blog post (long rant ahead, be warned), as most of you probably know about this already, I have my own website, which is actually hosted on a VPS in Singapore powered by OVHcloud, a pretty popular server hosting company based in France. I’ve been paying US$240 per year for the VPS and it has been serving me well. However, I had the idea of hosting my own modded Minecraft server so that I can allocate more RAM, which allows the server run smoother, so I decided to get a dedicated server from OVHcloud, which costs US$46.99 per month, I also had to pay for an additional US$37.99 setup fees for the first month. That was a pretty big investment, but here’s an issue — I never got the server after paying for it. I ordered the server on 22nd March and I still don’t have the server right now as of me writing this blog post (31st March). After going through multiple messages in the support ticket that I created with the OVHcloud customer service, they said they will escalate the situation and sort it out as soon as possible, but to no one’s surprise — they never did. Yet, they still claim the server is a 120 seconds delivery upon order and it is still in stock. I absolutely cannot believe how a company as big as OVHcloud, can do such thing as to screw their own customers over like that. That is unacceptable. I decided to rant about that publicly due to the fact that I got scammed by OVHcloud and I would like everyone to be aware of their terrible customer service. Don’t get me wrong, OVHcloud has some great servers with very compelling prices and specs, but the delivery times of the server are just ridiculous.
So the TLDR then — I got a new job at the start of 2022, then COVID started spiking hard here in Hong Kong in just a couple of months, so I finally decided to take the COVID vaccines. I am so busy with work that I can’t even stream or do MC modding anymore for the time being. And I got a new dedicated server from OVHcloud to replace the VPS I got from the same company 4 years ago, but it was never delivered and somehow I felt like I got scammed.
Thanks for reading this blog post, even if you’ve only read the TLDR. I’ll write another one again whenever I can, see you guys then!
-Jacky
