Quarterly inventory – 2026 Q3

Dear FutureMe,

Today would be a good day to do a quarterly inventory.

How is your personal life going?

How is your work life going?

How is your Volunteer Service life going?
Future Me

Personal Life

Near the end of July, I will retire from 37 years of “doing computers” for my employer.

I have done so.

I have yet to get a good routine going. On the other hand, I have had a day or four that were wonderful.

Mom is gravely ill

At the beginning of the year, she was fine, if a little unsteady on her feet. The underlying problem is that she wasn’t getting enough exercise. In years past, she would do some gardening and go on trips with Frank. There were four falls in four months, although thankfully, she hadn’t broken any bones. But she was unable to get back up on her own feet by herself. Her cardiac condition has been deteriorating, and her doctor forced a pacemaker on her. Within a day, she was in the emergency room at Kaweah Delta and couldn’t get herself out of bed. She’s been almost entirely bedridden ever since. From KDDH, she went to a physical rehabilitation nursing home but didn’t really make much progress. Insurance stopped paying, so now she is at home getting palliative care. I’m visiting almost every day, but her health is in slow decline.

Twitter/X

I deactivated my paid account on 2026-07-02 because these unhelpful people couldn’t figure out how to get me logged in via email with a second-factor via SMS. I never did find out why my account was flagged for lockout. My suspicion is that what I was reposting was deemed offensive by some, and they reported me, and no one at Twitter is tasked with reigning in butthurt bullies even when it leads to the loss of a paying customer. But it worked: I’m off Twitter now.

Weekend in Las Vegas

I tried mobile ticketing with the Las Vegas monorail, and that was a disaster.

Actually, on the way out of the monorail, there was a placard announcing “This way to Freedom Fest”. Huh, I had heard about that from the Andrew Heaton podcast. I looked up their agenda, and yes, I would have really liked to have heard from Andrew and Spike Cohen. I went to see how much it costs, and … $250 for the day. Oof, I’m out. By now it’s already 10 AM, and the day would have been over with by 4 PM (and there would have been downtime too as they break for lunch).

So now I’ve spent money for two nights on a hotel room, $50 for a mediocre breakfast, felt scammed by the monorail (although really it was just bad software programming), and essentially napped and played a video game. Just staying home would have been better. Well, I hoped Jimmy Carr would be funny.¹

But really, I would have been far better off getting a room in the Wynn, where the Jimmy Carr show was, and doing the Thursday night show (cheaper room rate) instead of the Friday night show. If I’d simply done a one-night stay and turnaround, I wouldn’t have tried to mess with the monorail, and I wouldn’t have had to walk outside in the heat and wouldn’t have paid for a rip-off breakfast buffet.

Retirement Life

I explored a few new computer languages to learn. I think I’ll go with Racket, which is a version of Lisp.

One thing I’ve wanted to do for four years now is to 3D print some button covers for my Anker PowerConf S500. There’s a whole story behind using it in a Zoom meeting every week as a portable microphone in a room of 30+ people, but fighting the fear of needing to scream at people: DON’T TOUCH THE BUTTONS!!!

And, by the way, stranger, welcome to the meeting. But please don’t touch the buttons.

That is to say, the Anker PowerConf S500 has four buttons on the front, but only one (the power button) is a press-and-hold-to-activate button. The other three are insta-kill for Zoom.² The middle button for answering a telephone call: wow, does that ever break Zoom. One must actually power down the PowerConf S500, unplug the dongle from the Zoom laptop, Windows registers the microphone as gone, plug the dongle back into the Zoom laptop, and then power up the PowerConf S500. Windows registers the microphone as present again. Zoom reattaches. Meanwhile, the online meeting attendees are filling the Zoom chat with messages that they cannot hear anything anymore.

It’s a little stressful.

The in-person people want to be helpful. They reach for the speakerphone to pick it up and hand it to the microphone runner. Sometimes they touch the insta-kill button. Sigh. ³

Nicely enough, the Racket programming language and the OpenSCAD computer-aided design program are a match made in heaven. Here’s my button:

This is from the underside; the top has smooth curves.

Anyway, this quarter, the real reason I bought the Anycubic Photon Mono resin 3D printer was realized. And I had a lot of fun getting Racket to emit an OpenSCAD file directly. The only thing I didn’t try was to get the edge that will be glued to the PowerConf S500 to curve in the same way that the PowerConf S500 curves. It doesn’t curve much, so glue ought to be enough to fill in the gap. But the perfectionist in me would like to find out the Bezier curve of the face where the three buttons poke out and then slice away that top plane (in the Z axis) to match the curve.

Work Life

I have built one last mail relay server to replace one made in 2009. The one in 2009 was a big mistake (Tenets of IT #47). But to test it, I need to be able to use swaks from many places. The security team has been a little slow to update the firewalls to let boxes and networks talk to my new server. I finally got it done, and every time someone sends an undeliverable email, my server sends not just the bounce but the original message! This will vastly help the people who have configured systems with bad email addresses. Their biggest problem is identifying which system or process is generating the bouncing email.

I got my retirement going-away lunch on Wednesday, July 22, 2026. There were probably more than 25 but fewer than 30 people in attendance. I gave a speech about my 37-year journey in IT; I’d set the timer for seven minutes⁴ and finished up 15 seconds before the timer went off. 🙂

Volunteer Service Life

On the drive to Las Vegas, I listened to a fabulous podcast episode directly tying to what our organization does. It was just wonderful and made me grateful to go on the trip.

Clubhouse volunteer

I’ve started volunteering at a local clubhouse two days a week for 4 hours a day. Mostly, I’m a janitor, but I also run the cash register, selling sodas, bottled waters, and candy. There was a board meeting, and it looks like they would like me to become their IT guy too. Really, they need a server to run CiviCRM, but thankfully I was given a Raspberry Pi 5 as a retirement gift. My personality wants to price out a refurbished Dell Optiplex with an LSI 9207-8i connected to an ICY DOCK MB326SP-1B disk enclosure running TrueNAS over six SATA SSDs…. This project could quickly become unwieldy before I even start. A friend asked if I couldn’t just do it on a Raspberry Pi, and sure, I could.⁵ I just need to plan to eventually build a low-cost robust server and migrate away from the Pi. I also have a leftover Protectli Vault V1210, so I’ll set that up with HA Proxy to let the local box host CiviCRM and a Nextcloud instance.

Chairman for New Year’s Eve Party

I have volunteered to be the main planner/chairman of our New Year’s Eve party. The fun part so far has been that I recorded the audio of the two planning meetings (so far) and (installed and) used my local LLMs to turn the audio into summary documents. Next month, I’m going to ask if we can start buying a texting service so that I can use a web page for texting to communicate with volunteers.

SF 2026 Master of Ceremonies

For our most recent dinner-and-a-speaker event, I got to be emcee. A nice thing is that this service commitment gave me motivation to lose some weight, and I did drop twenty pounds over eight weeks. My clothes for the event certainly fit me better than if I had not lost the weight. A bummer is that I lost my hat. I loved that hat⁶⁷. Perhaps it will show up in some sort of lost-and-found box, but I probably won’t hear about that for a week.

Yes, he was funny. ↩︎
Well, two of the three are insta-kill; if you tap the Bluetooth button while already on Bluetooth, nothing happens. ↩︎
I actually sent in a product enhancement request to Anker for a firmware fix to make all the buttons press-and-hold-to-activate buttons but they didn’t implement that. I understand that: No company of mass market consumer appliances wants to complicate their technical support by first having to ask, “Which version of the firmware are you on?” Heck, how would anyone even figure that out? ↩︎
No-one remembers anything if one talks too long, so brevity is the essence of a good speech. 37 years in seven minutes, with thank-yous and everything! ↩︎
The major problem with using a Raspberry Pi as a server is that /var/log gets written to the SD card, and writing to it is continuous. SD cards are built to store data; they are not built for continuous writing – they wear out after months or a year or two. If you know that it will wear out and die, you build a routine of backing up the SD card periodically. Then when it dies, it’s not a catastrophic loss of data. ↩︎
I’m surprised that I didn’t post about my hat back in 2024. The first one I bought was from Etsy, for $32. It is a green baseball cap with embroidery that says “Make Orwell Fiction Again”. Along those lines, I later deleted my Google account. I wanted to buy these hats for Christmas gifts, so then I went with Rockatee, which was a mistake. Those were $27 apiece, but Rockatee didn’t deliver. Well, they didn’t deliver until I threatened to have my credit card company rescind the payment. But by that time, it was too late for Christmas. I placed a new order with Amazon, which did arrive in time, but those were $35 apiece. Rockatee shipped, so I ended up with product, and I did pay for them, and then I had extras to give away as gifts. ↩︎
I had deleted my Facebook account way before. ↩︎

Converting an audio recording to summary text via local LLM

As mentioned in my previous post, I had fun installing code to run LLMs locally. This post will be for me: steps to replicate turning the recording into a summary text.

Convert from MP3 to WAV

ffmpeg -i ~/transcripts/meeting-2026-09-08.mp3 -acodec pcm_s16le -ac 1 -ar 16000 ~/transcripts/meeting-2026-09-08.wav

Run the Whisper.cpp code to turn the recording into a transcript

cd ~/src/whisper.cpp

./build/bin/whisper-cli --model models/ggml-small.en.bin --file ~/transcripts/meeting-2026-09-08.wav --language en --output-txt --output-srt --output-file ~/transcripts/meeting-2026-09-08 --print-progress

I created a prompt file for reuse after every planning meeting:

You create accurate meeting notes from a supplied transcript.

Use exactly these Markdown headings:
## Summary
## Decisions
## Action items
## Open questions
## Names, dates, and terms to verify

Only report decisions, owners, dates, and deadlines that the transcript explicitly states.
Do not invent, infer, or "clean up" unclear details. Mark ambiguity as uncertain.

Split the transcript into smaller chunks

rm -rf ~/transcripts/meeting-2026-09-08-chunks

mkdir ~/transcripts/meeting-2026-09-08-chunks

split --lines=400 --numeric-suffixes=1 --suffix-length=3 --additional-suffix=.txt ~/transcripts/meeting-2026-09-08.txt ~/transcripts/meeting-2026-09-08-chunks/chunk-

Prep for the run of the LLM to make summaries

rm -rf ~/transcripts/meeting-2026-09-08-chunk-summaries

mkdir -p ~/transcripts/meeting-2026-09-08-chunk-summaries

And then I got a bash script:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -u
shopt -s nullglob

LLAMA="$HOME/src/llama.cpp-rocm57/build-rocm/bin/llama-cli"
MODEL="$HOME/models/gguf/Meta-Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct-Q4_K_M.gguf"
SYSTEM_PROMPT="$HOME/llm-prompts/meeting-summary-system.txt"
CHUNKS_DIR="$HOME/transcripts/meeting-2026-09-08-chunks"
OUTPUT_DIR="$HOME/transcripts/meeting-2026-09-08-chunk-summaries"

mkdir -p "$OUTPUT_DIR"

for chunk in "$CHUNKS_DIR"/*.txt; do
    base=$(basename "$chunk" .txt)
    summary="$OUTPUT_DIR/$base.md"
    log="$OUTPUT_DIR/$base.log"

    printf 'Summarizing %s...\n' "$base"

    if "$LLAMA" \
        -m "$MODEL" \
        --system-prompt-file "$SYSTEM_PROMPT" \
        --file "$chunk" \
        -c 4096 \
        -n 500 \
        -ngl 99 \
        -cnv \
        -st \
        --no-display-prompt \
        2>"$log" \
        >"$summary"
    then
        printf '  Wrote %s\n' "$summary"
    else
        printf '  FAILED: inspect %s\n' "$log" >&2
        rm -f "$summary"
    fi
done

Fun project: ROCm and local LLMs

Back in May, I got the idea that while I was still employed and had money, I should buy upgrades for my computer. I did so. Last week, I implemented the plan, and it worked.

Background

Back in 2017 (nine years ago!), I bought an ASRock motherboard. At the time, AM4 CPUs were all you could get. I did not buy the latest and greatest CPU, because the latest and greatest is always overpriced. Although Ryzen 7 was available, an AMD Ryzen 7 1800X went for $500. Instead, I bought a Ryzen 5 1500X for $150.

Later, in 2020, I bought an MSI motherboard because I was having trouble with random lockups. But I was still on the Ryzen 5 1500X and 16 GB RAM.

This rig did just fine for me for the last six years. Really, for the last nine years. I’d kept a video card from 2013, though, and it has only 3 GB of RAM. Okay, back in 2013, I splurged the heck out of my purchase there because the video card was $700 before tax and shipping. But for the games I enjoyed playing (Factorio, Tropico, Endless Space, XCOM2, World of Warcraft), it was plenty.

Somewhat, I’d like to play Baldur’s Gate III next. The 3 GB RAM video card was nowhere near good enough.

May 2026 purchases

32 GB RAM (Man, those prices hurt.)
MSI Radeon RX Vega 56 (8G RAM)
AMD Ryzen 7 5700X3D CPU

The RX Vega 56 was the video card with the largest amount of RAM that I could get without growing into a PCI 5 slot. The motherboard has only PCI 4 slots, so it didn’t make sense to me to pay more money for a card with a capability it cannot use. In the back of my mind too, I didn’t want to mix a card with PCI 5 capability being stymied by a PCI 4 motherboard. If everything matches and lines up, then there won’t be weird problems because some software expects PCI 5 access.

I did want the Ryzen 7 5700X3D processor because it is built with a 7 nm process (oh my goodness!) and consumes (only) 105 watts. The X3D part of it has a whopping 93 MB of L3 cache.

Well, when I received the parts, of course I added the RAM first. Easy peasy, but it didn’t change things much. I wasn’t doing much work that needed RAM.

I went to install the RX Vega 56, and… this video card is about 1/4″ too long for my case. Oof.

Well, way back when, I’d built a Windows 7 box and bought gear for it to be beefy. It sat in a large and quiet Antec P180 case, with an Antec 850 watt power supply.¹ So I’ve got a case large enough, and it has the power supply with the extra connections for the RX Vega 56. I’m just going to have to find the time to do the migration.

Migration

I had moved the Antec case / Windows 7 box into my old office, where I used to work from home, and then pulled all the components out.

Last week, on Wednesday, everything lined up, and the whole day was mine. I started with vacuuming and dust blowing the Antec case. Then I powered down my main machine and started the migration process. Between the cleaning and component moves, it took about five hours before I hit the power switch on the new rig.² It had the same MSI motherboard but now with the Radeon RX Vega 56 and the Ryzen 7 5700X3D.

The magic smoke did not escape! In short order, Debian was running, and I was happy. I did move the audio from electrical to S/PDIF (IEC 60958-3).

The project

I asked an AI to guide me through adding ROCm to this machine. It did so pretty easily. However, the devil is in the details, and pretty quickly, I was running into all sorts of obstacles. It helped that I had a specific goal: turn an MP3 file into a summary of a meeting.³

The AI guided me through installing llama.cpp⁴ with HIP to connect to the hardware via ROCm. There were numerous packages that HIP expected would be there that I had to find out about because they were missing. Thankfully, pasting the messages of the failed compiles would lead the AI to figuring out what was missing.

By the time I was done, I’d added all these:

rocminfo clinfo hipcc cmake build-essential git pkg-config mesa-utils libamdhip64-dev rocm-cmake clang llvm libclang-rt-dev libclang-rt-19-dev libomp-17-dev libhipblas-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev

One of the snags was that llama.cpp had a dependency on HIP 6.1, but my hardware can only do HIP 5.7.

git clone https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp.git llama.cpp-rocm57

Amazingly, the AI guided me through downloading the llama.cpp-rocm57 source code, find the check-in for the code that depends on HIP version 6.1, and guided me through deleting it!

This worked!

I am an utter git newbie, but the AI has enough training to guide me through the whole process.

After getting the initial part of ROCm, HIP and llama.cpp-rocm57 installed, I asked about how to do transcription. “Please guide me through installing an LLM to do speech to text, inputting an mp3 file recording of a meeting, and outputting a transcript of what was said.”

The AI then guided me through installing Whisper (whisper.cpp). That went easy. I got about 11,000 words out of the transcription.

Then I asked how to summarize it. It generated a prompt file for me, and threw that at llama.cpp-rocm57. I did run into the problem that the 11,000 words were too much for the 8 GB video card. But I split the transcript file in two, and ran llama.cpp-rocm57 on each piece.

It worked.

I even got a nice little summary like this:

Action items

Action	Owner	Deadline	Evidence/notes
Find a cook	Unclear	Unclear	The group is looking for a cook.
Decide on menu	Unclear	Unclear	The group needs to decide on a menu.
Determine ticket price	Unclear	Unclear	The price of the event is still uncertain.

This is just so cool: from an hour-long MP3 recording of the first planning meeting to a list of action items, all on my local machine. I’m thrilled.

Foolishly, I hadn’t kept on with the task of installing a Bitcoin miner in it. I would later find in this machine a Bitcoin wallet from summer 2014. But back in 2014, the idea of running an 850 watt power supply full-time during summer really did not appeal to me. But if I had been able to mine 1 Bitcoin, that would be worth about $80,000 today. ↩︎
I’m retired now, so I don’t have to be in a rush. ↩︎
I had volunteered to be the project lead on a New Year’s Eve party. I had recorded the first meeting on my Sony ICD-UX570. In the past, I would pay Amazon to transcribe it for me, but that would cost around $3. I wasn’t terribly thrilled about uploading a recording of a meeting to the cloud, either. ↩︎
I tagged this post with “Facebook” because although I have my beef with them, they do provide their large language model, Llama, as open source and for free. Credit where credit is due, man. ↩︎

Let’s Encrypt inspired trouble, part 4

As stated before, I’m angry that Let’s Encrypt started signing and issuing certificates with certificate chains that are invalid because they didn’t wait for the ca-certificates bundle to include their new root certs.

I tried to add a new feature to Nextcloud but it did not work because the chain of trust remained broken. This was slightly annoying, but not infuriating like being pinged every few seconds that the connection was unsecure.

Thankfully, this is solved by going here: Chains of Trust and choosing:

ISRG Root YR

Subject: C=US, O=ISRG, CN=Root YR
Key type: RSA 4096
Certificate details (cross-signed by ISRG Root X1): der, pem, txt

Download the file root-yr-by-x1.pem and then reconfigure a new fullchain.pem that includes it.

But yes, this proved to be a pain in the ass, because finding which certificates need to be in the fullchain file wasn’t clear. There ended up being three of them:

The first was the wildcard cert for the domain that came from the certbot renewal process:

subject=CN=domain.tld issuer=C=US, O=Let's Encrypt, CN=YR1 notBefore=Jul 26 04:20:36 2026 GMT notAfter=Oct 24 04:20:35 2026 GMT

The second was the intermediate cert that came from the certbot renewal process:

subject=C=US, O=Let's Encrypt, CN=YR1 issuer=C=US, O=ISRG, CN=Root YR notBefore=Sep 3 00:00:00 2025 GMT notAfter=Sep 2 23:59:59 2028 GMT

and the third was the cross-signed YR cert that came from the Chains of Trust page at https://letsencrypt.org/certificates/:

subject=C=US, O=ISRG, CN=Root YR issuer=C=US, O=Internet Security Research Group, CN=ISRG Root X1 notBefore=May 13 00:00:00 2026 GMT notAfter=Sep 2 23:59:59 2032 GMT

Let’s Encrypt inspired trouble, part 3

Again with the random breakage; I just so dearly love that this shit happens when I’d rather be working on anything but.

The problem is still that Nextcloud Desktop file sync barks every 30 seconds that the chain of trust is broken. Also, Thunderbird is barking the same, but at least it only barks every 5 minutes.

Part of the problem rests with the ACME client on pfSense. I’ve configured the option to request a fullchain from Root X2, but the ACME client doesn’t include that in the request.

I’ve just regenerated all the certificates using the ACME client on the pfSense machine.

The ACME client is requesting Root X2:

/usr/local/pkg/acme/acme.sh  --issue (wildcard_name) --dnssleep '180' --preferred-chain ''\''ISRG Root X2'\''' --log-level 3 --log '/tmp/acme/wildcard_name/acme_issuecert.log'

But nowhere is ISRG Root X2 mentioned in the log file. The wildcard .cer file I do get is issuer=C=US, O=Let’s Encrypt, CN=YR1, but its root is issuer=C=US, O=Internet Security Research Group, CN=ISRG Root X1

I’ve downloaded all the files. Furthermore, I ran the following on the fullchain.cer file: openssl crl2pkcs7 -nocrl -certfile fullchain.cer | openssl pkcs7 -print_certs -noout, and got this:

openssl crl2pkcs7 -nocrl -certfile fullchain.cer | openssl pkcs7 -print_certs -noout
issuer=C=US, O=Let's Encrypt, CN=YR2

subject=C=US, O=Let's Encrypt, CN=YR2
issuer=C=US, O=ISRG, CN=Root YR

subject=C=US, O=ISRG, CN=Root YR
issuer=C=US, O=Internet Security Research Group, CN=ISRG Root X1

and CN=ISRG Root X1 is the problem. The certificate chain won’t validate until Root X2 is in the chain or Root Y2 is in the chain.

So I’m damned if I do, and I’m damned if I don’t. The ACME client is prevented from getting the chain.pem file that refers to root certificate the certificate is signed by, and Let’s Encrypt won’t supply the the chain.pem file on their website for download.

The actual problem was solved thusly¹:

As it turns out, pfSense has two locations where the ACME script puts things.

/tmp/acme/<name>
/cf/conf/acme/<name_slightly_different>

The /cf directory has the Y2 chain files, while the /tmp directory has the root X1 signed wildcard certificate that refers to a Y2 intermediate.

Okay, getting the files from /cf/conf/acme/<name_slightly_different> is the way to go. Unfortunately, we’re back to the problem that the root Y2 certificate isn’t trusted.

So the first half of the problem is solved by getting all files from pfSense that are in the /cf/conf/acme directory and putting those on the Nextcloud server.

The second half of the problem is that this certificate chain points to a root your local machine doesn’t trust, because the root.pem is not in the local machine’s trust store.

Thankfully, this is solved by going here: Chains of Trust and choosing:

ISRG Root YR

Subject: C=US, O=ISRG, CN=Root YR
Key type: RSA 4096
Certificate details (self-signed): der, pem, txt

That “self-signed” warning sounds ominous, but the pem certificate is the one that works.

Download the file root-yr.pem and run these two commands:

sudo cp root-yr.pem /usr/local/share/ca-certificates/root-yr.crt

sudo update-ca-certificates

After rebooting my machine, I’m no longer getting barked at by Nextcloud Desktop file client sync that chain of trust cannot be trusted.

Well, it is “solved” until a random update shits on the root-yr.pem file in my local trust store again. ↩︎

End of an era for me

Yesterday was my last day of work for my employer. I am officially retired, after 37 years of “Doing computers” for them.

Mildly interesting, I also got an email from past me via https://www.futureme.org/:

The following is a letter from July 26, 2021, delivered from the past by FutureMe
Dear FutureMe,

Friday I powered off 80 of 81 servers, shutting down GroupWise at work. My 25 year career as a GroupWise administrator has been on hospice care for seven months now. Night before last, I pulled the plug on it.

I was sad, of course. I don’t actually agree with those people who say on their deathbed that they regret spending so much time at work. I built things. The work I did made other people’s lives better. I loved that job (until it changed, and I no longer did). There is a lot of good to say for becoming really competent at a big old complex thing.

But, with my career in seven months of hospice care, I managed to get to the acceptance level in my stages of grief. I was great at something no one wants anymore. Such is life.

The whole Microsoft world is such a mess. These people have the attention span of a five-year-old, and it shows. Competent they ain’t. Well, the PowerShell idea was a good one. And they often do get the different cats in the herd to step up and at least try to define their interfaces. But overall it is a wild mess.

Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of my non- GroupWise life. I hope something good comes along

P.S.: Did I call it? Microsoft now has their official Linux distribution: CBL-Mariner. Therefore, Windows 15 will really just be CBL-Mariner running WINE. 😉
Future Me

Five years ago, I was motivated to pay off my mortgage as soon as possible. I started paying $2,000 per month to get to zero. This was accomplished in November of 2025.

I had to drain my cash reserves a lot. My financial advisor had told me that she wanted me to have $25,000 in cash in the bank when I retired. I calculated when that would be and picked a date. Later I had to move it a week to better align with the company pay periods. But it was a happy coincidence that my retirement date was five years after I was made to shut down GroupWise.

I had even asked my manager if they would have given me a golden handshake to get rid of me; he ran it up the chain of command, and they said no. But if the truth is to be told, I was a crappy employee these last five years because my heart wasn’t in it. I needed about $20,000 to pay off my mortgage, and if they had left my position unfilled for seven weeks, that would have offset it. Then there would have been additional savings, as it would have taken a while (four years) for the promotion chain to bump people up from step 0 to step 5 (to where I was). So I stuck around. I needed the cash.

I did do everything that was asked of me during the migration to Exchange Online. Not only that, but I even learned some of the features that Exchange Online has that GroupWise will never have. But man, search in Exchange / Outlook sucks. It should be an embarrassment to all of management at Microsoft.

I also ran the project to get rid of Proofpoint to go all-Microsoft. We lost capability there too. But even though it sucked, I did what I was told.

My retirement going-away lunch was great. My co-workers were super kind. They got me a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8 GB of RAM. I hope they didn’t have to buy it new, because the price of RAM today is ridiculous, and it would have been too much money.

Another gift was a whole collection of Buc-ee’s steak grilling spices. I love it! I’ve never been to a Buc-ee’s yet, but I’ve been told that they are as large as a K-Mart used to be.

The cards people signed were enough to make a grown man cry.

I will be forever grateful for the path God put me on that let me be “The GroupWise Guy” for my employer for so many years.

Las Vegas Monorail

TL;DR: It started off bad due to poor software and ended up bad for unknown reasons.

I went to Las Vegas as a birthday gift for myself, and (so far) all I got was resentments.

Once I got there, my mood turned sour when I tried to use my mobile ticket on the Las Vegas Monorail. I paid $24 for two days of rail pass, but the gate denied me my first day. The software scanned the barcode I was showing on my phone, it claimed the ticket (and the money) and then … did NOT open the gate. So I tried the ticket again, and it barked at me that I was trying to use the ticket “too soon” although clearly nothing checks that the gate had been opened or not.

I went back to my room and checked their website from the laptop I brought. Now I got conflicting information: apparently, just scanning a barcode on a cell phone is NOT supposed to work – but from a mobile wallet it will. Their web page said something about combating fraud due to images shared by people. Oof. I had not printed the piece of paper, and now it was too late in the evening to find an open print place.

I’d never opened the email from the Las Vegas Monorail on my cell phone, because I don’t do email on my cell phone. Likewise, I also had trouble finding the email from six months ago, but eventually I found it. Back to my cell phone, I use webmail and open the email and then the mobile ticket the email linked to. It has a link I’d never seen before: Add to Apple Wallet.

I’d never seen that link before, because I don’t do email on my iPhone. Whenever I’d opened the email on the desktop, it would say Add to Google Wallet (which irritated me). Their website also touts Google as their partner with Google Pay (more irritation).

Okay, the email on iPhone might work: I click the Add to Apple Wallet button, and it takes me to the page, and … it barks at me that this ticket has ALREADY been claimed as a paper ticket. Damn it!

The next morning, I try the monorail again, and this time the barcode does work.

Okay, so it was all just a big glitch from when they claimed the ticket and fouled up linking that to an “open the gate now” action. And the warnings about not allowing cell phone images instead of paper were wrong.

I try the monorail to get to the show I’m going to see, but of course, casinos are going to route people to where the gambling is – but I need to find Las Vegas Boulevard. I get lost, wander around outside, then inside, then outside again. I’m too hot and eventually call for a Lyft.

One last problem: the iPhone was infuriating by blocking the QR code display every time.

Every time I tried to show the QR code to the turnstile, Apple Wallet took over and preempted it with the NFC “Double-Click the side button to pay”. There are two problems here: 1) To show the QR code, the iPhone screen is facing away from me, so I don’t know that the image of the QR code has been replaced by the image of my credit card with the button prompt madly blinking at me. 2) All weekend, I tried every setting in Apple Wallet that I could think of to turn it off and stop fucking up the boarding pass. NOTHING worked. Finally, on the last monorail trip, I got the inspiration to put the phone into Airplane Mode. That was the ONLY thing that worked to stop Apple Wallet from fucking up the boarding pass QR code.

And OBTW, the monorail broke on that last trip, and what should have taken fifteen minutes took an hour and a half in a jam-packed car. They even sent us north on the southbound car for some reason. With some hindsight, it was comical, but during it, it was quite annoying.

Days later, I’m wondering if the Apple Wallet NFC preemption is what broke the first interaction when the turnstile registered the ticket (claiming it) but failed to open the gate. I’ll never know. But I do know I felt defeated that I’d paid for a two-day ticket and was denied late in the evening that first day.

Quarterly inventory – 2026 Q2

Dear FutureMe,

Today would be a good day to do a quarterly inventory.

How is your personal life going?

How is your work life going?

How is your Volunteer Service life going?
Future Me

Personal Life

Changed Linux distribution to Debian on my main machine

This has been, so far, the smoothest change from one distribution of Linux to another that I can remember. I went from Fedora 43 to Debian 13.4.

Part of the magic is that my /home directory is on a separate disk. During the Debian install, there is an option for that – it asks for which disk /home is on, and the disk partitioner runs with it.

I didn’t move away from KDE yet. But pretty much all the KDE apps I had on Fedora just ran just fine with the configuration files stored in /home.

The few things I did have to mess with:

zenstates.py
lpstat -p -d followed by lpoptions -d
sudo apt update && sudo apt install pavucontrol-qt
sudo apt install -y pipewire-audio pipewire-alsa pipewire-pulse wireplumber
And a reinstall of Steam.

I have had to reassign the multiaccount containers for all my browser logins and log in again. But that happens every time, and I know to expect it.

The only one that caused me any consternation was the adding of pipewire-audio pipewire-alsa pipewire-pulse wireplumber. Audio in Firefox tabs wasn’t playing, but adding these programs fixed that.

Mostly, I wanted to change because I want to do some Music Player Demon wrangling with Perl, and Fedora doesn’t have those programs as easily installable. I’ve configured Kate with the code-checking server, so when I edit my Perl scripts, Kate is barking at me that the dependencies cannot be met.

The only thing I miss is that Firefox on Fedora showed a video progress bar on some sites, while Firefox on Debian doesn’t. I liked being able to skip to the end of routine videos instead of wasting five minutes watching them.

Down with TurboTax

My mom had a horrific experience with TurboTax technical support. It wouldn’t let her log in, and it failed every time she tried to jump through their 3D biometrics data collection¹. Worse, she spent three hours waiting on hold for a human being to help, and when they finally answered the phone, they refused to help.

I’ve been annoyed with them anyway because they want to force me to upgrade to Windows 11. There is absolutely nothing in Windows 11 that is an upgrade from Windows 10 that TurboTax needs to rely on. I’ve got my previous returns on a Windows 10 machine (that I back up with Nextcloud). Why can’t I run this program there? It is completely stupid that they added that requirement.

I’d bought a copy from Costco, but I’d never peeled back the registration code. So I asked Costco for a refund, and of course, they are great about taking care of customers.

MercyMe concert

I was given the gift of a ticket to the MercyMe concert in Fresno on April 17. The concert was great. One can tell that the band and the audience are having fun. Singing along was encouraged, and sometimes the songs were old-fashioned gospel songs and hymns from way back when. The beauty of that is that if you are the kind of person who would go to a MercyMe concert, you probably already know It Is Well with My Soul and Amazing Grace. The band keeps working on new songs, and many of them have an upbeat tempo. The whole show was fun.

Mom in a nursing home

My mom fell several times in the past few weeks, which is troubling. One of her doctors let her know that if she refused to get a pacemaker, she would be refusing treatment, and therefore the doctor wouldn’t be providing treatment for her going forward. She reluctantly agreed to the surgery, although it filled her with massive amounts of dread and some panic. The evening after the surgery, she was in the worst state I’ve ever seen her in: confusion, tremors, and shortness of breath. The next morning she insisted on going to the emergency room. It took them three days to provide a list of nursing homes she could be moved to.

As an aside, this is one of the few times I miss getting rid of my Facebook account: it would have been a good resource to find out which nursing home to move her to. But without Facebook, I had to go on personal experience. My brother’s experience and my experience are quite limited here. Without that, I get to rely on … Yelp. Oof. I know how Yelp can be gamed, so that was less than comforting.

The facility in Yelp with the high score (and that would take her) was where we moved her to. My brother and I did a tour of the place too. It did seem to earn the good score it got in Yelp – but what do I know?

Since then, my mom is getting better. The only thing she dislikes is that the facility is quite full and all the staff are at 100% capacity. My mom hits the little “request service” button, and it takes hours for someone to be able to show up. The physical therapy work they are doing is good, so I’m grateful for that.

Let’s Encrypt changed the root certificate

I wrote a separate post on this. The short story is that my wildcard SSL certificate was automatically renewed, but Let’s Encrypt changed which root certificate the chain of trust resolves to. Bam, Thunderbird and Nextcloud File Sync are broken. This could have been avoided if Let’s Encrypt had waited until their new root certificate was included in the standard ca-certificates bundle that is used in all distributions. I should clarify: Thunderbird Address Book sync was broken – all other functions of Thunderbird continued to work fine.

Work Life

Not fun: April started with a mailbomb

For a day and a quarter, my cortisol levels were elevated, and I probably burned a few days off my life expectancy. It was from an event outside my control, but the stress comes from a thousand (or more) people not getting the email they need.

A firewall appliance started sending out alerts, and the box it sent them to relayed them to our IIS SMTP box that forwards to the Microsoft cloud. The timing was perfect: 6 PM on a Friday night, so no one was paying attention until Monday morning. 30 minutes after it started, the cloud began rejecting. The box that relays to the cloud started moving things to the Badmail folder. Are 1.6 million files in the Badmail folder a bit much?

Even after getting rid of them, IIS SMTP was not happy, but that is likely because Defender antivirus was in a “Why does this happen to me?” wailing state.

Fun: I got a Perl Dancer2 app to use SAML Single Sign-On with Entra ID

I’ve always wanted to make an internal website that can identify who is visiting. I finally got it working, and it is beautiful. SuSE Linux with Apache as the front-end handling the SSL, and Perl Dancer2 on the back-end.

Motivation to retire: Intune won’t warn you about rebooting 5,000+ PCs.

I was in the middle of a 14 hour file copy job when this hit. I’m so happy I’m going to retire soon. Although I feel bad for my co-worker who triggered it, I won’t mind at all walking away from the disaster that is a Microsoft environment.

Volunteer Service Life

I did get to attend a Unity Day in Hanford in April. It was nice, and I got to meet some new people outside my normal locale.

I got to attend the Tri-State Roundup in Laughlin, Nevada. It was good, and I met plenty of nice people.

Our Founders’ Day Picnic fed 270 people. We’re thankful for the turnout, especially since it was rather hot.

Can you say “Make Orwell Fiction Again” ? I knew you could. ↩︎

Twitter / X changed the rules, and I have deactivated my account.

Previous title: Twitter / X changed the rules and ~~I’d like to cancel my subscription now~~

When I signed up, I did so without installing an app to my cell phone. I signed up with the website, email, and SMS texting only. I had two-factor authentication enabled, and all that worked well. I paid for a subscription. Like a dumbass, when it came time to renew, I bought a year’s subscription because of a discount.

For an unknown reason, they’ve locked me out of my account. I get a prompt “Let’s confirm you are a human” with a URL to an app store.

I don’t want to install an app.

Really, X / Twitter wasn’t much fun for me anyway. If they’re going to be jerks about randomly locking me out of my account and demanding I install an app so that they don’t have to respond to email, I might as well just cancel my account.

I’ve tried the automated help at https://help.x.com/en/managing-your-account/locked-and-limited-accounts three times now, but no one there is bothering to help me. It’s been about a week since the first time I asked for help.

I’d received an email from paidfeatures@x.com and tried to ask them about my account lockout, but received the reply: “Our customer support options have changed and this mailbox is no longer monitored.

If you are a Premium user please DM @Premium: https://x.com/premium“

Can’t very well DM you if you won’t let me log in, dudes.

Generally, I think it was terrific for Elon Musk to buy Twitter. Before Elon, Twitter was a willing conspirator with the US government to throw the 2020 election.

But somewhere along the line, X (new Twitter) gave up on keeping all the forms of customer service open.

~~I’d like to cancel my account, please.~~

I have deactivated my account. Apparently in 30 days they will delete it for me.

Another bit of Let’s Encrypt inspired trouble

One of the pieces of bad advice I got while trying to diagnose the Let’s Encrypt problem was to reset my Nextcloud File Sync client connection. No big deal, they said, just recreate the connection.

BY THE WAY (said no one) WE’RE GOING TO TRASH FILES WAITING TO SYNC.

Well, I’m being a bit overly dramatic here. The files aren’t syncing, but I do see them on the laptop they were transferred to. So they are not lost, which is important because they were audio recordings of speakers from Wednesday the 24th and Sunday the 21st. But the sync process that worked before, now isn’t. It reports everything is fine, but the files are not copying across.