When I say tractor, I mean the part of a tractor-trailer rig, for hauling stuff. In this case, it was Pepsi. This is the first time I’ve seen one in real life.
What caught my attention was that the driver’s seat was neither on the left or the right, but centered. That gave me a what-the-heck moment, and then as I squinted at it, I saw the Tesla logo.
This is actually two 13 second clips: I played with Kdenlive to zoom in on the second clip. You probably want to use the Full-Screen option to see it clearly, and full desktop to get large screen resolution.
When I started this blog, I had three goals in mind:
Learn WordPress, and have content to play with for things like upgrades, migrations, and figuring out how WordPress works.
Provide technical tips, tricks, and recipes for doing computer things, primarily on Linux.
Writing content that expresses my opinions.
If I’m honestly looking at my own motivations, that last one holds the most appeal to me.
I’m old enough to be a grumpy old man, but I’m also old enough to know that opinions without solutions are terrible reading. No-one wants to listen to a whiner.
In fact, one of the defining moments of my life was when my dad was exasperated with me, and he exclaimed at me something I needed to hear at that time:
Anyone can whine about things; useful is providing a solution.
My dad, when I was about thirteen years old and whining about something big time
So, I’m up north with family for Christmas vacation. Dealing with family can be hard. I have two solutions: have another community I can escape to (my volunteer service community), and have my computer I can escape to.
Yesterday was day four of cabin fever with the whole family. My brothers and mother had exhausted watching all the movies and YouTube they could stand. They wanted to do something, anything, that wasn’t watching more television. YouTube is simply television without the cost overhead of paying writers, producers, and talent. My brother’s television set comes with YouTube, with embedded advertising. It sucks, mightily. YouTube also has the problem that it gives a platform to total con-men who are looking for marks to prey upon. This really isn’t any different from the television preachers who pitch salvation for dollars.
And I get it: if my life were that empty, I’d be easily preyed upon, too.
At this point in my blog, I’d like to do a 4,000-word essay on the problems of American life where our government and media conspire to drive us to be consumers of crap to fill the void in our life, instead of healthy and useful. But all that would really boil down to is this:
As an aside, I really like Stephan Pastis’ comic strip, and buy his page-a-day calendar every year. Most days are at least mildly amusing, and some days produce actual laugh-out-loud moments. Some days are profound. Not that I’m trying to convince you to buy stuff to fill the void in your life….
So, back to my family. We all suffer from a lack of purpose in life. I’ve got it the least bad: I’m still employed with a place that pays me well, and (although I hate my job) I’m working toward my retirement.
Mom never did take my step-sons in as her grandkids, and neither of my brothers got married and produced kids either. So my mom tends toward self-pity, having gone through the trouble of raising us boys, but not getting the benefit of grandchildren. She does take care of Frank, the man she partnered with after a year of being a widow. So that gives her purpose. She also had to specifically decide to go out and socialize. She has friends she visits to play Majong, and a club called Gadabouts, and Red Hat Society club.
One of my brothers was forced into retirement early, and hasn’t found the motivation to get a job. He’s actually a superb cook, and this last week he has been cooking all our meals. The meals have been delicious. But in his off-time, all he does is watch videos and sleep. Clearly, he is depressed. I hope he can find a purpose in life.
My other brother has always had a rough life. He works in a low-end job, and tends to get restless, irritable, and discontent with whatever job he has. The longest stretch where he was happy was in Death Valley, where he worked from 2003 to 2021. But the HR lady there went woke, and as soon as the trans asshole showed up and started their bullying, the HR lady sided with the trans asshole, and my brother quit. Now he’s up here in a cold, dismal town where it rains nine months out of the year. In his off-time, all he does is watch videos and listen to re-runs of Art Bell’s Coast to Coast AM. I hope he can find a purpose in life.
So how do I find purpose in life?
Volunteer service is the obvious win for me here. The particular people I spend time with consider ourselves a fellowship; this is a good name for our community. Although I had to go through hell to face the fact that I needed help, once I got into this fellowship of help, my life turned 180° around. I can help because I’ve been through the same hell that all newcomers are going through.
If I didn’t have this, I hope I would have found a church fellowship to be a part of.
I do have a circle of friends on the Internet. We met on Slashdot more than 22 years ago. Back in 2019, one of our friends died, and 21 of us went (most of us flew) to Seattle to attend his celebration of life. Although I still communicate with these friends, it isn’t daily like it used to be. Half of them came down with TDS, and the community split in two. But at one time, there were more than 80 of us. This digression brought to you by:
There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance—that principle is contempt prior to investigation.
William Paley (1743-1805)
Half of my circle of friends on the Internet have contempt, prior to investigation, regarding God.
I thank God that I am not one of them. I have plenty of evidence that something out there, supernatural and surpassing understanding, is an active agent in my1 and other people’s life. Point being, that if I weren’t in the fellowship I’m in, I would hope I would become a part of a religious fellowship.
Volunteering down at a soup kitchen would be good for my soul.
Any sort of volunteering would be good for my soul.
I also have plans (or perhaps they are dreams) of writing a lot of code when I retire. Priority 1 is obviously more exercise. After that, I want to write some code to lay out Factorio blueprints, and build the software that manages the tree structures needed to lay out connected pieces in sensible ways. Ultimately, I intend to write a flow charting-based integrated development environment based on Nassi-Shneiderman flowcharts. I’d like to use the IDE to write a video game loosely based on the book of The Legacy of Heorot.
Back to my volunteer service: there are two different offices which are either directly related or tangentially related; I plan of volunteering at both after I retire2. They also need a newsletter editor, and I’d love to write a system in LaTeX to import the various documents and format them consistently. I’m not terrible with Perl, so I think I can work up a nice system of opening files with LibreOffice, converting them to plain text, formatting them the way I want, and then adding back in whatever italics, boldface, super- or sub-scripting elements were in the original. I already do the website for one of them.
So yesterday, everyone was frustrated that this time together had gotten so boring. But I’m not bored because I know “This too, shall pass.”, and, I have other outlets.
I hope, dear reader, that you too can find other outlets.
Volunteering my time and effort gives me a high-quality purpose in life. My self-worth goes up when I am helpful.
I hope you can find ways to grow your self-worth and purpose.
One of them is a 501(c)(3), and for the next five days, I am president of the board of directors. That, plus $5, will get me a coffee at Starbucks. Not that I’d ever go to Starbucks, they’ve gone woke. Anyway… the other is probably also a 501(c)(3) but I haven’t tried becoming a board member yet. Having a day job is not conducive to being of service there. ↩︎
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
Not really a whole lot going on. I have flat feet, and so when I recently got to be Master of Ceremonies at a volunteer service event, I wore my nicest shoes, but all that time in them injured my left foot something fierce. Here a week later, my foot still hurts.
I’d injured my foot several weeks back. My son had told me about Hoka shoes, and indeed they are like walking on marshmallows. Between them and keeping my foot elevated while sitting, I’d recovered. But then I felt the need to dress as sharp as I could for the event, and I re-injured my foot.
Yesterday I was rather depressed. That shows up rarely, maybe two times in a quarter, but it was present yesterday.
I had a ton of fun about a month ago, migrating one of my volunteer service websites to a new host. I moved from Amazon Lightsail to Linode. I was thrilled that the move went so smoothly, so I did it again, this time to my internal Proxmox server, documenting the whole thing for that blog post.
Oh – and I gave up on OpenSuSE and moved my main machine to Manjaro. Manjaro has been pretty good. I wish the KDE tilling window manager script worked on it; although I can keep hitting meta+arrow to tile windows, it is kind of dumb that I have to. This is a KDE problem, not a Manjaro problem – but because I did migrate, I also got the KDE “upgrade”. That would have happened had I stayed on OpenSuSE too.
Work Life
If $34,000 dropped into my lap today, I would retire tomorrow. I did finally clear my retirement service credit buy-back. I talked about that in Quarterly Inventory 2023 Q2. It is done. Magically, I gained 6.1 years of service credit overnight. The better part is that it frees up $300 per month, which I need because of inflation.
We added a new product, Kiteworks, to replace a service that Proofpoint exited. So far, the Kiteworks company and support are terrible. Because Proofpoint has been going down in quality because of the sell-out to Thoma Bravo, I wouldn’t be surprised if the reason they (Proofpoint) recommended Kiteworks is that they got a kickback. I have zero evidence of that, but it seems to me like the kind of thing Thoma Bravo would do. Anyway, Kiteworks sucks: would not recommend. I’ll probably do a blog post about it later; but there are four problems:
The interface is somewhat opaque, and difficult to figure out where particular things are, when I need to change them.
There is no documentation. What documentation there is, is from three years ago when the service was vastly different: it in no way applies to the product today.
The implementation engineer didn’t explain to us what the effects of the choices were, so we deployed badly to 2,200 of 5,000 users. 5,000 users would have been blindsided with a surprise “what the hell?” situation, except that we caught it some 1,800 users in.
So … we’ve had a stable environment for several years now, we’ve deployed Kiteworks, and 1% of machines the Outlook Plugin is deployed to are now crashing randomly and silently, losing all work, … and your technical support is blaming Outlook? Repair Outlook and the problem will go away? Re-image the machine to a fresh image and the problem will go away? Y’all are clowns. How many sets of log files do I have to upload before y’all will start looking at the problem? The problem is Kiteworks Outlook Plugin. We did not have this problem prior to installing your program. If there were a virtual clue-by-4 I could deploy over the Internet, you’d be badly bruised right now.
I’m not really enjoying work right now. I’m thankful I have a good boss, though. He’s great.
Volunteer Service Life
I very much enjoyed being Master of Ceremonies at our Fall event. The speaker was wonderful. It didn’t hurt that he grew up and joined our fellowship 45 miles north of here. The whole event was great.
I don’t know if I’ve mentioned that this year I get to be President of the Board on our little 501(c)(3) here. That job title, plus $5, will get you a fancy coffee at Starschmucks.1
Anyway, it weighs on me that our finances are not sound. We previously had a member who contributed $1,200 per month to our Central Office, and he died three years ago. We’d gotten a $6,000 refund on taxes due to Covid-19 and keeping our employee on the payroll, so it looked like we had money. During Covid-19 a meeting started up in a shack, off-the-record, to avoid government interference. Well, last August, they hooked up a second air conditioning unit in serial (electrically) and then overnight the shack burned to the ground. People showed up for the 7:00 AM meeting to find smoke and embers. No injuries, thankfully. Well, that meeting contributed $300 per month, and poof, that’s gone. Between this and inflation putting the hurt on everyone, our Central Office contributions are not meeting our expenses. We’re going to have to fire or reduce the hours of our single part-time employee. It is depressing.
I’ve got another website, which hosts recordings of speaker meetings. Something in WordPress 6.6 caused it trouble, so I downgraded to WordPress 6.5. But now the login screen takes two minutes to complete. That box is on Ubuntu, and I’d like to migrate to Debian instead. So I need to do a migration again (mentioned above), but I also need to schedule that with the guy who does most of the uploads to it. I don’t have analytics running on it, either, so I don’t have a good feel for what days / times of day it is least used.
I first read that joke in 1981 or 1982, in the Garfield comic, where Jim Davis was commenting on inflation. A cup of coffee went from 25 cents to a dollar at restaurants. Jon made some inane observation and Garfield replied with “that, and a buck will get you a cup of coffee.” When Starbucks became popular in the mid 1990’s I revived the joke with the Starbucks attribution. I still see it being used once in a while on Slashdot or Reddit. ↩︎
I happened to be driving back from Tulare tonight, and wanted to pick up tacos for dinner at BT’s on Mooney Boulevard in Visalia. I waited at the left hand turn signal at the intersection of Tulare Avenue and CA-63 (Mooney) in Tulare. Turned left, put the cruise control on 40 MPH, stayed in the right lane. I didn’t have to tap the brakes or adjust the speed for the next 7.3 miles. Never even hit a yellow light, though for one intersection a cross-traffic car had pulled up so I thought I might. Thirteen green lights in a row. 🙂
Yes, 40 MPH is really slow for this trip. I wasn’t in a hurry, and know that optimal fuel efficiency is around 30 MPH: higher than that and I’m burning fuel to defeat wind resistance. 40 MPH is a fair trade-off. I’m not so slow that I’m a hazard, and Mooney is two or three lanes the whole way.
My employer had let me continue to report to work after the pandemic hit. Many of my co-workers immediately opted-in to working from home; but I wasn’t one of them.
I am thankful for that I got to keep reporting to work, because I like the normalcy of the routine. I loved the peace and quiet of no co-workers at all.
Other departments in my employer’s organization had brought all their staff back in September. Then reported infections started happening, and they would have to send everyone home for a few days while the work site was disinfected. Turns out each one of those events cost $2,000 – $5,000. My department decided that everyone should work from home, no exceptions, until further notice.
They ordered me a VPN appliance that extends the network into my home. I brought it home, hooked it up, and it worked perfectly on the first try. Apparently our Networks team is very good.
The last few days, my “commute” has been from my living room to the spare bedroom I’m setting up as my home office. I’ve tried adjusting my alarm clocks and such, but with mixed results.
Regarding my commute: I put $10 of gasoline in my car yesterday. This will probably be the last gasoline I put in my car for many months. My car is mostly electric; but even with the heater going for my nightly trips out, I’m never draining the battery to zero.
One thing I’ve noticed is that I am under more stress now. It’s probably due to a big project at work entering it’s final laps, and there seems to be more work to do than there are hours in the day. But I can definitely tell that my shoulders are tight all the time now; an eye twitch that I get has come back.
I’ve done some shopping for the new home office. Parts are starting to dribble in. I wanted a new desk that was large enough to hold all my stuff; but apparently there is not a market for that short of $1,000+. I’m using a four person dining table with the extension leaves put in. The space is still too small. I need to shut my laptop in order to see the bottom half of one of the desktop monitor screens.
My ass hurts at the end of the day, because the wooden chair is not meant for eight hours of use per day. The real chair is on order, but won’t arrive for two to seven days.
My telephone headset has a faint hum in it that I don’t remember from before. But perhaps it was always there, and the work room air conditioning set a minimum noise level the headset hum never cleared. I did buy some LED light strips because I need light first thing in the morning and at night. Those definitely added some hum; so I’ve moved them far away. Then I discovered I ordered the wrong part, and want the ones with Amazon Alexa built in. I’ve also ordered some quarter-round aluminum channel to mount in the upper corner of the room between wall and ceiling. The LED light strips will go inside the channel. When the diffuser is snapped in place, I should get a nice broad light source that illuminates the room without much (if any) shadow.
The alarm clocks have been more work than I had expected. Because I used home automation (I bought it; I might as well use it), there are way more things to be reconfigured now, just by not needing to wake up quite so early in the morning. Some of the stuff is in Amazon Alexa, and others of it are in Philips Hue.
No injuries, thank God. But some serious resentment at the old loser guy on the bicycle. First, he chose to deliberately cut off the kid in the minivan; then, he laughed at the kid when the kid honked at him. This infuriated the kid, but that was bad, because the kid’s attention was no longer focused on where the minivan was heading.
I happened to get a dash cam for Christmas, so here’s the video.
Full screen is good, because I figured out how to highlight the bicyclist while he was still on the sidewalk.
My little scream at the end is freaking hilarious. I’m sure to be a chick magnet now.
My car is pretty hurt. The fender was just barely not rubbing on the tire (and sometimes it was). The steering wheel needed to be at about 2 o’clock to drive straight down the road. I didn’t go faster than 25 MPH the whole way home (which made people behind me wonder).
