IRL | David's Blog

Quarterly inventory – 2024 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

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. ↩︎

Mildly amusing: 7.3 miles and 13 green lights in a row

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. 🙂

https://goo.gl/maps/p7LE7MgXYPTXuBJJ9

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.

Working from home

I know: I’m late to the game.

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.

Minor traffic accident

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).