Category Archives: technology

Weight Lifted

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Went to a vascular surgeon on Monday morning to get the ol’ carotid arteries checked out. That’s something I never dreamed that I’d be saying as little as 4 months ago, but apparently 2020 is just going to be one of those years where weird shit comes at you from every direction. Lose control of your eyes in January. Find out you’ve got carotid stenosis in February. Get hit by a global pandemic in March. Develop chest tightness in April.

Can’t say that I’m really looking forward to May.

However, the visit to the vasculatorium© turned out okay for me. Got my temp taken (98.4, I think), BP (140/85, I think – heart rate was 76), weight (170). Got to talk to about 14 different people, none of whom was the doctor that I made the appointment with. Got to regale them all with stories of why I went to the ER in January, and two of them made me smile and pull their fingers and raise my eyebrows and stick out my tongue. Both approved of my performances and declared that I haven’t had a stroke.

Then I went in for an ultrasound of the arteries, and that was pleasant enough experience. Had a lovely technician basically massage my neck for 10 minutes and then leave.

At long last, the actual DOCTOR doctor came into the room…and made me smile and pull his fingers and raise my eyebrows and stick out my tongue, before approving of my performances and declaring that I haven’t had a stroke. I was beginning to wonder if anyone there had bothered to read the reports from the ER saying, “no stroke.”

The dude finally got around to my carotids and told me that, yeah, there was some blockage in both. He drew a very bad representation of a carotid artery on a piece of paper and showed me where said blockage was. Then he said that it was under 50% in both of them, no surgery, come back and check again in a year.

I said, “That’s it?” Yep. That’s it. I asked what the actual percentage of blockage is, and he said, “Under 50%. That’s about as specific as I can get.” I asked if either artery is more blocked than the other, and he said, “No. About the same.” I asked what would happen if it gets to be more than 50% and he said, “If it’s under 80%, you’ll need to check it every 6 months. If it’s over, then we’ll talk about surgery.”

So I made an appointment for April, 2021, and I left. And I felt much better than I have since the first week of February, when my GP made it seem as if my carotids were both about to explode. I’ve got another appointment with him in a few weeks and I might tell him he’s a jerk…or I might just get a prescription refill and be on my way. In either case, I won’t be as stressed as I was a week ago.

In other news, the family had a zoom conference call on Sunday afternoon, and it became apparent that I need to get remote access into Dad’s computer so that I can get him set up correctly should we do it again (and I hope we do, as it was enjoyable).

I’ve been trying to get some estimates from landscapers to see what can be done with my back yards. So far, I’m having a hard time getting any of them to call me back. Guess they don’t want money?

Insurance agent is supposed to be coming to look at my roof next Monday – I’d really love to get THAT fixed.

Oh yeah – Right Networks acquired another company yesterday – Rootworks. As I understand it, that acquisition puts us in a pretty good spot to become the go-to cloud company for any CPA firms with fewer than 300 users. I’ve decided to be positive for a change and to believe that I’ll be able to work at RN until I retire. Maybe not as lucratively as I’d once assumed, but comfortably enough, I guess. And if the house has a new roof and good-looking backyard, maybe I can even get a nice chunk of change for it if I want to move to a shack in the mountains.

Magnificent Saturday

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I felt pretty good this morning, which was nice – because the weather today has been fantastic. It rained very early (like between 0600 and 0800), and I sat on my deck in my bathrobe, drank coffee, and read my phone during that time. In addition to the rain, there was a pretty strong breeze and it felt amazingly like sitting under a tarp during a camping trip. Very relaxing and a nice prelude to the rest of the day.

I should mention that the featured photo for this entry is one that I took of sunrise over Lake Superior in October, 2016. It was at Au Sable Lighthouse at Pictured Rocks National Seashore, and a few hours after I took that shot, I was on a call with my (AT&T) boss and getting the first inkling that my job was in jeopardy. One of the most beautiful mornings juxtaposed with one of the worst. I need to get back to Pictured Rocks, though. I haven’t been since that autumn, and I don’t want to conflate that wonderful place with bad memories.

After the rain had stopped, I put on a shirt and some pants, along with a windbreaker, and headed out for a brisk walk. “Brisk” in the sense that it was still a little chilly – probably 60 degrees. I didn’t set any speed records, but after two days of not really walking (and about six of those days in the last two weeks), I really wanted to just have a nice long walk. I got 5.5 miles in and averaged about 15.5 minutes/mile. I’ll take that every time.

Back at the house, I jumped into yard work. Mowed both of the back yards, as well as the front-side one, cut down a lot of weeds and shrubs in the back of the house, cleared crap out from around the deck, and fixed the “blow it all out” hole on my lawnmower. The cover had come off – what a pain THAT was to get back on! It was a perfect day for this kind of work. Sunny, high sixties, breezy…one of the nine perfect Georgia days that I’ve written about previously.

In the afternoon, I played around with my router a bit and discovered that it will do an admirable job of cutting some miter-jig grooves for my table saw, so I’m going to try to do that tomorrow. I also did a few loads of laundry and took another 2.5-mile walk in the afternoon, during which I tried to take a picture of a squirrel standing straight up in the middle of the road. Said squirrel took off as soon as I brought my phone up, but I did managed to get him with all four little feet off of the ground…which was nice.

For dinner, I cooked the first of my Rastelli’s pork chops. Like the chicken and salmon before it, the pork chop was fantastic. I took a chance on Rastelli’s a couple of weeks ago and put in an order for $140 worth of chicken, salmon, and pork – mainly because I saw a good review for them and because I wanted to stock up on meat that I could eat without health concerns. I’m now a devotee. When this stuff runs out (a couple of months, probably), I’ll be making another order.

Throughout today, I’ve been running scripts to delete old profiles from all of my firms. This will result in them all having less data on our servers and they’ll save money because of it. They’ll probably never know I’ve done this for them, and that’s fine. I really just wanted to script something cool, and this fits the bill. I’ll continue running the scripts tomorrow and I should be able to have all of my firms cleaned up by Monday. Then I’ll have to come up with something else to interest me.

Looking forward to sleeping well tonight. This has been a really good day.

Solutions

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Another day home, another day getting better at working there. The boys are currently settled in happily on their kitty tree by the window. They don’t both have to be there, though. They were being little hellions yesterday. Fighting over the top spot on the tree, then flying around the house and yowling at each other, they made it very difficult for me to get any kind of a work groove going. With that in mind, I added another chair (Gramma Sprague’s old wing-back) to a spot in front of the window today. Joshua immediately curled up in it and went to sleep, and Chamberlain settled into his favorite spot on top of the tree. I had an uninterrupted morning.

I also had some issues with my internet yesterday, which was a bigger concern than the cats. I figured that the problem was probably my wireless signal and not the speed of the outside connection, but I really didn’t want to move everything downstairs in order to plug the laptop directly into the router. Truth be told, that’s exactly what I’d tell a client to do if they called in needing help for internet issues while working from home.Instead of doing that, though, I spent $130 on NetGear PowerLine Adapters,which I was able to buy online from Best Buy and pick up at the store at about 10 yesterday morning.

We used a version of these things at Digital Life when a customer didn’t have good wireless strength throughout the house, but I was never overly impressed with them. The newer generation, though…just damn. Call me impressed. The way the adapters work is pretty simple. You plug one into an outlet near the router and you attach it to the router with a Cat-5 (Ethernet) cable. Then, you plug the other adapter into an outlet near the system that needs a better connection (my upstairs laptop, in my case). The adapters use the electrical power lines in the house (basically) to connect the “far away” adapter directly to the router. Much easier than having to fish cable through the walls. The “far” adapter can serve as a wireless access point, a physical network port, or both. In my situation, I connected my laptop to the adapter with Cat-5, and my download speed when from about 8MB to about 29MB instantly. Problem solved.No problems for the rest of the day yesterday and today is a continuation of that. Decent speed, no jitters…just like working from the office.

I also connected my upstairs Roku to the wireless access point; and that seems to be running better, too.

Joshua looking regal in the wing-back chair

Chamberlain has now moved off of the tree and settled into the wing-back. Everybody’s still happy.

For the last week or so, I’ve been opening the front windows for the boys, but I don’t dare open them all the way, as I do downstairs. When they see anything – a bird, a dog, a bug, or an air molecule – they tend to try to get to it. I yell at them downstairs when they do this, but the paranoid side of me can see both of them leaping for a squirrel outside of the upstairs window, hitting the screen with a combined 35 pounds, and falling out. Because of this, I basically crack the windows open about 2 inches on either side (these are tall windows that open side-to-side, not bottom-to-top.

Since I do want to be able to open them a little more, I think I’m going to try to build some frames this afternoon, into which I can insert a couple of heavy-duty pieces of wire shelf. I can then attach the frames to the windows and let the boys have about 10 inches of fresh air. It’s hard to describe, but I’ll put a picture in here after I complete the frames.

The featured image for this post (also inserted here) is one that I took in my back yard a couple of days ago. I went out on Tuesday evening to mow the back yards – first time I’ve done so this year – and determined that I can no longer look the other way when it comes to fixing the landscape timbers that are keeping the upper part of the lawn from sliding into the lower part. As you can see, they need to be replaced. I don’t know exactly how to do this, but it’s something that has just risen to the top of my list. I talked with a friend who is a handyman by trade, and he told me that I can probably get the timbers – pretreated and stained – for about $10 each. If that’s the case, then I’m probably looking at $600-$700 for the material and God knows how much time learning how to replace everything. No way am I hiring somebody to do that, however. It can’t be that tough, right?

Famous last words, I’m sure.

Week of 10/22/18

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Monday: Thought that I’d try something different this week and put down some notes from each day into a post that will be published at the end of the week.

I played a concert with the Gwinnett Wind Symphony yesterday afternoon. It wasn’t the best thing that I’ve ever been involved with, but it probably wasn’t the worst, either. We had a decent crowd at Gwinnett Infinity Theater, and – in spite of a few close calls – the band didn’t fall apart.

After the concert, I stopped at MicroCenter and picked up a mini Bluetooth keyboard, which I’ve paired to my phone (and am currently using to type this). Together with the WordPress app that I mentioned in yesterday’s entry, my phone is actually becoming something that I can legitimately use for writing. Yes, the KB is pretty cramped, and the shift keys aren’t exactly where I expect for them to be, but with practice, I can probably get up to 60-70 words per minute, which is amazing.

After the stop at MicroCenter, I went over to visit Herb in his new assisted living place. It’s a pretty good setup for him, and is close to Jenny and me. He’s got a small bedroom/office in one room, and kitchen/living room in another, and a good-sized bathroom. Pretty homey, all things considered, and he’s got caregivers around the clock, which is excellent. I helped him get his wireless printer set up and gave him a ream of paper (I’ve got more than I’ll ever use). Jenny was also there, so we visited for a bit before I came home, watched some television, did some laundry, and hit the sack.

Printers were the bane of my existence at work today. About a week ago, one of my firms decided to swap two printers. Normally, this isn’t a big deal, and I would just have to change their names in the group policy that pushes them out to workstations. Something went wrong with the policy, however, and I spend much of last week trying to get things working. Not only did the two printers not swap like they were supposed to, but people started losing OTHER printers. I got a frantic call from the client admin this morning saying that nobody on the second floor of the building had any printers.

So I spent all day trying various things to figure out what the hell was going on. Between 5:30 and 6:00 I think I finally got things working normally. It’s my hunch that the policy was never set up correctly when the firm came on board two months ago. I’m guessing that the on-site people manually installed everybody’s printers and nobody noticed that the policy wasn’t working until something had to change. When I made that change, all of the problems came to light.

It was, to put it mildly, a frustrating day.

I did get a little bit of time during the day to do some more work on a powershell script that I’ve been writing, and that was fun. I’m trying to, basically, rewrite the registry editor so that I can modify specific user hives in remote terminal servers. There are probably a hundred other (better) ways to do what I’m trying to do, but I’ve never used Powershell as much as I should have when I was managing systems, and learning a new language is a nice break during otherwise monotonous days.

Tomorrow will be another stressful day – we’re migrating four firms to Office 365. Two of my guys are in the O365 phone queue for expected heavy traffic, and two others are on a project in Florida, so my team will be severely short-handed.

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Tuesday: The weather took a turn for the cool this morning. I think it was in the low 50s when I got up and hovering around 60 when I left for work. Never got warmer than the low 70s.

Work itself wasn’t too bad. I had to do a few more tweaks for the printers that have taken up much of the last week, but got that out of the way early this morning. The rest of the day was spent closing tickets and helping my team with their own. Also got a little bit of work done on my Powers he’ll script and though of a few things that I can add to it.

Learned from one of my team that our team entry into last week’s Mega Millions drawing actually bore some fruit! We bought 9 tickets as a team on Friday as a part of a team-building exercise (went out to dinner at Dave & Busters), and we won $200. Not a billion bucks, but not bad. Of course, nobody won the whole thing, so tonight’s drawing, as you may know, is the largest jackpot ever at over $1.6 billion. Yes, I do have tickets – bought twenty of the things on my own. If I win, maybe I’ll throw some cash at my team.

I got home fairly late tonight – somewhere between 7 and 7:30 – and didn’t do much at all. Watched some television, washed some dirty dishes, and now I’m in bed. Maybe I’ll be a billionaire when I wake up.

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Wednesday: Not a billionaire. Not even a millionaire. In fact, on the twenty lottery tickets that I had – that’s 106 numbers altogether, I matched exactly…none. Oh well. Back to the grind, I guess.

It was nippy today for a while. Tomorrow is supposed to be nippier, with a high in the 60s. I’m not sure if it got over 70 today, but I was inside for most of the day, so I was comfortable in my Downtown Magnetawan tee and jeans. I had high hopes of closing out a bunch of tickets today, but things kept getting in the way and I honestly don’t know what my final numbers were.

Did an interview from 4 to 5:30. Nice kid, but he won’t be working for us. The three of us who interviewed him were unanimous in our opinions that he has absolutely no computer skills, in spite of his degree in cyber security.

Learned this afternoon that I have to do one-on-one meetings with my team before 11/15 – which in my case means before 11/1. So every day between tomorrow and next Friday will be spent in preparing – gathering metrics, listening to phone calls, reading ticket summaries, etc. Not my idea of a good time. We’ll also be migrating firms to Office 365 every night from tonight until the end of the year, which is going to cause high ticket loads every morning. This is the biggest project the X-Company has ever attempted, and I don’t think it’ll be a lot of fun, but it does need to be done.

I tied the registry portion of my Power Shell project into the lookup portion of it today, and it’s working quite well. This tool may actually wind up being really REALLY useful for my team.

Got home fairly late again tonight – somewhere around 7 – and make a couple of chicken sandwiches to eat while watching “The Newsroom” on Prime Video. That was it. Sitting in bed now and am about to be lying in bed. Just waiting for the kitties to settle in.

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Thursday: It was indeed a little cold today, with highs in the mid-60s and an unrelenting breeze. Normally, I would love that, but I underestimated the prognosticators and wore a tee shirt to work – did not bring a jacket. Of course, it was completely comfortable in the office, but my breaks outside were cold.

Tried to prepare for my 1-on-1 meetings with my directs for about half of the day, worked on tickets for most of the other half, and had my own 1-on-1 with my boss, where I learned that I’m doing pretty good. We talked about my future plans – whether I’d stick with the management path or jump to an upcoming escalations specialist spot. I said that, in my heart of hearts, I’m a techy; but that I’m determined to see if I can get comfortable in an admin role. That being the case, I do not intend to apply for the ES role when it comes up.

Turns out that I’ve got the inside track to a management promotion as we continue to add level 1 employees. My boss doesn’t want to have more than 12 directs. As we add more L1s, we’ll break them up into more teams, each with a team lead (leads currently report to my boss). The plan is to put another level in between the L1 leads and the Service director (my boss), and that’ s where I’d go. The leads would report to me and I’d report to the service director.

As I grow more comfortable in this role, I can see where that position would be more to my liking – dealing with intelligent technical leads without having to also deal with the daily grind of dealing with newbies who may or may not have a future in tech. Certainly something to think about.

We also talked about our respective personalities and how we approach our leadership positions. Turns out that both of us harbor inner thoughts that we’re frauds, which is oddly comforting. So I’ll soldier on and continue to work on my leadership and motivational skills (or lack thereof), and will continue to try to make this a new 2nd-act career.

At the end of the day, my friend Schuyler and I dug into my Power Shell project and tweaked and played until after 6:00. That being the case, I didn’t get home until close to 7:00. Made a shepherds pie for dinner (very good), did some dishes, and watched a hilarious mockumentary about a terrible survivalist. It was called, I think, “Tex Montana Will Survive.”

Got in bed with the intention of watching some college football, but it appears that it is not on a local (non-cable) channel, so I guess I’ll just go to sleep.

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Friday: A cold, drizzly day to end out the work week. At least I was smart enough to wear a rain coat today.

Worked on tickets for most of the day. Had one 1×1 meeting at around 11:30 and got some coding done late in the day, but for the most part, I zoned out to tunes and worked on problems. Had one guy not show up for work – he sent me a picture of the side of his car, said that he was hung up and waiting for AAA. 2 hours later said that AAA had just picked him up (this was a also at around 11:30), but he never came in. Very smart guy. Good guy. And this is his third unexcsused absence in two months and the second this week. We’ll be having a meeting on Monday, which I do not want to have. But… I wanted to manage people, right?

I got home by 6 o’clock or so and it was 60 inside the house. Hated to do it, but I was sort of tired of being right on the verge of cold, so I turned on the heat (set to 68). It’s the first time I’ve had it on since probably March, and the earliest that I can remember turning it on. My Nest thermostat needed something different, though, and I’m interested to learn if it handles heating as well as it handled cooling all summer. The heat has been off for the last hour or so, so I’m not overly concerned yet about my natural gas bill. Plus, we’re supposed to rebound and be back in the 70s by tomorrow.

Speaking of tomorrow, I don’t have many big plans for the weekend. Going to fix Jenny’s toilet on Sunday – replace a flapper, I think – and will probably start organizing things tomorrow for my trip next week. Will probably also go somewhere tomorrow afternoon to watch some football, play trivia, and hoist a few. At some point, I need to buy toilet paper and clean my master bath.

Call it the weekend of the toilet.

So I’ll wrap this up now and call this experiment of nightly updates to my blog, using my phone as a monitor and a tiny Bluetooth keyboard as an input device, a rousing success. Had I known how much I could use the phone for if I attached it to a keyboard, I probably would’ve picked up the latter years ago. It will definitely come in handy on off-the-grid vacations in the future.

With that, I close this entry and prepare for sleep. I’ll pick up this tome next week!

The Taxman Leaveth

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Today’s featured image is one that was obviously taken quite a while ago.  The boys were still babies – I’d guess in the 4-months-old range – and Boo was still the biggest kitty in the house.  She is now dwarfed by them.

I was going to feature a panoramic shot that I took at Lake Huron last year, but it was just too large to be considered, so I’ll embed a smaller version of it here:

Now that that’s out of the way….what have I been doing with myself lately?  The answer to that is, basically, not a lot.  Settling into my life as an L1 lead at the X-Company is a bit challenging, having not had direct reports in over 10 years.  Last week, I completed three annual review with members of my team; somewhat awkward, considering that two of the three have been at the company longer than I have.  The toughest ones are still ahead.  I get to sit in judgement of two guys who basically trained me.  One of them can be confrontational at times.  Not looking forward to that, but it’s part of the gig.   I’ve also been doing a number of interviews every week – the L1 teams are going to be growing pretty dramatically, and we’ll probably end up hiring 20-30 new folks over the course of the year.  At least I’ve got a say in who the new people are, which is nice.

I’ve also been doing quite a bit more coding (which is what I really want to do anyway), putting together some scripts for my team.  I have to keep all of them on the down-low, as we’ve got a petty tyrant in an L3 role who doesn’t like for anybody to automate anything if they don’t report directly to him.  That being the case, I’m just very quietly writing, tweaking, and perfecting a few bullet-proof scripts for everyday tasks and letting a few of my folks use them until they become so engrained in the daily grind that it’ll be hell for the person who tries to take them away.  The new idea going around the L1 community is that the tyrant will say that my scripts are not allowed in our environment before magically releasing his OWN scripts a week later that do exactly the same thing.  Apparently, he’s done that in the past.  Should it happen, I will call him out on it.  Publically.

Tax season ends on the 17th, and everyone at the X-Company is looking forward to that.  With our growth and the merger and our infrastructure and development teams’ bad habit of rolling out changes without fully testing them, the last several months have been a long nightmare.  My main problem client (the one who sent at least two letters from their lawyer to complain) have formally announced that they will be leaving after the season (and the people praised the Lord), so I’m really looking forward to the 18th.  In the immediate aftermath of the season, the vast majority of CPA firms go on vacation for at least a few weeks, which means we’ll have the chance to clear out all of our old tickets, regroup, and get ready for the next season, which starts around August.

We’ll also be entering “project season,” which is when people like me go on the road and set up new clients.  The only project that I’ve volunteered for so far is one in Chattanooga (not THAT firm in Chattanooga…a different one) on the week of May 28th.  I didn’t realize when I signed up for it that that week includes Memorial Day, so I’m honestly not sure how that’s going to work.  I don’t know if I’ll have a day less to set things up or if I’ll get a comp day for working on the holiday or what.  In any case, I’ll be in Chatty for 4-5 days, away from the office and hopefully enjoying myself.

The GBB competed at the North American championships last weekend – and got thrashed.  It definitely didn’t help that we were scheduled as the second band to play in our section – the early bands generally get screwed by the judges, who are hyper-sensitive first thing in the morning and have to leave room for higher scores for later bands.  It also didn’t help that, frankly, we’re just not as good as we have been in the past.  We ended up coming in 12th out of 13 bands.  It was the first time since we started competing in around 2007 that we didn’t win or place 2nd – and we’re planning to move up to the highest section next year, so it was a bit of a wakeup call for the folks who were really pushing for that move.  Scores, should you be interested, are posted here.  Interestingly, the San Antonio Band, which won the section with a phenomenal score, was founded by two former members of the GBB who moved to SA several years ago.  They benefitted, I am told, from their late-in-the-day performance.  Since we played so early on Saturday, I hit the road almost immediately after our performance and didn’t hear any of the other bands.

So that was last weekend.  The week before that was devoted to rehearsals every night – preparation for the competition – and the weekend prior to that was Easter.  I had an Easter gig; that’s nice, but it pretty much spoiled any weekend plans I may have wanted to have.

So this weekend is really the first time in quite a while that I can relax a little bit.  Not much, mind you.  I need to mow the lawns and do some housekeeping, and I’m also in the middle of a long-term project of cleaning and organizing my garage.  So I’m going to do all of that stuff and get some sleep.  Next weekend, however, I’m headed to the woods.  Have already taken off next Friday in anticipation of this.  It will probably rain, of course, but just being able to kick back and sleep in the woods next to a stream will be fantastic.   And I might finally get to test out the car camping setup that I came up with late last year.

The Amazon Echo Dots that I mentioned in my last post have continued to be a source of fun for me.  I updated a number of the rooms in the house – and the garage – with Phillips Hue lights, and the Hue and the Amazon systems work really well together.  One cool thing about Hue is that it is aware of my phone location – so it will automatically turn off all of the lights in the house when I leave, and will turn on the garage and kitchen lights when I come home.  Since my garage door light gave up the ghost a couple of years ago, I’ve been coming home to a completely dark house.  It’s so much nicer to drive into a lit garage – and having the house light up for me is also pretty excellent.

That’s just the Hue system.  With Amazon/Alexa, I’ve also setup a number of routines – for example, the system turns on various lights in the morning and begins broadcasting NPR and the weather for me, then tells me what’s on my calendar for the day – and I’ve have had some fun playing “Jeopardy!” every night after work.  Also put in a couple of bluetooth speakers, and – thanks to my Amazon Prime account – I can tell the system to, for example, “Play Yorkshire Building Society Band,” and it’ll just kick off a random selection of that band playing throughout the house.

Being able to say, “Alexa, add toilet paper to my shopping list,” is pretty nice, since I have a terrible habit of forgetting what I need three seconds after I think of it.  Same with to-do items (“Alexa, put clean the garage on my to-do list”).  Definitely helpful for an old fart with a spastic memory.

The best things, however, are the various sleep sounds that I can have it play.  Not surprisingly, “Wind in the Trees” and “Icy Snowstorm” are my favorites, though I have over 50 white noises that I can tell it to play while I’m lying in bed (or, to be completely honest, when I’m not lying in bed); and I know – by checking my sleep patterns – that running those sounds at night is helping me sleep better, if not for longer.  My typical night used to consist of 2-3 hours of “restful” sleep and 4-5 of “light” sleep.  Those numbers have reversed since I started playing sleep sounds.  Also, if I concentrate, I can come close to believing that I’m in the woods when I play the “Wind in the Trees” sounds.

At any rate, I plan to add at least two more Phillips Hue lights (outside the front door) and am considering replacing the fluorescent tubes in my kitchen with some sort of recessed Phillips lights, and I’ll continue to experiment with gadgets and IFTT scenarios for the Dots.

So I guess I’ve kind of caught up with things, and I must now go tackle the lawn.  After that, I might do some shopping, then start in on housekeeping tasks – or maybe I’ll just go to a bar and play video golf.  It’s the weekend, dammit.

Finally.

 

That Was A Short Spring

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I mowed my lawns three days ago.  It was a beautiful sunny Sunday, with temperatures in the 70s and a wonderful little breeze keeping everything nice.  Monday, it rained.  Tuesday, it rained and began to get a bit chilly.  Today had no rain, but it’s back in the low 40s with 20+ MPH winds, and it’s freaking cold!  This winter is never going to end.

Before I continue, I must wish Dad and his bride a happy 7th (?) anniversary.  I wasn’t sure if this was the right day or not, but I had a picture from their wedding show up on my Facebook feed this morning and then saw another one posted by Dianne, so I guess it is!  Sorry, Dad.  You know I’m not really big on remember dates.

The GBB is plugging along, getting ready for the championships in a few weeks.  Hard to believe that we’re already up against it.  I’m not overly excited about the contest this year.  I don’t think we’re all that great, don’t particularly like the music, and don’t have the vacation time that I used to have.  Burning two days off to drive up to Fort Wayne and back doesn’t fill me with excitement, considering that I’ll probably want those two days back in the fall when I’ll – hopefully – take a decent break from work.  I’m planning on spending a week or 10 days in Canada in July, which is nice.  Truth be told, though, I’m really looking forward to what has become a tradition of heading to Michigan sometime in October.  Hoping I’ll have enough vacation time built up to spend a week or two there.

I broke down and bought two Amazon Echo Dots a couple of weeks ago.  They were on sale for $30 each, and I figured it’d be nice to be able to turn my lights on and off with my voice rather than diddling around with my phone while I lie in bed.  I was right.  It’s very nice.  It’s also nice to be able to ask “Alexa” to play a podcast (or a list of them), or to play any of a number of calming noises (ocean, mountain brook, wind in the trees, etc.) or to just roll a little hypnosis at me to help me sleep.  I’ve also gotten into the habit of asking the thing for weather updates or a morning news brief, or to play the occasional game of Jeopardy.

The Dots came on the heels of me finally getting around to hooking up the Ring spotlights that I got for Christmas from the X-Company.  This is also a fun li’l toy for me.  It’s a motion detector with spotlights and a camera over my garage, which alerts me with indoor chimes (also on my phone) whenever it detects anything large in my driveway.  The large thing, as it turns out, is usually me – either leaving for work or coming home from work – and the cats have quickly figured out that, when the chimes sound in the evening, they’re about to get some food.  Other than being woken up by cats, there isn’t much better in life than coming into my driveway and seeing a little feline face (or two) peeking through the front windows at me.  I’m impressed enough with the spotlight that I may actually spring for a Ring doorbell to go with it.  I’ve got to admit that it’s nice to be able to keep an eye on my place when I’m not here.  There is the sporadic annoyance – like during a very windy day a week or two ago when I kept getting alerts because trees were throwing moving shadows across the driveway.  And I’ve been startled a couple of times on rainy nights when the glare of headlights going past on the street set off the motion alert; but through tweaking and modifying the motion zones, I’ve got it down to basically only letting me know when there’s an actual person (or car) in my driveway.

Also good for knowing when packages are delivered.

I have not yet figured out how to network the Echo Dots with the Ring.  For instance, if motion is detected after dark, turn on the lights downstairs.  But I assume that I will eventually.  For now, I’m just exploring the new gadgets and having some fun.

Speaking of fun, I’ve taken advantage of my new position at work to start doing a little bit of coding on the side again.  Nothing major, and I’m pretty much restricting myself to powershell scripts, but at least I can spend an hour trying to automate things without having to worry about my ticket closing numbers dropping.  In the end, the scripts that I write will end up helping my team to take care of things in a few seconds that might take other teams a few minutes.  Or maybe I’ll share the scripts with other teams and show what a great guy I am.

Nah.  I want my team to shine.

By the look on Joshua’s little face right now, I can gather that it’s time for bed.  So I guess I’ve written enough for now.  A warm bed sounds pretty good.

Back to Creation

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Today’s featured image is one that I took in July, 2011, of a couple of cats on my deck.  I have no particular reason for using it.  I just did.

Much of yesterday and this morning was dedicated to website design, build-out, and modification. You’ve probably noticed differences in this’yere blog – hamburger menu to categories, droplist for archives, etc.  I’m currently trying to get a plug-in to work that will allow me to embed files directly from my OneDrive, but have so far not had much luck.  Email has been sent to the plug-in’s developer.

Yesterday, I made some huge strides on getting GoPaladins.com to look more like I want it to look.  It’s now running completely on a BootStrap base, which is something that I’d just started learning about when AT&T dropped the hammer, and I haven’t had the time to fool around with stuff like that since joining the X-Company, so putting the big site on that code is forcing me to dig into it a bit and figure things out – which I enjoy doing.  Still a lot to do on that site if it’s even going to approach the functionality of the old one that GoDaddy broke; but the original was years in the making.  I’m taking baby steps with the new one.

One said baby step was the purchase of a new monitor yesterday morning.  The television that I was using wasn’t getting the job done, and is slowly failing (colors get all wonky, which is not good when you’re designing sites and/or editing photos), so I splurged and bought a 34″ curved display at MicroCenter.  Truth be told, I was considering doing that anyway, in order to make it not only possible but actually preferable to work from home, which I think I’ll now start doing one day a week.  The monitor is wide enough for me to treat it like two monitors, and it’s got software that lets me break it up into different windows – so I can use half of it for a browser and split the other side into quarters for two additional programs (a ticketing window and a remote control window, for example) and not have to spend my time hunting for the stuff that I need.  It’s also at a good height, which is very nice.  I spent 6 hours in front of it yesterday and didn’t have a headache OR a backache.  Money well spent.

Have a rehearsal with the Gwinnett Wind Symphony this afternoon, which should be interesting.  Haven’t touched my tuba in probably 6 months, and we’re playing Schoenberg and some other weird stuff.  Atonal garbage for the most part, but I need to get my tuba chops in shape for an upcoming Easter gig.  The concert, by the way, is next week.

I felt terrible this morning because I woke up convinced that it was Monday and I’d forgotten to go to the one rehearsal that I told the director I would make.  Put me into kind of a funk as I fed the cats, did my potty business, and prepared to take a shower before finally realizing that it’s Sunday.  Once I figured that out, I went back to bed, much to the delight of all three cats.

I’m considering mowing the front lawn today.  Also need to do some laundry.  And maybe try making some cheesy beef macaroni stuff in a crock pot just to see if it’ll work.  Or I could do it the regular way.  Rehearsal goes from 6-8, so I doubt I’ll be eating afterwards.

Well….that ought to do it for today.  Not much to put down here other than the fact that it was in the 30s this morning, which blew me away.  It has since gone up to nearly 70 in the sun, but still feels rather chilly.  I must be getting old.

Consolidation

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I think I mentioned a few days ago that GoDaddy had completely screwed up my website.  If I didn’t, well…they did.   And I, being the go-getter that I am, decided, basically, “To hell with them.”

To that end, I signed up with a new host, and you’re seeing the first tentative steps that I’m taking towards getting everything off of GoDaddy.  My new hosts have – wait for it – actual daily backup service.  They have integrated WordPress service.  They allow subdomains (and if you’re here, you’re on one of them).  And they seem to have pretty fast servers.  So I’m moving everything here.  My blogs.  My forums. My sandboxes.  Not only that, but I’m pulling in all of my OLD blogs, too.  How cool is that?  Remember the original “Stuff Nobody Reads”?  It’s here.  So’s “Frowzy Noise.”  And the ever-popular “Lives of Our Days.”  With the exception of a few very short startup attempts, everything I’ve ever written in blog format is now under this virtual roof.

I’m sure the historians will thank me, although I still have to bring over some photos that are still on the migration site.  If you peruse posts, you’ll see a lot without photos, even though I may reference photos in them.

Today’s featured photo, by the way, is an old picture that I found of Chamberlain.

I’m also moving the football forums here, though that’s going to take quite a bit more effort than this did.  I had them set up, briefly, but realized too late that I’d made a few stupid mistakes, so blew away what was there and I’m starting over.

Oh – I accepted that job today.  The Level 1 Lead for the X-Company.  It’s not a huge step up, but it’ll be an extra $4K a year.  That will be helpful for retirement.

 

i hate this job

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So.

I’m currently sitting at my desk at work.  It’s 12:37 AM, Sunday, November 18th.  I got out of bed at around 6:00 AM, Saturday, November 17th.  I expect to next be in bed at around 4:00 AM this morning. 

Why?

Well, I can give legitimate reasons for why I got up yesterday morning at least.  The cats were hungry and I had to get to Greenville to shoot Furman’s final game of the season.  Had a lovely time, in fact (although my purple guys lost and ended up with the school’s worst season in 18 years).  I managed to get my shots delivered to the Greenville News well before my deadline and all was good.

Got home at around 9:30 and *tried* to take a nap, but just couldn’t fall asleep.

Now why am I at the office in the middle of the night?  That’s a much more difficult question to answer.  Ostensibly, I’m here to help out with a systems upgrade, scheduled to run from midnight until sometime between 2:20 AM and 6:00 AM.  My actual participation in this upgrade, however, amounts to about 5 minutes of work to be performed somewhere around 2:00 AM.  At least that’s the projected time – and previous upgrades have been notoriously poorly projected.

There are, in fact, 6 people from my team participating in this upgrade – none of whom actually do much of anything.  All of the actual work is being performed by one database administrator and two software engineers.  My boss, however, is adamant that he wants “butts in chairs” during the upgrades.

So why am I here?   I haven’t got the first clue.  Chalk it up as just one more reason that I hate this job.

Since I’ve got to be here and awake for the next several hours, I guess I’ll write something in this here blog.  Good plan, huh?

The game today, although a bust athletically, was pretty good photographically.  The camera that I’ve had for the last 10 days is the new Canon 1Dx – an incredibly piece of machinery that doesn’t seem to have any flaws.  I just did some browsing about it – looking for lower prices (I am not at all opposed to gray market purchases) – and was unable to find any.  It appears that I’ll be shelling out about $6,700 sometime next year for the camera body.  An unheard-of amount for me to pay earlier in my digital camera “career,” but after having shot with the thing for the last three games, I am so in awe of what this camera is capable of doing that I’m willing to spend most of my 2013 bonus to own it.

Of course, I might get that bonus and use it for something more normal – like paying off a few bills – but, somehow, I’ll be shooting next season on the 1Dx.  It quite literally opens up high school games (and dark college games) like nothing I’ve ever seen before; and that includes the high-end Nikons that have, until the arrival of the 1Dx, dominated the low-light wars.

We’re nearly two hours into the upgrade now, btw.  I still haven’t done anything.  Have been web surfing and talking photography with one of the guys on my team.

After tonight’s over, I’m almost out of the woods for a while.  I’ve got a concert tomorrow afternoon with the GBB (that’s gonna be fun….I’ll be 80% asleep), but then I’ve got 8 days off.  Monday will be mainly a day of sleep, housekeeping and packing.  Tuesday, I’ll head to Waukegan for 5 days. 

This trip may hold some heart palpitations for me, as it seems likely that Amy and I will be spending some time with most of her family on Friday.  I’ve met her folks before (don’t think I horrified them or anything), but now I’ve got to try not to make a fool of myself in front of her siblings, their spouses (spice?), and any of their offspring that come along.  “Terrified” is probably not too strong of a word to use here – but neither is “anticipatory.”

I’ll also get to meet (I think) her boss at the music store where she works.  My impression is that he might be more protective of her than anybody else, so that should also be an interesting experience.  But hey, I need some cleaning brushes for my horn, so I’ll be able to make a good impression by actually buying something from the store….

Switching gears completely, I’ve got a little paint program on my tablet called “Fresh Paint,” and I’ve been having a blast recently by playing around in it and trying to paint Bob Ross style landscapes.  For those of you who hate public television, I should explain that Bob Ross is the guy who hosted “The Joy of Painting” for God knows how long on PBS.  Although he died several years ago, reruns of Ross’ show still air all the time, and I record them to watch on Sunday mornings.  I’ve become convinced that I could go out and buy paint supplies and do a passable landscape painting on my first try simply because I’ve seen Ross do it so many times.  I’ve literally come to understand the technique….whether I’d actually have the talent to make something that doesn’t look ridiculous remains to be seen.

Having said all that, it is necessary to point out that a computer paint program is in no ways similar to actual painting, so the whole “Bob Ross on a Microsoft Tablet” experiment is just something that make me laugh – and something that I find both relaxing and enjoyable.  I give you, “Swiss Goat Mountain.”



“Swiss Goat Mountain” – a painting by me
 

It is now 2:54 AM and I have completed my part of the upgrade, which was to push out a new version of a monitoring client to the enterprise.  Technically, I have nothing left to do, but I may need to stay here for several hours while other work is being done.  I don’t really know why.  To make matters interesting, however, there is someone on the call – I swear I am not making this up – who has fallen asleep and is snoring happily.  Wish I was.

I think I’ll call this a finished entry for now (at 3:11 AM).  Hopefully, I’ll be able to get out of here before too much longer. 

TWD

and you thought i was dead

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It was brought to my attention a few weeks ago that I have all but abandoned this blog – or any other blog – since last July.

Sorry about that.  There hasn’t been a great deal going on, I haven’t seen anything really shiny, and my stupid job has got me exhausted most of the time.  So….let’s just try to pick up where we left off and hit whatever highlights there have been in my life since July (in no particular order.  This will be strictly stream-of-consciousness writing).

For starters (or enders, actually), I’m typing this on my new Microsoft Surface tablet.  Yeah.  I finally joined the tablet generation.  There was no way I was going to get another Apple device, so the iPad family was out; but a lot of my friends have gotten various types of tablets over the last few years and I was growing somewhat fond of the portability of the things.  When Microsoft finally released a tablet that – quite seriously, thanks largely to the fact that it is Microsoft – has the potential to replace my laptop, I took the plunge.  Perhaps I should have waited another month and gotten the Surface Pro, which runs a full-blown instance of Windows 8 (this one runs Windows 8 RT, which is a scaled down version of the Windows 8 OS), but I thought the time was right, so I just got what I got.  If I want to upgrade to the Pro later on, I’ve been told I can do so for a $50 restocking fee.  We shall see.

At any rate, this is quite a nice little computer.  The touch-sensitive keyboard/screen cover had me a bit nervous at first, as I wondered if it would be a complete pain to use.  However, it works very well if it’s on a tabletop (as it is now).  Takes a little getting used to, and I’ll never be able to use it to type as quickly as I do on a mechanical keyboard, but I’m probably cranking out about 40 wpm right now.

The camera on the tablet is not great.  Actually, that’s a lie.  The camera is terrible – my phone’s camera is (literally) about 6 times better; but who really cares?  It’s not like I’m going to be carrying this thing around in the hope of getting a great photograph.  I have a phone – not to mention a couple of professional-grade cameras – for that. 

The biggest complaint I’ve heard about the surface (one which does not bother me, by the way) is that there aren’t as many apps available for it as there are for the iPad.  This is a fact in one sense and a complete red herring in another.  It is true that the Apple app store has a billion apps and the Windows app store does not.  A quick check just now revealed to me that there are around 4000 Windows 8 apps available in the US.  However, let’s think about the apps themselves.  How many different versions of a fart machine does the typical iPad user need to have?  And how many iPads are running full-blown Microsoft Office applications?  I rest my case.  I don’t think of my tablet as a toy – I really don’t.  It’s a tool and a potential replacement for my laptop.  I use it to check email, look up things on the web, work with files, and occasionally edit photos.  I don’t even have any games installed on it.  If I want to play computer games, I’ll use my playstation or I’ll go to an arcade.  Laptop games, by and large, suck.

Bottom line?  I like my new tablet.

Going back now….after I left Ahmic last summer, I drove west across Ontario in order to cross the border at Sault St. Marie, Michigan.  It was an absolutely stunning day and the drive was beautiful.  My border crossing was also, without question, the smoothest ever.  The customs dude, took my passport, asked me what I was doing (“Going home from vacation,” said I), gave my passport back, and waved me through.  Total time at the booth: 10 seconds.

After that, I made my way across Michigan’s upper peninsula, down through Green Bay, WI, and stayed the night at a hotel in Marinette, WI.  The following day, I completed my trip to Waukegan, IL, and set up camp at the Michigan Beach State Park.  I spent the next few days hanging out with Amy, swimming in Lake Michigan (cold, but fantastic), visiting one of America’s foremost renaissance fairs near Kenosha, WI (Amy is one of the court trumpeters), and had the extreme pleasure of sitting in at a rehearsal of the Chicago Brass Band.

I suppose I should talk a bit about work.  I hate my job, am not fond of my team, despise my company, and am getting incredibly sick of having me schedule radically changed every 5 weeks or so.  When I got back from vacation, I worked M-F, 8-5.  That was changed to M-T, 8-7.  Next week, I’ll be going to M-F, 10-7.  In December, I’ll be switched to S-W, 7-6.  Planning anything outside of work is a nightmare, which is one reason that this blog hasn’t been updated since my vacation.  I get home from work, watch a few minutes of television, and go to bed.  On my days off (like today), I sleep a lot or run errands.

Fortunately, I haven’t had to work on Saturdays yet, so I’ve been able to make all of my planned football games.  I’ve become convinced that my best lenses are badly in need of cleaning and recalibration, however, so have rented lenses for 4 of said games.  Not a particularly cheap arrangement, but hopefully the improved photos will result in increased sales.  So far this season, I’ve sold about $500 worth of pictures, which pretty much offsets the rentals and gas expenses.  This weekend (tomorrow), I’ve also rented a Canon D1-X body, and I’ll need to sell a pantload of prints to pay for that.  I doubt that will happen, but I really want to try out that camera body.  I’ve also been hired by the Greenville News for this game, which is nice.  It’s the first time that a major media outlet has given me a shot, so I’m really hoping to have a good outing and get my name permanently on their stringers list.

My Microsoft Surface Tablet PC

I paid off my car this week!  It was something that I expected to do by the end of the year, but a very nice windfall from Dad allowed me to do it all at once instead of waiting for next month.  As I told Amy, “That puts me one step closer to telling AT&T to get bent.”  I would dearly love to be able to do that on May 10th, 2013; but I don’t see that happening.  Maybe by 5/10/14 – that way they’ll have to give me my 15-year prize, too.  I think I’m up for luggage or something.

I’ve mentioned Amy a few times here, so let’s catch up on her a bit.  Since my first trip to meet her last Spring, I’ve gone back to the Chicago area a total of three times and she’s visited Atlanta three times.  The next time we get together is currently set for the week of Thanksgiving.  I’m looking forward to it.  We send lots of text messages to each other and talk on the phone 4-5 times a week, but being together is just so much nicer.

In September, I attended the NABBA fall board meeting in Cincinnati.  Not much to report on there, except that it was a nice drive, my hotel room was fantastic, and I actually kind of like downtown Cincy.

Now that the car is paid off, I’m going to enjoy not having a car payment for a few months, but I think there’s going to be a new car in the not-too-distant future.  The Audi is closing in on 170,000 miles.  Not a lot, I know, but it does mean that little things are going wrong more frequently than I’d like.  “Little” problems in an Audi usually equate to $1,000 repair bills.  I’ve got my heart set on a Subaru Outback because I want something that comfortable to tool around in in the city and is also something that I can take out into the woods when the opportunities arise,  While the Outback is by far my first choice, however, I’ve also been looking at other 4×4 vehicles that have some promise.  No drop-dead date on that purchase, but it is something that I’m looking into,

It has gotten cooler in Duluth, GA, and I’ve had a raging cold for the last couple of weeks to prove it.  My outdoor cats are quite comfortable, however.  Two of them, Daphne and Buddy, apparently spend most of their time under my deck.  Brooks, who I am 99% sure is the son of Fleck (Fleck died a few months ago, by the way) has taken up residence in the little house that I built for Fleck last summer, and he seems quite content there.  I can count on being stared at by one or all of them every morning now – they’ve become quite tame and they expect their breakfast to be delivered on time.

Walking has gotten more difficult as the year has gone on, largely because of my work schedule.  When I get out of bed, it’s pitch black.  By the time I leave for work, it’s just starting to get light.  By the time I get home, it’s pitch black again.  The schedule change next week should help, as I’ll be able to start walking at 8 in the morning or so and will be able to make it to work by 10.  When the schedule changes back to an 11-hour one, however, the walks will again suffer.  It’s too bad, because I was actually starting to get into shape when I was able to walk every day.  I’ve noticed now that the pain in my calves that I had largely overcome is now back when I try to go for more than a couple of miles.  Back to square one, I guess.

The Georgia Brass Band make actually return to the NABBA championships in 2013.  That was a done deal a month ago, but it’s now up in the air again because we’ve been invited to play at the Great American Brass Band Festival (and we’ll be doing it).  For some members of the band, the idea of playing both events is too daunting.  I don’t really know why, but I’m not going to push it.  I’ll be at NABBA regardless – and if the band doesn’t go, then I’ll have a much easier time doing my duties as NABBA’s secretary.

I guess that’s enough for now.  I was thinking about this blog the other day and I’d really like to write more going forward.  It all comes down to time and topics, however.  If I don’t have much of either, I may disappear for another four months.