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
The search for the best Linux desktop continues, and KDE and Fedora 43 continue to disappoint. In theory, the meta key plus the PageDown key will minimize all windows on all screens. Nope, only on the current screen. Also, where to configure that has gone completely missing in KDE Plasma 6.5.5 (KDE Frameworks 6.22.0). AI is worthless here, referring to menu items that don’t exist because they have been removed. This is on top of the elimination of KSysguard – I’m still salty about a favorite tool being removed because some developer didn’t want to be bothered with porting it to KDE 6. And of course, I still don’t like KDE for being bigots.
Signed up for Medicare
I had another birthday, and then promptly signed up for Medicare, because if I hadn’t, then I’d be fined for the rest of my life with higher premiums for signing up late.
I sold and bought some stock.
Back in July of 2022, I bought shares in Micron Technology, a manufacturer of memory chips. Unfortunately, I only had $250 in my stock trading account at the time, so I was only able to buy 4 shares. But I bought them at $60 per share. So recently I sold 1 share at $370, making the rest of the shares essentially free. 🙂
Similarly, I had bought 4 shares of Costco at $473 per share ($1,892 outlay). I recently sold 2 of them for $975 each, bringing in $1,950. The two shares I have left are essentially free.
Currently, I’d like to buy Corning (symbol GLW), Fastenal (symbol FAST), and Medline (symbol MDLN). Valmont Industries looks good too (symbol VMI).
A friend of mine who is in the trucking business hauling equipment to construction sites points out that 100 new cell phone towers were built in 2025 nearby. Cell phone towers and gear were still a growth industry in 2025, although the main cell tower company is forecasting a poor 2026.
Mom went into the hospital
The Kaweah Delta Emergency Room (ER) still has quality problems with their employees. Once a person gets to the rest of the hospital, their quality is quite good. I suspect that the ER staff burn out very quickly. She got back home maybe three weeks later.
Rumble video losing independent journalists
Two of the journalists that I subscribe to, to help pay for them to be able to do their journalism, have announced that they are no longer going to do shows on Rumble. I’ve been a fan of Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn for a while now. But Glenn has found the daily grind of a television show to truly be a grind. I can understand that. Matt and Walter disagreed on Matt’s choice to bring in more people to Racket News, so now the America This Week show is no more.
I’m bummed because these shows on Rumble were mostly the only “television” that I watched. I was also watching Scott Adams before he died.
It’s not that I would dedicate time to watching their shows, but rather that when it was time to fold my laundry, that gave me a good hour or two to catch up on the news.
I still like Russell Brand, so it is nice that he is still on Rumble.
Work Life
Goodbye, Proofpoint
This quarter, I have been made the lead on a project to eliminate Proofpoint and go 100% Microsoft: Exchange Online Protection (EOP) and Microsoft Defender for Office (MDO). I’m not a project manager; I’m an engineer. Stressed out and intensely disliking my work life is an apt description of January and February.
I am SO happy that I’m four months away from retirement.
Proofpoint was a great company in the early days. Then the owner sold out1, and the investors started milking the customers for money. Technical support got slow (but the premium prices remained). This last year, however, it seemed that the Proofpoint management pulled their heads out of their asses and support was getting better.
Alas, it is too late for my employer. They’ve spent a ridiculous amount of money “going Microsoft” and the upper management Microsoft fanboys wanted to show a little savings for the massive increase in cost. As I’m writing this, I don’t know how bad Microsoft will be compared to what we had when we had Proofpoint. I know that some loss of functionality is guaranteed. But I don’t know the size of the impact, yet.
The actual migration was a little painful, but not terribly so. If we’d had a real project manager and started the project two months prior, it most likely would have been flawless. We didn’t have the time needed for proper testing and careful examination of what we were doing, however.
We did get on an anti-spam blacklist for a week. One user spammed almost 400 people, and the email did not have an unsubscribe link. Also, our DKIM records were fouled up, and the consultant didn’t remind us to check that. We wouldn’t have been in this trouble if we’d been able to restrict the number of outbound recipients. Pouring salt into the wound: Exchange used to have a setting where the maximum quantity of recipients could be limited. They’ve moved it to a per-mailbox setting, which is a little painful when there are more than 7,000 mailboxes and 20 to 100 changes per day.
Work From Home
Oof. The management at my employer has (in my opinion) earned the nickname Dimmer Switch. “A metaphor for a manager who walks into a bright, productive room and metaphorically “dims the lights” until everyone is working in a state of apathetic gloom.”
Yeah, said management is demanding a stop to our work-from-home plan that we’ve been on since 2021.
I want to specifically point out that the manager I directly report to is a great guy, and in no way a Dimmer Switch. If I were to start my own company, and my business grew enough to need management help, I’d hire him away in a minute if I could.
But above him is a whole middle management class of Dimmer Switches. And they want their employees in the office where they can micromanage watch them. The amount of CYA actions that my coworkers are invoking has spiked.
I’ll have to put up with about a month of in-office-only work before I retire.
Renewal cost
My manager happened to be the person to authorize the license renewal with Microsoft: more than $3 million per year. When we were with Novell, it was one-tenth of that. Yes, Novell provided only 90% of what Microsoft does.
But hey, at least the director of my department doesn’t have to go to an IT director’s conference and get made fun of for not having moved to Microsoft. Your and my tax dollars at work, man.2
Volunteer Service Life
It was mildly amusing to me that eleven days into the new year, I received an email to Future Me from three years prior:
Dear FutureMe,
Last night Alberto was in the web site and he hit the Update button. I’d messed with file permissions so I could batch-upload the new format meeting schedules, so his update kind of failed because it couldn’t write to the file system. I got it fixed by 12:20 AM. Thankfully, today was … Meeting Minutes day, so I was off work, and staying up past midnight wasn’t really a problem.
If last night was the worst night I have all year, I’ll be a blessed guy.
I went back through my quarterly inventories for 2023, and indeed, it was the worst night I’d have all year. 😊
The Events Calendar (TEC) continues to vex
A problem is that the problem takes a while to develop. One symptom is that any of my users go to the calendar on the website, hit a button to scroll to some other month, but instead of displaying the new calendar, the throbber just hangs. Using debug mode on the browser (F12) I can see that something in the server is creating a 401 Not Authorized response when TEC goes to retrieve the next entries for next month. I don’t know what is doing that.
The other symptom is that any of my users go to the calendar on the website, hit a button to scroll to some other month, and the calendar reports that there are no events to display.
Immediately after troubleshooting (which involves disabling and reenabling WordPress plugins), the calendar will behave fine. Between one day to two weeks later, problems return.
A problem with all WordPress support is that they don’t do true support, where they set up a remote control session and you can see (and control) what they do. They only ask for the admin password to the website, do some black magic, and when it is done, you’re fixed but clueless. I find this appalling.