Quarterly inventory – 2025 Q2

Dear FutureMe,

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

How is your personal life going?

How is your work life going?

How is your Volunteer Service life going?

Future Me

Personal Life

I’m in a little bit better mood this quarter, mostly due to taking on another Volunteer Service position, and listening to a book. I did have a lot of fun with MPD (Music Player Demon), although that went pear-shaped more recently.

Home Air Conditioning

When I was in my 20’s, I lived in a place that had only a swamp cooler. Augusts, here in the Central San Joaquin Valley desert, will often get to 110 °F (43 °C). With only a swamp cooler, that was not fun. Now that I’m in my 60’s, I want refrigeration. Seriously.

Although I have the pieces for a sun shade for my western facing glass door, I haven’t made any progress on building it. My air conditioning unit is doing poorly, too, so that is a bummer. Back in December, Grant’s Air Conditioning replaced the control board (computer). This new one appears to have a setting where if the desired temperature cannot be met after some period of time, it goes into failure mode. It will kick the refrigeration compressor on for ten seconds, and then stop. It tries that every five minutes. Meanwhile, inside the home, the internal temperature keeps rising. Eventually, the outside cools off enough to where the differential is back within range, and full cooling begins again.

Okay: a backstory. Back in February, Grant’s Air Conditioning replaced a huge capacitor. I think its job is to jump-start the blower. The thing is almost the size of my fist. Also, a while ago before, I started having weird electrical problems in the house. My UPS (uninterruptible power supply / battery backup) in my master bedroom started kicking on, and reporting out-of-bounds power levels from street power.

My theory is that something in the blower has changed, and this jump-start capacitor is draining to zero as it jump-starts the blower. It uses so much power in this process that my UPS detects the out-of-bound condition, and kicks in to protect my gear. Or in the other direction, it pulls so much power to recharge, that there’s a spike when it finally fills up. Either power overload or underload happens, and the UPS kicks in. I hear it clicking and the front-panel displays an error condition.

The first time I started seeing this UPS behavior was during the winter. Then in February, the air conditioning / heating unit failed, and Grant’s came out and fixed the capacitor.

About two months ago, the UPS started acting funny again. The air conditioning also started the failure mode where it only runs the refrigeration for ten seconds and quits. I had to run off to a meeting, so in desperation I forced the blower into always on mode, and left. By the time I got back, the refrigeration was back on. I left the blower in always on mode.

Days later, I notice that the UPS events have stopped. The blower has been running for a couple of months now. If the blower doesn’t need to be jump-started, the capacitor doesn’t get energized (it seems to me).

That was a long story about my fear that my air conditioning unit is going to need major service to repair / replace the blower. If not that, another $240 for another capacitor that won’t last very long.

Food and food costs

Inflation is always bad, and this time is no different. I very much need to avoid eating out at fast-food or restaurants; my financial advisor would like me to have $25,000 in the bank when I retire. I’m at around half that, and I hope to retire in twelve and a half months. There for a while, I was cooking / heating frozen pizzas, but I was clearly gaining weight. So then I switched to breaded chicken fillets from the delicatessen portion of Winco (the best grocery store we have). But the price of those has been going up too, and, they seem to make me really drowsy on my lunch break. I suspect there is too much deep-fat fried breading on them. I wasn’t gaining weight with them, but I wasn’t losing any either.

Now I’m trying frozen burritos, although they don’t digest as well as the breaded chicken fillets. My preference would be to buy steak. But I remember when New York Strips were $6 per pound, and at $15 per pound now, I’m out.

I’ve had to add more fast-food stores to my boycott list due to inflation. There is no way I can justify going to them anymore. I was bummed that the one place (which has high-quality tacos) has been losing customers, and last night when I drove by to check on their Sunday Taco Special, they’d raised the price a dollar. Long term, I expect they will go out of business.

Other personal life items

I still need to redo my personal mail server. This is yet-another task that would be fun if I had a week to do it. For the Juneteenth holiday and the use-it-or-lose-it-Personal-Holiday-Allowance Friday, I did have four days in a row available. However, I was working on my MPD project, and it didn’t go well.

MPD project (Music Player Demon)

One thing that was super fun was buying a Raspberry Pi Zero and adding a HiFi Berry DAC Zero, and configuring it. It went about as beautiful as it could. Now, in my Work-From-Home office, I don’t need a laptop running Snapcast client; I’ve got this hooked into my receiver instead:

Pictured here is a disassembled Raspberry Pi Zero and a HiFi Berry DAC Zero, in addition to the powered on unit in production. The Raspberry Pi Zero is about two keys wide and four keys long if laid on the numeric keypad of your full-size keyboard. I was happy enough with the streaming audio sink that I bought two more kits; the unassembled pieces shown are from those kits.

I tried writing Perl code to manage MPD using AI. On the one hand, it didn’t take very long at all to crank out 7,000 lines of Perl, which mostly did do what I wanted. But it wasn’t fully what I wanted. Looking at the code, I got the idea that it was putting too much into one branch of one loop, and that trying to break it into more logical pieces was the right thing to do. I went back to manual mode, and have made a mess of it. Sure, my various functions are in more logical places, but the differences between what I think I want versus what I write make it slow-going. I also managed to clobber previously set alarms, so I’m actually worse off now than before. Oof.

Listening to a book: Catch-22

I subscribe to a couple of journalists who do a weekly show with an hour and a half of current events and half an hour on a book they are reading. They’ll propose a book to each other, and if the other hasn’t read it, that will become the book. A couple of weeks ago, one of them said that Catch-22 by Joseph Heller was the funniest book written in the last 80 years. Maybe he said “one of the …” but either way it was high praise.

I went ahead and paid Audible.com for a copy. Yes, this book is terribly funny.

I remembered a moment from 45 years ago, when my best friend Craig had told me he’d just read the funniest book ever, Catch-22, and that I should read it. I wasn’t fond of the idea because what I knew about the term Catch-22 was that it is always a “lose-lose” situation. Looking back, I suppose my thinking was that was the book would inure me, and that I’d become more accepting of Catch-22 situations. For whatever reason, I took a pass, and didn’t read the book. Here, 45 years later, this book does make me smirk a lot. I don’t regret not reading it 45 years ago, but I think I would have enjoyed it back then too. I don’t know, though: back then I was in high-school, and hadn’t experienced a lot of bureaucracy. Today I have 35 years of that in my history, so maybe I can laugh easier about it now.

Work Life

If $18,000 fell out of the sky and into my lap, I would retire tomorrow.

I’m counting down: twelve months (plus a few weeks) to go.

One of my co-workers died. I’d been working with him for more than twenty years. I had tried to let him know that my life got vastly better when I stopped drinking alcohol; but, he didn’t want to hear it. I know that if someone doesn’t want to stop, there is no way to convince him or her otherwise – and attempting to do so anyway causes the alcoholic to dig their heels in deeper. Rest in peace, Joe.

Volunteer Service Life

I did add one more service commitment this quarter: two times a month, I’m with other members in a meeting in our newest homeless shelter. It’s an interesting place: they have a dog kennel. Many people who have been long-term homeless have only one companion: their dog. So if they have to choose between a shelter that doesn’t allow pets, versus remaining homeless, they’ll stay homeless. This newest homeless shelter solves that problem by building in a dog kennel and a bicycle lockup, so that people who do get a bicycle don’t get it stolen.

Quarterly Inventory 2024 – Q1

Dear FutureMe,

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

Question: How is your personal life going?

Question: How is your work life going?

Question: How is your volunteer service life going?

Personal Life

There hasn’t really been much change this quarter in my personal life.

I went to the Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE 21X), but regret it because it was so much money. Previous SCaLE events were at the LAX Hilton, which is half the price of the Pasadena Hilton. The trade-off is that the LAX Hilton has only about five restaurants nearby, so if 400 people break for lunch, those five restaurants are absolutely swamped. If 400 people break for lunch at the convention center in Pasadena, there are probably 30 restaurants within a ten-minute walk nearby. But $400 per night for this show really isn’t worth it to me. If I had stayed three nights for the full four-day show, that would have been $1,200. ACK! For that kind of money, I could pay down my mortgage one month and retire a whole month early. Really, SCaLE is a wonderful show if you already live in Los Angeles and don’t have to spend money at the Pasadena Hilton.

Had my ten-year colonoscopy. Zero polyps found; I get to come back in five years because of my age.

I went to a Jack-In-The-Box restaurant a couple of months ago. Lunch was $20. I suspect this was my last visit to a fast food restaurant ever 1 (well, in California, at least). Sacramento decreed that fast-food workers should get, beginning today, a minimum wage of $20 per hour (as if fast-food workers would make it a career). The result is that Sacramento has completely priced these stores out of business due to inflation (unless they replace the workers with robots).

2024 New Year’s Resolution: go to the gym more often. Resolution failed: I suspended my gym membership. $60 a month is too much (yes, inflation).

One really fun thing for me is that I bought another Tiny PC and put 32 GB of RAM in it, and I am running Proxmox on it. This lets duplicate all the steps I will go through to migrate the website (item (5) in the volunteer service list below) from Amazon to Linode. If I bungle a step, I revert the snapshot and try again. Even better, I can document about how I did the migration to my blog. I did have DNS pointing to this home device, which (via pfSense) did actually route the public Internet to this little host. I’ve since turned this off, but will turn it on again when it comes time to demo the new website.

Work Life

If $44,000 dropped into my lap today, I would retire tomorrow.

I have little to do except e-discovery and email retention policy work. We had a good system where clients would work through legal counsel before opening an email investigation; but, our new(er) management wants to bend over backwards to be helpful. That is a nice sentiment, but the previous practice protected us from liability – only the people with legal training made judgement calls. Now, I have people asking me to find “inappropriate” email, as if I know what the hell that means in a legal context. Sometimes I hate my job.

I did take on printers and the print server. I did build the replacement server and migrated over; that went really well.

The other big project is to check 5 million email that are about to be deleted: are they supposed to be deleted? There’s no way that my direct report and I can read all five million email and verify them all. So, we’re spot-checking. I probably will read about 12,000 email before we can confidently pull the trigger on the deletion process.

Volunteer Service Life

I counted up all the current service commitments I have, and it numbers sixteen at the moment.

  1. Sundays: treasurer of a weekly meeting.
  2. Sundays: Technology captain of a weekly meeting (I run the Zoom camera, speakerphone, and laptop).
  3. Second Sunday: audio recording and posting the recording to our .org website of the second Sunday speaker breakfast monthly meeting.
  4. Tuesdays: Secretary of a weekly meeting.
  5. Second Tuesday: web servant for our little 501(c)(3) central office.
  6. Second Tuesday: liaison to our district (complement of item (10) below).
  7. Second Tuesday: president of the board of our little 501(c)(3) central office.
  8. Last Tuesday: member of a monthly technology sharing session (I presented last month). Nicely enough, this is on Zoom, and happens from 16:00–17:30 which allows me enough time to be secretary at 19:00 (item (4) above).
  9. First Wednesday: Recording secretary, monthly district meeting.
  10. First Wednesday: liaison to our little central office monthly meeting (complement of item (6) above).
  11. Every other Wednesday: co-chair of the Founder’s Day Picnic; as such, I am on the planning committee. I set up the laptop, camera, and speakerphone for Zoom participants. Created two documents, but have a third pending. The other chair has been in Europe, so as far as I can tell, I’m the only one who has done anything.
  12. Thursdays: meet with my sponsee weekly.
  13. Thursdays: treasurer of a weekly meeting. Also, supplies.
  14. Fridays: literature captain of a weekly meeting.
  15. First Saturday: member of a temporary contact committee (meets monthly), and have begun outreach to a local institution.
  16. First Wednesdays (until this weekend): stage manager for our twice yearly dinner and a speaker event.

  1. Edit: this is almost certainly an overstatement. I still like Panda Express, and it hasn’t raised prices ridiculously, but it does qualify as a fast food restaurant. ↩︎

Coffee, again: inflation + energy drinks = change

I’ve given up energy drinks due to inflation. They were overpriced to begin with; but now inflation has gone too far, and I’m out.

Coffee is good, but the Keurig company is bad, so what to do?

Turns out Costco carries a Ninja Dual Brew coffee maker that fills the bill.

(longer version):

Way back when, I was a fan of Keurig. I bought an early Keurig brewer and loved it. But, foolishly, I didn’t do the de-scaling thing that one needs to do. It’s never really been a task I had to grow up with, so I don’t have a practice of doing it. (I’m still looking for To-Do list software that will do recurring tasks. Ideally it would be in Nextcloud).

Anyway, I eventually ruined my Keurig. It did last a really long time. But between the time I bought it and the time I needed a replacement, the company came out with a new line of machines that tried to implement (essentially) DRM (digital rights management). In other words, if you tried to put in non-Keurig coffee pods, the machine refused to work.

There’s a Nietzsche quote: “Mistrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.”

When the Keurig company announced this scheme, I was done with them. I’ll never buy another Keurig branded item, ever.

It was also a stupid implementation of DRM, because it pointed a camera at the top of the coffee pod and looked for a QR code which identified the pod as authentic. So … buy one authentic pod, slice the top off of it, and glue it to the camera. Now every coffee pod is authorized.

Okay, so there is a work-around; but, what we have is a company that is willing to bully its customers. No-way am I going to reward that sort of company with any new sales.

So, what to do?

Well, turns out that Monster Energy has a line of energy drinks that are low (or zero) calories. Also, they keep working on different flavors. I started buying them. A lot of them. I was buying them by the case; usually drinking two a day. Over the course of two months, I’d go through five cases. Each case was 24 cans of 16 ounces each.

In the beginning, I was paying about $28 per case. That’s about $1.17 per can. Then the price creeped up to around $32 per case, or $1.33 per can.

But, some of the more popular flavors jumped up to $38 per case, then $43, then $48, and now over $50 per case.

In fact, to combat the perception that the prices are so bad, they’ve stopped selling them by the 24 pack case. Sure, the price per case is back down to $28, but the case is now eight cans instead of 24.

That’s the equivalent of $84 per case, for what I used to pay $28 – $32.

I’m out.

But man my ass was dragging without the caffeine boost.

Back to coffee is the answer; so I bought a normal coffee brewer.

There’s a reason the Keurig line of brewers was popular. The nightly mess of having to empty the grounds, and wash the filter basket and coffee pot definitely lowers my quality of life. It also boosts my home energy costs: I didn’t used to have to run the dishwasher every single night. I have the reusable filter with a micro fine mesh, and it’s fine; but I don’t want to reuse it without putting it through the dishwasher. I suppose that’s a choice I’m making that is picky. But that’s the way I am, so if I want coffee tomorrow morning, I need to run the dishwasher tonight.

Previously, I’d put dirty dishes and cups and tableware in the dishwasher and wait until the machine was full enough to warrant running a load. Dishwashers burn a lot of energy. I’m fine with that, because I get that “sanitize” work out of them. But running it every night for a coffee pot, filter, and coffee cup seems wasteful to me. The machine was practically empty.

Thankfully, I was in Costco a few days ago, and saw that they carry the Ninja Dual Brew coffee maker.

I don’t know much about Ninja, except that one of the podcasts I listen to is about the stock market, and one of the guys mentioned that Ninja as a company has excellent customer loyalty. Cool.

And indeed, this machine does coffee pods. I’m sold.

I’m back to 60 seconds for a cup of coffee, and no mess after. Heck, with the inflation costs of the Monster Energy drinks, this purchase has a positive ROI.

Thank you, Ninja, for making this machine. Thank you, Costco, for carrying it.

Southern California Edison wants a rate increase of 23%

If you want to file a public comment regarding this Southern California Edison (SCE) application, the link is here

This is regarding their application A2305010: the initial applications is here. The 23% increase number is shown on page 5.

Essentially, they are saying that they need to:

  • Upgrade their SAP Business Suite Enterprise Resource software, and that will cost $35 million.
  • Replace all the smart meters they installed 15 years ago that are getting old. If there is a dollar amount assigned to that, it didn’t jump out at me.
  • Finish their Service Center Modernization Projects: apparently new buildings. The document says “Please see Exhibit SCE-06, Volume 07, Enterprise Operations, for more information on the various service center modernization projects.” Where that document is, I cannot find. I did find a company that says it helped SCE design new service centers in a $180 million program. This application, A2305010, says it’s asking for $25 million.
  • Wildfire Management at $17 million. This is probably the only one I agree with. The Paradise fire a few years back was devastating, and indeed it came from negligence on the part of Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) letting their transmission lines go unmaintained.

There is a lot in that application, including that they are paying about 10% on debt, and that medical / dental / optical benefits to employees is growing.

I don’t know about you, but my electric bill has already jumped up way too high; and an increase of 23% would be terrible to me.

AND ANOTHER THING: I’m submitting my public comment now. This isn’t a gripe at SCE but rather at the CPUC (California Public Utilities Commission). I happen to run my own email server, so I can create as many email addresses I want, for free. If I want to filter incoming items, I can use the recipient email address for that filtering. So why wouldn’t I create an email address like california-public-utilities-commission-subscription-service@example.com ?

I did successfully subscribe to several of their daily digest notifications about various CPUC motions. I clicked on the link to verify the account. Everything is working fine.

And … the CPUC public comment form field has a maximum limit on the email address size. It is barking at me that the email address is invalid. It is not invalid: you just have a programmer who didn’t size the form field correctly. The SMTP spec says an email address must not exceed 254 characters, and mine has 71. Now I have to create a new email address alias to comply with your dumb programmer’s code.