Personal life

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?

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.

Sundays: treasurer of a weekly meeting.
Sundays: Technology captain of a weekly meeting (I run the Zoom camera, speakerphone, and laptop).
Second Sunday: audio recording and posting the recording to our .org website of the second Sunday speaker breakfast monthly meeting.
Tuesdays: Secretary of a weekly meeting.
Second Tuesday: web servant for our little 501_(c)(3) central office.
Second Tuesday: liaison to our district (complement of item (10) below).
Second Tuesday: president of the board of our little 501_(c)(3) central office.
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).
First Wednesday: Recording secretary, monthly district meeting.
First Wednesday: liaison to our little central office monthly meeting (complement of item (6) above).
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.
Thursdays: meet with my sponsee weekly.
Thursdays: treasurer of a weekly meeting. Also, supplies.
Fridays: literature captain of a weekly meeting.
First Saturday: member of a temporary contact committee (meets monthly), and have begun outreach to a local institution.
First Wednesdays (until this weekend): stage manager for our twice yearly dinner and a speaker event.

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. ↩︎

Home alarm clock: no progress

Today was pretty depressing. I want my morning alarm clock to be some sort of automation that plays three MP3 files I own on the sound equipment in my bedroom. I spent a lot of time today and do not have a solution.

When I bought the soundbar from Costco, I didn’t know to shop for something Home Assistant compatible. Although, even if I did know that, I think I’d still be stuck because I would feel like an absolute fool to pay $1,000 for a Sonos Soundbar. Sonos is the only vendor of soundbars that plays really nice with Home Assistant.

Apparently, way back when, some LG Soundbars had Ethernet ports on them, and they played nice with Home Assistant. Those aren’t available anymore; with everything having switched over to Bluetooth.

My current solution is an iPad using Bluetooth to light up the soundbar I hooked up to my TV. It works, often. But it doesn’t work 100%, which is a problem for the functionality of an alarm clock.

Also, there is no volume control: whatever the TV left the volume at, the music will play at that volume the next morning. This is sometimes a problem if the movie the night before was really loud, and I needed to turn down the volume to not blast out the neighbors or the speakers. I want automation to make my life less manual control, instead of “Oh! I changed the volume on the TV! I need to reset to xx for tomorrow morning!” just before I fall asleep. That’s the opposite of starting a nice night’s sleep.

My brother gave me a Mini PC running Windows 11 for Christmas. I was hoping that today I could set it up to use the soundbar as a Bluetooth speaker. Well, yes, when connected to a monitor and keyboard and mouse, I did get an MP3 file to play via Bluetooth on the soundbar.

So close.

But what about when the Mini PC is running headless? Nope. Could not get that to work. It is Microsoft Windows, after all. I’ve been using Microsoft products for 30 years, and they just are not good at automating anything. I suspect they think that automation is a Bad Thing, and should only be wielded by wizards instead of mere mortals.

So here I am at the end of a wasted day, without a better solution for my home automation alarm clock that mostly works. It is depressing.

Make Time For What You Love

I was in a meeting Monday night, and one of the gentlemen mentioned that in his morning routine, he no longer reads a bunch of page-a-day books; he reads just one. He and a friend had been talking about daily routines, and his friend asked him: “So, you read so many; do you remember any of them?” This was a valid check, and no, not really. So he changed his routine to just read the one, but to remember it and reflect on it during the day.

I heard this and thought it was an excellent point. I read five page-a-day books (and two bookmarks with a full paragraph each) every morning. Did I remember Monday’s readings? No, I couldn’t say that I had. Perhaps I should change things up a bit.

After the meeting, I went to get dinner: yes, Panda Express. After eating dinner, I read my fortune cookie: Make Time For What You Love

Well, that’s a heck of an admonition. I don’t even know what I love! How am I supposed to make time for it‽

I mean, I know that I’ve been grandiose and too selfish and self-centered. One could argue that this an expression of self-worth, but ultimately, it’s all childish.

Make Time For What You Love – I should figure out what I love.

I love my son. He’s out of the house and becoming his own man – I love him, but I don’t have a ton of interaction with him. I love my mom – but she has her own life, too. I love being helpful to people who struggle with technology I understand, because I’d made it my career and life’s work. But that love of life has mostly faded away since my employer chose to implement newer, crappier technology. I have zero interest in helping make a bad decision less painful.

I love figuring out puzzles / video games / programming: back to that grandiosity, I love the self-congratulatory accomplishment of using my brain well. I’ve always loved learning, and this is an extension of that.

What do I love, that I should make time for?

Tuesday morning, the first (and main) page-a-day book I read had as its topic: Are We Having Fun Yet?

That put a massive grin on my face. I practice gratitude, every morning. Indeed, yes: I am having fun with my life in volunteer service.

Nicely enough, three of the other four page-a-day books I read Tuesday had a similar theme: Are We Having Fun Yet?

Thank you, Lord. Yes, I am having fun with being helpful in volunteer service.

Today’s main page-a-day book had the theme: do things in volunteer service. I’ve been doing that for seven years now, and it’s been good for me.

But back to that important question: what do I love, that I should make time for?

I know that I ought to take better care of my physical body. I should decide that one day a week will be go-to-the-gym day. Okay, that’s a fine goal. Can’t say it thrills me, though. It seems more of an obligation to myself than a desired act with its own gumption because I find it fun.

What I really want to work on is building an interactive programming environment that I had an idea about some forty years ago. The technology for it is almost here. It probably already is, but is still in low resolution with a limited viewport. And really, I aim to flesh this interactive programming environment out in the development of a video game. The video game will have elements from three of my favorite games, and can have the back-story from a particular science fiction book I read some forty years ago.

My plans are to retire from my job, first. At the end of a day at work, I’ve burned a lot of brain sugar. I’m tired, and the last thing I want is to push my brain even harder, when I’m likely to make stupid mistakes because of having exhausted by brain sugar reserves. Once I retire, I want to get into the routine of going to the gym, getting some cardiovascular energy going, and then coming home to work / play on my programming project.

That will be my ideal Make Time For What You Love because yes, I’ll be having fun, finally.

Today, I think I’ll see if I can’t programmatically create a WordPress post from a script. I did take the day off from work today, simply because I wanted to. Are We Having Fun Yet? I hope to, today.

Quarterly Inventory – 2023 Q4

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?

Personal Life

There hasn’t really been much change this quarter in my personal life. For Christmas, my mom and I drove to Oregon where my two brothers live. It was nice being able to spend some time with her. She told me stories of her and dad living in Sacramento before I was born.

My mom had a soft tissue sarcoma surgically removed a month ago. Although nothing about getting a cancer is good, at least soft tissue sarcoma has a five-year survivability rate of better than 80%.

I did give four of the Tilt Five augmented reality kits to my family for Christmas. I am a little sad that we didn’t get to play Settlers Of Catan, though. It didn’t ship yet, although the plans were for Q4 2023.

2024 New Year’s Resolution: go to the gym more often. This should be easy to do: in 2023, I went twice. Here in the first week of January 2024, I’ve already gone once.

Work Life

If $55,000 dropped into my lap today, I would retire tomorrow. I recognize that I’m feeling a little sorry for myself: last year, the bulk of my life’s work was deleted because we moved to Microsoft. This quarter, the last bit – an email archive server – was deleted. So it is nice that we freed up 15 TB of storage. But now I have nothing to do except e-discovery and email retention policy work.

I’m going to take on printers and the print server. No-one else wants it. I can be of service by picking up the work that no-one else wants to do. I did build the replacement server from a template, so that is started.

Volunteer Service Life

I’m now president of the board of the little 501_(c)(3) we have. I’m no longer treasurer for my Tuesday night group, nor am I a General Service rep for my Friday night group. Instead, I am now secretary of the Tuesday night group, and Literature person for my Friday night group.

I have a ton of obligations to fulfill regarding two websites I help with. I’m a little resistant because the workload is so large.

Quarterly inventory – 2023 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?

Personal Life

Not really a whole lot going on. My mom did want to move in to a senior assisted living facility, so we took a tour and got a complimentary lunch. However, the place charges $8,000 per month which is $96,000 per year (and the move-in fee is one month’s rent, so $104,000 for the first year). Although my mom has some money, this was too rich for her blood. The residents we met loved the place. They say it is like a cruise ship that is parked. I was mildly interested to see if they are publicly traded, but alas they are not. Their headquarters are in Seattle WA, but they are privately held.

Happy that I have a Nextcloud server running on a tiny PC here at home. I had to configure pfSense to do Dynamic DNS to map the server name to my home IP address. The Internet gateway had to be beaten into submission to pass outside traffic in: pfSense had to carefully map the listening IP address and port (with an SSL upgrade) on the public Internet to the inside address and port. Running physical hardware is I think a better option than renting a Linode. Don’t get me wrong, I love my Linode running my email server on my own domain. But for serving up a calendar, address book, to-do list and media files – oh so many media files – the Linode would have been rather expensive. $110 later, I’ve got a (refurbished) 16 GB RAM Intel Core i5 running a cool 12 watts at idle. Storage is over on the Synology NAS (not exposed to the Internet). 12 watts isn’t as low as a Raspberry Pi, but still, it’s pretty good.

FINALLY! My new cell phone has an address book with entries. The entries are stored on the Nextcloud server, which is nice. I’m having to use Nextcloud email to get access to the address book contacts; and I’d prefer Roundcube, but that they are there at all is good. When I added them to Nextcloud email, it did create Birthday entries on my calendar which is sweet.

I’ve been trying to get Home Assistant, running on a Raspberry Pi 4, to connect to the files on the Synology, but it doesn’t work. I’m pretty sure it is that the Synology requires SMB 3, and Home Assistant isn’t specifying vers=3.0 correctly. It could be something else though, which is extremely frustrating that I cannot tell what the hell is what.

Been playing a lot of Factorio. Did get Elder Axe’s blueprint used and fully implemented; it is probably the best blueprint I’ve used so far. That said, it is missing a few assembly machines, and only has a single yellow science and a single purple science, so progress toward artillery was extremely slow. Bulked up my defenses and let the game run over night and during the day when I’m not at home. Still needed to manually craft some materials (low density structures) for yellow science bottles to be produced in less than a week’s time.

Work Life

The email retention project will soon be winding down. There was some kerfuffle because Opentext (who bought Micro Focus and GWAVA, who bought Attachmate, who bought Novell) wants to increase the yearly charge a huge amount, and we have documentation that their records are screwed up. They are claiming some people are new, when I show we paid for them three years ago, so they are not new. The whole mess though did kick us in the butt to export everything out of the server so we can power it down and delete it. That would free up 15 TB of storage, which is a reasonably large amount.

I did get to fix a broken system where server templates run a script on startup that send an email to a Mediawiki server, and the body of the email becomes the documentation for the new server in the wiki. Fixing that was cool, because it was a nice feature way back when, to get some documentation simply because the new box powered up and asked the server team member to answer a few questions. It’s not 100% solid though, as I just learned of two servers, and they are not in the wiki. 🙁

Volunteer Service Life

I’ve registered for a couple conferences; one is out of town with a hotel/motel. I also get to go to an Election Assembly, although a friend booked the motel. I’ll drive as we carpool three people. I get to man a Public Information booth at a health fair here in a couple days. One person on the Board of Directors for our local 501_(c)(3) is ineligible to run, and another has announced that he may not run for health reasons. That leaves me and two others as elected members. Maybe one other person is interested in running? I also attended a technology workshop via Zoom, and heard that apparently I’m a “dark knight”. I’ve done technological stuff (it’s just WordPress), so like a knight, I’ve shown up to save the day: but I’m a dark knight because zero other people understand the dark arts I’m using to keep the website running. Did I mention that it’s just WordPress? But if I were to get hit by a bus, people might feel helpless to continue on (which would be a shame, since it’s just WordPress).

Quarterly Inventory

The time frame is October through December 2022

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?

Personal Life:

Amazon Echo purge
- I decided to abandon Amazon Alexa because they insisted on pushing advertising into my morning wake up routine. My morning wake up routine exists because I want to wake up grateful and happy. Playing a wake up song and then violating my peace with your advertising produces anger, not peace and grattitude. so, I’m out. I unplugged all my Amazon Echo devices and sought replacements.
  - Mycroft was no good.
    - The Raspberry Pi image they have doesn’t do audio levels right.
    - They have a terribly overpriced Raspberry Pi which does, so maybe that’s why the community version sucks.
    - They require a cloud login to use the service. Not a fan.
  - Apple Homekit is not great.
    - The microphone on the HomePod mini is super sensitive, which would be good if the software behind it wasn’t weak.
    - The software behind the HomePod is a low effort undertaking. Way too often I get an idea of something to ask it, and it (essentially) replies with you should do that on your iPhone. Mostly, it successfully controls the smart lightbulbs; and that’s about it. As an example, tomorrow morning I would like a reminder that I’m going to breakfast with my son at 7:00 AM. With the Amazon Echo, this was easy. With the HomePod, I get “your iPhone is not available. Check that it’s powered on and it’s software is up to date.” Both those things are true, so something else is wrong. Or really, the HomePod just isn’t going to store reminders and I should be doing these things on my iPhone. But even if I did a reminder on my iPhone, I’d need to be near it to get it. The Amazon Echo devices were a far better implementation of basic functionality.
    - I set up Automations on an iPad to light up a Bluetooth -enabled television sound bar. Automations don’t work well with Bluetooth, and putting the question to Reddit /r/Shortcuts got my post deleted by the mod because he doesn’t like the question being asked so often where the answer is “yes, Apple does not do this well”.
      - Something you can try: if the device (in my case, an iPad) can be put on the Settings –> Bluetooth –> list of possible connections screen, and just sit there, then Shortcut Automations on the iPad can light up the various Bluetooth devices within reach. But if something (like an errant Shortcut Automation) takes screen focus away, then the next Shortcut Automation which tries to light up a Bluetooth sound system, won’t, and you’ll never get the audio you wanted. If you wander over a few hours later to where the iPad is, you’ll see whatever caused your apparently really bad at multitasking iDevice to lose track of Bluetooth connections.
  - I put an image of Home Assistant on my Raspberry Pi.
    - So far it looks like it might work out best. I do have a problem though; I had set up my WiFi using Steve Gibson’s Three Dumb Routers scheme. Yes, it is secure. Whoops: my Home Assistant box needs to be able to talk to the Internet of Things (IoT), so it is on the IoT network (the “S” in IoT stands for “Security”). But I would like to be able to configure it from my main machine here on the secure network. I litterally cannot get there from here (which is a good thing). I’m going to have to put my network training to use for this home project.
The Helm email appliance company business exit
- I got an email they are going out of business; I have until December 31 to find a replacement.
- I built a replacement Dovecot + Postfix server.
  - It would have been on Amazon AWS Lightsail, but:
    - Amazon commits the crime of false advertising with their Lightsail lowest tier boxes. They advertise a 512 MB RAM machine, but deliver a 474 MB RAM machine. Mail-In-A-Box refuses to install on a 474 MB RAM machine, so the easy way to transfer my mail services to be on my own machine was out.
    - Opening a technical support ticket got me nowhere because the help desk person doesn’t actually know, and his backline support told him lies about kernel memory consuming RAM; that’s why the machine doesn’t have the full amount. I work in an environment with 600+ virtual machines and have spun up almost 70 of them myself, on Xen, KVM, and VMware. I know what virtual machine provisioning does and looks like. Amazon chose to underprovision by 9.25% so they could stuff more VMs on a blade. I’m not nearly as annoyed that they underprovisioned as I am that they lied to me about it.
    - Fine. You’re going to lie to me about your business practices? I’m out.
  - Now, I’m a Linode customer.
    - Details about the migration here and here and here.
A thief stole a Christmas package off my doorstep.
Christmas was in Coos Bay, which meants an all-day drive Friday, Christmas with the whole family on Saturday and Sunday, and then an all-day drive back on Monday. The In ‘N Out at Redding California was not, because the place was packed, both times. Costco gasoline up there was almost 10% cheaper than in Visalia, which surprises me. Of course the gasoline in Oregon was cheaper still.
Haven’t played video games, but have been watching television instead. Never had watched the Harry Potter films, so am slowly going through them. On number 3 right now.

Work Life

Exterro has been terrible. It got listed in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant. I can see in global search-and-redact brief moments of shine and wonder. But implementation had been terrible. Even after months of project implementation, the Go Live date came and nothing worked right the first time for several weeks. Product support is out of Calcutta India, which means every support request we make takes 24 hours to turn around. Most often, the front end help cannot help, so they have to take screen shots of what is wrong and submit that to back end support. That’s going to burn another 24 hours.
- Lately, they aren’t even acknowledging problems I’m presenting them.
Waterford Technologies MailMeter has been a much better project implementation.
1301 days until retirement.

Volunteer Service

Currently recording Secretary for the local 503(c) corporation; if I don’t get the meetings minutes done quickly, it stresses me out all month.
I have three other service positions going on. One of them means travelling to Sacramento and other places.
Currently going to six meetings a week; sometimes seven if a friend asks for a ride to a meeting.
- Sunday morning: central service representative
- Sunday evening: technology chair (I bring gear that lets the meeting be online and in-person, beyond just an iPhone. Using a laptop and a PTZ camera, Zoom attendees can be on a monitor in the room, and we have a wireless speakerphone which lets everyone be heard).
- Monday Night: no service position
- Tuesday Night: treasurer
- Thursday night: no service position
- Friday night: general service representative
- Monthly, as opposed to weekly meetings:
  - First Wednesday, General Service meeting
  - Second Tuesday, Central Service meeting and board of directors meeting.
I was also a volunteer at our New Year’s Eve event. My first duty was to be stage manager. Then, I set up coffee, I set up games in a room for game night (although Bill H. came by on purpose, we only had a few people drop in and take a look). I helped with getting the appetizers put out, and then helped in the kitchen with slicing the deep pit barbeque beef and slicing and plating cake and pie. Lastly was cleanup with the take-away of New Year’s Eve balloons glitter: never again. Didn’t get out of there until 1:30 AM.

Irons in the fire:

I owe an article to the newsletter.
TRA web site to replace Mike K’s web site.
Move my volunteer service web site from Amazon to Linode
- Also, I need to upgrade PHP and the Bitnami base makes that tough. Worse, the database will need to go from ASCII to UTF, which tripped up the migration tool I was using.
- Add input forms to the web site and convert to three pages: newcomers, members, and information for professionals.
Newly elected as Registrar, I need to plan an event which is tentatively scheduled for February 25.
World Ag Expo volunteer service.
What I would really rather play with: Tilt Five Augmented Reality glasses; mine came in. 😀
It’s time to back up my main machine, too.