Category: Volunteer service life

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 – 2025 Q1

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

Whoops – I’m sixteen days late. I just added twelve reminders to myself, to be delivered by Future Me

I support Future Me, and am delighted when I see an email sent to the future arrive in my mailbox.

Personal Life

Ooooof. I’ve been in such a funk these last four months. It is bordering on problematic.

I still don’t have a girlfriend, and my house is messy enough that I don’t want to bring people over. Saint Valentine’s Day highlighted my awareness that I really need to change things if I don’t want to die alone. I probably will anyway, but keeping things the status quo will guarantee that.

One positive thing I have started is a sun shade for my western facing glass door. The original owner put reflective film on it to try to drive the heat of the sun back, but it isn’t effective. So I got the idea that I’d build a shade from roofing panels. There’s no way that I can transport them in my Ford C-MAX. However, my brother happened to have a need to drive down here with his long bed truck, so I asked him if he would help me. The Lowes buying experience was underwhelming, but by the end of the afternoon, we put four 3′ x 8′ sheets in the bed of his truck and brought them home.

I still need to bolt them together and to a board or rail to hang them. And I’d like to buy some Rust-Oleum to paint the holes after I drill them and put bolts in. And then I need to hang the shade. But I can already tell that without the tree, this summer would be exceedingly hot inside that room.

I did reconfigure my home alarm clock a little bit, and am delighted with it. Previously, it wasn’t very good. Today, I would rate it splendid. I should do did a blog post about it.

Another change is that my main machine and my alarm clock machine are running Fedora Workstation, KDE Spin. Most of my other websites are running Debian, away from Ubuntu.

I do need to redo my personal mail server. This is yet-another task that would be fun if I had a week to do it, but I don’t so then it just adds to my stress level.

Factorio: Space Age was a letdown. It feels too much like a grind, and the really fun part, blasting bugs with artillery, is unreachable until several planets are exploited. That just makes the grind worse. Sigh.

Work Life

If $25,000 fell out of the sky and into my lap, I would retire tomorrow.

I’m counting down: fifteen months to go.

Volunteer Service Life

This was another one that kicked my ass this quarter. I upgraded the version of PHP on the website, and the calendar plugin prompt started killing off the server. We’d get an out-of-memory error within five minutes. The event calendar is just about the second-most important feature of the website. The website became dysfunctional: what to do?

Probably the best event calendar is The Events Calendar by Modern Tribe. Problem is that it didn’t play nice with our theme. I use an older Twenty Fourteen theme, with a child theme, Fourteen Press, too. Since The Events Calendar wasn’t working, I went with Sugar Calendar. Mostly, I liked that it exports and imports JSON instead of ICS or CSV.

I have my regrets, though.

We paid $100 for it, and as mentioned in the previous quarterly inventory, finances were already so tight that we had had to cut our one employee’s hours 20%. The other regret is that support in the WordPress world is clownish. I tried to get a technical support call going, and they replied that they don’t do support sessions. They want me to create a user on the website with admin privileges and then send them the name and password so they can root around, fixing things.

WTF?

Okay, sure, I’ve got the home lab thing going, and I can copy the website here, and let them root around in the copy of the website, but … this is ridiculous and idiotic. I feel like a fool contemplating the idea.

The third regret is that they advertise that their event calendar can also do ticket sales. Well, that is only true if you set up a Stripe account with them: they don’t do the other payment systems. We’ve got three, and none of them are Stripe. I wouldn’t be surprised if Stripe kicks back a part of the commission to their service partners. So the ticket sales idea was a waste of time for us.

The surveillance state makes things screwy

One of my volunteer service opportunities is to record speakers at meetings and then put the recordings on a website. I use the Sony ICD-UX570 Digital Voice Recorder, which I’ve talked about before. I take the MP3 file and edit it using Audacity, trimming off everything before and after the speaker. Then I export the audio with a smaller bitrate to make a smaller file. Lastly, I rename it and upload it.

Today, a friend called me, and asked if I could burn a recording to CD. His friend, the gentleman who spoke, is almost 80 years old, and he would be best served with a physical CD – none of this Podcast Feed nonsense or USB stick which his truck may or may not be able to use. Sure, I said. This should be easy.

Okay, first I tried Fedora Workstation KDE Spin and got errors. I tried Brasero first, but it was super grumpy. Then I tried K3B which is my old favorite, and it was grumpy too.

I gave up and went to a Windows laptop. Did I want to use Microsoft Windows Media Player or Apple iTunes?

I went with iTunes because I’m not a fan of anything Microsoft.

Freaking iTunes worked, but….

What the hell is the name on this CD?

audiocd:/Philip Kerr – 01 – Game Over – Track 01.wav?device=/dev/sr0

At 80 years old, I’d be acutely aware of my mortality.

Oh! That is certainly what I want this 80-year-old man to see when he pops this gift CD into his truck CD player display:

Philip Kerr - 01 - Game Over

If I’m him, there’s no way I don’t think to myself: What the hell? And then he’d have to say some Hail Mary’s to apologize to God for the cursing.

This gentleman’s name is not Philip Kerr. I did write his name in the various properties fields in iTunes. None of those appear to have come over.

I know that the music industry wants to keep tabs on every sound file ever, so they can in theory collect royalties. But this was my recording, done live and in-person.

This is just screwy.

And apparently, this isn’t a problem on the CD, it is a problem in Fedora. I didn’t know that yet. All I got was the Orwellian vibes.

Okay, back to Fedora KDE Spin.

Ooooooooffffffff.

Thank goodness for Perplexity.AI. It turns out to only be an 8 step problem.

One: Check group memberships – must be a member of cdrom – I’m good

Two: Adjust K3B settings

K3B > Settings > Configure K3B > Programs > Permissions > Change Permissions > Apply

Three: Add a system policy

sudo vim /etc/polkit-1/rules.d/85-cdrecord.rules
polkit.addRule(function(action, subject) {
    if (action.id == "org.freedesktop.udisks2.filesystem-mount-system" &&
        subject.isInGroup("cdrom")) {
        return polkit.Result.YES;
    }
});

Four: Restart services

sudo systemctl restart polkit

Five: Update udev rules

sudo vim /etc/udev/rules.d/99-cd-burner.rules
SUBSYSTEM=="block", KERNEL=="sr[0-9]*", MODE="0660", GROUP="cdrom"

Six: Reload udev rules

sudo udevadm control --reload-rules

Seven: reboot the computer.

Eight: try to burn the CD with K3B.

Thank goodness it worked.

I had forgotten that CDs are as small as they are. The older gentleman actually had two recordings on file, one for 45 minutes and another for 55 minutes. That’s too much for a single audio CD. Heh.

WordPress migration notes, part 3

Joy. Not.

I get to do a migration from my existing website to a new instance of WordPress on a new (virtual) machine.

This is the website I maintain as a volunteer service for a fellowship I am a part of. I’m the web servant, and have been since 2017. I originally inherited the static HTML website from a gentleman who wrote it in Microsoft FrontPage 98. But a few months later, a member showed me an app that helps our members find meetings. That app was written by a member, and is easiest to implement as a WordPress plugin. “I guess I’m learning WordPress now” was my 2017 motto.

Indeed, I wrote a whole new website using WordPress and incorporated the meeting finder plugin. I’ve been maintaining the website ever since. Five months ago, I migrated it from Bitnami on Amazon Lightsail, to straight Debian on Linode. For five months, it ran fine, mostly. Twice in the five months, MariaDB crashed due to an out-of-memory error.

Today, it cannot get but a few hours before MariaDB crashes due to an out-of-memory error. Something changed, but I don’t know what.

So I have created a new Debian virtual machine on Linode, and am installing WordPress on it. What follows are a few notes about the process.

I spun up a shared hosting Linode on the Nanode 1 GB plan. I should mention that this website doesn’t get but a thousand or two hits per month, and we recently had to cut our office manager’s pay 20% because inflation is hurting everyone and donations are down. More than $7 per month would be wasteful, and us not being good stewards of our member’s money.

So, Debian is installed, and I ran updates, and it is time to start configuring the new server. I’m still using only the IP address to get to the new machine, and will have to configure Let’s Encrypt / Certbot later.

First things first:

Vim was preinstalled, which was nice. That left picking my default editor:

update-alternatives --config editor

Next, I want to customize my bash shell:

vim ~/.bashrc

I commented in the aliases for ll and l and the export command for ls to use --color=auto

Then I added at the end:

alias ..='cd ..'
PS1="\[\033[0;32m\]\u\[\033[0;37m\]@\[\033[0;35m\]\h \[\033[0;34m\]\W\[\033[0;31m\]\$\[\033[0m\] "

Next, I set the host name:

hostnamectl set-hostname www.example.org

I think I rebooted, and then got back in.

apt install apache2 -y
systemctl status apache2
apt-get install php8.2 php8.2-cli php8.2-common php8.2-xml php8.2-mysqli php8.2-zip php8.2-curl libapache2-mod-php -y

This is similar to what is being described at Rose Hosting, but with a few changes.

I’m leaving out php8.2-imap, php8.2-redis, php8.2-snmp, and php8.2-mbstring. I know that I don’t have a need to do IMAP to a mailbox, because this small 1 GB1 RAM machine won’t be hosting a mail server. With “only” 1 GB of RAM, I need run as little excess code as possible. Likewise, I’m leaving out Redis because it really expects a minimum of 8 GB of RAM. I’m not planning on exposing SNMP to the outside world, so that can go. And I don’t see that I’ll ever need multibyte strings, so php8.2-mbstring is out.

Next is the database:

apt install mariadb-server -y
mysql_secure_installation
mariadb
systemctl enable mariadb

When I logged in to MariaDB, I did the Step 5. Create a WordPress database and user from the Rose Hosting page.

However, I used the same user name and password as on the old website. This is because I want to use the same wp-config.php from the old server. This has complications later.

Because of the low RAM situation and Automattic’s getting wasteful with other people’s money, instead of wget https://wordpress.org/latest.zip I brought in wordpress-6.5.5.tar.gz

Although I did this, Automattic is arrogant enough to know better than me, and upgraded me to the latest version anyway. I had to downgrade, manually. I would later have to add a plugin to prevent WordPress from upgrading itself.

WordPress was extremely grumpy and would not let me get to the administration pages to run the update permalinks action.

And at some point, WordPress got all messed up. It was a similar problem as talked about here, but it didn’t have the Bitnami components to it; only the wp-config.php. Since I brought in that file from the old server, I didn’t have to edit it, but now two records inside the database don’t match the configuration.

I was also trying to bring in the Apache configuration files from the old server. I don’t recall if I fixed Apache first, or WordPress first.

Since I had brought in the Apache configuration files from the old server, there were directives in the configuration files which needed to be met. This meant running the following, because Apache wouldn’t load without them:

a2enmod rewrite
a2enmod ssl

I did bring the configuration files in, but now Apache is grumpy about the missing SSL configuration. I needed to copy in the files from the Let’s Encrypt install.

If I recall correctly, this got Apache running, but WordPress was pretty messed up because it thought the root of the website was under /wordpress/ instead of under the base directory of /

There were two things I needed to do. One was to edit .htaccess in the WordPress directory:

RewriteBase /
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

Both of these previously referred to /wordpress/ instead of /

The other thing I needed to do was to log in to MariaDB and run:

UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = REPLACE(option_value, 'http://172.16.1.1/wordpress', 'http://172.16.1.1/') WHERE option_name = 'siteurl';

UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = REPLACE(option_value, 'http://172.16.1.1/wordpress', 'http://172.16.1.1/') WHERE option_name = 'home';

Where 172.16.1.1 is a placeholder for the actual IP address of the running server.

And finally, I have a base WordPress install with the default theme, and the same admin password and path as the old server.

Now to migrate the old content over. I need to remind myself that I “get” to do this. Serenity Now! Serenity Now! Serenity Now!!!

  1. It amuses me to put the word “small” next to the phrase “1 GB RAM”. The first computer I ever programmed (in 1979) was a mini-mainframe with 4 KB of RAM. ↩︎

Time with family can be hard

When I started this blog, I had three goals in mind:

  • Learn WordPress, and have content to play with for things like upgrades, migrations, and figuring out how WordPress works.
  • Provide technical tips, tricks, and recipes for doing computer things, primarily on Linux.
  • Writing content that expresses my opinions.

If I’m honestly looking at my own motivations, that last one holds the most appeal to me.

I’m old enough to be a grumpy old man, but I’m also old enough to know that opinions without solutions are terrible reading. No-one wants to listen to a whiner.

In fact, one of the defining moments of my life was when my dad was exasperated with me, and he exclaimed at me something I needed to hear at that time:

Anyone can whine about things; useful is providing a solution.

My dad, when I was about thirteen years old and whining about something big time

So, I’m up north with family for Christmas vacation. Dealing with family can be hard. I have two solutions: have another community I can escape to (my volunteer service community), and have my computer I can escape to.

Yesterday was day four of cabin fever with the whole family. My brothers and mother had exhausted watching all the movies and YouTube they could stand. They wanted to do something, anything, that wasn’t watching more television. YouTube is simply television without the cost overhead of paying writers, producers, and talent. My brother’s television set comes with YouTube, with embedded advertising. It sucks, mightily. YouTube also has the problem that it gives a platform to total con-men who are looking for marks to prey upon. This really isn’t any different from the television preachers who pitch salvation for dollars.

And I get it: if my life were that empty, I’d be easily preyed upon, too.

At this point in my blog, I’d like to do a 4,000-word essay on the problems of American life where our government and media conspire to drive us to be consumers of crap to fill the void in our life, instead of healthy and useful. But all that would really boil down to is this:

As an aside, I really like Stephan Pastis’ comic strip, and buy his page-a-day calendar every year. Most days are at least mildly amusing, and some days produce actual laugh-out-loud moments. Some days are profound. Not that I’m trying to convince you to buy stuff to fill the void in your life….

So, back to my family. We all suffer from a lack of purpose in life. I’ve got it the least bad: I’m still employed with a place that pays me well, and (although I hate my job) I’m working toward my retirement.

Mom never did take my step-sons in as her grandkids, and neither of my brothers got married and produced kids either. So my mom tends toward self-pity, having gone through the trouble of raising us boys, but not getting the benefit of grandchildren. She does take care of Frank, the man she partnered with after a year of being a widow. So that gives her purpose. She also had to specifically decide to go out and socialize. She has friends she visits to play Majong, and a club called Gadabouts, and Red Hat Society club.

One of my brothers was forced into retirement early, and hasn’t found the motivation to get a job. He’s actually a superb cook, and this last week he has been cooking all our meals. The meals have been delicious. But in his off-time, all he does is watch videos and sleep. Clearly, he is depressed. I hope he can find a purpose in life.

My other brother has always had a rough life. He works in a low-end job, and tends to get restless, irritable, and discontent with whatever job he has. The longest stretch where he was happy was in Death Valley, where he worked from 2003 to 2021. But the HR lady there went woke, and as soon as the trans asshole showed up and started their bullying, the HR lady sided with the trans asshole, and my brother quit. Now he’s up here in a cold, dismal town where it rains nine months out of the year. In his off-time, all he does is watch videos and listen to re-runs of Art Bell’s Coast to Coast AM. I hope he can find a purpose in life.

So how do I find purpose in life?

Volunteer service is the obvious win for me here. The particular people I spend time with consider ourselves a fellowship; this is a good name for our community. Although I had to go through hell to face the fact that I needed help, once I got into this fellowship of help, my life turned 180° around. I can help because I’ve been through the same hell that all newcomers are going through.

If I didn’t have this, I hope I would have found a church fellowship to be a part of.

I do have a circle of friends on the Internet. We met on Slashdot more than 22 years ago. Back in 2019, one of our friends died, and 21 of us went (most of us flew) to Seattle to attend his celebration of life. Although I still communicate with these friends, it isn’t daily like it used to be. Half of them came down with TDS, and the community split in two. But at one time, there were more than 80 of us. This digression brought to you by:

There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance—that principle is contempt prior to investigation.

William Paley (1743-1805)

Half of my circle of friends on the Internet have contempt, prior to investigation, regarding God.

I thank God that I am not one of them. I have plenty of evidence that something out there, supernatural and surpassing understanding, is an active agent in my1 and other people’s life. Point being, that if I weren’t in the fellowship I’m in, I would hope I would become a part of a religious fellowship.

Volunteering down at a soup kitchen would be good for my soul.

Any sort of volunteering would be good for my soul.

I also have plans (or perhaps they are dreams) of writing a lot of code when I retire. Priority 1 is obviously more exercise. After that, I want to write some code to lay out Factorio blueprints, and build the software that manages the tree structures needed to lay out connected pieces in sensible ways. Ultimately, I intend to write a flow charting-based integrated development environment based on Nassi-Shneiderman flowcharts. I’d like to use the IDE to write a video game loosely based on the book of The Legacy of Heorot.

Back to my volunteer service: there are two different offices which are either directly related or tangentially related; I plan of volunteering at both after I retire2. They also need a newsletter editor, and I’d love to write a system in LaTeX to import the various documents and format them consistently. I’m not terrible with Perl, so I think I can work up a nice system of opening files with LibreOffice, converting them to plain text, formatting them the way I want, and then adding back in whatever italics, boldface, super- or sub-scripting elements were in the original. I already do the website for one of them.

So yesterday, everyone was frustrated that this time together had gotten so boring. But I’m not bored because I know “This too, shall pass.”, and, I have other outlets.

I hope, dear reader, that you too can find other outlets.

Volunteering my time and effort gives me a high-quality purpose in life. My self-worth goes up when I am helpful.

I hope you can find ways to grow your self-worth and purpose.

Merry Christmas.

  1. When I let Him. ↩︎
  2. One of them is a 501(c)(3), and for the next five days, I am president of the board of directors. That, plus $5, will get me a coffee at Starbucks. Not that I’d ever go to Starbucks, they’ve gone woke. Anyway… the other is probably also a 501(c)(3) but I haven’t tried becoming a board member yet. Having a day job is not conducive to being of service there. ↩︎

Quarterly inventory – 2024 Q3

Dear FutureMe,

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

How is your personal life going?

How is your work life going?

How is your Volunteer Service life going?

Future me

Personal Life

Not really a whole lot going on. I have flat feet, and so when I recently got to be Master of Ceremonies at a volunteer service event, I wore my nicest shoes, but all that time in them injured my left foot something fierce. Here a week later, my foot still hurts.

I’d injured my foot several weeks back. My son had told me about Hoka shoes, and indeed they are like walking on marshmallows. Between them and keeping my foot elevated while sitting, I’d recovered. But then I felt the need to dress as sharp as I could for the event, and I re-injured my foot.

Yesterday I was rather depressed. That shows up rarely, maybe two times in a quarter, but it was present yesterday.

I had a ton of fun about a month ago, migrating one of my volunteer service websites to a new host. I moved from Amazon Lightsail to Linode. I was thrilled that the move went so smoothly, so I did it again, this time to my internal Proxmox server, documenting the whole thing for that blog post.

Oh – and I gave up on OpenSuSE and moved my main machine to Manjaro.  Manjaro has been pretty good.  I wish the KDE tilling window manager script worked on it; although I can keep hitting meta+arrow to tile windows, it is kind of dumb that I have to.  This is a KDE problem, not a Manjaro problem – but because I did migrate, I also got the KDE “upgrade”.  That would have happened had I stayed on OpenSuSE too.

Work Life

If $34,000 dropped into my lap today, I would retire tomorrow. I did finally clear my retirement service credit buy-back. I talked about that in Quarterly Inventory 2023 Q2. It is done. Magically, I gained 6.1 years of service credit overnight. The better part is that it frees up $300 per month, which I need because of inflation.

We added a new product, Kiteworks, to replace a service that Proofpoint exited. So far, the Kiteworks company and support are terrible. Because Proofpoint has been going down in quality because of the sell-out to Thoma Bravo, I wouldn’t be surprised if the reason they (Proofpoint) recommended Kiteworks is that they got a kickback. I have zero evidence of that, but it seems to me like the kind of thing Thoma Bravo would do. Anyway, Kiteworks sucks: would not recommend. I’ll probably do a blog post about it later; but there are four problems:

  • The interface is somewhat opaque, and difficult to figure out where particular things are, when I need to change them.
  • There is no documentation. What documentation there is, is from three years ago when the service was vastly different: it in no way applies to the product today.
  • The implementation engineer didn’t explain to us what the effects of the choices were, so we deployed badly to 2,200 of 5,000 users. 5,000 users would have been blindsided with a surprise “what the hell?” situation, except that we caught it some 1,800 users in.
  • So … we’ve had a stable environment for several years now, we’ve deployed Kiteworks, and 1% of machines the Outlook Plugin is deployed to are now crashing randomly and silently, losing all work, … and your technical support is blaming Outlook? Repair Outlook and the problem will go away? Re-image the machine to a fresh image and the problem will go away? Y’all are clowns. How many sets of log files do I have to upload before y’all will start looking at the problem? The problem is Kiteworks Outlook Plugin. We did not have this problem prior to installing your program. If there were a virtual clue-by-4 I could deploy over the Internet, you’d be badly bruised right now.

I’m not really enjoying work right now. I’m thankful I have a good boss, though. He’s great.

Volunteer Service Life

I very much enjoyed being Master of Ceremonies at our Fall event. The speaker was wonderful. It didn’t hurt that he grew up and joined our fellowship 45 miles north of here. The whole event was great.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned that this year I get to be President of the Board on our little 501(c)(3) here. That job title, plus $5, will get you a fancy coffee at Starschmucks.1

Anyway, it weighs on me that our finances are not sound. We previously had a member who contributed $1,200 per month to our Central Office, and he died three years ago. We’d gotten a $6,000 refund on taxes due to Covid-19 and keeping our employee on the payroll, so it looked like we had money. During Covid-19 a meeting started up in a shack, off-the-record, to avoid government interference. Well, last August, they hooked up a second air conditioning unit in serial (electrically) and then overnight the shack burned to the ground. People showed up for the 7:00 AM meeting to find smoke and embers. No injuries, thankfully. Well, that meeting contributed $300 per month, and poof, that’s gone. Between this and inflation putting the hurt on everyone, our Central Office contributions are not meeting our expenses. We’re going to have to fire or reduce the hours of our single part-time employee. It is depressing.

I’ve got another website, which hosts recordings of speaker meetings. Something in WordPress 6.6 caused it trouble, so I downgraded to WordPress 6.5. But now the login screen takes two minutes to complete. That box is on Ubuntu, and I’d like to migrate to Debian instead. So I need to do a migration again (mentioned above), but I also need to schedule that with the guy who does most of the uploads to it. I don’t have analytics running on it, either, so I don’t have a good feel for what days / times of day it is least used.

  1. I first read that joke in 1981 or 1982, in the Garfield comic, where Jim Davis was commenting on inflation. A cup of coffee went from 25 cents to a dollar at restaurants. Jon made some inane observation and Garfield replied with “that, and a buck will get you a cup of coffee.” When Starbucks became popular in the mid 1990’s I revived the joke with the Starbucks attribution. I still see it being used once in a while on Slashdot or Reddit. ↩︎

Quarterly Inventory 2024 – Q2

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.

One event that was noteworthy was that my 86-year-old mom was in the hospital for three days, (well, four, if waiting in the emergency room waiting room counts as “in”), with a C-diff gut biome infection. Apparently, an antibiotic she was taking for an eye infection allowed Clostridioides difficile to run amok.

I’ve been a little sad and depressed about how much WordPress work I need to do. This blog needs to be moved to a new server, but I really don’t want to take all the crap along, that the various plugins have added to the database, never to leave. That is a more complicated migration than just shipping all the junk over. “Complicated” is proving disheartening to document and plan. I have another couple WordPress sites to migrate in the volunteer service life category, too.

I had a need to edit a PDF; I get to submit an application to our local Sheriff’s office to meet with people about to leave incarceration. The good news is that Firefox (my favorite browser) has PDF editing capabilities now. Alas, the PDF application form wants signature and initials. The bad news is that Firefox ESR is version 115, and adding graphics to PDFs doesn’t show up until version 119. So I need to upgrade. I tried to upgrade from OpenSuSE Leap 15.6 to OpenSuSE Tumbleweed Slowroll, but the ISO image is broken and spontaneously reboots almost immediately after booting. Now my main machine is broken, big time. I installed Debian with KDE. That worked fine, except guess what else uses Firefox ESR version 115? At least I was back up and functional, but now I need to find a rolling release with KDE. I tried PCLinuxOS. It was quite amusing to me that they call themselves The Boomer Distribution. Technically, I’m a Boomer, although when the real Boomers were off doing drugs sex and rock-and-roll at Woodstock, I was 8 years old and discovering that I liked reading / wasn’t great at sports.

Anyway, I gave up on PCLinuxOS after a week. I couldn’t get Steam to work, and the PCLinuxOS forums don’t let me just sign up: I’d have to email some guy at a Google email address my preferred User ID and password. Yeah, no – I’m out.

I have installed Manjaro. I like it pretty well. I have become a part of the Oh by the way, I use Arch club.

There are still things I want to tweak, to make using it smoother. But it does run Steam, and it does run KDE with Kröhnkite. I’m happy with this.

Work Life

If $39,000 dropped into my lap today, I would retire tomorrow.

One fun thing sprung out of taking on printers and the print server. It had a problem because old printers would be deleted from the print server, but not from the client workstations that used to print to them. Some portion of 5,000+ workstations printing to 830+ printers were configured for more printers that are no longer there. I’m guessing that about 5% of the workstations are configured for printers which no longer exist. Microsoft Windows apparently just pounds on the print server, asking if the (deleted) printer is back online yet. I’d be curious if they abuse their own print server that way. They probably don’t have a print server because network printing is hard.

Anyway, I get to bring in a print server log file, parse it for missing (deleted) printers, and generate a service ticket to have the desktops group visit the user and remove the missing (deleted) printer. Of course, one user can have multiple deleted printers, and I don’t want to generate six tickets for six printers for one user. I’ve been getting to keep track of these in a Maria DB database, and doing all sorts of Perl scripting to help me with this mini-project. It has been fun.

The other aspect is that I got print server reboots to work in about a minute; where before it was problematic. If there were more dead printers than Apache threads, the server would get into a deadlock, waiting for the dead printer threads to time out – but the polling cycle was faster than all of them could time out. Oof.

Volunteer Service Life

I still have too many volunteer service commitments. One dropped off on May 19. The event was successful, with 178 people attending from all over northern California. Another dropped off on June 8, when the Founder’s Day Picnic was over. We were hoping to feed 300 people, but only 83 showed up. I had been flying pretty blind on this one. We came out in the black, but only barely.

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. ↩︎

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.