Work life

Quarterly inventory – 2026 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

Near the end of July, I will retire from 37 years of “doing computers” for my employer.

I have done so.

I have yet to get a good routine going. On the other hand, I have had a day or four that were wonderful.

Mom is gravely ill

At the beginning of the year, she was fine, if a little unsteady on her feet. The underlying problem is that she wasn’t getting enough exercise. In years past, she would do some gardening and go on trips with Frank. There were four falls in four months, although thankfully, she hadn’t broken any bones. But she was unable to get back up on her own feet by herself. Her cardiac condition has been deteriorating, and her doctor forced a pacemaker on her. Within a day, she was in the emergency room at Kaweah Delta and couldn’t get herself out of bed. She’s been almost entirely bedridden ever since. From KDDH, she went to a physical rehabilitation nursing home but didn’t really make much progress. Insurance stopped paying, so now she is at home getting palliative care. I’m visiting almost every day, but her health is in slow decline.

Twitter/X

I deactivated my paid account on 2026-07-02 because these unhelpful people couldn’t figure out how to get me logged in via email with a second-factor via SMS. I never did find out why my account was flagged for lockout. My suspicion is that what I was reposting was deemed offensive by some, and they reported me, and no one at Twitter is tasked with reigning in butthurt bullies even when it leads to the loss of a paying customer. But it worked: I’m off Twitter now.

Weekend in Las Vegas

I tried mobile ticketing with the Las Vegas monorail, and that was a disaster.

Actually, on the way out of the monorail, there was a placard announcing “This way to Freedom Fest”. Huh, I had heard about that from the Andrew Heaton podcast. I looked up their agenda, and yes, I would have really liked to have heard from Andrew and Spike Cohen. I went to see how much it costs, and … $250 for the day. Oof, I’m out. By now it’s already 10 AM, and the day would have been over with by 4 PM (and there would have been downtime too as they break for lunch).

So now I’ve spent money for two nights on a hotel room, $50 for a mediocre breakfast, felt scammed by the monorail (although really it was just bad software programming), and essentially napped and played a video game. Just staying home would have been better. Well, I hoped Jimmy Carr would be funny.¹

But really, I would have been far better off getting a room in the Wynn, where the Jimmy Carr show was, and doing the Thursday night show (cheaper room rate) instead of the Friday night show. If I’d simply done a one-night stay and turnaround, I wouldn’t have tried to mess with the monorail, and I wouldn’t have had to walk outside in the heat and wouldn’t have paid for a rip-off breakfast buffet.

Retirement Life

I explored a few new computer languages to learn. I think I’ll go with Racket, which is a version of Lisp.

One thing I’ve wanted to do for four years now is to 3D print some button covers for my Anker PowerConf S500. There’s a whole story behind using it in a Zoom meeting every week as a portable microphone in a room of 30+ people, but fighting the fear of needing to scream at people: DON’T TOUCH THE BUTTONS!!!

And, by the way, stranger, welcome to the meeting. But please don’t touch the buttons.

That is to say, the Anker PowerConf S500 has four buttons on the front, but only one (the power button) is a press-and-hold-to-activate button. The other three are insta-kill for Zoom.² The middle button for answering a telephone call: wow, does that ever break Zoom. One must actually power down the PowerConf S500, unplug the dongle from the Zoom laptop, Windows registers the microphone as gone, plug the dongle back into the Zoom laptop, and then power up the PowerConf S500. Windows registers the microphone as present again. Zoom reattaches. Meanwhile, the online meeting attendees are filling the Zoom chat with messages that they cannot hear anything anymore.

It’s a little stressful.

The in-person people want to be helpful. They reach for the speakerphone to pick it up and hand it to the microphone runner. Sometimes they touch the insta-kill button. Sigh. ³

Nicely enough, the Racket programming language and the OpenSCAD computer-aided design program are a match made in heaven. Here’s my button:

This is from the underside; the top has smooth curves.

Anyway, this quarter, the real reason I bought the Anycubic Photon Mono resin 3D printer was realized. And I had a lot of fun getting Racket to emit an OpenSCAD file directly. The only thing I didn’t try was to get the edge that will be glued to the PowerConf S500 to curve in the same way that the PowerConf S500 curves. It doesn’t curve much, so glue ought to be enough to fill in the gap. But the perfectionist in me would like to find out the Bezier curve of the face where the three buttons poke out and then slice away that top plane (in the Z axis) to match the curve.

I have built one last mail relay server to replace one made in 2009. The one in 2009 was a big mistake (Tenets of IT #47). But to test it, I need to be able to use swaks from many places. The security team has been a little slow to update the firewalls to let boxes and networks talk to my new server. I finally got it done, and every time someone sends an undeliverable email, my server sends not just the bounce but the original message! This will vastly help the people who have configured systems with bad email addresses. Their biggest problem is identifying which system or process is generating the bouncing email.

I got my retirement going-away lunch on Wednesday, July 22, 2026. There were probably more than 25 but fewer than 30 people in attendance. I gave a speech about my 37-year journey in IT; I’d set the timer for seven minutes⁴ and finished up 15 seconds before the timer went off. 🙂

Volunteer Service Life

On the drive to Las Vegas, I listened to a fabulous podcast episode directly tying to what our organization does. It was just wonderful and made me grateful to go on the trip.

Clubhouse volunteer

I’ve started volunteering at a local clubhouse two days a week for 4 hours a day. Mostly, I’m a janitor, but I also run the cash register, selling sodas, bottled waters, and candy. There was a board meeting, and it looks like they would like me to become their IT guy too. Really, they need a server to run CiviCRM, but thankfully I was given a Raspberry Pi 5 as a retirement gift. My personality wants to price out a refurbished Dell Optiplex with an LSI 9207-8i connected to an ICY DOCK MB326SP-1B disk enclosure running TrueNAS over six SATA SSDs…. This project could quickly become unwieldy before I even start. A friend asked if I couldn’t just do it on a Raspberry Pi, and sure, I could.⁵ I just need to plan to eventually build a low-cost robust server and migrate away from the Pi. I also have a leftover Protectli Vault V1210, so I’ll set that up with HA Proxy to let the local box host CiviCRM and a Nextcloud instance.

Chairman for New Year’s Eve Party

I have volunteered to be the main planner/chairman of our New Year’s Eve party. The fun part so far has been that I recorded the audio of the two planning meetings (so far) and (installed and) used my local LLMs to turn the audio into summary documents. Next month, I’m going to ask if we can start buying a texting service so that I can use a web page for texting to communicate with volunteers.

SF 2026 Master of Ceremonies

For our most recent dinner-and-a-speaker event, I got to be emcee. A nice thing is that this service commitment gave me motivation to lose some weight, and I did drop twenty pounds over eight weeks. My clothes for the event certainly fit me better than if I had not lost the weight. A bummer is that I lost my hat. I loved that hat⁶⁷. Perhaps it will show up in some sort of lost-and-found box, but I probably won’t hear about that for a week.

Yes, he was funny. ↩︎
Well, two of the three are insta-kill; if you tap the Bluetooth button while already on Bluetooth, nothing happens. ↩︎
I actually sent in a product enhancement request to Anker for a firmware fix to make all the buttons press-and-hold-to-activate buttons but they didn’t implement that. I understand that: No company of mass market consumer appliances wants to complicate their technical support by first having to ask, “Which version of the firmware are you on?” Heck, how would anyone even figure that out? ↩︎
No-one remembers anything if one talks too long, so brevity is the essence of a good speech. 37 years in seven minutes, with thank-yous and everything! ↩︎
The major problem with using a Raspberry Pi as a server is that /var/log gets written to the SD card, and writing to it is continuous. SD cards are built to store data; they are not built for continuous writing – they wear out after months or a year or two. If you know that it will wear out and die, you build a routine of backing up the SD card periodically. Then when it dies, it’s not a catastrophic loss of data. ↩︎
I’m surprised that I didn’t post about my hat back in 2024. The first one I bought was from Etsy, for $32. It is a green baseball cap with embroidery that says “Make Orwell Fiction Again”. Along those lines, I later deleted my Google account. I wanted to buy these hats for Christmas gifts, so then I went with Rockatee, which was a mistake. Those were $27 apiece, but Rockatee didn’t deliver. Well, they didn’t deliver until I threatened to have my credit card company rescind the payment. But by that time, it was too late for Christmas. I placed a new order with Amazon, which did arrive in time, but those were $35 apiece. Rockatee shipped, so I ended up with product, and I did pay for them, and then I had extras to give away as gifts. ↩︎
I had deleted my Facebook account way before. ↩︎

End of an era for me

Yesterday was my last day of work for my employer. I am officially retired, after 37 years of “Doing computers” for them.

Mildly interesting, I also got an email from past me via https://www.futureme.org/:

The following is a letter from July 26, 2021, delivered from the past by FutureMe
Dear FutureMe,

Friday I powered off 80 of 81 servers, shutting down GroupWise at work. My 25 year career as a GroupWise administrator has been on hospice care for seven months now. Night before last, I pulled the plug on it.

I was sad, of course. I don’t actually agree with those people who say on their deathbed that they regret spending so much time at work. I built things. The work I did made other people’s lives better. I loved that job (until it changed, and I no longer did). There is a lot of good to say for becoming really competent at a big old complex thing.

But, with my career in seven months of hospice care, I managed to get to the acceptance level in my stages of grief. I was great at something no one wants anymore. Such is life.

The whole Microsoft world is such a mess. These people have the attention span of a five-year-old, and it shows. Competent they ain’t. Well, the PowerShell idea was a good one. And they often do get the different cats in the herd to step up and at least try to define their interfaces. But overall it is a wild mess.

Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of my non- GroupWise life. I hope something good comes along

P.S.: Did I call it? Microsoft now has their official Linux distribution: CBL-Mariner. Therefore, Windows 15 will really just be CBL-Mariner running WINE. 😉
Future Me

Five years ago, I was motivated to pay off my mortgage as soon as possible. I started paying $2,000 per month to get to zero. This was accomplished in November of 2025.

I had to drain my cash reserves a lot. My financial advisor had told me that she wanted me to have $25,000 in cash in the bank when I retired. I calculated when that would be and picked a date. Later I had to move it a week to better align with the company pay periods. But it was a happy coincidence that my retirement date was five years after I was made to shut down GroupWise.

I had even asked my manager if they would have given me a golden handshake to get rid of me; he ran it up the chain of command, and they said no. But if the truth is to be told, I was a crappy employee these last five years because my heart wasn’t in it. I needed about $20,000 to pay off my mortgage, and if they had left my position unfilled for seven weeks, that would have offset it. Then there would have been additional savings, as it would have taken a while (four years) for the promotion chain to bump people up from step 0 to step 5 (to where I was). So I stuck around. I needed the cash.

I did do everything that was asked of me during the migration to Exchange Online. Not only that, but I even learned some of the features that Exchange Online has that GroupWise will never have. But man, search in Exchange / Outlook sucks. It should be an embarrassment to all of management at Microsoft.

I also ran the project to get rid of Proofpoint to go all-Microsoft. We lost capability there too. But even though it sucked, I did what I was told.

My retirement going-away lunch was great. My co-workers were super kind. They got me a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8 GB of RAM. I hope they didn’t have to buy it new, because the price of RAM today is ridiculous, and it would have been too much money.

Another gift was a whole collection of Buc-ee’s steak grilling spices. I love it! I’ve never been to a Buc-ee’s yet, but I’ve been told that they are as large as a K-Mart used to be.

The cards people signed were enough to make a grown man cry.

I will be forever grateful for the path God put me on that let me be “The GroupWise Guy” for my employer for so many years.

Microsoft does the I.F.S. again.

I.F.S. = Incredibly Fucking Stupid

TL/DR: 5,000 workstations are hit with a surprise reboot in the middle of the morning because the policy says “Audit mode only” and the documentation doesn’t warn that “Oh by the way….”

At work, one of our security team members changed a policy in Microsoft Defender. The policy had a piece: Audit Mode Only.

When I read Audit Mode Only, I would believe that this would be a low-impact change. Nothing really is going to change, but some things will start to be logged. That’s what I would expect, and that’s what my co-worker expected.

Silly him. He hit Apply and 5,000+ machines got notified that they would be rebooted in 5 minutes. And then 2 minutes. And then all the work you have in progress was sent to go kick rocks.

If adding Audit Mode Only were going to impact things, wouldn’t it behoove Microsoft to warn people? Yeah, no, we’re talking about Microsoft here. Nowhere before the Apply button is one warned that one is about to reboot every machine in the organization.

Look at the date on that: 5 years ago. And four years later in the same thread, one guy reports still being hit with it.

Turns out that hitting Apply deploys the policy that won’t do anything but audit, but deploy does force a reboot. Surprise!

I think the biggest failing here is that for five years, Microsoft had a chance to put large warnings into the product about what will happen, and they did not.

The icing on this cake was that it happened at 10:30 AM on a Tuesday. Once per week, at 10 AM on Tuesdays, our highest elected officials hold a Public Meeting, in their chambers, where official business is conducted, with a couple hundred people in attendance. The timing couldn’t have been worse (or better, if the goal is to expose what clowns Microsoft are).

New Year, new Microsoft fuckup

At work, someone else on my team is responsible for pushing out desktop software, and the decision has been to remove Adobe Acrobat and use Microsoft Edge instead. That’s fine; I agree with simplifying the environment and only installing Adobe stuff if one has a license because one’s job is creating or editing PDF files. The fuckup is that Edge notified me this morning of a new feature in Edge: “We’re picking up where you left off. If you don’t want this feature, you can turn it off in Settings”

Liars.

The settings button is right there – the icon looks like a gear – but clicking it brings up only “Pin toolbar”, “Hide all annotations”, and “View document properties”.

No, the document properties don’t control anything.

Even Microsoft Copilot doesn’t know where this new setting is. It says it should be found behind the three dots menu … and inside that, the gear icon for Settings, and inside that, the Cookies menu, but that is fruitless.

Mostly, I’m complaining about two things:

Someone on the Edge team created a new gear icon for their random three settings, and QA didn’t reject it with “We already have a Settings section – put your stuff there!” No, they let the stupid design ship into production.
By making the new option default to “on”, Microsoft is reinforcing what is wrong with them: “it’s not your computer, we will do whatever the hell we want because it is our computer.”

Perhaps the fuckup is that upper management at Microsoft has so emasculated their QA department that they don’t have the ability to prevent stupid from shipping into production.

And as always, someone at Microsoft did not conceive that their new idea might be half-baked. “We’ve created a new feature! Of course everyone should be inflicted with it!”

Grrr.

Once per week, our help desk system runs a report I created, and it sends out a file attachment with the exact same file name. This is a report and does not need to stored long term – it is a snapshot of what happened during the last week. There is zero reason to add a date to the file name and end up with 52 new files per year. The idea that a new file with the old file name is a different file apparently didn’t occur to whomever was pushing the new feature.

What I don’t want, is to start reading this document on page 17. This week is a new file, even though the file name is the same. Last week, I got to page 17 because that is where the summary finished and the detail began. This week, I want to start on page 1, because that’s where the summary starts.

I would like the ability to disable this pick up where you left off feature¹, but that option appears missing in all the settings menus I could find.

So not only did Microsoft ship into production a duplicate gear icon with lame options, but they didn’t get the new option into the real settings. I cannot turn this new feature off.

I am so looking forward to retirement, when I won’t have to put up with Microsoft’s dysfunction.

Microsoft, famously as I remember it, was the inventor of the phrase “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature” a.k.a. “It is working as (poorly) designed. Pray that I don’t design it further.” ↩︎

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.

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.

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. ↩︎

I read your email

… is a bumper sticker a friend of mine gave me about two decades ago. I never did put it on my car because it would (rightly) freak people out. I did hang it up in my cubicle because … if you work for my employer, I may indeed read your email. You see, I’m the e-discovery guy.

Now really, I’m not going to read your email unless there is some lawsuit or public records act request that indicates your email should be included in the discovery. Even then, I’m not going to read any more than I have to, to verify that the e-discovery query I’ve created is operating properly.

Actually reading your email is a paralegal’s job, after I hand over the evidence, er, everything that matches the search query. Whether it qualifies as evidence needs to be determined by someone with legal training: not me!

I should probably mention that this is within a large organization’s email system, and all employees get training during the on-boarding process that email in our system is the property of the organization: there is no right to privacy here. We are a public sector organization, so anyone can file a public records act request for anything in our email system. Don’t do personal stuff in the corporate email!

There are two of us on the email discovery team. Lately, we’ve been working on the email retention project. We’re going to purge email older than each department’s retention period. It is crucial that we don’t purge items that need to be kept. So these last few days, I’ve been calling up people’s old email, and checking that the addresses of senders and recipients match the labels on the email. There’s about five million email to check; we will not be able to check every one. We’re spot checking.

But, in spot-checking, I really am making the bumper sticker come true. It’s generally tedious, too. If there’s an email address I don’t recognize, there might be a clue in the email thread as to which departments this email is between. So I may have to actually read the email, instead of simply scanning the addresses and labels.

This was a long-winded way of saying that a co-worker of mine sent himself an email in 2008 with a link to a web page article. What the heck: I’ll click that link.

Kudos to you techtarget.com – your link still works, fifteen years later. Impressive.

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).