Good morning, and a happy Thursday to you all. Today is the last day of the month of a leap year, 29 February 2024.

There will be kids born today that will have an interesting shared attribute… a real birthday every four years. I need to head over to Facebook to see who has birthdays today and give them an extra little cheer.

Check that… I just took a quick look at the February 29th birthdays, and one name was on that list… and she passed away in September of 2022. I’m guessing this would have been her 60th (15th?) birthday.

I’ve got coffee brewing, and, for those of you who have read my posts this week, yes, I was able to locate another slice of my wife’s breakfast casserole yesterday. That was a great way to start the day. Today will be a little different… breakfast will include a new pill to treat my elevated cholesterol. Heart pill, aspirin, and vitamin at night, anti-anxiety and cholesterol meds in the morning.

I jumped online with the guys last night. We picked up where we left off in C.B.’s world and engaged in battle with some sort of weird stoney ice beasts with tendrils. The dice seemed to like me at first, but quickly grew bored with me, like a first-year college romance. We survived, so that’s a win. Interestingly enough, he named the creatures Harvey, Tim, Lyle, and Vicki… a nice homage to the classic Carol Burnett show. He cracks me up.

I have my last day of class today, and we’ll be covering Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery, then Monitoring and Log Analytics. This group has been a lot of fun to work with this past week. After I get done, I have a little recording to do for a side project at work, and then it will be time to turn my attention to the month-long course I’ll be delivering next month with a fellow trainer based in the Toronto area. We’ve worked together before, and we have pretty good virtual classroom chemistry.

It’s about that time, I guess.

I hope the world is treating you better than you deserve.

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 349

Good morning, and a happy Wednesday to you. It is 28 February 2024.

Looks like Texas has a nasty wildfire going on in the panhandle. 370 thousand acres. I know the winds were nuts at my place in Kansas yesterday, and I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that part of Texas hasn’t had the winter precipitation they hoped for, leaving the prairie pretty dry.

Writer’s block… I need to pause for a moment to ponder what I want to write about.

My senior dog, Lucy, is getting up there, 12 years old now. We suspect she has some visual and cognitive issues. She is OK jumping up on my leg rest, but won’t use the little dog staircase in front of the couch for the younger dogs… who are now 3.

Last night was not a good night for sports fan Bob. My Jayhawks lost at home for the first time in 20 games, losing to a 3-point shooting BYU squad. We were up by 12 at one point and ended up losing by 8. The next three games will not be fun with two road trips to Texas to play Baylor and Houston, and a home game against K-State. It’s within the realm of possibility that Kansas could close out the regular season losing four games in a row.

My class went well yesterday, as I expected for “networking day”. I hope the folks in attendance had a good experience. They seemed to.

I did get a call from the doctor’s office yesterday. Time to add high cholesterol to my list of stuff to watch. My doctor is putting me on another medication to treat that, and then we’ll run some more blood tests in April when I go in for my follow-up.

Lisa asked me to keep an eye on deliveries today. We have a neighbor dog that likes to make packages on our porch as his territory.

Time for me to grab a cup of coffee and see if there’s a hidden piece of that corned beef breakfast casserole lurking in the fridge. Otherwise, it’s toast and peanut butter.

I hope the world is treating you better than you deserve.

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 348

Good morning, and happy Tuesday to you! If you plan your day appropriately, there will be TACOS! Today is 27 February 2024.

I had a good first day with my class yesterday. It’s a small class for me, with about twenty folks in attendance, most based in the Tampa/St Petersburg area of Florida. I introduced a few of them to generative AI for the creation of Teams backgrounds, and there were a couple of enthusiastic creators. It’s always fun to try out a prompt at https://bing.com/create .

Today is my favorite day in this particular course – networking day. It’s just the old infrastructure dog in me enjoying the binary math of TCP/IP. All the fun of networking without having to run coaxial cable through a high school cafeteria wall.

I’ve received a couple of nice comments from friends, old and new, and I am grateful. My motivation for writing is kind of two-fold, as I’ve shared with you in the past. I believe in creating good habits – heaven knows I’ve done a pretty fair job at creating bad ones in the past. The other motivation is to get things written down for my granddaughter and other grandkids that might pop into the family tree at some later date. I need to write it down now, as a person never knows what maladies might render a person unable to get experiences recorded. I ponder what weird stuff might be going on in my brain at any given time – am I all there? Is there a weak blood vessel sitting in some lobe of my brain waiting to pop like a tiny little bomb in my head? Is that little tremble in my hand something normal at my age, or is it a telltale sign of something else?

Anyway – thanks for taking a little time to read my blog posts. Thank you for the kind words.

Oh, a follow-up from yesterday – the gamemaster from my Sunday game reached out, and it’s not a “TPK” yet. We’re still in the fight.

Coffee is done brewing, and there’s one more slice of Lisa’s corned beef breakfast casserole from Sunday. I’ll douse that with a little sweet pepper sauce and get something in my stomach. I’m supposed to eat with my morning pill, the new medication I’m taking to treat some of my anxiety issues. I don’t think I’ve had a panic attack since I started, so I’m going to assume it’s working.

Tonight… there will be tacos. I believe there will be an onslaught of generative AI pictures featuring old guys eating tacos today… some possibly coming from my mischievous prompt-writing mind.

I hope the world is treating you better than you deserve.

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 347

Good morning, and happy Monday to you all. Today is 26 February 2024.

I need to keep my mind sharp and remember that there are 29 days in February this month, not 28, leap years being what they are.

I’m getting going a little earlier today for a change. My class this week is on Eastern time—four days of cloud administration for a particular customer. I’m confident we’ll have a pretty good week. With the earlier start, I got up and started brewing a pot of coffee, and as soon as I’m done getting this in the can, I’ll reheat a piece of the corned beef breakfast casserole Lisa made yesterday.

Yesterday was a good day. It was my five-year anniversary with my employer. I came here after a sixteen-year stint with my previous employer, Centriq Training in Kansas City. I received an email about the award people receive after five years, a crystal desk sculpture. I’m looking forward to displaying it when it arrives.

On Saturday, Lisa and I went and did a little seed shopping. We picked up pepper, tomato, herb, and some other veggie seeds to get started in our AeroGardens. I’m hoping we’ll have seedlings ready to plant in the first week or two of April.

I got together with some of the guys yesterday for a gaming session. We were missing a couple of party members due to other responsibilities, so the strength of the party was dialed back, but the strength of the opponents was a little more than we could handle. I had to bail at my usual time, but the party forecast was cloudy with a chance of a TPK… total party kill. Usually, when something like this happens, I’ll get a text message or FaceBook messenger letting me know that through some miracle the party survived. Today I may not receive such a message. I think it’s more likely that I’ll hear that the big bads are holding onto my character’s remains and will return them if the surviving party members perform some sort of errand.

Coffee is done, and it’s time to get my breakfast reheated.

Hey – I appreciate you. Thanks for reading my stuff. I know it’s not ground-breaking or worthy of any sort of award, but that’s not why I do it. It’s simply about creating a writing habit.

In the meantime…

I hope the world is treating you better than you deserve.

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 344

Happy Friday, everybody! Today is 23 February 2024.

I’ve been taking my health more seriously this year, both physically and mentally.

On the physical side, I’ve made a move to address a couple of issues I have deferred for too long. I’m currently taking medication to address some of my anxiety issues, hoping that a decrease in my anxiety issues will knock over a couple of other dominos. I haven’t had a full-blown panic attack since I started the medication, and I’m also hoping that this addresses my blood pressure spikes. There are other side effects, of course, but that’s to be expected. All in all, I’m feeling alright… better anyway.

The other issue I addressed yesterday was my hearing. I went in for a full-spectrum audiology evaluation, and the results were not unexpected. I have some hearing loss, more in my right ear than my left, and we need to keep an eye on it. The range in my right with the noticeable decrease is in a range common to sportsmen and musicians. I’m not much of a shooter, but I have gone to a few concerts and driven around with music cranked up as loud as I could stand it when I was a kid.

I’ve got some other aspects of my life I want to focus on, but the main thing is just trying to become the best version of myself that I can. I make an effort to be a good person, make good decisions, and read the right books, but I’m flawed, some might say I’m a little broken, but I’m open to a little spiritual kintsugi… repair me, and do it with lacquer mixed with gold, silver, and platinum. Highlight the repairs, and let the world see that I’m not afraid to get myself patched up.

Time to make a pot of coffee and get a little toast in me.

I hope the world is treating you better than you deserve.

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 343

Good morning, and a happy Thursday to you. Today is 22 February 2024.

Phone service is being interrupted all across the country this morning. My wife immediately pondered that this could be a trial run by hackers before the coming November election.

Heather Cox Richardson wrote an interesting opinion piece the other day. For those following the impeachment talks sponsored by Comer and Jordan in the House of Representatives. The primary witness that Comer and Jordan have presented as credible has been charged with lying… and admitting that the allegations the witness presented were originally sourced from Russian intelligence.

The Russians want Trump in the White House. They know that he can be manipulated and would do their bidding regarding the war in Ukraine and other parts of the world. The Russian media have claimed him as their favorite American pet.

The US foreign adversaries are looking up and down at the United States for weakness. Electrical infrastructure, water, internet, communications. I will be paying close attention to possible “trial runs”, where the infrastructure gets attacked, brought down, then restored, followed by all of the activity logs getting erased.

Find Heather Cox Richardson’s post from 21 February 2024. It’s an interesting read.

I’m going to get some breakfast and get ready for my trip to the audiologist to get my hearing checked. I’m overdue for a comprehensive test on my hearing. Today is the day.

I hope the world is treating you better than you deserve.

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 342

Good morning, and a happy humpday to you all. Today is 21 February 2024.

There was a time in my life that I wondered what life would be like in 2024. Now I sit here with a computer on my lap, connected to the entire world, and the news is on in the background, being shown on a huge flat-panel screen I could only have imagined as a kid.

I remember when a 19″ television screen was big. That evolved into one of those oversized console televisions that took two people to move if you wanted to run a vacuum cleaner.

There are some aspects of life that I kind of hoped for but have yet to pass. Vehicles on the road have four wheels or two wheels, with the occasional three-wheeled oddball made in Canada or overseas. Of course, there are delivery vehicles and long-haul vehicles that have more wheels, but there aren’t any flying cars preparing to lift off the highway. It might happen someday, but I don’t expect to see the sky filled with flying cars in my lifetime.

The big play of the day is Artificial Intelligence. I use it daily. It can do some pretty amazing things, including helping me organize my day. I’ll be throwing a few queries into CoPilot after I’m done with this blog – I already used it to generate a list of five blog prompts and one of the ideas was to talk about technology, where we came from, where we are, and where we’ll be going.

It’s pretty amazing, even without the flying cars.

I hope the world is treating you better than you deserve.

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 341

Good morning, and a happy Taco Tuesday to you all. Today is 20 February 2020.

I just about had a panic… the time on my laptop was off by 12 hours, and I thought I had lost track of days worse than normal. I still made a mistake with my YouTube stuff, though. I’ll have to record a different post for later. I thought I was up for today’s post, but I was off a day.

I recently listened to an executive book summary about time management. I just flipped through my Headway library, and it keeps track of my history, but I have listened to so many summaries of late, I can’t remember which summary it was. I do remember the primary theme, though – if time is money, how do you manage your investment? It’s giving me a little pause. I need to keep that idea in mind as I work through my prep week. I need to stay focused on several important tasks and avoid distractions.

I’ll be making a run to the doctor’s office in a bit. I need to get some bloodwork done.

One area of interest for me is generative AI, and how it can help with many workplace, and homeplace, tasks. I was having a writer’s block moment, and went to Microsoft’s CoPilot prompt in the upper right corner and asked the AI to help me out with a prompt for my blog, and it gave me this:

“Explore how artificial intelligence and automation are reshaping the job market. Discuss the potential benefits, such as increased efficiency and the creation of new job categories. Also, consider the challenges, including the need for re-skilling and the ethical implications of displacing human workers. Offer insights on how individuals and organizations can prepare for these changes to ensure a future where technology and human talent coexist harmoniously.”

It’s an interesting topic, but a little deeper than what I want to get into with a 200-word blog post… but I will say that the AI writes a pretty good post. I need to dig a little deeper into that functionality later today.

In the meantime, I’ll get the rest of my day sorted, and make plans for tacos at the end of the day.

I hope the world is treating you better than you deserve.

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 340

Good morning, and happy Monday to you all. It is the beginning of a new work week. Today is 19 February 2024.

Today is President’s Day, one of those days on the calendar that read as a federal holiday, but in reality, it’s just another day of work for most Americans. I’ve got plenty to keep me busy as I have some emails to get out, a newsletter to write, and a couple of certifications/credentials to focus on. I think I have a Youtube segment to record as well. One of the guys on that Youtube team is taking some time away, so some of us need to step up and cover some extra sessions.

I’ve been on some new medication for about a week now. I think it’s helping. My anxiety level seems to be a bit lower and more manageable. The goal is to rein in my anxiety to lower my blood pressure and reduce the chance of something bad happening. Irregular heartbeat, high blood pressure, and panic attacks are a bad combination. I feel ok right now, and I’ll take my pill with food here in a bit when I grab a bite to eat and get my first cup of coffee.

More stuff going on in the news. Trump is comparing himself to Navalny, the opposition leader in Russia that Putin killed off in a gulag north of the Arctic Circle. Of course, he did… meanwhile Trump acts as a Putin proxy in the US, pretty much doing everything he can to kill any kind of deal on the border or provide assistance to Ukraine. He has been pushing his new sneakers… no word if the new Trump kicks can cure bone spurs.

Kansas won a game on the road this last weekend. Road wins in the Big 12 are becoming a rarity for most teams, as the grinding schedule tenderizes just about every squad. KU has most of the week off, with no games scheduled during the week, and then action resumes on Saturday.

I’ll be back in my virtual classroom in another week for a four-day class, then I’ll have a month to focus on cloud solutions architecture.

I’m going to get this in the can and get started with my day. Lisa made fresh bagels yesterday (blueberry!), so breakfast became an easy choice today.

I hope the world is treating you better than you deserve.

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 337

Good morning, and happy Friday to you all. Today is 16 February 2024.

The news to open the day is that 47-year-old Alexey Navalny has died in prison in Russia. He was the leader of Putin’s political opposition and was a constant embarrassment to Putin and his corrupt government. Navalny repeatedly called out the Putin regime for their corruption and had been subjected to numerous assassination attempts, most famously the Novichok poisoning in August of 2020.

Usually, Putin’s critics have passed due to intense allergic reactions from 5 story falls from balconies. It looks like there has been a localized pandemic among journalists critical of Putin’s policies.

I’ll be back in my virtual classroom in a couple of hours to complete my week of Artificial Intelligence workshops. These workshops have been one of the most enjoyable experiences of my career. I’ve been doing the exercises at the same time as my attendees, and having the attendees provide me with prompts for the exercise. So far, I’ve modeled a German Biergarten in Munich, a SciFi theme park in the UK, a cruise ship-themed casino on the Las Vegas Strip, a steampunk-themed Skating Rink in the Florida Keys, a Harry Potter-themed resort/spa located in the Vatican City, and lastly, a futuristic natural history museum in Antarctica.

It has been an absolute joy.

Time to think about my next steps. It’s time to get going making coffee and getting the garbage out for pickup. Tomorrow, Lisa and I will celebrate our 28th wedding anniversary.

I hope the world is treating you better than you deserve.

Peace y’all.