Evie Day 271

Good morning, and welcome to my favorite day of the work week. Today is Tuesday 12 December 2023.

Yes Virginia, there will be tacos!

One of the tools I have loaded up on this WordPress site is a little tracker that shows me how many folks check out my site daily. I don’t have a multitude of visitors, but I am thankful for those of you who decide to drop by and read about what’s going on with me and where my head happens to be on any given day. I’m sure that there are several folks that question why I do not pull my head out of the place some believe it has been inserted. I’m not the most exciting guy on the planet, and that’s just fine. Maybe that just means that I’ve grown up a bit.

A bit… not completely. Let’s not get carried away.

I was reading an opinion piece about religious displays on government property in Iowa, and it’s interesting to the point where if a local government has to accept a display on behalf of one religion, then all others who want the same treatment get it as well. The local Satanic Temple decided to ask for the same recognition and received it… and folks are hacked off. It’s a combination of things – religious freedom and freedom of speech. There are a lot of folks who don’t like the Satanic display but have no problem with the nativity scene. If you have one, you have to allow all – Christianity (one flavor or the other) is not the state religion – we don’t have one. That was the intent of the separation of church and state. If you are going to allow one, you have to allow those to which a person might not endear themselves.

I made good progress on my security session for Friday. I think I have all of the content for the session and a few extras that I can pore over for interesting tidbits.

I’ve got a couple of hours until I start my Eastern Time Zone session at 8:00 AM local time. I better make a pot of coffee and get a little breakfast in me. Lisa made a breakfast pie on Sunday, and I’ll reheat a slice of that to go with my medium-roast Tanzanian peaberry coffee.

(BTW, thanks for reading)

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

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 270

Good morning, and a happy Monday to you. It is 11 December 2023.

I go back to Eastern Time this week, as I’m back in the security chair to teach a theory course. It’s the same class I taught two weeks ago by myself, but this week, a larger class and a split load as I co-deliver with another instructor. I have a presentation on Friday on security readiness, so this delivery and a little extra time should get me in the proper frame of reference for Friday’s security call.

Sports Fan Bob is a little blue, but I’ll deal. The Kansas City Chiefs have lost to Philadelphia and the Buffalo Bills two games in a row. The Chiefs are out of sync, and we have receivers that can’t hang on to the ball. I expect significant changes in the wide receiver corps in the offseason. The mistakes are adding up like a Home Depot contractor’s bill to fix an old house. The draft has helped in some areas but has been a letdown in others. Don’t get me started on the receivers the Chiefs traded picks for… the disappointment with two high-profile trades is staggering.

I’m watching the morning news, and I see Elon Musk is allowing Alex Jones back on his social media platform. Jones lost a couple of lawsuits over comments he made over the mass murder of children and teachers at Sandy Hook. I am so glad I abandoned that platform. This will be another recipe for disaster, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it leads to another lawsuit.

OK, it’s time to get the coffee going and get myself dialed in for class.

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

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 267

Good morning! Happy Friday to everybody, today is 8 December 2023.

I took a moment to check my day count, and I’m on the verge of day 22000. The average person lives between 28500 and 30000 days, so if I’m lucky, I’ll reach that first 28500 milestone on September 26, 2041.

OK, that gives me something to consider. Not quite 18 years.

I finished up my cloud solutions architecture course yesterday afternoon. We had a pretty good week, and the comments from my attendees were all positive. I’ll start over on Monday, with another week of expert-level security, followed by another week before the holiday working on more security with some hands-on labs and a little less theory.

I’ve got a presentation to put together… today is my best day to work on that.

I might grab my son today for lunch. Today is “Stop Day” on campus, tantamount to a holiday before the college students face the dread of finals week next week. If it’s Dane and me, you can bet sushi will be on the menu.

We had a bit of an avian crisis this morning. A little bird got into the house somehow, so we coaxed all of the dogs back into the master bedroom, turned on the porch light, turned off the other lights in the family room and kitchen, and then chased the little beast with a broom to get it out of the house. The small bird took the hint, perched on a wreath on the open front door, and Lisa closed the door quickly to return the small creature to the folds of Mother Nature. No birds were hurt in this event, although I may have made myself a little bit dizzy.

OK, time to consider the day…

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

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 266

Good morning, and I wish you all a happy Thursday. Today is 7 December 2023.

A day that will live in infamy.

And not just because a couple of old friends were born on this day.

Growing up, I remember my grandmother telling me the story about Pearl Harbor. My dad was about 10 months old, and she was in downtown Sioux City, Iowa. She was doing a little Christmas window shopping, with my dad in a stroller (my friends in the UK would call it a “pram”), and she went by one of the local radio stations. It was common practice for local stations to mount a speaker at the station so the general public could hear the local broadcast.

What happened on this day 82 years ago set in motion a series of events that changed just about everything.

Today is the last day of my cloud solutions architecture class. I’ve had a good group this week, and I have a little more work to put in on a collection of study links for them.

I also took on some additional responsibility to give a security presentation next week. I’m hoping I didn’t bite off more than I can chew. This isn’t a presentation for my West Coast team… this is a presentation for all of the security instructors from around the world.

It might be time for me to get focused on the day.

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

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 265

Good morning, and a happy hump day to you all! It is Wednesday, 6 December 2023.

Wow… writer’s block.

OK, a recap. Yesterday was a pretty good day. Gracie (my youngest daughter) came over for a bit with Evie. Gracie was taking care of some things around here, preparing for the holidays while I was in class back in the sunroom. When I popped out to grab a bite of lunch, Evie was sitting in her little playpen watching “Bear in the Bog Blue House”. She is such a little cutie. She is a hundred days away from her first birthday.

My class went pretty well yesterday. I try to close the day with a case study to work on overnight. I’ve been doing that a while to accommodate my learners on the other side of the Atlantic. I’ve got at least one, and he’s over in Germany, so he’s in class until 10:30 PM there, and he can go over the additional course content the next day and try to get a decent night’s sleep.

Kansas looked pretty good in a win over a local team last night. UMKC came into Allen Fieldhouse last night, and it went about the way one would expect, although I have to admit, I thought Kansas could win by a bigger margin… I predicted a 22-point win, Lisa predicted 24, and Kansas won by 19. I know, I’m nit-picking.

That expression… nit-picking. I should stop using that. I believe the origins have to do with the removal of lice.

OK, that’s a pleasant though.

I’m going to look over my content for the day and get focused.

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

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 264

Good morning, and a happy Tuesday to you all. Today is 5 December 2023.

Yesterday was a special day in our family. My niece gave birth to a baby boy, my brother became a grandfather, and my mom became a great-grandmother for the second time. All are well.

My class is off to a good start. I’ve got about 20 learners in my virtual classroom, once again spanning the globe, but for the first time in a long time, I don’t think I have anybody further east on the planet beyond Germany. My German student was rather pleased when I passed along a “take-home assignment” at a decent hour so he could go get some sleep.

Yes, I know… they were already home in a lot of cases.

Tonight, we’ll have our regular dinner, celebrating the day of the week in the traditional fashion. The only question is how many tacos I’ll pick up for dinner.

There’s a basketball game on tonight. Kansas knocked off UConn last Friday night, and with that win, as well as some other losses among some of the top-ranked teams, Kansas moved to number 2 in the country. Kansas will host the University of Missouri/Kansas City Kangaroos at Allen Fieldhouse for a tune-up game before getting into the last stretch of holiday non-conference games. Two of the games I am looking forward to – the matchup against the University of Missouri this weekend, and the game on December 30th against Wichita State. I harbor no ill will against the the WSU basketball team – I used to hang out with a couple of players when I was a student at WSU, but these days I’m not a big fan of the school itself. There are reasons, but that’s a story for another day.

The time has come to get the coffee going and think about breakfast.

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

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 263

Good morning, and a happy Monday to you. Today is 4 December 2023.

I’ll be back in my virtual classroom in a couple of hours to teach cloud solutions architecture. 4 days on Central Time this week, back on Eastern Time next week for another security course, then rounding out the calendar year with another security course that has a little more hands-on than theory.

Sports rant…

I know a lot of folks thought that Andy Reid was the offensive genius behind the Chiefs’ success during his rein as the head coach, and some thought Eric Bienieny was the beneficiary of Reid’s offensive prowess. Any casual Chiefs fan would cringe at that today, as the Chiefs’ offense continues to sputter after the move from Bieniemy to Naggy. All I can do is hope that if the Commanders fire their head coach and don’t make Bieniemy the head coach, the Chiefs make the move to bring him back as co-head coach and offensive coordinator.

Kind of weird this morning. I was having a dream of entering traffic on a highway while driving a white minivan, and a motorcycle wiped out right in front of me. I pulled off to the shoulder to go provide aid, and then the alarm went off… and left me hanging. I want to know that the motorcycle rider was OK.

I don’t often remember my dreams, but I sure remember that one.

Time to shift my focus to coffee, breakfast, and work.

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

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 260

Hi. It’s me again. Today is Friday, 1 December 2023.

Yeah, December. It’s kind of crazy how fast the days, weeks, and months seem to be passing at this point in my life. It’s a math thing, right? Every day we live is a less significant fraction of our lives. Today will be 1 day in 21991 that I’ll have lived… while today will be 1 in 260 for my granddaughter. Those days for the little ones are so much more significant as those neural connections in her little brain grow and get reinforced.

I head over to the doctor’s office early this morning, an 8 am appointment to talk about my long-standing arrhythmia, an irregular heartbeat (atrial fibrillation/atrial flutter) that was first diagnosed after I collapsed on a basketball court while I was in my 20s.

This week has been one of ups and downs, but I think I’m ending on a high note. I’ll get into some meetings a little later today, talking about cloud security and the current state of security operations with a coworker, and we’ll plan some next steps to advance the subject with our teams at work.

Tonight, back to the sports fan grind – KU Women’s Volleyball will host Penn State in the second round of the NCAA volleyball tournament, and KU Men’s Basketball host UConn. Tonight will be a good night… might need to pop a little popcorn for this one.

Until next time…

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

Peace y’all.

Evie 259

Good morning, and a happy and prosperous Thursday to you all. Today is the last day of the month, 30 November 2023.

I’ve been pondering my health a little more lately, probably triggered by the traumatic experience of turning 60 this last September. I think about age-related issues, such as cognitive decline, hypertension, that odd occasional tremble in my hand, and just general mental health stuff relating to anxiety, etc.

I had some stuff keep me up last night. As I told my wife, it was like my head was playing a radio and constantly switching channels, going from talk radio to music to white noise and back again. It was complicated by one of those “ear worms” – a song you get in your head and just can’t get escape. I love music. I have a preference for different styles. Before I work, I listen to a lot of smooth rock from the 80s, a lot of Christopher Cross, Bruce Hornsby, James Taylor, and Dire Straits. That said, why did the song stuck in my head have to be “Bad Blood” by Neil Sedaka?

It seemed like that song was stuck on “loop” from 3:00 AM until my normal wake-up at 5:30. Not a pleasant experience. I’ll get through the morning, but when I take my lunch break today, I’ll likely be slapping on some noise-cancelling headphones and listening to my meditation music for an hour before I go back and wrap up my class.

I better make a pot of coffee.

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

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 258

Hi everybody! Today is Wednesday, 29 November 2023.

November is slipping by pretty quickly. Time seems to go by much faster when one stays busy, and this month I have been rather busy, and that doesn’t appear to be changing as we move into December.

My class is going well this week, and my attendees are being a little more engaged. It can be hard at times to draw people out, and if you’ve been around folks who work in IT, there is a sizeable portion of the community that doesn’t want to be drawn out – they just want to kick it in the back of the room and listen. I’m not going to compel folks to participate if they aren’t up for it, because I know that getting called out in a learning environment can cause some folks stress.

We had out typical Tuesday night dinner last night. Tacos are the perfect food.

After we dined on our taco feast last night, we settled in and watched the Kansas Jayhawks host the Eastern Illinois men’s basketball team. The spread on the game was ridiculous, something like 38.5 points, and Kansas played to the level of their competition, eventually winning by 8 – a far cry from the projected point spread. Kansas hosts the University of Connecticut Huskies on Friday night, the number 4 ranked team in the country. Kansas will need to bring a little more game to win at home, I think.

OK, time to think about breakfast… coffee, and scrambled eggs with a little leftover chili ought to get my digestive system moving.

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

Peace y’all.