Evie Day 132

Hi everybody! It is Wednesday, 26 July 2023.

One of the things I do is post my blog updates across social media. I’ll post on Facebook, Mastodon, and, historically, Twitter – or whatever Elon Musk thinks he wants to call it this week.

The other day, Musk apparently announced a change to the branding of Twitter, changing the logo from the blue bird to a dark, ominous capital “X”. A few other companies already have registered trademarks and products that use the letter X. Xerox trades their stock under the abbreviation “X”, and other tech companies – Meta, Microsoft, have other products (like Microsoft’s XBox) that use that letter as well. On Monday, I first logged in to Twitter, and at 6:30 AM it was still a bird. At 9, it was the letter “X”. It was at some point later that day that somebody in legal told Elon about the trademark problem, and yesterday morning, the logo switched back to a bird. I have a feeling it will be an “X” when I log in shortly… I hope they can make up their minds.

There’s plenty going on in the news, lots at the federal level, and then there’s the weather and climate news that folks really don’t want to hear.

I’m back in my virtual classroom in another hour, and I’m going to use the rest of my time this morning to get my motivation for the day. Some days are easier than others. This morning, I’m struggling a little bit, but I’ll get it sorted.

I’m going to get after it.

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

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 131

Hi folks! It is Tuesday, 25 July 2023.

I’m starting to wonder where all of the summer is going.

Yesterday I had a service tech come to the house to check out the status of our air conditioner. Apparently, when I swapped out the new air filter, I increased the airflow to the A/C system. Combine that with one or two days of cooler-than-normal temperatures, and the thing apparently froze… which then caused the A/C to not run properly when the temps went back up. It’s running pretty well right now, with house temps right around the 70 degree (F) mark.

I’m back in my virtual classroom in a couple of hours, talking about our learning plan for the week. I’m talking about virtual machines and scale sets today, then handing the mic over to my training partner to discuss application and container services.

Odin is sitting by Lisa begging for some of her breakfast. He’ll get a taste, I’m sure… my wife is a soft touch when it comes to the dogs.

I’ve got to take a look at my tasks for the day and organize a couple of notes. No major worries, just trying to march my ducks around the parade ground.

Lots of news about global climate change on the tv this morning. Sigh.

But, there’s not a lot I can do about that right now, is there?

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

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 130

Happy Monday, if there is such a thing! It is 24 July 2023.

We had a pretty good weekend around here. I need to get an HVAC repair person out to the house to take a look at the air conditioning. We’re not completely heat-soaked here, but I have a feeling that the A/C is struggling to keep up with the heat passing through. At first glance, I see that there is a 33% chance of thunderstorms today, but the expected high is still 98 degrees F/37 degrees C – so no real relief, just higher humidity.

Yesterday was a good day. It was my youngest daughter’s 25th birthday, so we went over to her place to see her, her boyfriend, and our granddaughter, Evelyn. Evie was all smiles, with hints of a chuckle in there every now and then. After a little birthday cake, we went into Baldwin City for dinner. My son got pulled over by the local police – they say he was doing 12 miles over the speed limit, and then one of the officers claimed there was a “fairly strong smell of marijuana” coming from his car. They did a search, found nothing – the officer claimed that my son’s Dungeons and Dragons books were the culprit, combined with the dead skunk odor that wafted through his open sunroof.

Do they teach officers what marijuana actually smells like?

Dane told me that when he was a resident assistant in the dorms, Lawrence police officers trained the RAs on how to recognize the smell of dope in the dorms. Maybe the local constabulary in Baldwin City could get a little help distinguishing the smell of books from cannabis.

Anyway, they let the young man off with a warning. Might’ve had to do with Dane asking where he was speeding, and the officer blowing him off. I can’t say I’m a real fan of the Baldwin City police department.

Anyway, after that little incident, we met my sister and brother-in-law for dinner, then went for a few innings of my nephew’s baseball game. We drove through the country on the way home, just to relax. It was a nice end to a pretty good day.

I’ve got some stuff to do to get ready for my work week. Taking a look at a couple of software packages to integrate into my presentations, and I’ve got an Elgato Stream Deck coming, and that will give me some different automation options during my online deliveries.

Enough! Time to make the coffee.

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

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 127

Good morning, and happy Friday! I hope this finds you well. It is 21 July 2023.

Had some weird stuff happen with my schedule over the last few days, with some class schedules changing and others requiring a little more attention. Found out we changed a vendor or an application for background operations and the transition did not go as smoothly as we would like, but after a day or two, everything got sorted out, and now I don’t have to burn CPU cycles trying to solve that problem.

One of the things I share with y’all is that I’m neurodivergent – I’m ADHD, and I have a few other proclivities (like using big words like “proclivities”) that can cause some anxiety if certain habits aren’t addressed. I like structure – when I have a session, and the defined purpose of the session is activity A, I don’t want to do a spontaneous redirect to activity B. It gives me anxiety… and sometimes the people directing that spontaneous redirect really don’t care.

I care. If it caused me a little anxiety, I may have not been alone. There are a lot of neurodivergent folks in IT.

After a bit here I’m going to watch a little bit of the FIFA Women’s World Cup. I watched a couple of the matches from the opening day, with New Zealand earning an upset victory over perennial powerhouse Norway, and the other host country Australia winning a competitive match against Ireland. I’ve got Canada/Nigeria recorded for some early viewing today, and then the US women square off against Vietnam tonight for their first match.

OK, time for me to get the coffee percolating and get an English muffin in the toaster.

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

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 126

Hi folks! It’s old, fat, bald guy Bob writing a daily post.

Today is 20 July 2023.

The world is a little bit focused on women’s sports today, as the FIFA Women’s World Cup starts in Australia today. I’ve set my DVR to record all of the matches. The US Women’s National Team are vying for their third straight World Cup title, and there are several members of the US squad that are competing in their fourth cup. The women’s World Cup hasn’t been around that long, with only 8 tournaments, and the US has won 4 of them – credit to Title IX, requiring colleges and universities to provide as many women’s athletic scholarships as there are men’s.

I have a two-hour talk a little later this morning on the topic of load balancers, firewalls, network security groups, and application gateways. It feels like I’ve talked about this content for years… because I have.

We’ve had pretty mild weather this week, barely touching temperatures in the 90s as we’ve had quite a bit of cloud cover and occasional rain. I’m not complaining, and we’ll reap the benefit of cooler temps when I get the electric bill next month.

New Star Trek episode tonight, which is always fun.

It’s about time for me to start focusing on my day ahead. I’m kind of boring this morning.

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

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 125

Hi everybody! It is Wednesday, hump day, the middle of the work week.

It is 19 July 2023.

I flipped on the news, and it was all about the former guy. I look forward to the day when he is a distant memory. He doesn’t do anything for anybody other than himself, and now he’s fighting multiple court cases, criminal and civil. It appears to me that the primary motivation for his run at the presidency is to throw out the charges against him and pardon himself. He claims he has plans, which he claimed in 2016, that never came to fruition. Every few months he held, “infrastructure week”, where the term infrastructure was used as a prop… but no infrastructure bills were passed. Just the opposite – funds that were dedicated to things like schools and military bases were redirected towards his southern wall, which never really amounted to much.

I read yesterday day that Trump wanted to test the wall along the Mexican border with cattle, and my mind immediately went to a scene from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”. Bovine ammo launched from trebuchets. Moo!

Yesterday I had a pretty good day with my class. My co-trainer stuck to the schedule and got some stuff done, and we’ll rinse, lather, and repeat that today. I did see that my schedule might be a little up in the air for the last week of July… we have a couple of instructors dealing with family and health issues, so we’re having to adapt to that changing landscape.

Lisa took some nice pictures and a little video of Evie yesterday. I’ll get a chance to see her this weekend. Gracie (Lisa’s and my youngest daughter) has her birthday this weekend, so we’ve been invited over for a little celebration Sunday afternoon.

Time to get this in the can and get to pondering my day.

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

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 124

Good morning, everyone! Today is Tuesday, 18 July 2023.

Tonight, there will be tacos!

Lisa is taking a day off from work today, and heading over to our youngest daughter’s place to spent some time with our daughter and granddaughter. I’m more than a little jealous.

I’ll be jumping back into my virtual classroom in about an hour to handle some review and discuss the week ahead with my class of learners from all around the world. I’ll start off with a little survey, jump into some review, then discuss what’s ahead. I think we’ll have a little time to address any questions they might have before we cut them loose to take a look at our course content.

We had an in-service learning day yesterday. Mostly productive, a lot of discussion about the road ahead, and some of the challenges we face. There is always change, and for a company, the size of my employer can be surprisingly nimble.

I need to work on my video recording chops, and a few other skill sets related to different learning styles. We’ll see how that goes.

Other than that, not a whole lot to share. I look forward to tacos this evening, and I hope you get to enjoy that most perfect of foods yourself.

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

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 123

Good morning! It is the beginning of a new week, and today is 17 July 2023.

I’ve got some work to get to here in a bit.

One of the bits I do for work is a brief daily recap of a change or two to our cloud platform. It’s a shared responsibility, but one of the guys that leads our team is under the weather (more than a little under the weather, but that’s not something we need to share out of respect for his privacy), so I’m trying to pick up a little of the slack, picking up a couple of extra sessions. I probably should have recorded them yesterday, but I have some time this morning to get the sessions in the can.

Of course, the moment I say that or write it down, unforeseen events will reveal themselves and add some complication to my day, right?

I’m watching the news. Looks like the weekend weather messed with some travel, as well as caused some destruction across the country. I was sitting here Friday afternoon when the storm rolled through, and it was nasty looking. I fired up the weather radar, and it looked like Lawrence was going to be directly in the path of nasty storms – it was shaped like a boot sitting sideways – and all of the worst weather was coming directly into Lawrence. The winds peaked around 80 miles per hour, and the rain came in sideways. Fortunately, we didn’t have any funnel clouds with it, just a lot of high-speed winds. Lisa told me that her group on campus was directed to the storm shelter, away from all of the windows. My son was working in an IT lab surrounded by glass (it’s called the ‘fish bowl’), and they were told to get out of three as well.

OK…

I’ve got to get focused on the day ahead of me. I’ve got sessions to record, and a day of internal training with my team. I’ll have to see if I can effectively multitask at times today… not my strongest suite.

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

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 120

Good morning and happy Friday, everybody! It is 14 July 2023.

And because the 15th falls on a Saturday, it is also payday! Woot!

Life is a series of minor victories.

Today is the last day of class this week. I have a two-hour office hours session starting in about two hours, and we’ll go over the week’s content, tackle some of the review questions, and then explore a learning game created by a teammate. I’ll then get some posts into our course channels as follow-up content.

Friday is also garbage day, and I think there’s a bag under the counter that needs to go out before I get settled into my morning routine.

I saw that the Screen Actors’ Guild has gone on strike in Hollywood. That means that both the Writers’ Guils and Actors Guild are picketing the tv and movie studios… and folks that watch TV like me will get stuck watching crap reality tv shows for the next few months while this all gets sorted out. I better find some old series with multi-year runs to binge on because other than Chopped and Forged in Fire, I’m not a real big fan of reality TV. The only bright spot for me, to be frank, is that we’re a little more than a month out from college and pro football season, and as I’ve started to enjoy futbol (soccer), there is always a game on somewhere in the world.

I’ve got to get some gas cans filled up. I’ll be spending some quality time alone with my lawnmowers this weekend.

It’s Friday… we made it.

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

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 119

Hi everybody! Today is 13 July 2023. It’s a Thursday.

I started to watch the US versus Panama last evening in the semi-final of the CONCACAF Gold Cup, but I stepped away about 8:00 PM to go game online with some friends, so I just fired up the DVR and am into the second half of the match with the score still tied nil-nil.

We got through our second day of the course without too much of an issue, but there may have been some confusion about the topics who was supposed to cover and when. We had office hours yesterday and some of the content that I’m going over this morning was addressed, but because of the nature of the session, it was not recorded. This morning will have a session that will be recorded, and for folks that attended yesterday afternoon, there will be some redundant information. I’ll be presenting it rather than my training partner, so I hope that my style helps to reinforce the concepts.

In a few minutes, I’ll spend a moment or two creating the scenario I want to present. I’ve got it formulated in my noggin, so it won’t take me long to get it written down.

As I’m watching the match from yesterday rather than the news, I’m not sure if there is anything crazy going on in the world right now. There probably is, the world being what it is.

Maybe now is as good a time as any to get this in the can and get going with my day.

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

Peace y’all.