It is Wednesday, 16 November 2022.

Last night the Michigan State – Kentucky game ran a little late with Michigan State winning in double overtime. The game pushed that Kansas-Duke match back almost an hour to a 9:21 start rather than the scheduled 8:30. Lisa and I watched the first half, then recorded the rest of it.

It is now 6:20 in the morning, and we’re getting caught up on the game right now. Two minutes remain, and it is a tight match between two storied programs.

Go Kansas.

48.4 seconds left, Kansas up by 3.

I do love college basketball. I think it’s more enjoyable than the NBA, with the young guys having a little more fun. I have to admit, I don’t know that I would enjoy a game as much if it was my job.

11.8 seconds left, Kansas up by 3.

Jayhawks going to the free throw line with 9.2 seconds left. Make the first… make the second… 5 point lead and a Duke timeout.

Game over. Kansas pulls down the win.

Now back to irregularly scheduled programming.

I’ve got my chili and eggs on standby, and the news is now on. Lisa is dealing with some work-related issues involving students and the trials and tribulations of being a 20-year-old student.

Some guy in Florida declared his candidacy for the US Presidency. I hope he goes away soon.

Time for me to focus on the day before me.

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

Peace y’all.

15 November 2022. It is Tuesday.

Lisa and I are sitting in the living room, I’m on the sofa, and she’s on the loveseat. All of our dogs have gravitated to her, and it’s rather humorous. It’s as if the dogs know who gives out the most treats.

The news is always a mix of the good and the bad. Right now they covering the violent murders of three University of Virginia football players. UVA is shut down for a second day. Yesterday, the University of Wisconsin was shut down as well, as one of the murdered football players was a transfer from Wisconsin.

The good news is that an election denier was denied in Arizona. Kari Lake came up short, and that’s a sign that our democracy is healthy. There is still a possibility that Lauren Boebert could lose her seat in the House of Representatives as she and her opponent are headed for a recount. A number of mail-in ballots are being reviewed, and apparently, in Colorado, folks get a chance to correct mistakes in their mail-in ballots to get them counted.

Tonight, Kansas faces Duke. Bill Self, Kansas’ Head Basketball Coach, is on a self-imposed four-game suspension over the recruitment of a player than never attended the University of Kansas – the player attended Duke. It will be curious to listen to the verbal dance that little factoid will lead to during the game.

Day 2 of my admin course. Central Standard Time, so a slow roll up to the beginning of the day.

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

Peace y’all.

It is Monday morning, 14 November 2022. Today I’ll return to my virtual classroom for a cloud administration course, and I’ll be working with the same training partner I worked with last week.

It’s going t be a week. I have some reports due, so I’ll try to complete those this morning before my class gets going in earnest. We’re delivering on Central Time rather than Eastern Time, which gives my training partner a little break, as he lives in Mountain Time. Last week had to have been pretty rough.

Monday is the first class day, and then an evening of recovery. That’s really the best plan for Monday, as the first day of the admin course is always a challenge getting folks set up in the labs. By the end of the week, everybody ought to be settled in, but day one and day two are always a little more demanding.

Tuesday will be fun. In this admin course, Tuesday is generally a day to focus on networking technologies, which is my favorite day of this class. After the day is over, it’s basketball night, as the University of Kansas Jayhawks take on the Duke Blue Devils in an early season matchup of blue-blood programs. Wednesday is a day, friends get together online for a little virtual tabletop gaming, and then we’ll close out this class with a couple of leftover modules on Thursday, a closing, and open lab time. Friday is meetings/meetings/meetings, and then I’m taking a little time off.

The Kansas City Chiefs won yesterday and moved to sole ownership of first place in the AFC as the Buffalo Bills lost to the Minnesota Vikings.

That’s enough for now, I guess.

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

Peace y’all.

Good morning, a happy Friday to you all, and for those in the western hemisphere, I wish you a peaceful, respectful Veterans’ Day, this 11th day of the 11th month.

There’s news coming over the wire, and it’s meh. There are still election contents that need to be sorted out – and we know that some won’t get properly sorted until next month in the case of the runoff between Warnock and Walker in Georgia.

I’ve got meetings starting in another 45 minutes. Working for an international company means that meeting times fall where they may. East coast schedule early in the day, west coast schedule later in the day.

I’ve got a delivery coming later today, a new laundry machine, to replace one that has been problematic (intermittent pauses… can take hours to get a load of laundry done, and requires constant checking to see if it paused). I can’t help but wonder if it isn’t simply a firmware upgrade from working right. The same model was available on sale for about half of what we paid for the original, and a 5-year warranty was available for it, so I think a timely upgrade will work out for the best.

Russia is testing a nuclear-powered drone torpedo. Yay.

OK, time to get this in the can and get back to irregularly scheduled programming. I might be taking the weekend off from blog posts.

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

Peace y’all.

“Odin, you are a bundle of joy… and other stuff”

My wife’s words just a moment ago while we wait on the morning coffee to brew up.

Today is Thursday, 10 November 2022. We are still watching election returns, and there are a number of very tight races left over from the election on Tuesday, and some of these contests are going to head to a runoff in December.

There was no red wave.

There is still a chance that the GOP will take control of the House and the Senate, but at this point it looks more like a stalemate. Some seats lost, some seats gained, but the wave that normally happens in midterms. I can live with that.

Today is the last day of my cloud security course, and I have had an absolute joy working with my training partner this week, and he and I work together next week for a cloud administration course.

Kind of funny… I went into LinkedIn to check on a couple of old coworkers and noticed a couple of folks have changed positions since I left that office. Looks like they’ve had to pivot following industry changes and the pandemic. I hope folks are ok.

I remember when I gave my notice back in 2019. I remember telling them that I was taking this opportunity because I thought that if certain market conditions played out the way I thought they might, I needed to make a move as I might be out of a job in a few years if I didn’t.

I’m no oracle, but that was eerily prescient.

Kansas has a basketball game tonight versus North Dakota State. Weather is making a hard turn towards winter with the cooler weather. New washing machine arrives tomorrow. There’s plenty of stuff going on.

I’m going to go tend to my rat killin’.

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

Peace y’all.

It is Wednesday, 9 November 2022. Right now I’ve got the news on, and they are reviewing the election results – at least the ones they can review – and it doesn’t look like there was a wave or a tsunami or whatever people wanted to call it.

Right now it looks like not much is going to change at all.

And that’s fine with me.

I’ll return to my virtual classroom here in another hour and get settled in, and the nice thing is that I won’t have to worry about too many distractions.

Other than that, it’s back to life as we know it.

Lisa has some work to do today – she is focused on getting a grant proposal in under a midnight deadline today, so I’ll make sure she has dinner tonight. I’ll tuck myself off into my workspace this evening and stay out of her way.

Oh, man… I have to admit that I am somewhat relieved at the results I’m seeing. This is NOT what the opposition party was hoping for, and I am glad.

Yesterday folks demonstrated some sense. They recognized that the economic problems we are facing are problems we all face everywhere in the world.

Things are manageable. We can get through this with the leadership we have in place.

Hey, I’m going to get this in the can and get on with my morning.

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

Peace y’all.

Good morning. It is the 8th day of November 2022. It is election day in the United States, and I’m already tired of this day.

Seriously.

Elections suck all the air out of the room. The money spent on elections could feed the hungry and house the homeless. There are enough lies told (legally) to keep the country’s priests in confessionals for decades.

Just saw a graphic talking about the amount of money billionaires are spending on candidates, and it’s absolutely hideous, primarily because billionaires don’t want their taxes to go up. They’re ok with everybody else getting the bill, but they don’t like it when they are asked to pay as much as the working folks of this country.

That’s not a joke. That’s not a misleading statement. This country does some interesting things with taxes – the income tax that folks pay on their wages can vary from income class to income class, but in the case of my wife and I, we’re around 30% on federal income tax. Billionaires earn their $$$ primarily through investment income that is taxed at a rate of about 8%.

Billionaires want to pay less… and they don’t really give a rat’s ass about anybody other than themselves.

I probably ought to turn the TV off for the rest of the day. Or maybe the year.

I probably ought to go back to my sunroom and focus on things I can control.

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

Peace y’all.

Good morning! It is 7 November 2022, the first Monday of this eleventh month of 2022. It is hard to believe that 2023 is just around the corner – that year I will turn 60.

I stayed up a little late last night watching Sunday Night Football – the Kansas City Chiefs hosted the Tennessee Titans and somehow pulled out a win in overtime. Most of the night, I was not in a great mood as my favorite NFL football team struggled against an outstanding Tennessee defense. It didn’t help that our kicker missed a “point after touchdown” and a field goal, but he got it together to hit the game-winner in overtime.

I’m back in my virtual classroom today, teaching an advanced role-based course on cloud security. My training partner is in the Mountain Time zone, but our class is scheduled for Eastern Time, so I told him that I’ll come in early to shoulder the load first thing – once again, I’m everybody’s cup of coffee.

Tonight, some more good sports action as the University of Kansas hosts the University of Nebraska – Omaha to begin the college basketball season. The Jayhawks had an exhibition game against Pittsburg State last Thursday night, but tonight counts in the record books.

It’s about time for me to get busy with the activity of the day.

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

Peace y’all.

Woot! I like round numbers.

Today is Saturday, 5 November 2022. I missed yesterday when I was feeling under the weather most of the day – although I will admit that despite my discomfort, I found a way to make it a pretty productive day… I just didn’t write my blog.

So here I am again, returning to my role as an unpaid content developer for Twitter. Yeah, I smiled and laughed a little when I wrote that.

No, I don’t write for Twitter. I write for me, and I share that I’ve posted something new on Twitter, and if it’s something I really want to draw attention to, I’ll post it on Facebook.

It’s a brisk Saturday morning here. We’re getting some stuff done before we settle in to watch some college football later. I have a feeling I’m about to be asked to take some empty boxes out to the trash (which I will do with no additional commentary).

This is still my favorite time of year. I love the crispness in the air, and the smell of the outdoors after a bit of rainfall dampens the leaves on the ground. I know in some places, getting all of the leaves raked up is a high priority. Not at this house – it’s all biodegradable, so let nature take its course. I’m not real big on turning my yard into the front lawn of a country club with the perfectly manicured lawn and curated artisanal plant selections. I moved out here to get away from that sort of attitude. I mow… that’s good enough.

OK… time to get to the other tasks of the day.

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

Peace y’all.

Good morning! It is 3 November 2022, a beautiful Thursday morning, with a sunrise breaking across the horizon with slate blues, sharp orange-pink highlights, and just enough purple to spark the imagination.

I voted yesterday. If you are an American citizen, I would encourage you to vote. Just one to a customer, thank you.

I like the word “encourage”. I am not an “influencer”, and I have no ambition to be so. There’s something about that word, “influence” that hits me at the wrong angle. I looked up a definition, “the capacity to have an effect on the character, development, or behavior of someone or something, or the effect itself”.

I don’t want to effect people other than make them think. I often ponder the questions we ask ourselves prior to making a decision. Some decisions we put a lot of effort into, such as decisions on purchasing a car or house, what wine to have with dinner, or that dreadful array of ice cream options at Sylas and Maddy’s (think Baskin-Robbins, but locally owned). Other decisions don’t require as much effort, or we sidestep the effort altogether – such as the decision to have another cocktail… too often I don’t put in the requisite effort and end up rolling out of bed rather than popping right up the morning after.

I am not a fan of people that put labels on themselves, so even if I did demonstrate the capacity to have an effect on the character, development, or behavior of someone, I’m not sure I would welcome the label “influencer”. I know I have been one – that’s what parents do – but again, I don’t label myself.

We tend to get stuck on labels, and we do a pretty poor job being a little more creative with the labels we assign. Look up synonyms for “influence” and you see some options that mean the same thing but have just a slightly different angle of attack – words like, “form”, “shape”, “control”, and “govern”. I can tell you straight out that I would never want to be called a “controller”, and I have no intention of running for governor.

I like the word “encourage”. Helping people to work up a little gumption to tackle a challenge is a good thing. It’s so much more positive, and look at the synonyms – “inspire”, “motivate”, “invigorate”, “revitalize”. You can get a sense of positivity from words such as these.

That’s what I’m talking about!

I hope you can encourage others today. I’ll try to walk that road myself.

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

Peace y’all.