It is Tuesday morning, the 16th day of August, in the year 2022. I am waiting on coffee, drinking a glass of water, and watching the news… all while writing this blog post. On the morning news, they are discussing the affidavit regarding the search and seizure of classified documents from the Trump compound, and they can’t talk about the details. There is too much sensitive information contained in the affidavit.

From what I gather, there was a roadmap describing the contents that were missing and recovered from the search, and there’s highly classified material.

Yay. That’s great.

Ugh.

The guy that didn’t want to sit through security briefings had a bunch of security documents.

Donald J. Trump is a national security risk. Whoever thought electing this idiot to office ought to be ashamed of themselves.

Now the story has shifted to Rudy Guiliani and his role in election interference in Georgia.

I used to be a Republican.

Now it’s embarrassing to admit that I was ever that naive.

Time for me to think about the day ahead. Week 3 of my cloud solutions architecture course. This morning is a review/preview office hours session, then study time, followed by a chalk talk session on the whiteboard app.

Tonight may call for tacos.

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

Peace y’all.

Good morning! It is Monday, 15 August 2022, and it’s also payday… so, yeah, a generally positive kind of vibe.

Although I will admit, I had to correct a spelling error when I almost wrote “good moroning”, but I guess that would be for people that continue to support certain lost causes.

It’s going to be bit-flip kind of day, switching certain activities off and on as I prepare for my delivery week. I have four sessions over four days, with a review/preview session tomorrow, a case study on Wednesday, and a chalk talk on Thursday. Friday is set aside to “tell ’em what we taught ’em”, followed by the regular array of meetings.

There are always some meetings.

I don’t mind them, and I recognize the necessity of them.

The news is on in the background, and they’re about to talk about Salmon Rushdie and the attack on him. I can’t recall who said it, but someone said something to the effect, “if your religion cannot handle words, the words aren’t the problem”.

Nothing is above criticism. I’m not above criticism, the Catholic church is not above criticism, the administration is not above criticism… and no other institution is either. Yes, that includes every religion on this planet.

Hell – if we ever encounter alien life, they won’t be above criticism either. If they turn us all into livestock, you can bet we’ll find flaws in the cookbook.

I’ve reached the point of my post where I realize I’m reaching pretty hard for the next sentence. That’s a clue I need to wrap it up.

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

Peace y’all.

It is Sunday morning, 14 August 2022. Right now Lisa and I are watching one of the Sunday morning news shows, and there is some pol on there that is being asked direct questions and if he starts dancing any fast, he may very well vibrate fast enough for a phase shift.

Lisa wasn’t feeling well last night, and I was flipping through social media when I came across a post about a couple of old friends’ band playing, The Opinions, at a venue in north Lawrence last evening. Lisa gave me a hall pass, so I headed out to see them, and catch a little of the headliner, Patriarch, a legendary area band from the 70s and 80s that I believe is being inducted into the Kansas Music Hall of Fame.

It was good seeing the guys, and I tried to lend a hand on the load out – there was a big Patriarch fan base, and when the stage gets swapped to for the headliner, folks want that transition to happen as quickly as possible. We got it done, and then retreated to the bar for a little conversation and a beer. There are few things I enjoy as much as talking with Tim about guitars, and talking with Kelly about whatever.

Today I’ve got a little work study to get in, but I’ll defer most of it to tomorrow. The main thing today is just realigning my brain, playing a little tabletop with some friends, and just chilling out.

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

Peace y’all.

It is Saturday morning, 13 August 2022, and I am contemplating my workload around the house.

I also make myself safe from having the FBI retrieve classified documents at my house.

Yesterday afternoon the warrant was unsealed for the search of the Trump residence, and an inventory of documents was released with the classification data. If the average American had been found with the documents listed in the manifest, they would be looking at a very long time in prison. If a 78-year-old was found with them, he would likely be looking at the rest of his life in prison.

Several rebuttals have come out of the Trump camp. One that might carry a little weight was a statement by Trump saying that they were all declassified by him, as he had the authority to do so, and that there was a standing policy that anytime Trump took documents to his residence they were declassified as a policy.

OK… that policy was documented where?

If it wasn’t written down, it didn’t happen.

The other more humorous allegation by Trump was a shot at his predecessor, Barack Obama. Trump stated that Obama took home 30 million pages of classified content home to Chicago. That lie was so blatantly false that the National Archive provided a press release describing their archival process for the Obama Presidential Library and how classified documents were never outside their control.

It’s all pretty ridiculous. Trump thinks the law doesn’t apply to him, but in reality, it applies to him just as much as it does Reality Winner and anybody else that mishandled classified information.

The FBI is dusting the files for prints.

My oh my.

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

Peace y’all.

Today is Friday, 12 August 2022.

I am very happy not to be someone today. The person I am happy not to be is former president Donald J. Trump. He’s having a rough week, and it will likely get even worse today.

There’s going to be a lot of speculation about the documents and materials that were seized from his residence at Mar-a-Lago. There is already some mention of certain “subjects” being floated by the press, most notably, the Washington Post mentioned in their report that some of the documents the FBI was seeking dealt with nuclear secrets.

Holy crap.

This is pretty damn insane.

Secrets for sale.

I really don’t want to speculate further. The imagination just can’t turn off over this sort of thing.

On the news, one attorney from the DOJ just made the comment, “there are classified documents, and then there are CLASSIFIED documents”.

I have some friends that served in the military, both in the US military, and military of other countries. Off the top of my head, I know I have friends that served in Canada, Israel, Australia, Jordan, Sweden, and India. I’m guessing the rules for the handling of classified documents are pretty universal.

This is going to be a bonkers news day.

Tomorrow’s blog post will probably have a little more detail. The DOJ will release the information in the warrant this afternoon unless Trump’s lawyers block it. Trump is publicly saying he wants it released. I’ll bet he’ll eventually try to stop it “as advised by his legal council”.

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

Peace y’all.

It is Thursday morning, 11 August 2022. I’m going to get this cranked out, because I have a talk in a couple of hours (closer to 3, actually) on a subject that is not my strongest. Every technical instructor has a gap here and there, and I am not a database administrator… so some database related subjects aren’t exactly in my wheelhouse.

That’s ok, though. We all need to stretch and flex our brains every now and then, and I get to practice a little cerebral elasticity… I hope my brain is made of just a bit of memory foam.

There’s still more fallout over the FBI search if Trump’s private residence in Florida. Here’s my take – if you don’t break the law, you don’t have to worry about the FBI coming to your residence with a search warrant. You can’t take souvenirs home from the White House – they belong to the country, they belong to history.

Part of the irony is that while the former guy was in office and not on the golf course, he signed into law more stringent punishment for people that walked off with classified information.

Oops.

Coffee is brewing in the background. I found out Lisa makes the coffee a little stronger than I had been… so I went with four scoops of beans rather than three. I like hers a little better than mine, so, learn and change, right?

Alrighty, time to organize my talk a little more.

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

Peace y’all.

It is Wednesday morning, 10 August 2022. I have a case study to present to a virtual classroom full of learners across twelve time zones in about two hours.

Everything is going to be fine.

One aspect of my job that I really love is the opportunity to deliver with some very knowledgeable and experienced peers. My training partner this month has been at the mothership for better than twenty years. He delivered a session yesterday afternoon that was fantastic, and the case study we deliver this morning will build on that session with some more interaction with our learners. We love to get them involved and keep them involved, and we stay focused on the critical thinking skills necessary in this solutions architecture role.

I’ve got my glass of water at the ready as I wait to grab my first cup of coffee. Hydration was a little bit of a sidebar conversation in yesterday’s class, and I need to refocus on drinking more water. I haven’t been drinking my eight glasses of water per day, often settling for four or five. I can do a little better. Time to break out the orange flavoring … that seems to help me throw back an extra glass or two.

Time to get dialed in on my case study delivery.

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

peace y’all.

It is Tuesday morning, 9 August 2022. I am happy, healthy, awake, and looking forward to my first cup of coffee just as soon as the coffee maker completes the cycle. Some people pour their first cup of coffee as soon as there is enough coffee in the pot to fill a cup …. sociopaths!

I can now hear the last sound of water coursing through the pot. The time is upon us…

… but it can wait until I crank out this post.

The news today is focused on the raid at Trump’s private residence at Mar-a-Lago. Keep in mind that last February there was a story about multiple boxes of government documents being found at Trump’s residence – that story can be found here. Yesterday, the FBI came a-calling again, this time with search warrants.

Today, of course, there is such righteous indignation coming out of both Trump’s camp and the GOP leadership.

Tough.

Back in the 70’s, there was a character played by former Little Rascal Mickey Gubitosi called “Baretta” – ok, he adopted the stage name “Robert Blake” – and that character had a catch phrase, “Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time”.

The former president is learning another lesson. If you are going to attempt to overturn an election and prevent the peaceful change of administrations following a lawful election, you better pull it off. There are consequences for epic screw ups, and this is the biggest screw up in US history by a sitting president. He was impeached twice for a reason.

I look forward to the day when Trump is in everybody’s rear view mirror, and no one pays attention to him anymore.

If America. we love a couple of tropes – we love the underdog that overcomes tremendous odds to succeed. Always a winning story. The other trope we can’t take our eyes off – when the mighty fall.

This isn’t just a fall. This is a slow-motion train wreck.

Every American with even the most basic situational awareness saw this coming. Trump is too damned stupid to follow the most basic tenets of CYA… cover your ass. His inner circle is likely moving money around and taking a look at real estate in countries that don’t have extradition treaties with the US.

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

Peace y’all.

It is Monday morning, the first day of a new work week. 8 August 2022.

This morning I’ll have to focus on some time management. I have a couple of lessons to cover this week on data storage and data integration, and there are several meetings hanging out there that I need to attend. I had a teammate reach out to me for help on a project that he’s been struggling with, so that task will get some coverage today. I have a meeting with my manager in a few hours as well, but I anticipate that won’t take too long.

There’s news out there about the budget and about the economy. Some things are going pretty well, some things could stand to be doing better. There are pics of destroyed documents floating around the toilet in the White House. There are accusations of laws being broken by a former administration, from missing phone records and missing texts to threats against officials.

It’s tiring.

So, I’ll focus on work. That is a wonderful productive escape.

I’ll do my thing, get some orange essential oils in the diffuser, pour another cup of coffee, and prepare for my week and the rest of this month.

September won’t be quite as stressful.

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

Peace y’all.

It is Sunday morning, the 7th day of August in the year 2022.

I tweeted something yesterday that I now regret a bit. Yesterday, Twisted Sister Lead Singer Dee Snider posted a picture of a bad tat – some dude was walking around with a full back tattoo depicting an image of Donald Trump throwing up a “Seig Heil” style salute with the words across the top that read “New Aryan Empire”. Considering the quality of the artwork, I’m surprised the artist spelled those two words correctly.

I made a comment that I don’t think we’ll be seeing that artist’s work hanging in the Louvre any time soon, some artists have it, some artists don’t.

I don’t want to discourage artists. I want to discourage Nazis.

I believe in art. I believe in people that carve wood, chisel granite, paint with watercolors and oils, and put their stories, their poems, their lyrics on paper.

The things we can create reflect our feelings and our experiences. We have love. We have fear. We have hope. We have dreams. We want to revolt against societal walls that create pain. We want to stand up for opportunities for all. The poor kids need some help. The rich kids sometimes need a little help, too, but the help the rich kids need might be a little different than the poor kids because the rich kids don’t need new shoes. These kids need to play together and go to school together (I’m not a big fan of private schools and their efforts to siphon off public school funds into their selective system).

I’m just ranting at this point.

Anyway. Make art. Don’t be a Nazi. There you go.

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

Peace y’all.