It is Friday, the end of a long week, and the 11th day of February.

I’m reminded of a conversation I had before the turn of the century, all the back in the 90’s. The topic had to do with being necessary to a business’s operations. Is it good to be irreplaceable?

I argued that it is bad.

Think about it. If you are the only person capable of doing a job, you can’t get promoted. You won’t be given additional responsibilities. You’ll be stuck in role until the business model changes.

So, being irreplaceable is a bad thing… but even worse is thinking you are irreplaceable when, indeed, you are.

As a technical trainer, I’m replaceable. I’m pretty good at what I do, with decades of experience, and, hopefully, an appealing delivery style – but I have no illusions about my employer’s capacity to replace me if I start acting like a fool, throwing tantrums, and making my employer and my entire industry look bad.

That is happening right now. Workers in an entire industry are throwing temper tantrums to draw attention to themselves over something as ridiculous as mask mandates. You know, if you’re going to pick your hill to die on, aim a little higher. It just demonstrates how people think they are part of the solution when all they are doing is compounding the problem.

And they can be replaced… this is going to be the last convoy for a lot of the protesting truckers in Canada, and likely the groups organizing in the US. Anti-science idiots that spend too much time listening to right-wing satellite radio with hosts that will be more than happy to talk good people into putting their asses on the line for a pretty weak cause.

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

Peace y’all.

It is Thursday, February 10… yes, the year hasn’t changed, it’s still 2022. I’m watching the news, an interview with a White House correspondent (Maggie Haberman) who has a book coming out about Trump. I have a feeling Trump will soon be releasing some press release about how the author is bad, the book is full of lies, and her employer is failing… the typical stuff from the former guy. Why he hasn’t been arrested yet, I have no idea.

It is the last day of my four-day class, and 4:00 will be welcome. Granted, I still have an hour’s worth of meetings after, but the formal end of class is at 4. Tomorrow, I’ll have some meetings starting early, and a pretty full day of human interaction.

Coffee is done, and I know my cup is sitting over there longing for a full pour of the dark, warm, and deeply satisfying libation. I do like my medium-roast Tanzanian Peaberry.

The next part of the equation centers on my breakfast choice. Do I go with the low-carb bagel, or maybe a little eggs and bacon as the morning opener? In a few moments, it will dawn on me, and I’ll prep a morning meal. I might just fall back on my old reliable, a couple of pieces of toast and peanut butter.

It feels like the words are moving a little slower from my mind to the page. This is just one of those mornings where I could be off on some rant, but I’m feeling that wouldn’t be productive right now. Focus on the positive, don’t wish ill on people. When you wish bad things on people, it makes me wonder who out there is wishing bad things on me? The karma train stops at everybody’s house sometimes.

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

Peace y’all.

It is Wednesday morning, February 9, 2022. Right now I’m catching up to the day’s news, and I’m still kind of stuck on the GOP’s definition of “legitimate political discourse”, which apparently means it’s ok to beat a Capitol police officer with a flag pole if you’re doing it in support of the former guy.

The GOP is in trouble, and they know it. Half the time I open up the news of the day and read some wannabe political pundit making noise about how the reactionary wing of the Republican Party is going to recapture the House and the Senate in 2022 and prosecute all of the Democrats that have been involved in the investigation into the 2 and a half month temper tantrum after he lost the election in 2020.

It amazes me how people can’t wrap their pointy little heads around the fact that Trump was a horrible president and that the majority of voters in this country voted him out. Let’s just overthrow the election to appease an old rich white guy’s ego.

Makes me sick. The accusations flying about without basis in reality just make the accusers look like uninformed conspiracy theorists… check that… might be inaccurate… because rather than “look like conspiracy theorists”, this bunch of morons is a bunch of conspiracy theorists. If it looks like a duck…

Yeah, might be a good idea for me to close this out and get on with my day before I throw something across the room.

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

Peace y’all.

It is Tuesday, February 8, 2022, or as I call it, “the morning after”.

I know that I write about my interests in various sports, and last night was a sportsball kind of night. For the third time in a row, my KU Jayhawks fell to the Texas Longhorns in basketball. It was one of those “coulda, woulda, shoulda” games that I thought we had squared away, only to lose in the last minute. It was a very frustrating game.

The sun will come up shortly.

Always does.

I’m going to be tackling a little more of the class load today. My training partner is introducing the day with the basic of cloud networking, then I’ll jump on with interconnectivity and load balancing.

Class will run through 4:00 this afternoon – this is an East Coast time zone class, so we start an hour earlier, break for lunch an hour earlier. I think I’ve got the same thing going on next week as well.

Now a story on the news about gerrymandering. Yay. Because when you can’t win with policy, you have to win by arranging with election districts in the manner that creates the most distrust and will likely create the most extreme candidates for both sides.

US politics is a bothersome thing.

I’m going to grab a cup of coffee, a low-carb bagel with salmon cream cheese, and just relax for 45 minutes before I have to head to the west end of the house and get my day sorted.

Still bugs me to lose three games in a row to the same team. Chaffs even more when it’s Texas.

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

Peace y’all.

It is Monday, the first full Monday in February, the 7th, of the year 2022. I’m sitting here drinking my water, waiting for the coffee to finish brewing, and I’ve got a low-carb bagel ready to pop into the toaster. I’ve got an admin course on East Coast time, so I’ll be in my workroom by 7:00 AM for an 8:00 AM start. Everything gets moved up an hour.

Dogs are losing their minds right now, with Lucy and Freya taking the lead on the nonsensical barking.

I’ve been thinking about power and control lately, with the news currently reporting on a Chinese tennis star, Peng Shui, who reported the sexual assault last November, then disappeared, and now briefly appeared at the Beijing Olympics to deny it was ever assaulted, she’s retiring from professional tennis, and never spoke to anyone from the west without having a handler looking over her shoulder the entire time.

Looks to me like she’s going to disappear altogether and probably turned into a concubine for some Communist party member. I feel for the young woman… I wish she could’ve defected while she had a chance.

The Russians are still building up their forces along the border of Ukraine, poised to march across the country like the Germans crossing the lowlands of Belgium on their way through France. I really hope that doesn’t turn into a full-fledged war.

Coffee’s done brewing. Time for me to focus on the rest of the day. Kansas at Texas tonight at 8:00.

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

Peace y’all.

It is a slow Sunday morning, this 6th day of February, 2022. Lisa and I are watching mixed doubles curling. It’s not the most exciting sport to watch on the face of the planet, but I do appreciate the finesse and strategy. Some serious physics happening on these lanes.

The talking heads were on TV this morning, as they are wont to do. There are always going to be politicians that will rub me the wrong way, and one of them was on TV this morning, smiling and endearing himself to his real constituents, millionaires and billionaires that pay him to do their dirty week in Congress. I am not a fan of that gentleman from West Virginia.

I’m hanging out today, waiting on my daughter to wrap up her laundry room loads so I can get a couple done myself. I just need to be patient and wait my turn.

Playing around the virtual tabletop later this afternoon with the guys. I do really enjoy our Sunday afternoon sessions.

Back teaching cloud administration this next week with a younger trainer. I hope I can show the young man a thing or two about training. I’m not perfect, but I am pretty experienced. Hopefully, there’s something I can pass along to him.

About time for me to reheat some chicken wings in the air fryer. Having a hard time getting motivated to do much else.

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

Peace y’all.

It is a beautiful Saturday morning, the 5th of February, 2022. It’ll be a slower-paced day, with a little basketball this afternoon, and a dinner plan that includes some new cooking tools we have yet yo take out of the box.

I’m watching the news, and hearing about the GOP censuring two of their own, Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, for doing the unspeakable – they spoke the truth. The GOP’s national governing body has determined that the actions taken by the Trump-supporting crowd as legitimate political discourse.

What a joke that party has become. Glad I left when I did.

This whole aftermath of Trump losing the election is ludicrous. His whole argument for overturning the election is based on lies and vapor.

OK. That’s enough of that. Don’t want to get my blood pressure elevated over that loser.

I was approached about working on a new project at work, and I offered to jump in and participate. This could be an interesting new approach to scheduling our classes. We’ll see how it goes.

Other than that, not a whole lot to discuss. Teaching an administration course this next week on east coast time, so earlier start, but we get wrapped up earlier in the day as well.

Might take a look at some Olympics actions today as well.

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

Peace y’all.

It is Friday (Happy Friday, Everybody!). It is the 4th day of February, 2022, and the folks on the morning news are talking about good news in the January jobs report with 467,000 new jobs. Good news is always welcome, and this news is, apparently, quite a surprise.

I wonder if people believe all of the economic gloom and doom predictions that seem to go counter to the actual state of the economy. Wall Street is doing pretty well, employment seems to be doing pretty well, and the only real negative I see is the inflation rate – which in a lot of cases seems to be more price gouging ( I know you have an extra dollar, and I want it) rather than inflation (I know you want it, but this other customer wants it more).

I’m not an economist, but I’ve taken a few (9? 12?) hours of economics in college. I may not be as smart as you, dear reader, whether you friend, stranger, or grandchild (hi – I hope we’ve met, and I love you), but supply-and-demand issues happen with the current supply chain issues, but more and more it seems people are just raising prices because they can.

Or maybe I’m just cynical and spend too much time thinking the worst of my fellow man. No, people will jack up prices if they can. Who am I kidding? Seems like there are more jackals than puppies somedays.

I’ve got meetings starting in a few minutes.

The Olympics have started. I hope there aren’t any international embarrassments. Watched a little skating last night. It’s nice to watch something different.

OK, back to the mill…

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

Peace y’all.

It is Thursday morning, February 3, 2022. I’ve got a big puppy on my legs and two smaller ones off to my left wrestling and snarling at each other in mock battle.

What will the day bring? Well, you can pretty much bet that somebody famous will say something reprehensible, and somebody that nobody ever heard of will make the news. It might be for doing something good, or it might be for doing something that chills a person to the bone.

Also looks like there was an anti-terrorist attack by US forces against bad actors in northwest Syria. Right now the Syrian media is pushing a narrative that a lot of innocent lives were lost, but I don’t trust that much. For all I know, the Syrian government is pushing out photos of their own nerve gas attacks against their own people from a few years back. We know it happens, we’ve caught them in the act before.

Today’s weather is going to be rough across most of the southern plains states. Lots of flights have already been canceled, with some airports in Texas canceling more than 75% of their flights. I’ve often lamented having to back off my travel regimen prior to the pandemic, but right now, I am happy to be working from home.

It’s the last day of a first-time delivery. All in all, the class has gone pretty well. Not too many students, they tend to be pretty quiet, and they’ve been pretty dedicated to completing labs. We’ll get things wrapped up later this morning, and I’ll get my course notes emailed out to them.

That’s enough for now. Time to grab a bite of breakfast before I continue on my morning return.

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

Peace y’all.

Good morning, everyone! It is Wednesday, February 2, 2022. It is Groundhog Day, and the folks in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania are on the lookout for Phil… either in the form of a groundhog or in the visage of Bill Murray, who is probably around there somewhere.

Watched some sports last night with a degree of trepidation… Kansas played at Iowa State last night, and Hilton Coliseum can be a challenging place for the best teams to win on the road. The Jayhawks were without their leading scorer, Ochai Agbaji, who stayed back in Lawrence following a positive test for COVID. The Jayhawks found a little magic of their own and gave the Cyclones a tougher game than they did when they played at home, with the Kansas team winning by 9.

I can live with that… or, more appropriately, I can sleep with that. One habit I need to relax a bit is my attachment to sports teams. I have to get used to the idea that my being a fan, the t-shirt I wear, the socks I wear, the appetizers and drinks I choose for the game have nothing to do with the game. I have no effect on the outcome of a sports event.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, there’s a bunch of idiots doing idiot stuff. I wrote yesterday about the bomb threats at the HBCU schools, and there were Nazis – real, swastika flag-waving Nazis, protesting in Florida. Probably could have fit their collective intellect into a nano-thimble.

Day 3 of my security course today. I had a couple of my learners let me know that their attendance is going to be spotty today and tomorrow, so I’ll try to keep them up to date in a backchannel. Also received news that I was switched from one class next week to a different delivery… which I’m fine with, but the original delivery had a coworker helping with the delivery that I’m trying to help and mentor. I guess that’s just the way it goes sometimes.

I’ve done my thing, did my habit. Time to get ready for the rest of my day.

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

Peace y’all.