Wednesday morning was smooth sailing. I had breakfast and lunch already prepared and in the fridge, and my coffee pot programmed to startup in before I could get out of bed. I'm writing this in retrospect and can't recall most of the events that happened at work that day.

I remember my boss being upset over something with some people and was ranting on a call with them. My co-worker is kind of tone deaf and started playing videos from his phone while laughing aloud, but my boss told him to lower the volume since it was a distraction.

Later my co-worker showed me the video he was laughing at earlier which was some screw loose (I'm assuming from TikTok) that talked with a forced southern accent and his face right up in the camera while whining about how people in church whine over trivial things such as the thermostat instead of being like David and cutting heads off his enemies in the Bible. I didn't think it was very funny because it was just an awful message trying to be humorous.

After work, I went to an arts and crafts store to find some picture hanging wire and a small picture stand. I bought a hanging wire kit, but it turns out it didn't include the "D-rings" which I didn't know I would need until later. I also should have got a larger picture stand.

I'm trying to put up some paintings I got from my dad last year from out of his storage shed. The paintings come from a distant relative of mine who after World War II, took up painting. He's made a lot of these paintings, but perhaps the one that I would like most is in the possession of my aunt who got it from my uncle, who got it from my grandfather. It's a painting of a family property from the 1800's who were county pilgrims and part of where my family comes from. Oh well, she got to it first... But I do have a lot of these old paintings and they're quite nice with a characteristic charm that I find fitting.

Thursday morning I woke up well rested since it's my remote work day. I had waffles and coffee for breakfast. Things were going swell until it was 10AM and that's when the rest of my day and mood went south.

The morning scrum meeting had our security guy and a few others on the call to rattle our cages (specifically mine) over why vulnerabilities weren't being addressed. It's supposed to be a shared task and there's also the dynamic of there being another company involved (i.e. the parent owner company) and its smaller domestic offices to deal with as well. When it comes to the additional companies and offices, I leave it up to their IT team to address their own vulnerabilities since they're more familiar than myself with their environment and users. Many of these vulnerabilities are the result of old software that's needed and cannot simply be removed or patched.

So cage rattling doesn't bother me much, I'm used to it, but what got me upset was two things specifically. My boss threw everyone under the bus to say that we weren't doing anything, that we were dropping the ball despite my previous work in addressing device policy discrepancies found in an audit or the .NET stuff brought up in a security review meeting. It's okay to say that it wasn't enough, but to belly ache about nobody doing anything is kind of spitting in my face here.

The second thing that upset me was that one of the guys from the IT team of the parent company said that most of the vulnerabilities he saw were for detections (that is to say, endpoints) coming from my company and that his stuff was golden. This wasn't true at all.

I didn't have any time to counter them though because I'm not interested in their stories, but instead my focus was on appeasing our security goon because his attention was only on the vulnerability count and not so much the severity of those vulnerabilities. A point that I was trying to make was that I've been working slowly to address the higher severity discoveries which were taking time, but when I brought this up he quickly shifted tactic to say that "we have a security team that already monitors for high severity items, I'm talking about breached SLA's" which was actually going back to the root of my point where everyone is just raising a stink over a number line going up without understanding the context or nuance behind it. The SLA by the way isn't actually a real SLA in the sense of there being a contract; it was just a timer tacked onto an auto generated task in Jira. There is no contract and arbitrarily tacking a timer onto something isn't going to make me work any faster; cage rattling would be more effective. So I got a little grumpy with him in the meeting for not trying to understand because I think he intended to come in guns blazing then leave without any resistance. I later apologized for my behavior in an email though, but he did not...

Also I didn't bring it up, but this supposed security team is slacking something horrible because the servers they maintain thru a managed service provider (which thank the Lord I'm not responsible for) are to the moon in both vulnerabilities. What are they up to?

So after that meeting concluded, I spent the rest of the day without taking a break to dive back into Qualys and clean it up. First order of operation was to make a new dashboard, yay...

The dashboard that we were working from originally had everything on it from servers to all the company devices, including the kitchen sink. I couldn't make heads or tails of anything because it was just thousands of duplicated junk detections and irrelevant vulnerabilities for stuff we don't maintain. I eventually figured out a better filtering method to export a report for only my domain while excluding everything else and guess how many detections came up then? Only 164, many of which were recent and would be addressed by Microsoft in a future security update.

I ran the report for Mr. Golden boys environment too and he was sitting on over just shy a thousand! Most of that looked like Google Chrome and Oracle Java SE to me, but whooie, he's got his work cut out for him. I sent him the report because I don't think he knows how to use Qualys, ergo if he can't see anything because he can't figure it out, then that must certainly mean the vulnerabilities don't exist in his books.

Meanwhile the "high severity" stuff will get a back seat for now because I gotta make that number line go down. Sorry state sponsored hijacked notepad++, but we've got out-of-date Zoom installs to address first!

Thinking back on all of this, it has me wondering what other offices are doing with their IT and security. Does it look the same as mine? I feel like we've got too many people running around that don't know what they're doing while pretending that they do as they attempt to do everything (and poorly too might I add.) I'd prefer to stay in my lane and not venture too far from it because you'd have to be a neurotic crack head Quixote to keep up with this windmill farm.

The bureaucratic controls and sign off requirements is also hampering operations too all because of a profound mistrust of one another; make no mistake in thinking it's about safety or doing things the right way because that sort of authoritarian soft speech is the pretense and excuse for covering up insecurity and dysfunction. It took me nearly a week just to get my .NET 6 removal utility and remediation script approved because one of the signers was out of office.

I guess this is just the reality of modern corporate IT. I really miss those days before these middle management MBA productivity busy body positions flooded the industry to pad out job hiring counts all to make the country look like it's doing better than it really is. It's had its consequences to say the least, especially in the competency department.

Someday soon I'd like to leave all this behind to become a goat herder or maybe a historic millwork-er because this IT junk is for the birds.

Thanks for reading my blog!

Last Sunday I lost one of my notebooks that I used for taking quick notes at church. I've been searching all over my car, the house, and even called around to see if others may have found it. I guess it really is gone... So I suppose I'll have to go and buy another one. I'm not sure of what else to do in order to not lose these things. It's like I set em down somewhere and they just simply vanish!

Here lately I've been grabbing the Dallas morning news paper (I think that's what it's called?) when at the grocery store. It's mostly just news about wars and political stuff that has no relevancy to Dallas or the local area what-so-ever, but my cats love sitting on them! I was noticing that KitKat in particular likes to sit on paper, and sometimes they both like to jump up on the dinner table. I'm afraid their claws might damage the surface of the table if they accidentally scratch it, so I got a few news papers to lay out. When I was eating breakfast, I noticed near the top of the papers a "$4.99" just off to the corner. Ruh roh!

Without realizing it, I may have been taking these from the store without paying, thinking they were just sat out by the door for free. Some places do that you know? And also, I didn't see any obvious price tag on the racks. I'll have to drop back by and ask them if I was supposed to be paying for those because I've already grabbed three. Also, I kinda like perusing them when eating breakfast.

The workday was run of the mill with not too many eventful things worth writing about. I did go out for lunch to a little burger place I like. I usually try to get out there early since it's such a small place, but I got caught up assisting with setting up a Logitech Teams conferencing rally bar, so by the time I got there the place was packed full! So, I had to take my order with me out to the car.

When the work day was over, I drove right home. I didn't waste any time getting supper together which I remembered to take a picture of them tacos! I made them with the same ingredients as yesterdays tacos. I also scrambled some eggs and mixed them with the left over carne asada for tomorrows breakfast.

I had a lot of leisure time after supper, so I prepared a lunch for the next day. After that, I played around with my power tools to get back on track with making some replacement window frames for my kitchen. The kitchen windows are two casements side-by-side. The bottom sashes are approximately 27 1/2 inches length and width, while the top sashes I haven't yet measured since I intend to keep them (they're still in decent condition.) My cuts have to be 28 inches though because when I make the profiles and joints, it'll shave them down to the correct size. I hope this first set turns out correctly because it's been such a stinking ordeal to learn how to work around the imperfections of my table saw.

My table saw is a "job site" saw, which me being new to all this stuff didn't know that "job site" saws are not exactly intended for precision wood working and are best for making rough cuts. The kerf plate is ever-so-slightly bowed in the middle from DeWallt, which causes me to have to be extra careful not to apply downward pressure when making my cuts. I've also learned to not make long cuts through a whole piece after so many inches high (about 2 1/2 inches), or else the grain in the stock will cause the blade to subtly move and warp, resulting in a sloppy job. So I just cut half way thru on one side then flip the piece over to cut it the rest of the way from the other side instead of cutting all the way thru in one go. Each piece needs to be perfectly square on all sides and this technique seems to work well.

You can see a slight bow when I lay it flat and down on its face...

It's a little difficult to describe this in writing, but hopefully someday soon I'll be able to make a video on how to make your own traditional wood windows with conventional power tools. From all my trial and error, I've learned that making traditional wood windows would ideally call for either an original "sticking(?)" machine from the early to mid-1900's, or really expensive precision machinery which can range between enthusiast to industrial scale equipment. Alternatively, hand milling tools are an option to make them by hand, but that requires a lot of experience and skill to do for something that shouldn't be all that hard to do with plain old power tools... It just takes finding a technique that works, and I think I found one!

Thanks for reading my blog!

I missed writing a journal post for the last few days, but I'm not going to sweat over it. If I miss a day or two, oh well...

Last Friday and Saturday I cleaned up the house, mowed the yard, gave up on digging up the remaining sandburs in the front yard (they got too out of hand and it was too hot out), washed laundry, and made more pizza. Oh yeah, I also went to a birthday party last Friday. The Sunday after church, I spent the evening with some friends; it was a good time!

None of us knows anything about soccer or who even won the world cup for that matter, but the kids were outside playing "world cup" in the front yard with a soccer ball, so I kept them entertained as a "goalie guard" (their name for a goalie) between two picnic table benches. I wore out pretty quick running around in the heat which is something I don't often do. I can pace myself with a push mower, but running around instantly saps my stamina.

When I got back home that night, I realized that I lost one of my notebooks which I summarized the Sunday service in. It was my junk notebook, but I was still disappointed to discover that I lost it. I've been looking all over for it and trying to find if anyone else might have seen it. So far no luck... I hope it turns up somewhere because this is the second notebook I've lost so far!

This Monday morning I found out there were some people (namely developers) using software that required that old version of .NET 6 I had removed by a remediation script, so I packaged that sucker up in an intunewin file (because they don't offer it in an MSI, go figure...) and deployed it back out there. This is really turning into a headache for me. I don't think it's worth the time of day bothering with removing this kind of stuff that isn't even actively exploitable because you don't know what it's a dependency for; obvious software such as games, web browsers or funky screen recorders I agree with removing from peoples machines, but this shouldn't even be an issue to begin with. Honestly, we should be using read-only / copy-on-write thinclients or chromebooks if we really want clean secured endpoints. Everything we do is in a web browser any how, so why not?

Other than that, it was a laid back morning. Nobody running around like chickens with their heads cut off, so that was good. I also had my usual breakfast tacos too!

Later in the day after work, I went to the grocery store to do a little shopping. I picked up stuff that should hopefully last me the week. I'm going to see how well I'll fare with tacos all week long as a trial run to slow cooker meals before I buy one. The tacos I made were carne asada with sour cream, shredded cheese, jalapeno and onion slices, cilantro, diced mango, and lime squeezed over it. They were very excellent tacos! I also like fish tacos too and will include those in other meals for some variety if this all works out.

Unfortunately I didn't think to take a picture of them for a "picture of the day," so maybe tomorrow I'll try to remember.

Thanks for reading my blog!

I'll probably start doing an image of the day soon

Today I did some work on the CozyNet site to improve the pagination buttons for "Next post" and "Previous Post" to better handle single day multi-posts. I touched on this a little earlier this Monday, but didn't complete it.

The issue that I was facing was organizing posts by date and time that fell on the same day. The naming convention wasn't lending itself to be very helpful here since it only tracked the date and the file system doesn't seem to keep track of creation time. Also, I'm not particularly fond of basing scripts in this manner upon the file creation date and time anyhow, since it's something that's often easily modifiable. Back when I migrated CozyNet to a new server, my file migration process changed the time stamps and date of every file since they weren't preserved; I find this method of tracking highly unreliable and prone to future instability.

So I had to figure something out. My example files were "20260720_blog" and "202607202_blog," which if you pay close attention, it has an additional 2 appended to the end of the date. This is simply to indicate that it's a second file, but it can be any range of number. When I finish my blog posts, I run a few follow up scripts to auto generate the comment table, update the site search indexer, and to update the pagination nav buttons. It all takes about 5 seconds, but the pagination nav button script is a little unique.

The nav buttons are actually a PHP scriptlet that simply pulls from a pre-arranged listing of blog posts in a text file outside the webroot. I didn't want PHP to do any heavy lifting or processing here beyond ingesting the file list into a variable and walking it based on the source name of the requested document. The pre-arranged listing is generated by the pagination script that I run after completing a post, which simply lists the contents of /blogs/ while filtering out irrelevant files.

What I ended up having to do was simply adjust the list filter to introduce "sort" and that was all I needed this whole time. I spent a few hours coming up with an elaborate solution, only to find that "sort" without any flags or additional commands would sort it correctly. You'd think that with 202607202 being a larger number than say 20260723, that it would sort it higher, but nope! Apparently the "-n" flag would read this numerically, but the default sort behavior will collate lexicographically. I guess I never really noticed that until today.

There wasn't much else going on in the office today since I completed most of what I needed to do in the morning. It was just more the same stuff from yesterday, which I don't think is worth repeating here.

After work, I had a wedding to attend back at the church. Thankfully I packed a supper the night before so I didn't have to go out and spend more money to eat. I got back home right at dusk and spent a little time with the cats since they'd been cooped up in their room the past two days and made a vanilla ice cream float with some cream soda too for dessert.

SharePoint outage, Aaaaa!!

Yeah, that was going on back in the office, but it didn't bother me, just the other departments. There was a global or regional outage of the SharePoint service from Microsoft, which I'm sure caused a stir for some people.

Anyhow, I wasn't well rested this morning. I had trouble staying asleep over night and probably only got three hours at the most. Fortunately I don't bother much with the SharePoint stuff, so my rolling out of the bed last minute wasn't met with a firestorm of activity.

It was a laid back day since I work remote on Thursdays. I didn't feel like making anything for breakfast this time either. I spent my time following up and closing out tickets and working on this here blog.

I'm glad to see that my remediation script is working at removing the .NET 6 runtime from off of peoples workstations. I don't think I quite yet had the clear to do that, but I didn't care and launched it anyway. Now I can watch number line go up in remediated devices and the other number line go down for detected vulnerabilities; this feels silly...

I also found out after a security review meeting that some tickets I was addressing (they were auto assigned to me from the CSO's account in Jira) had hallucinated missing patches and was auto-generated by a product called Nagomi. In case you're wondering what it is, it's yet another AI dashboard security product. I spent probably three hours in Qualys pulling up reports to counter the Nagomi findings only to be told that it was an accident and wasn't supposed to be assigned to me in the first place...

To uplift my spirits after that, I made homemade Pizza for supper! This time I made them small, like personal pizzas, since my little electric oven is... well, little. I wish I could get propane to the house so that I could use my nice big gas oven and it not just be there as a kitchen prop, but alas that's yet another item on my to-do-list of repairs. I aught to share some before and after photos of the house so you guys might understand how shot this place was when I got it!

A little while later that evening, I had a bible study meetup to get to. I like to keep two note books for these where one notebook has my slopp y poorly written notes written in haste and the second one I transcribe my sloppy notes to with more attention and care. I only keep the second note book with me to look back in review or reference for the meetings and don't actually write anything to it until the next day. I think I've written about this before, but I find that writing things down helps me to better internalize them, and I mean physically writing things down because typing doesn't work for me.

Something that was said during the meetup that I thought worth noting down was that faith grows in us by exercising it, and that it's not about the size or quantity (hence the mustard seed parable.) It starts off small, but if we faithfully work with what little we have, it'll grow.

Thanks for reading my blog!

I woke up pretty groggy this Monday morning. It's because of the terrible allergies and swimming out at the lake the day before. I changed my alarm to beep 30 minutes later to just lay there for a moment.

After feeling a little more awake and less groggy, I got ready for the day and headed out to work. I didn't even greet the cats like usual, but I did pour out some water for the dog since it's been hot out during the day.

Now, with this being a Monday, I like to pick up breakfast tacos. It always gives me something to look forward to on Monday mornings at the office. I also brought my own heavy whipped cream for coffee since the office only carries that fake Cafe Mate soy milk alternative.

I can tell I was still groggy, even while driving thru town, because I stopped at a green light thinking it was a red light for some reason. It wasn't until around the lunch hour that I was finally beginning to wake up. Since I didn't pack a lunch this time, I had to go out yet again to buy a lunch.

I'm noticing that I'm going out for lunch a lot here recently...

My general rule around eating out is one breakfast, one lunch, and one supper for the week. I would like to scratch all but the breakfast tacos on Monday mornings because it's getting hard to find food that's not unhealthy for a good price. On average, lunch is over $12 now and suppers are generally $15, which adds up fast if you're eating out multiple times a week. I don't like that, but I keep getting caught in these situations where I don't have the time of day to prepare a lunch and a supper.

The reason for the suppers, by the way, is because I don't have enough time to drive back home after work shortly before going to - say, a church function or the like. If I don't eat, I'll get skinnier than I already am and also tired.

I'm beginning to formulate a plan to address this dilemma though, which I won't like, but I don't think I have a choice. This means batch cooking similar meals for the week and freezing them... This will probably be burritos. A slow cooker or that insta-pot my coworker won't stop talking about will probably be required. And I'll probably start buying my meats in bulk too.

During my down time, I spent time on the CozyNet server building in some additional functionality to support multiple posts in a single day. If you've noticed, all my blog posts are dated in the file name like "20260721_blog.html." This name is important for the comment system to pull up the corresponding database table without resorting to java script or session tracking, but in rare scenarios where I might post more than once in a single day, I have to adjust the naming of the latest file to something else. The comment system is capable of handling any file name so long there's a database table matching it on record, but the blog post pagination buttons never had such functionality. So for example, "20260720_blog" would get picked up but "202607202_blog" would be seen as a larger number, giving it priority over future blog posts. If I completely changed the name, it would mean having to make a special case exception in the site search indexer, which runs on a wildcard for "blog.html" files.

I didn't want to change how anything works except for the pagination buttons, so spent some time tinkering around with that. I have it kind of working and can post multiple times in a single day, but I haven't yet figured out how to organize it by date. File creation date doesn't appear to be tracked on here and modify dates are no good. I'll figure something out.

After work, I went grocery shopping for the week. There were a few items I missed that I'll have to pick up next time, but I got some stuff together to make a pizza and pasta dinner. When I got back home, I heated up some leftovers from Saturday for supper.

I spent the rest of the evening outside in the front yard digging up sandburs that managed to sprout up after last weeks rain. I was hoping to be able to mow the front yard too, but because there were so many sandburs, I wasn't able to. I managed to dig up most of them, so maybe later in the week I'll hopefully get another chance to mow the yard.

This Tuesday morning I had no grogginess and was immediately awake; I didn't waste any time either. I cleaned up the bed, tended to the animals, let the cats out of their room for a little while, prepared breakfast, packed a lunch and got tidied up for another day at the office.

The commute to work was especially relaxing, having nobody behind me and nobody in front all the way there.

I was back in Qualys again going over detected vulnerabilities and patching. I'm still addressing the .NET 6 runtime out there. I have the dotnet-removal utility deployed and a remediation script setup to actually remove it, but the next road block is the bureaucratic redtape of middle management. They're also responsible in halting the Windows 11 25H2 update too... I'm supposed to submit a change request for this sort of thing, which I guess is fine (albeit I'm used to the days where I owned my domain), but where it becomes a road block is in having to explain things in detail to people that aren't actually interested in understanding squat about it, but are trying to pad out their Outlook calendars to appear busy in meetings for upper managements productivity board. It's a stink'n racket.

The sad reality to it all is that this is a waste of everyone's time. The .NET 6 runtime isn't going to do anything and can be safely ignored. I feel like I'm always being pulled by two sides.

After work, I went over to help de-weed a very large garden (more like a crop field) ran by members of the church. It was split between sweet potatoes and sorghum. We did that for about an hour, then ate watermelon after and fellowshipped. I did what I could, but my legs were already pretty sore from digging up those sandburs the other night.

As soon as I got back home I took a bath. It was getting really late by now, but I went ahead and washed the dishes then prepared both a lunch and a supper for tomorrow to take with me to work. Tomorrow I'll be going to a wedding and will be getting back late again. Since I've already eaten out one too many times this week, I wanted to prepare something now instead of the next morning when I know I won't feel like it.

Thanks for reading my blog!

This blog post is in relation to my previous post on "Guide to a modern and practical desktop with KDE Plasma 6 (X11 only)." I'm still using this desktop setup, but with a few additional improvements and tweaks to make it more pleasantly functional.

I'd like to start off by saying that the floating panel feature of KDE Plasma is not so great. I've been toying around with it and have noticed that even without the panel plugins, it's not a smooth operation for application menu bar users when transitioning states. Even on Wayland, it has this frame hitching effect that's very jarring. For instance, the floating panel changes the internal margins. This can cause some of the widgets and icons to subtly reposition between floating and non-floating states, which in my opinion becomes a usability flaw if your icons are moving around like that.

I've also removed the virtual desktop viewer widget since I found it to be a waste of space. When I swipe my touchpad, I can easily tell which desktop I'm on and don't need the widget at all.

And I also moved the window controls to the left rather than them being on the right hand side. It has a more visual consistency being alongside the application menu rather than it being on the right-hand side next to the system tray. Additionally, I've configured it to always remain visible rather than dynamically winking in and out depending on the window state, because I thought it kind of annoying that the window controls weren't consistently there. I found myself resorting to those more often than the same set of controls in the actual window titlebars themselves.

Theme-wise, I've also made my own panel colorizer presets to make the desktop feel a little more opened up and less constrained by panelbars. When an application window becomes maximized or touches a panel, it'll change to a solid bar that blurs the background, which I think looks quite nice.

More images of the desktop:

This really looks and feels to me like something KDE Plasma or some desktop environment project aught to copy because it works really well. Visually it looks nice and made for productivity rather than an art project or something straight out of the early 2000's, albeit the Breeze Plasma shell theme is lacking (especially among the widget themeing.)

For example, this bubbly pop out island effect doesn't communicate connectivity with the rest of the desktop shell, even though it's part of it; this makes it feel sort of thrown out there and in-cohesive, as if it were alienated from the rest of the UI. It would look a lot nicer with a frosted glass effect too, but after experimenting with other Plasma shell themes, none of them are as complete as the default Breeze theme, so I'm going to leave it alone for now.

Pop outs like this aren't very good form. It should be connected to the panel.

Thanks for reading my blog!