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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Author: Karel Kerezman

  • What’s starting, when, exactly?

    If I had to see this, then so do you.

    Arrows added via screenshot utility for emphasis. Names NOT changed to protect the guilty.

    A few minutes ago I received a marketing email in my work account from SkyKick, an outfit that does some cloud-related stuff related to Microsoft’s cloud offerings, like migrating email from local Exchange to Microsoft 365. We do business with them so actually blocking them would be counterproductive (supposedly), fine, whatever.

    But. At 4-something in the afternoon (the day before, and a federal holiday no less) I have a very, very hard time believing that they have a webinar starting 2 hours from right now. Especially since the start time is also clearly stated as 11 o’clock (Eastern, because the entire business world operates on US Eastern Time, right?) tomorrow.

    All I can figure is that somehow it being 6pm Eastern right now is translating to… two business hours before 11am Eastern tomorrow? I guess? Dunno, seems wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey to me.

    Not that I care. They’d have to pay me serious money to get me in attendance for a Microsoft Copilot (hawk, spit) presentation. Yuck.

  • Re-Foundry

    Given that we’re never, ever, going to use the Starfinder stuff I set up in the Foundry VTT rig, I figured I’d get all that cleaned out. So I did. All of the systems, all of the modules, everything. In addition, I performed an upgrade to version 12.

    It’s clean, it’s tidy, it’s ready for… somebody to make use of for running some kind of tabletop-RPG-type game. Dunno who, when, or what, but hey… if you need a Foundry rig and don’t want to shell out for it, I already did so maybe you won’t have to?

    Wheeeee.

  • Duo Universal

    Just a quick heads-up for other WordPress admin types who installed the Duo plugin years ago and kind of forgot about it… apparently it’s been deprecated in favor of a new plugin which supports the new “universal prompt” system. It’s not hard to upgrade (deactivate old, install new, activate new, enter the same token/passkey/hostname as you did before into new, authenticate, delete the old once you’ve confirmed new works) but I wish there’d been a bit more communication about this.

    Also be aware that Universal Prompt defaults to an immediate push notification rather than giving you a button to click to initiate a push. Other than that, it’s basically the same, and works just fine. Hooray for security.

  • The Only Requirement

    I’m struggling with the sense, as I often do, that I’m not getting enough done. I haven’t put enough things away in the closet. I haven’t organized enough. I haven’t “produced content.” I haven’t, I haven’t, I haven’t justified my continued existence.

    Intellectually I know better, but brains are assholes (as we often say in this house) so I’m just going to place the following two statements here, in public, as a reminder to myself and to anyone else who need them:

    The only absolute requirement is that you get through to tomorrow.
    The only goal that matters is to not make things any worse for anyone (including yourself) in the meantime if you can prevent doing so.

    Everything else is gravy. Any progress is a bonus, not a minimum requirement.

  • Shiny Platter Capsule Reviews

    For part of my vacation time I’m actually using that 4K Blu Ray player that sits almost entirely unused in the living room.

    Yesterday I watched the Genesis documentary/interview piece, Sum Of The Parts. Which is a decent, if highly condensed, overview of Genesis’ discography and how it came to be. (With one glaring omission.) They also dabbled in covering the solo careers, showing the “highlights” of Gabriel’s and Collins’ output plus brief mentions of Hackett’s first solo record (before the split) and Rutherford’s Mechanics project and Banks’ various efforts. Mind you… near the end of the whole piece they got to “Collins left the band in 1996” and immediately cut to the preparation for the 2007 tour. Hmm. Poor Ray Wilson, left out of the story again.

    Today I watched the second Miles Morales animated adventure series installment, Across the Spiderverse. And it’s… good, overall. Almost continually quippy, though it managed to dial that down at some of the more appropriate moments. But that’s Spider-Man (and Spider-Gwen, and Spider-Woman, and, and, and, and…) for you, being quippy is sewn into the costume. (With one notable exception.) Visually, the team at Sony’s animation studio continue to push the boundaries using the first Spiderverse flick as a jumping-off point. It’s a delight for the eyes. Story-wise… I don’t know. It’s not done yet, so I can’t “sit” with it and get a feel for how well they’ve pulled that off. I’ve seen half a movie, now I have to wait for the other half.

    No more movies this week, but maybe I’ll start on a TV show next. I’ll decide on that… tomorrow.

  • PowerShell Fun: MX and SPF Lookup

    I don’t talk about work very often here, mainly because there’s not much to talk about. Every day’s a mix of new challenges and the same old song & dance… and the dance usually involves backups, somehow.

    Today, though, I dug in on a request to at least partially automate the task of retrieving and storing certain information about email domains in our client base. What better way to do that then with some PowerShell tinkering?

    (Don’t answer that question. I know there are better ways, for various values of “better.” PS is the toolkit I need to use for work-specific reasons, let’s leave it at that, shall we? Play nice.)

    (more…)

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