Despite being a day of rest, Sunday was a busy day for me, albeit an enjoyable one. Shortly after having my breakfast, I put on some shoes and went traipsing out into the barn to search for the old window casements I replaced. Since I couldn't find any aluminum tracks matching for a conventional wood window anywhere, I figured my only choice was to salvage the old ones.

After a little digging, I found the casements buried beneath some boxes I threw in there for a future burn day. I was leery of there being wasps or something else hiding in those boxes, but nothing came out to sting me this time. I brought the casements back to the house and laid them out on the kitchen floor to get to work.

Upon inspection, I noticed they weren't as bad as I remembered them being, but nevertheless they needed to be replaced since the bottoms were rotted. If there was enough space in the wall, I could have repaired them by sistering on some more material. I felt bad having to tear them apart to remove the aluminum tracks, but it had to be done. I'm thinking I could make use of these if I were to cut them down for a smaller window.

Anyhow, I managed to pull the tracks off and spent the rest of the day just cleaning one of them with three more to go...

I used acetone to wipe off most of the paint since these aren't supposed to be painted over, but it wasn't very effective at removing the calk and there was also a layer of paint that was totally resistant to the acetone I had to scratch off. I took some side by side pictures of a dirty one and the one I cleaned as best I could.

Some of that paint just simply won't come off, but I think it's good enough.

The calk and paint that was squeezed down into the track was causing the seal to fail (yes seal, not sill) because the way it's designed, it's supposed to gently squeeze around the front and back corners of the sliding window frame to keep out any drafts or prevent environmental escape. They were essentially glued into an open position. If properly maintained and taken care of, this window system is moderately less performant than your over priced modern windows you'd order out of a catalog, so long you pair it was a storm screen.

A smooth fit.

I also investigated the casements to see where the rot began and noticed a few things. The tracks were stapled onto the casement which meant water intrusion when it rains. I've seen the use of staples like this before, but ideally the track is stapled down only from the interior side and not the exterior. The exterior staple higher up seemed fine, but the lower exterior staple on both casements on either side had serious water intrusion that no doubt contributed to the rot. The casements were also missing their parting stop that the aluminum track covers over. Without that, you could easily damage the track by pushing the window into it. These casements were poorly made from the get go...

That lower exterior staple lead to a chain of events that rotted out the joint holding the bottom sill (yes, sill this time not seal).

Most of the remaining original window casements (talking 100+ years old now) are doing fine with the exception of the bottom sills needing to be replaced on a few of them. As for the newer casements (somewhere from the 1960's to 80's), all of them are exhibiting the same failure, which will require a rebuild. Now, unlike the kitchen window frames, the rest of the wood frames should still be salvageable, but are all in serious need of restorative work.

Thanks for reading my blog!

This is just a journal post of random things going on, and also a good excuse to try out my snazzy new RSS feed generator! I'm sure there's some improvements that could be made to it, but in the meantime I won't know until I try it out under different situations.

As I was documenting it to my notes on how it works, a thought occurred to me as I was looking over the list of documented utilities that I've made for the site. I've essentially made my own content management system here, which has a number of nice features that I think sets it apart.

It's not an everything CMS, but a self hosted blog only CMS, making it rather lean, simple and purpose built. It's also console only, so no WYSIWYG editors or graphical interfaces and control panels; but despite that, slowly it's come to a point to where it could actually be used by other people rather than just myself. It would need some reworking in the PHP template department for sure, but so long you have a clear and working knowledge of HTML and CSS, it's really quite nice to be able to edit the source templates to build out your own blog page.

I don't think I'll ever release it though because I don't want to have to maintain a project, but who knows, maybe one day maybe not. I just thought it was an interesting realization worth mentioning because building a CMS wasn't exactly on my to-do list.

Change of subject now!

I've been making a change to uh... I guess life style? I'm not sure what you would call it, but basically it's a change to how I think about things, or to be more precise, a change on how I ruminate on things.

I don't think ruminating is all bad, but it can quickly devolve if left unchecked into an obsessive compulsion, especially if you're an OCD type which I believe is what I've been doing for quite some time now. It was less noticeable to me before because I had a lot of distractions to keep me preoccupied, such as my computer and internet activities. It didn't bother me as much back then, but I don't have those distractions to run to anymore and recently I've found myself worrywarting over silly things that I was blowing way out of proportion. I don't want to go into needless detail since I find it personal, but basically it boils down to insecurity.

If you live in isolation, you'll never really know what problems you have and will think it's just a normal part of life when actually none of this was how anything was ever meant to be. You don't know what you don't know until you're around other people, and then your dysfunctions become glaringly obvious. The lie I believe that's all too easy to fall into is that it's just "being who you are," as if the dysfunction is something to identify with rather than break away from. Once it's totally revealed, you can break away from it.

And this is what I've been doing these past two weeks. The hump I've been getting over is an ingrained habit, which is to instantly fall back into ruminating on insignificant details or events that I feel like didn't quite go right or perhaps where I fell short in and didn't do enough. The root of it for myself comes from apprehension and insecurity because I've not had anyone to bounce off of or confide in personally for assurance or reassurance. A little assurance can go a long way, but without it, that doesn't necessarily mean I aught to devolve into worrying over everything to the point of dysfunction because it always turns into chasing after the illusion of total control and the control of outcomes. When it inevitably falls apart, it can send me into a ruminating feedback loop that just causes anxiety and despair. Also, it reveals that I'm lacking in relationship. Being an independent sort mostly out of unfortunate necessity, I've never put much focus into relationship before which no doubt has its consequences.

So to acknowledge a few things, I can't control everything and shouldn't bother myself to think that I can. I can't change history so there's no point in "what if" scenarios. I also can't predict the future, so there's no point in trying to change (control) it either. There's no sense in worrying over things that have happened nor things that will happen because worrying produces nothing short of anxiety.

I feel like this is a new level of letting go, and not from an apathetic sense, but in an improving kind of way that can set one free. Since I can see it now, the ingrained habit to fall back into rumination can be fought against! I feel like this has only been possible with a good conscience whereas before I didn't have the confidence nor the energy because my conscience was dulled. It was more or less a way of life and the way things were rather than a lie I was telling myself.

If I begin to sense that something is trying to tear me down in a negative way, whether that be my own thoughts or someone else to a point of destruction and dysfunction, I can readily say that it's of the devil and the option is always there to not entertain his lies or his liars rent free. Why should I listen to condemnation coming from the condemned? There's a whole world out there so I'm not hanging around these prison walls anymore.

Thanks for reading my blog!

Screenshot of the image sizer function

It's been a long time coming, but I've finally made an RSS feed generator for CozyNet! That's right, I don't have to manually copy stuff over into a feed index file anymore!

Yesterday afternoon I was making a few custom action scripts for my file manager that would resize images down to smaller dimensions and batch rename them to include the date in the file name. Typically each image that I have for a blog post includes the same publish date that's in the filename of the blog post itself. I have it this way so that the images are associated by name to their corresponding post. I did this with the intent for a future RSS feed generator, but never got around to it.

Till now, I've been manually naming the files and resizing them myself, which was laborious, but after scripting it to an easy right click of the mouse and selecting a file action in my file manager, it takes no time or effort on my part anymore.

Feeling inspired, I figured why not try to tackle the RSS feed issue too?

The main problem that I ran into a few years ago when I attempted this the first time was detecting and resizing image dimensions to a standard width for the feed while keeping their aspect ratio. Additionally, some images could be smaller than the standard width and wouldn't need to be resized. I should also mention that unlike my custom action script, the images themselves aren't being resized, but that the sizing is handled by attribute within the HTML img element itself.

The reason that I do this is because a number of RSS feed readers don't adjust the size of images, which can make for an unpleasant viewing for the user scrolling thru a post of full sized images.

Other issues I ran into was in trying to figure out how to parse and clean up HTML.

As I've mentioned before, I prefer a server-side dynamic page generation approach to running websites. The content of a blog post lives on the HTML document file itself (my choice) while most everything else is dynamically generated upon request. Typically the content should live in a database, but I intentionally did it this way so that I could run a search indexer on the site. When I make a new blog post, it's directly made in an HTML editor using a template (or in my case, a souped-up VIM); there's a history here, alright! The completed document is then submitted to the server via rsync and copied into the /blogs/ directory (or created and edited directly on the server too because I can use VIM anywhere!)

Since the HTML document is the source of the blog post, I don't have any other way than to parse that file for a feed, which calls for manual intervention. This means that I have to make a scraper if I do want to script this for a feed, and that's exactly what I did!

Now since this is all happening on the same server, I didn't need to use anything like cURL or WGET. The feed generator script simply stores the target blog post in its entirety into a variable, which is specified by giving the publish date of the blog post; like I said, the publish date is in the name of the HTML file so this greatly simplifies things.

After that, it runs thru a list of sed commands to clean it up because you don't want CSS classes or divs in an RSS feed. It also replaces the HTML width and height size attributes of image elements with a placeholder. Exiftool gets used for detecting the image file dimensions corresponding to the blog post, and with a little cross multiplication and division, the aspect ratio problem is also resolved. The image dimensions are stored into an array and one by one in a for loop the width and height placeholders are swapped out with a standard width and height.

Screenshot of the feed.

Going forward, I will need to include in the naming of the image files an additional digit or two to count their order because the feed generator doesn't actually know what order the images are supposed to be in for the blog post. It's just listing them out by the publish date in the file name and they're ordered by whatever else proceeds in the name, which isn't helpful. Relying on file naming to organize stuff in this manner is probably considered bad form by today's standards, but it's a very small bit of useful information without having to rely on overly complicated metadata tagging systems or databases to manage.

I'm sure there will be some hiccups come along the way that I'll need to tweak the generator script for, but by and large it's functional and does the job!

Thanks for reading my blog!

"Can we have Andersen windows?" "No, we have windows back home." Windows at home...

Well I'm happy to say that I've finally perfected (at least enough to my standards) my window frame making technique! It's taken a long time to finally get here, but hopefully it'll pay off.

I imagine some people reading this who are already skilled in carpentry or millwork might be wondering what the big deal is here; I mean, it's just a silly old window frame anyone could make in their sleep right!? Yeah, right... This wasn't easy to figure out, but once you know how it's not so difficult from then on.

I'd like to highlight a few areas that I would keep messing up because for someone completely new to this kind of stuff, it took a lot of trial and error.

My first mistake was watching YouTube DIY videos. The DIY videos were somewhat helpful, but they tend to leave a lot of important details out without showing or even so much as mentioning it. The "how to draw an owl" meme would always come to my mind, but I can relate when making technical guides or documentation on something advanced, like setting up a web server. There's an expectation of know-how that the reader should already have, or in my case, wood working.

My second mistake was attempting to follow a technique that only worked with high precision machinery when all the tools I have are considered "contractor" grade. The window router sash bit set turned out to be a pricey waste of money and time since I didn't have the proper router and table to use it on; additionally, this is by far the hardest method of making wood windows regardless of having the right machinery.

My third and final mistake was trying to get everything cut and shaped super precise all in one go from the table saw. It turns out, this will never work and there was an important little detail that everyone would fail to mention or intentionally skip so that it would appear simpler than it really was. Instead of trying to hone in the precision of my cuts, especially when making joints and tenons, all I had to do was get it just good enough then use a sanding file to finish it off. Meanwhile I'd see guys make their cuts, then pick up a whole other set to demonstrate it fitting together while completely skipping their work in making that happen. Grrrr!!!

I know how to make a cut on a table saw, but what I was wanting to learn is the whole technique of making the frames which includes fitting them together. I've noticed that many of these DIY content channels aren't so interested in showing you how as they are in showing off. These are simple little things in hindsight, but being new to this, it can make all the difference.

Any minor imperfection can be covered up with wood filler.

A book that I found unexpectedly helpful was "Gene Logsdon's Practical Skills." While it doesn't explain how to make a window frame or casement, it does contain helpful little bits of information which I was able to connect the dots with.

Sometime soon, I would like to make a blog post on how to make simple window frames with conventional power tools and some hand tools. I still need more time to learn how to make proper casements, but they're not as difficult despite being a larger piece with pullies and counter balance weights. Besides, the casements I'm working on use a spiral balance, which are simpler to build for.

I've also been wanting to make an additional interior window that can be hung over the main window. It would be one large piece that fits over serving as a second layer to improve the thermal efficiency of my windows during the cold part of winter and the hottest part of summer. In between those seasons, they can be removed and stored in the upstairs attic space.

This is all I have for now.

Thanks for reading my blog!

A poor photo of a rising red moon. I need a real camera!

The months of July and August felt like they flew right by me! They've been especially hot and dry too, which is common for the area this time of year. My yard is crispy dry and dead, meaning I haven't had to mow ever since my last general update blog post, I believe.

Unfortunately with all the heat and sunlight, it's baked my poor truck to the point of blistering the clear coat on the roof and hood. I think this is possibly because I wasn't consistently keeping up a coat of wax on it. It's a 26 year old truck so these things eventually happen. I will try to restore those spots, but in the meantime I went ahead and washed it off and waxed it. This sort of has me wanting to buy one of those metal carports so my cars aren't always baking in the sun, but I do have a barn in the back I could park them in if it weren't full of junk!

Maybe I'll pay someone to clear it out instead of buying a carport.

A few days ago I got back into the swing of wood working and made an almost complete window frame. I haven't made the check rail yet since it's a unique piece and wanted to perfect my technique in making the bottom rail and stiles. I had to tinker around with some spare stock on the table saw to learn how to work around its imperfections. Afterwards, and knowing what to keep an eye out for, I managed to make very accurate cuts. I do believe that I'll be using these for a final replacement frame in my kitchen!

I've also been researching the types of weather stripping I could use in the window casements. I would like to replicate the same system that was there before which were aluminum strips, but unfortunately it doesn't appear to be produced anymore. I can find the spiral window balances, which I'll probably use here, but the particular aluminum weather stripping for converting old wood window frames that I'm looking for doesn't seem to exist anymore. My guess is that they were common between the 50's and 80's for wood windows before the market shifted to cheaper fabrication methods. Nowadays it's all aluminum or vinyl casements, tracks, and frames with foam or rubber gaskets but nothing for wood frames and casements which is making this difficult.

One of my windows in the house that also needs repair work...

I'll try to salvage the old stuff if it's repairable. I've come across spring bronze stripping, but it's ridiculously expensive and kind of shoddy by comparison. I can't see it making as near a good seal around the frame as the aluminum weather stripping of yesteryear, but it seems to be the only option on the market.

I haven't made any additional home repairs yet. It's been a busy month and my scheduling could be better. I've also missed the last few days of journal posts too. The journal blog posts have been fun to make, but I feel like they're getting repetitive. It's also a chore to keep up with it when I've got other things going on so I think I'm going to pull back on it.

Change of subject...

I've been going thru some old stuff on my NAS server lately. I've accumulated a lot of stuff over the years, most of it being old junk I once identified with. I consider these idols today that I don't want having a part in my life anymore. I've deleted hundreds of gigabytes of game ISO's, my old WoW screenshots, all of the music I use to listen to, my sci-fi TV series collections (Farscape, Star Trek, Star Gate, Babylon 5, etc...) There's still a lot more to go thru, especially the things I have stored away in large containers up stairs, but it's going to take some time just because of the sheer amount of stuff I have to go thru.

Batch deleting files from Windows file explorer is faster than Dolphin!

What set me off was a series of events, but one evening I was listening to some old albums from Above and Beyond. They're well made and a good quality sound, but I found myself looking back to a sinful past and felt like this was leading to a pillar of salt situation for me. I don't want to keep stumbling over this stuff to be tempted by it and so I'm just going to get rid of it. The least personal items I'm going sell on ebay or give them to someone else since it might be worth something, but the more personal things that I use to identify with I'm going to burn them if possible. My identity isn't in the shallow things of this world anymore and I'm not going back to it either.

Thanks for reading my blog!

KitKat sitting on her favorite news papers.

Monday and Tuesday have been mildly busy days for me. Monday was a wedding shower for another friend of mine, which He'll be getting married this weekend. I feel like I've been writing about weddings every week now!

I got him some picture frames as a gift. I figured they would need some picture frames and it wasn't something too large or expensive.

Then Tuesday I was helping a retired co-worker setup a laptop for Windows 11. I doubt it'll support Windows 11 due to their arbitrary hardware requirements and granted the laptop is from 2018; it's as old as the one I'm writing from now! Unfortunately we left off late in the night letting it run updates for Windows 10 since MS front loads a bunch of junk before upgrading it to 11. I would have popped in a flash drive with a Windows 11 install already on it, but I don't possess anything of Microsoft except for my old desktop from 2011 and the official Windows 8.1 ISO. So the hard way it was...

He's been wanting Windows 11 and Microsoft Office for awhile now thinking he needs it, but I can't see him actually doing anything at all on that laptop. Most everything he does is on his phone, and he's never used Windows 11 before nor a modern version of Microsoft Office. The guy is in his 70's too; if I were him, I wouldn't even bother with computers anymore. He's kind of a susceptible person, so I'm afraid he's going to get fleeced by all the adware, dark patterns of Windows, and "Microsoft" Scamindian call centers. That's largely why I put my parents on Ubuntu MATE, but I will have to admit that not even Ubuntu is prepared for pedestrian users.

I can't tell you how many time that crummy app store crashes out on them, or how it used to not properly clean old kernels that would eat up the meager boot partition that then led to hosing up the package manager because it would bomb out if it couldn't apply the new kernel version. My mom has a real anxiety with that app store for updating the system too because it's so bad, but it's the only user friendly method of handling those. You can't trust the unattended updater either because it too would eventually bomb out at some point in the year. I think this is the last year for the release version of Ubuntu they're on to receive support, so I'll probably move them to Debian with the MATE desktop around Thanksgiving.

Thanks for reading my blog!

Last Friday night I spent time learning how to make my own Churros! Since I was already making my own tortillas for tacos, I was inspired to make Churros for dessert too.

I had a churro kit that had been sitting on the shelf for awhile now and figured this would be pretty simple. The kit came with a pastry bag and tube tip, and a mix. I followed the instructions exactly, which I noticed immediately something wasn't right. Regardless, I followed them to see what would happen and as expected, it wasn't working out.

The instructions on the side of the box said 1 1/2 cup of water to 1 cup of Churro mix. That's a lot of water! So you can probably imagine what that looked like. I had to add more mix to it to firm it up into a batter like paste. The box also said to heat up some oil in a frying pan, which I did.

When I attempted to squeeze out the Churro paste into the pan, it sort of lumped up and came out looking like a giant tape worm. I was so grossed out by its appearance and texture that I didn't want to eat it.

Nope.

I was just about to give up, but decided to give it a second try. I looked up some recipes online and I could see that the first few were all going to cause the same problem; they called for too much water! I looked around some more trying to figure out what was missing and I finally found it; you have to boil the water to a rolling boil first, then quickly dump in the flour mix and stir up into a ball! I had no idea that it could do that, but boiling the water is the trick that a lot of recipes seem to omit. I think the rule of thumb to go by is if a recipe calls for "warm" water, that means you aught to boil it... Why not just say that instead of "warm" water though?

After that I let it cool down because it was too hot for the pastry bag. The consistency from out of the tube was perfect. I also broke out the deep fryer too instead of using the fry pan.

Perfect form.

I realized half way thru that you should squeeze out the Churros onto a pan first, then gently drop em into the oil. I was following the lead of some YouTube videos where they were squeezing out th e Churro paste from the tube while standing over the pot of oil and quickly realized that you shouldn't do it that way or else risk dropping the whole tube into the oil and it splash back onto you. You could also risk the tube tip popping off and all the paste come blowing out into the pot. That oil is heated to 375 degrees fahrenheit.

They turned out perfectly!

Before and after.

Sprinkled a little cinnamon sugar over them.

This Saturday I spent most of my time at my parents again. I figured I should stop by every few weeks. I got my hair cut and had cat fish for supper, so it was a good time.

I don't have much else to write on for Saturday other than that. We mostly just hung out and talked.

Sunday after Church service I hung out with a friend of mine and his family to sell water melon to some of the other church goers. When we got back to their place to rest, I read Amelia Bedelia to the younger kids upon their insistence, which I vaguely recall my mom reading this book to me as a kid. It's probably still buried in the closet of my room back in their house somewhere. I do like the Eclectic Victorian house in the book though.

Picture from off image search... I didn't have one.

After awhile of rest, I took off to a supper I was invited to later in the evening at another friends place. They had an old slide projector with picture film slides of their family from between th e 70's and 80's that we watched. Even though I don't really know their family that well, it was still interesting to see. They were part of the homeschooling wave back in that time, which the grandmother said that back then there weren't any curriculum's or material like today and that it was kind of scary because it wasn't very well received among a lot of people either. You were totally on your own, but they manage d to find other families to get together with.

I remember my parents home schooling me for awhile, but I believe it was mostly due to my complete incompatibility and bad experience from enrolling me into kindergarten that prompted them to do that. I knew the rules, but had zero concept of instruction or receiving direction in that kind of environment and the school wasn't able to handle it.

Thanks for reading my blog!

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!

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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!