Life is messy at times and when it gets that way, we just have to clean ourselves up and move forward. 😆

The Christmas village has been destroyed…it might be time to take it down, before further casualties are caused by the feline invasion.

Decided to do a tiny bit of baking, so I made some chocolate chip cookies for game night.

Regal, as always…Russell surveys his domain.

My current Employer is requiring all employees to provide proof of vaccination, so that an OSHA compliance is met.

I’m at at all opposed to this request / mandate but I do find it funny the system my Employer is using states “do not upload or include information about medical conditions”; the data they’re requesting, it is information about a medical condition… 🤣

Just realized, between my partner and I, we know nine people who have Covid right now… Yay omicron variant… 😷🤒

This sleepy little guy is twitching in his sleep and clearly ready for bed.

It seems like it was years ago (and honestly, it was years ago or so it seems) but I received some bad news last night and instantly flashed back to my days at University, to my favorite liturature course, one covering the Victorian Era (for those of you who don’t know me, I have a minor in English literature). Christina Rossetti is one of my favorite authors of that era and one of her poems is echoing through my head, even this morning:

Promises Like Pie-Crust

Promise me no promises,
So will I not promise you:
Keep we both our liberties,
Never false and never true:
Let us hold the die uncast,
Free to come as free to go:
For I cannot know your past,
And of mine what can you know?

You, so warm, may once have been
Warmer towards another one:
I, so cold, may once have seen
Sunlight, once have felt the sun:
Who shall show us if it was
Thus indeed in time of old?
Fades the image from the glass,
And the fortune is not told.

If you promised, you might grieve
For lost liberty again:
If I promised, I believe
I should fret to break the chain.
Let us be the friends we were,
Nothing more but nothing less:
Many thrive on frugal fare
Who would perish of excess.

It’s funny how the human mind works…you can be focused one some bad news and instantly the brain takes you down memory lane, to something totally irrelevant and yet completly on point.

Last day of holiday break…so many things I haven’t yet done but it’s hard to find the energy.

Plus, it’s hard to be productive when this little furball wants to be lazy as well… 🐕📷

As my Partner hasn’t been feeling well, we didn’t do anything for New Year’s Eve…and that continued into the New Year. As such, we spent most of the day being couch potatoes and finally finished Only Murders in the Building.

I realize I’m wildly behind the times (the show debuted at the end of the summer and finished in the autumn) but good grief, this series was just absolutely amazing!! Each episode was a masterpiece (especially the one featuring a deaf character) and I was guessing up until the very end. I give it five out of five stars. 😃

Note: This post is from my old site and was ported over into Micro.Blog when I consolidated from two sites into one. All of the migrated posts can be found here.

Well, it had to happen…we had to loose just one more person in 2021…goodbye Betty, thank you for being a friend.

Instead of going out to a party, risking Covid and drunk drivers, we just stayed home, watching Betty’s various television shows…at least the ones I had access to view:

• The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970)
• Mama’s Family (1983)
• The Golden Girls (1985)
• Maybe This Time (1995)
• Hot in Cleveland (2010)

She was the last Golden Girl standing…and the world is going to miss her. I’m going to miss her.

Note: This post is from my old site and was ported over into Micro.Blog when I consolidated from two sites into one. All of the migrated posts can be found here.

No, it is not time for Valentine’s Day…put away the red hearts and bring back Christmas…it isn’t even the New Year! 😤

Random Thought: Three-day work weeks are always rough…and when you wake up to literal freezing weather but you’re all snuggly in bed, well, it’s very hard to get up and going.

Clearly more coffee is required… ☕️

Russell is keeping me company on this chilly Sunday evening. 🐕📷

Watching / listening to As Time Goes By while wrapping gifts. 🎄🎁

It isn’t often you’re able to test redundancy in your home set up but today, my power went out. I was in the middle of a meeting, sharing application support information with my current development team, when suddenly the lights went out in the basement (my home office is in the basement). At first, I was completely confused…all the lights had gone out, but my monitor was still on…? I stopped the meeting, interrupting our business analyst, in compete shock and bewilderment, asking if they could still hear me.

It was only then I realized I had batteries for most of my computers…which is when my power supply started beeping at me.

A long time ago (I’m not going to say when because a lady never tells his age), I bought a battery on a lark from newegg.com and used it solely for my modem and router. Back then, the apartment I lived in suffered semi-frequent power outages (the building was over 100 years old) and didn’t want to be slaughtered in the middle of a raid (we can talk about my World of Warcraft addiction another time, dear reader). The battery turned out to be a smashing success and life / gaming went on.

A few years down the road from the first purchase I bought a new battery; I needed a bit more oomph, as I’d acquired more gear and equipment. The old one was still holding up but starting to show its age: where once it could keep the internet connection alive for a couple hours, by then I was lucky to get 45 minutes out of it. So, I bought a new one and put almost all my equipment on it (including the new server I’d acquired…but that is a story for another time). The original battery was kept for my work set up: computer, monitor, etc.

Back to the present…it turns out the local power company was outside my house, switching out my meter. With no notice and just one knock at the door, they took out the old one and put in a new one. I really would have appreciated some advance notice but why would a monopoly care about its customers? Still, it’s nice to know my batteries are still working!

So, the moral of the story: make sure you have your internet equipment and computers on a battery backup…especially if you’re in constant meetings during the last two weeks of your employment.

Note: This post is from my old site and was ported over into Micro.Blog when I consolidated from two sites into one. All of the migrated posts can be found here.

All good things must come to an end…and thus, I’ve just turned in my two weeks' notice to my current employer. I’ve grown so much as both a person and a developer…and I’ve met some incredible people but it’s time to move on. It’s a rather bittersweet feeling, leaving a place where you’ve spent so much time and energy but as I said, all good things must come to an end.

Note: This post is from my old site and was ported over into Micro.Blog when I consolidated from two sites into one. All of the migrated posts can be found here.

We (my employer) recently parted ways with a development vendor and yesterday I was combing through various repositories, cleaning up the nightmare that was their branching strategy (or lack thereof) when I stumbled across this little gem:

Two thought immediately popped into my head:

• Why would you hard-code credentials into your application?
• Why wouldn’t you have stronger credentials right off the bat?

I have to take some of the accountability here; as the Lead at my company, code quality falls within my realm of responsibility. Thankfully, this commit never made it out of the Development branch…but it’s all to easy to imagine this sort of problem making it’s way up the chain, into Production. Honestly, I never thought I’d have to add “do NOT hard-code credentials” into our guidelines for new developers but then, I’ve been wrong about a lot of things in my career… 😄

On a lark, I took my Mac down the hall to our cyber security expert and asked her to spot the problem. It took her all of ten seconds to start laughing. Once she was able to stop giggling, she offered two bits of advice:

1. Stash this sort of issue in your “this is bad code” file to show to junior developers as a teachable moment.
2. Look into something called SonarQube to help automate the detection of potential security issues in source code.

It’s an old, tired stereotype that developers hate interacting with security folks but every time I talk with our cyber security expert, I get homework…and that’s an absolutely wonderful thing; when we stop learning, we start to degrade.

Note: This post is from my old site and was ported over into Micro.Blog when I consolidated from two sites into one. All of the migrated posts can be found here.

It’s rather surreal to think about but tomorrow is officially ten years with my Partner.

Note: This post is from my old site and was ported over into Micro.Blog when I consolidated from two sites into one. All of the migrated posts can be found here.

Once upon a time, in a land far away, there was a developer who went by the name of Jon. He decided it would be a grand idea to start a blog after college…and decided on WordPress. It was the thing back then, all the rage…and it seemed like a great idea to start learning PHP. Of course, as is the case with most nonprofessional blogs, new posts were written with less frequency as time went on, until the point where the developer let the hosting lapse and that was the end of it.

Fast-forward a number of years and I decided it would be a jolly good idea (you’ll have to forgive me dear reader, for the British phrase, as I’m currently watching As Time Goes By) to start up writing again; the reasons are unimportant and will likely be covered in a future post but that’s for another time… I thought about going back to WordPress but while I owned a series of domains, I wasn’t all that keen on getting into bed with another hosting provider. However, I’d recently switched to Fastmail and it provides the ability to not only store files but can also be used to host static websites.

After hearing about static site generators over the course of numinous episodes on the Stacktrace podcast, I decided to do a little bit of research. It seemed using a SSG provided the best of both worlds: the speed of statically generated files with the dynamism of a traditional CMS. Given the constraints of Fastmail’s file hosting (static files only), using a SSG seemed to be a perfect fit. I’ve no idea how I settled on Hugo but thus far it seems to be going well.

So there you have it, the backstory for this site and a tiny bit of history.

Note: This post is from my old site and was ported over into Micro.Blog when I consolidated from two sites into one. All of the migrated posts can be found here.