May 2020

Uncut Gems

Finally watched Uncut Gems. It is one of those movies that kept me guessing. It wasn’t really good or bad, not profound, and the story didn’t matter too much. It was just a wild ride. Triggered so many emotions. Sandler was good. He was still sandler, but it was also believable that he was a real person, not like the movies that started his career. I was pretty disappoint at the ending, I prefer mine happy.

I jogged 10 Kilometres for the first time since April 15. An hour and a minute to go 6.3 miles, which is nice because I didn’t lose too much time. My first 10K at the beginning of the year was like an hour fifteen, maybe an hour twenty. I went the secluded route from 85th to Prospect and back, twice.

I’m liking wearing a mask out. It’s summer, so I can’t wear a baggy hoodie without being hot. For some reason wearing a mask in public keeps me a little more calm. The masks scared me at first, but I’m getting used to the idea. I still can’t decide if I want to go back to work, or if I want to continue working from home. Work said the first wave of people would go back May 15, but it’s been delayed again. The office is currently in the county red zone, which means we’d all have to wear masks all day. I miss seeing my coworkers. But I also like sleeping until 8:30 am, and using my lunch break to exercise. I also like not spending an hour in the car 5 days a week. Oh well, I’m rambling…

Some memes I want to share…

MS-100

I’ve been busy the past few weeks. Work paid for a week long course to prepare me for the Microsoft 365 Identity and Services exam. I didn’t really like the instructor, but the labs and book have been helpful. We could tell from the syllabus that the instructor was not ready for a class as experienced as we were. He had the first hour set aside to help us get our lab environments up, but we had all already prepared before class started. He had another hour set aside to help us get our e-book, which we all downloaded before class started, so he had us stop for the day after lunch, so that he could prepare more material.

Work was fun today. One of our clients uses on-prem Lync 2013 server. AKA Skype for business. Their call center complained that when they tried to transfer calls direct to someone’s voicemail, the transfer failed. After a couple hours of pouring through logs, and making test calls I found that their voicemail had completely stopped accepting messages the morning before. So far, no one had noticed the extent of the issue. Exchange Unified Message requires a certificate which can’t be self signed to accept voicemails. It doesn’t require a internet CA certificate, so we were able to issue one from the DC and get voicemail working again. Learned a lot, and had fun fixing it. Was about to give up a couple times, but then I’d find another clue that got me closer.

Setup WordPress

Decided to do something with an old small form factor Dell I had lying around. Has a 120GB SSD, some sort of intel i5, and 8 GB of RAM.

I started by installing Ubuntu Server 20 LTS. Simple. Using apt-get to install apache2, mysql, and a few modules for both was a little more challenging, but still pretty easy.

Bought a domain name off of NameCheap for like 9 bucks a year. And here we are. Not sure if I’ll ever bother posting again. Just seemed like a fun way to spend some time. Next I’m thinking about adding postfix and hosting my own email server. That will be much more challenging.