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Happy 2024 Winter Solstice!

Happy Winter Solstice! 🌅 Here is my latest contact information: Robert . where-I-live my-Oakland-voicemail-number (voicemail) our-San-Jose-phone-number http://dummy.us.eu.org/robert http://www. My solstice update is below. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ News Lifestyle * Careers * The strange phone call. In late August, I had just returned from my doctor appointment. To prevent losing vacation after hitting my maximum vacation time, I had been taking entire days off and had taken that entire day off. When returning, I played a phone voicemail message from Human Resources asking that I call back. Receiving a call from HR is almost always bad news, not just because it is HR contacting me, but because almost nobody calls me on the phone these days. I called the HR person back. They started telling me a bunch of stuff, which I didn't understand, and I interrupted and asked "Am I being laid off?" She said "yes". I said, "OK, that's all I really wanted to know." * Tossed overboard. The HR person told me about severance, paying out of vacation, returning my company laptop, and getting my personal stuff from the office. It was the last that turned out to be the most problematic since, according to company policy, ex-employees cannot enter the building at all or even come onto the property, and all personal items are shipped to the ex-employee. I hadn't counted on that, and racked my brain trying to remember what was in my cubicle. Using my memory of the lay-out of my cubicle, I went through everything I could think of, including things that were on the floor, such as a foot rest. This list of things that I could recall were passed along to the HR person, and hoped that I didn't forget anything. * The first vacation. Noelle and I had planned a trip to southern Ca two weeks after the notice of the lay-off. I was expecting that severing my ties with the company wouldn't take more than one week. Boy, was I wrong. At each step, it was a struggle to reach the HR person to discuss what was going on w.r.t. documents that were to be sent, and, most importantly, the shipping of the contents of my office cubicle. I repeatedly warned Noelle that I wouldn't be able to go on the trip with her, and that she would need to stay in the hotels alone and make the visits without me. Pulling the rabbit out of the hat at the very last moment, I was able to reach the HR person and convinced her to delay everything for two weeks until I could return to deal with it all. * Navigating around the pirates. Since the break-in a few years ago, I set up a few webcams outside around the house. When going on vacation, I regularly check the webcams. We were a few days into our short vacation when I saw that someone (probably Fedex or UPS) had left a box on our porch. We weren't expecting anything, and I thought I had agreed with the HR person that we were going to delay dealing with all the lay-off stuff until I had returned. Frantic, I called the HR person even though we were in the middle of nowhere, and, thankfully, she answered right away. I relayed the existence of this package to her and she professed no knowledge of a delivered package. Fearing that it might be the personal contents of my office cubicle, I contacted a neighbor (who I thanked deeply afterwards) to pick up the box and keep it until we returned home. * Functioning without a routine. The offboarding process from my workplace didn't really improve much after we returned from our brief trip. Although I was sorely hoping that the box that was delivered while we were gone was my cubicle contents, it turned out to be just an empty box sent to me to return my laptop. So much for all my hand-wringing. My constant bombardment of my HR contact continued, trying to find out how to get the severance package signed (Dropbox wouldn't deliver to my email address), tracking my vacation time pay-out, returning my laptop, and the ongoing problem of the lack of my cubicle contents. * A dole house. Very soon after I found out that I had been laid off, the first thing I did was apply for unemployment benefits. There are a number of hoops that needs to be jumped through in order to receive benefits in Ca. It was my strong belief that I done everything required, but, one week after I had applied, I received a message from Employment Development (EDD). They needed to do an "interview". I figured that this was just part of the standard procedure, and I was happy to cooperate. But, at the alloted time, during the discussion, the benefits coordinator said that my company said that I had quit, not that my position was eliminated and that I was involuntarily dismissed. Quitting would have denied me all benefits. Since EDD is not allowed to accept phone calls from the company itself to confirm the conditions of the termination, I had to fax a letter written on company letterhead with a note explaining the conditions of my dismissal. So, again, another game of wack-a-mole ensued, attemping to contact the HR person to get them to write this note so that I could fax it. After a few days of the wack-a-mole, I faxed the note I got from HR, but the unemployment insurance claim was never processed or approved -- which happened to be fortunate given what happened next. * Meanwhile, back at the ranch. A couple of weeks after wrestling with all these problems, my ex-co-worker urgently wanted to speak with me. After setting up a time to chat, he explained a number of things to me, including that management had decided to keep the product going. I was quite shocked. The day that I was laid off, my ex-boss contacted me and had told me that it wasn't just me that was laid off -- the entire team had been. I had assumed that that meant that the entire product line had been sunsetted. My ex-co-worker went on to tell me that existing customers and the source code will need to be supported, and management wanted me back and working at the company in order to do that. * Wait. Was I just furloughed? I was well on my way towards divorcing myself from the company, and, after getting shabby treatment during the offboarding process, I had to think good and hard whether I really wanted to return to working for that company. My HR contact told me that, if I were to return, I would be shoehorned into a new team structure. To that end, I was to talk with what would be my new supervisor and his supervisor. I agreed on a time and, as it happened, the day was a Friday. I talked with them and we went over how I could fit in and projects that I could work on. During both conversations, the HR person was on the line the entire time. After we were done talking, during the final conversation, the HR person jumped in and put me on the spot, unexpectedly demanding that I needed to decide then-and-there whether I wanted the job or not. My mind raced, quickly reviewing the alternatives in my mind what the options would be, and I decided that I didn't exactly welcome the idea of spending the next six months or so looking for another job. My answer was "yes", that I wanted this tweaked version of my old job back. * The second vacation. Despite my reminding the HR person that I would be on vacation two weeks from the date of that conversation, I was told that they will need me to start the Monday after my Friday interview. My vacation hours had been paid out by then and I'd be starting with zero vacation hours, but the HR person assured me that my vacation would not be jeopardized by this. After getting these assurances, I gave in and started work on that Monday. * Travel * I love the smell of cow farts in the morning. Actually, I'm not sure if they were farts, but I'm pretty sure I did not love the smell. What we did smell was something unusual during our drive to and from Los Angeles in late July. We stopped over and stayed the night in Kettleman City on the way down and Coalinga on the way back since we could only hang around in L.A. for a few hours. It was a short strange trip, but we felt compelled to hit the road in order to see some friends before they permanently relocated from Ca to New York. * From the fire into the frying pan and back into the icebox. I guess going from 100 degree temperatures in where-I-live to 50 New England degree temperatures in mid-October could've been worse, but the change nevertheless felt dramatic. In a two-week frenzied road trip driving around New England in a rental car, we got to see family we hadn't seen since well before the pandemic. We express our gratitude to everyone who put us up and also put up with us, and apologize to everyone we were unable to have time to see, meet with, or talk with during our stay. See our pics at https://www.flickr.com/photos/noelle/albums/72177720321476498 . * Home * Baking without the shaking. FEMA has a grant program to allow homeowners to bolt the frame of their home to its foundation earlier in year. We went through the very laborious process of applying for the grant. A certain amount of bureaucracy was expected, and it took about of month of shuffling multiple documents back and forth. Most of my time was spent on trying to prove that I exist (i.e., my identity) primarily because of the complex ways I try to avoid identity theft. The work began in early summer before the horrible heat arrived. This work, along with the solar panels, were among my highest priority goals in preparation for the Big One. * Annual water leak ritual. The roof guy again put more effort on trying to prevent water coming in earlier this year. Building on the previous work, he added yet more sealant. He warned us that, if this doesn't fix it, he'd have to rebuild that part of the roof which will cost much more than has been spent on the work so far. * Health * A healthy lack of coverage. It wasn't until we had returned from our New England vacation that we did not have medical insurance coverage. And, the discovery was completely accidental. Noelle tried scheduling a doctor appointment and the person booking the appointment said that the health insurance info on file was invalid. This short interaction started a bumpy ride where we had to systematically go through all of our various insurances to see what was missing. We determined that it was an oversight by my employer during my layoff -- I had been assured by my workplace that my medical insurance coverage would continue during my layoff period and after I returned to work. All the problems were ultimately corrected, but we were lucky that nothing bad had happened during our New England trip. * Finance * Card rejuvenation. Every time I get a new credit card, I switch all my automatic payments to a card which will expire next. The idea here is that, if my card gets stolen, the amount of damage may be limited. In previous years, I never had an issue. I have a list of companies that I need to contact to make the switch, and I systematically go through the list. All was working fine until I got to the payment for my Virtual Private Server (VPS). The moment I entered it, it was instantly declined. At first, I thought to myself "that's fine, I'll just change over the other companies", but all the other companies began to decline the card. I got in touch with my credit card company and was told that my card was frozen. What followed was a long arduous process of gathering documents to prove who I was, faxing said documents to various entities, and constantly being put on hold while interacting with the credit card company to find out the status. When I thought that everything had been fixed, I tried my card to pay for the VPS again and the card immediately got cancelled! More phone calls, more waiting. I finally learned my lesson that my VPS was forbidden ground for that card, and I resorted to use my other card instead. * The possible jettisoning of the working world. During the roller coaster ride of my brief unemployment, I considered retirement as an option. This option would have been an early retirement since I'm too young to collect any government benefits. My research involved proactively contacting a financial advisor at the broker who held all my savings (nest egg). This advisor had tried contacting me several times over the last couple of years, but I had quickly given up since it seemed impossible to return the calls. But, through some miracle, my call was immediately answered this time. Noelle and I went to the financial advisor's office a few times, consolidating all of our assets and going through several analyses. After reviewing several scenarios, it was quite clear that retiring would have been a squeaker -- it would not have been a comfortable retirement. I was quite fortunate that I was able to return to work since it will allow me to add more savings for some cushion when I do reach that retirement point. * A cold day in hell. I have had all of my credit reports frozen since 1996 (only briefly unlocked when applying for a mortgage). It was in 1996 that I had had my bank checks stolen from our mailbox and went through a painful period during which I tried to patch up that mess. Because I had always been reluctant to unfreeze my credit reports, I had always thought that it would be impossible for me to open an online SSA account. However, due to a change in the Social Security Administration's application process, I discovered that, using ID.me, I would not need to unfreeze my reports. Going through the process was not easy, however. Everything worked great until it got to the point where it would use facial recognition to match your identity card (driver's license). The web site said that it would take no more than 15 minutes, but I spent over 45 minutes repeatingly trying everything to get it to work. I eventually succumbed and contacted the hotline to complete the process. There, a video interview is conducted and a human being, not a machine, compares your face against the identity card. At this point, nobody else should be able to collect my Social Security benefits -- assuming that there's anything left by the time I retire. * Food * Channeling my inner Brett Kavanaugh. The bitterness in beer has always doomed any attempt at my enjoying it as a beverage. I like wine and cider and have always steered clear of beer, but, this year, I ventured out slightly and tried sipping some sour beers. Some of these sour beers are far less bitter and therefore more tolerable. These days, I ask for samples of beer that may be acceptable and will drink them if so. I don't think I'll ever love beer like Kavanaugh, but who knows? Politics/Society * Voting/Elections * Naughty or nice. Definitely naughty. There's very little doubt that I, like about 30% of my fellow Americans, have joined Donald Trump's "enemy from within" list following my possibly pointless vote for Kamala Harris. Although this year was an exception, as a rule, I vote for third parties in the general election (usually leaving lots of unselected candidate offices) as a protest since both major parties disgust me. For this election, I figured that, if Trump were to win, I wanted Harris to get as many popular votes as possible to prove to everybody just how stupid the Electoral College is. In retrospect, my ballot ended up being a protest vote since Trump won both the popular vote and the Electoral College. * Nothing from nothing leaves nothing. It's fascinating that so many people just didn't bother voting. Pollsters contact some of these people, ask them whether they'll vote, and they say "yes", but, come election day, voting just wasn't important enough. While I understand the extreme disappointment with politics in this country, I cannot understand ceding control like that. I need to imagine that my life is more than that of a marionette dancing on the strings of some unknown puppet master. Technology * Computers * Software * PC * Linux * The slow grind. I could not figure out why my back-ups kept copying files both ways every day. Years ago, I wrote a series of bash scripts which use rsync to keep all my computers up-to-date with each other (similar to unison, syncthing, clsync, and git-annex). As part of this process, the script would look at recently-accessed files so that they would get prioritized in the back-ups; any changes to those set of files would get copied more quickly than others. But, every day, the same set of files kept getting their access time updated. Looking more closely, I found that only my computers that had their home directories encrypted using ecryptfs were affected by these nonsensical access times. The internet told me that ecryptfs stores all the metadata in the files themselves, and that's why the access times kept getting updated. The cure I came up with was to disable all updating of access times on the filesystems using ecryptfs. The only thing I miss about not having atimes is that my disk space-saving script can no longer compress not-recently-accessed files, but, overall, I think it was a net positive. * Hardware * Networks * Wifi shaming. This year, we stayed and visited with a lot of different people. One thing I noticed over and over was that everybody's wi-fi password was much more complicated and, presumably, more secure than mine. Worrying that I might need to up my game, I did some web searches to find out about how common home wi-fi compromises are. I didn't find a single mention. What's more, I found an article by computer security specialist Bruce Schneier stating that he intentionally doesn't have any password on his wi-fi network at all. I concluded that my apprehension was unfounded and I could live with my relatively weak wi-fi password just fine.


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