The Pale Blue Spot

 

Good morning! Being that there is currently a sleeping family member in every available space here and I always am up one or two hours before they are, I am having my morning tea (a delicious Milk Oolong, by the way) on the staircase! 44 hours.  That’s how long we get to stay at this AitBnB we paid for.  I thought that nothing would ever replace my grandparents old coach in the Pismo Beach Senior mobile home park, but this has been quite satisfying... it even smells like that place... the smell of sand and ocean air that has permeated the carpet over the years.  We have 4 hours left and I am happy to say that every minute has been a much needed infusion of happiness and relaxation. We head back to Fresno and 105 degree (41C) heat in a few hours, but at least it’s supposed to cool down tomorrow. It sounds like the entire state may be heading into another round of lockdown, though nothing ever changed much for us (and we’ve been careful to avoid other humans while he

I was recently asked outright why it is that I support Senator Bernie Sanders for President.  My initial response was something like, "It's complicated.  I'll write a 10,000 word essay on my blog and then post a link".  So I went off and wrote a few detailed paragraphs about anti-corporatism and the Green New Deal and blah blah blah... after working on it for an hour or so, I realized that it didn't explain all of the different facets enough and that I'd have to come back to finish it later. A week or so went by.  During that time, my wife and I won tickets to go see Hamilton (the musical, for those of you who have been living under rocks) in San Francisco and decided to drop everything to go.  Somewhere near Oakland on the drive up there on Tuesday, we went under an overpass where someone had posted a homemade sign which simply read: "Bernie: People over Profit".  I saw this and thought, "Yeah, that about sums it up... I'm gonna totally s

Apparently, there is a lot of confusion out in the land of the Interwebs among people in the IT community regarding Group Policy in Windows and using WMI Filtering to target Desktop machines. Being that the Global IT Team and I were attempting to set up new WSUS servers for each of the regions across the world where we have computers that need updating, we wanted to be able to specifically target Desktops, Laptops, DCs, and Member Servers separately, as doing so allows you to apply different policies for each (Keep in mind that this is essentially a new, entirely Windows Server 2016/Windows 10 environment).  There are a couple of key things that you'll need to know for the queries in the WMI filters that you'll need.  Namely: "ProductType" This value will look at the installed operating system on a machine. 1 =  Desktop OS 2 =  Server OS - Domain Controller 3 =  Server OS - Non-Domain Controller "PCSystemType" This value will look at the actual h

I initially wrote this as a response to a conservative friend on Facebook, and wanted to save it here: It feels like I've had the same detailed conversations about Trump's criminal behavior, impacts on the economy, etc. over and over with a number of conservative friends (I have 5 or so on Facebook) multiple times over the past few years. I've finally learned to just scroll past your political posts as I know that having a discussion about these things is pretty much futile on both sides, sadly. The thing that has been going through my head over the past couple of weeks has been to continue to wonder how so many people like yourself (who are actually intelligent and usually well educated) still stick behind this President no matter what he does. A lot of people just say it's because of Fox News, but I know it isn't that simple - Though it may be for some people, shouldn't be discounted at all, and is certainly a factor. Going back to the last election, for a