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On parenthood

I haven’t written too much about parenting, or being a dad, in this space. Maybe because more than half a decade being one, I still feel like I’m not very good at it. There’s a saying I’ve heard mentioned about meditation: if you think you’re enlightened, spend some time with your family. And my kids can push my buttons like no ones business. I suppose it’s only my fault. I was a grade-A hellion when I was younger, taking absolute pleasure driving the adults around me batty. I remember my cousins and I would take immense pleasure driving our grandmother to swear at us. And I seem to have to inherited the paternal authoritarianism that I rebelled against when I was a child, having turned into some sort of dictator toward my children: driving them to take over more and more of the daily household chores; limiting their dietary choices away from sweets and carbs; depriving them from screen time, or at least the passive kind.

I don’t suppose any of this is worse than what most parents go through, I surely don’t think it’s anywhere near the type of corporal punishment that I used to receive when I was younger. Yesterday’s newspaper headline told of a mother sentenced to 20 years in the death of her five-year-old after his head was knocked through sheet-rock. I know there’s monsters in the world, and I know I’m not one. But damn if my kids don’t test me some times.

It’s a bit paradoxical that it seems almost easier to handle the kids when it’s just me, versus when my wife and I are sharing parenting duties. I think part of it is due mostly to differences in parenting style, but I really think that the kids are playing us against each other in some respects. Not just that standard kid stuff where I’ll say know so they’ll go and ask mom instead kind of stuff, but just knowing on some level who is likely to let them get away with horseplay (dad) or who’s more likely to let them eat crackers on the couch while watching TV (not dad).

And the tantrums my oldest gets when she doesn’t get her way! Every denial is a betrayal and is the END. OF. THE. WORLD. Taking away TV is like the worst possible thing on earth, and the mere suggestion that she turn it off to do a chore can turn into a maelstrom of whining and pouting.

So it’s with mixed feelings that I have to say that things actually tend to go a bit smoother when the girls know it’s just them and dad. My wife has been out of town since Friday, and I’m proud to say that we made it through the weekend alive. I’ll have to save the glamours of 2AM bed-wetting for another day, but I am pleased to report that it is 9:30PM and both of my children are in bed asleep. In their own beds.

My wife and I definitely differ on sleep strategy. She’s content to lay down with the youngest for ‘nuggles’ until she falls asleep, but the process of getting the girls down for bedtime to dreamtime can run two hours, and I’ve got stuff to do, y’know? And the youngest knows that daddy doesn’t want her to sleep in the big bed. So much so that if my wife is home and I try to bring the youngest upstairs for bedtime, she will scream bloody murder to no end, until eventually mommy will come and get her. But with the wife gone, it’s a completely different story.

There’s been a bit of sleep deprivation here lately, to overcome any challenges to night-night time. No nap today and plenty of activities to wear her down, and she was ready before dinner was even on the table. And with half a melatonin gummy for dessert, she was out before the sun went down. And she’s already been up a few times since then, but went back down in her bed with no fuss. And I didn’t even half to lay there with her while she did it.

Sounds like a win for me.

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Downsizing

We’ve lived in our current home for 5 years now, a mid-sized two story built around twenty years ago. My wife and I upgraded from our 700 square-foot two-bedroom after our first child was born. The first house was great while we were dating, but was too small for our expanded family, and definitely too small for the second child for which we were planning. We were able to save up a sizable down payment over a year, set a budged and began looking at houses. We looked at a dozen or so, none of which really spoke to us, then my wife found our current home, which had been listed just outside of our budget.

The owners at the time had only been there for two years. The husband was Air Force, and had been redeployed, so they were short-selling. Three bedrooms, plus a finished room over the garage (FROG) which I immediately claimed as a man-cave. The downstairs: den, living room, dining room, kitchen; back deck, two-car garage, detached shed, back yard with tress. And the best part was that it was at the end of a cul-de-sac, far away from the first home, where there had been shootings, murders, house fires, animal attacks, and drugs. So we made an offer and got the house within our budget.

So now, half a decade later, and the rest of the costs have become apparent. The interest on the mortgage here is still more than what we paid at the first house. We just finished paying off a new HVAC system. The roof needs replacing. We’re just a 100-year-storm away from flooding. Cutting the grass; trimming the hedges. Power-spraying the siding. I was just told by an inspector that we have 60%+ humidity under the crawlspace. The insulation has fallen down and the whole thing will probably need encapsulation. Then there was the time that the upstairs shower drain leaked, causing damage to the beautiful scalloped ceiling in the dining room. We tried to save money and have someone matching the original work after the plumbers destroyed the ceiling, and I’ve never been happy with the result. The entry door in the garage is rotted from moisture. Et cetera, et cetera.

And then there’s the damage from the two little gremlins that are my children. The younger one, who’s known this house her entire life has been the worst. Markers on the walls, the doors. The CONSTANT cleaning, the clutter. I don’t know when the decision was made, but between work life, home life, and the side hustles, at some point in the past six months my wife and I decided enough is enough. We often tell each other the refrain “burn it all to the ground” during moments of frustration, just wanting to wash our hands of the whole situation. There are things that we’d rather be doing, places we’d rather be, than dealing with these benefits of home ownership. We hired a housekeeper to come by every two weeks to help out, but there’s still so much else to be done. And we’re done.

I think a lot of these feelings — both on mine and my wife’s part — stem from general dissatisfaction with our jobs. As a tech worker I’m at home mostly and am getting to the point where I could pretty much work from anywhere. My wife is determined to retire at her civil service position, but as a Federal employee can go anywhere. One of the arguments for staying put is that we have a few family members nearby, so we don’t want to lose that, so we’re still undecided as to where to go, but we’re sure that we want to go.

So while I’m waiting for the bank to process my home-equity loan so we can go back another $25k in debt to finance the roof and other repairs, we’ve decided to taking the first steps toward freedom: getting rid of our stuff. Step one, and the most important part of this plan: stop buying more stuff. It’s been hard, but we’ve been able to clamp down on this part so far. Our Prime membership has been unused for months and is bound for non-renewal. We’ve stayed away from yard sales completely this summer, and the only trips to the thrift store has been to drop stuff off. My one exception: books and magazines. I have subscriptions to several periodicals, and I am obsessed with the twenty-five cent shelf at the local library which usually has some gems.

Step two: get rid of your stuff. This is the hardest one for me, I’ve got closets with computer gear, flight sticks, racing sim equipment, motherboard boxes, cables, music equipment, et cetera, et cetera. I’ve got at least 5 computers for various roles, two laptops, seven monitors. Guitars, PA and other gear. I’ve got over a dozen board, card and RPG games that I haven’t touched in over a year. I do not have the emotional capacity to even think about sorting through any of this stuff. So right now I’m doing what’s easy: getting rid of the kids’ stuff.

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No longer a night owl

I’ve considered myself a night owl for years, and one who has felt comfortable on 6-7 hours of sleep a night. I suppose at first it was just an excuse to stay up late drinking and playing video games in my 20’s, but even after I stopped playing games as much I still preferred the time in the late evening to stay up and get things done after the rest of the family had gone to bed. These days though, I’m beginning to find myself becoming an early riser. Part of it I attribute to my young children, the rest to a few lifestyle changes I’ve been making. 

I’ve always had a bit of an arrangement with my wife, who requires much more sleep than I do. She has always gone to bed at a decent hour, I have 2-3 hours in the evening to do whatever I want to do, and then we’re both back up in the morning to start the day. It’s worked wonderfully for most of the 15 years we’ve been together. With kids, though, it’s proved to be a bit more difficult. 

I always seem to revert to longer spells of sleep when I go on vacation. I guess part of it is attributable to being away from screens, or maybe just the sheer physical exhaustion of going out and doing stuff out of my rut. Being in a hotel room with the family makes it difficult though. Getting the kids down is always a process, one that sometimes takes hours longer than I think it should, and recently I’ve just started capitulating and have been going to bed at the same time they are. It’s easier to lay down and pass out while they’re still winding down than to become frustrated waiting for them to fall asleep so that I can get on with things. And it’s proved much easier to get up earlier in the morning, refreshed, and do some work while I have two solid hours before anyone else wakes up. It proves a bit of a reinforcing habit as well. I’m more likely to go to bed early after having risen early in the morning. 

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Martin Rees: On the Future

Lord Martin Rees

I just finished On The Future, by Martin Rees, U.K. Astronomer Royale. This short 200-pager is Rees’s take on the technological perils and promises that humanity faces, both in the near and far-future. The book touches on many scientific topics, including artificial intelligence, space exploration, post-humanism and biotech. He explores existential threats like climate change, nuclear proliferation and biological warfare, then pivots to more philosophical questions about the role of science and religion, science and academia, government funded explorations vs. private sector missions. 

This book is aimed at the more casual reader and is more of a light read than other science books I’ve read in the past. It covers a lot of ground without delving too deep into the actual science, which makes for a light read through most of the chapters.  I think I may have skimmed through the first two thirds of the book, as I was familiar with most of what was being covered. It wasn’t until the latter portion of the book that Rees got into more of a personal discussion about the way science is funded and how the members of the scientific community operates. 

It’s clear that Rees is thinking legacy here. He’s in his late 70’s, and it’s clear that he felt compelled to write this book as a drop of knowledge to younger generations. It’s clear that this book isn’t written for his colleagues and peers, but toward the younger generation of aspiring scientists. This book may make a good addition to a high school summer reading list, but those with a more of a background in science may find Rees’s Prospects for Humanity a bit elementary. 

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Programming as a discipline

I’ve really gotten into programming lately. Like really started delving into in a way I haven’t done. I’ve been messing around with scripts and basic programming for some time, but I’ve never been able to complete a large project. I usually put some bits an pieces together to cobble for a function or small library, but my skills were never such that I could really put the larger pieces together. I’ve spent time looking at various libraries on GitHub or wherever, and just been floored by not only the size of the projects, but just the sheer complexity. 

One thing I’ve learned over the years — not just with programming, but skills in general — is that the things that got me here aren’t necessarily the things that will get me too the next level. I’ve learned this most painfully at my current job, where the skills that enabled us to be a fairly decent small IT service shop weren’t the skills that were going to be able to scale and get us to the next level of excellence. It’s one of the main reasons that I finally decided to go back to school to finish my degree. I’ve always been self-taught, and been able to get along with whatever needs getting along, but that same self-directedness has resulted in a bit of lack of discipline in several regards.

One of the main reasons I felt like I needed to go back to school was because my projects would always get to a certain point where I wouldn’t be able to figure out how the various components should fit together. I remember thinking that I needed to learn ‘design patterns’ and that I needed the tutelage of someone who could help me understand how to put the various components together. I was always good at being able to understand the syntax and structure of a language well enough to be able to do some calculation or basic function, but being able to take that same logic and put it into the larger set of data structures and external libraries and inputs, outputs that I needed to make something work — that’s always been where I’ve hit a wall and walked away from a project for the next starting point. 

I can’t say I learned a lot about design patterns per se during my college career, but what it has done is forced a lot of other things that I hadn’t considered, like test-driven development, for example. But one thing has happened in the intervening months and years that I’ve been finishing my degree — I’ve kept programming. It has become a habit — a practice — and I feel the changes in my brain, affecting how I think about problems. And things have begun falling together. I recall specifically looking at a piece of code on someone’s blog and seeing a class’s create function declared as a class function. It clicked. I’d understood the difference between class and instance-based methods for some time, but I never really understood why to use them. Same with a class passing self as a parameter to another class function. These were just two solutions to problems that I had been struggling to figure out for some time. Things are just starting to click in that way. 

I’ve made a habit out of programming, and I recently found myself coming back to one of these aforementioned abandoned projects. Looking at it now with the benefit of a year and a half of additional skills, I’m not so overwhelmed, and I’m thinking I know enough to take it a little further to the point where it will actually work. 

 

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Telling myself again…

I’ve decided that I’m getting the fuck off Facebook. While I’ve probably told myself that I’m going to start blogging again about a hundred times, I think that the social media behemoth has become to big for it’s own damn good and secondly, that I’ve got to force myself off of it if I’m going to be productive and achieve the level of success that I want to. I’ve already deleted the main app off of my phone, but escaping it completely will be impossible for the near term since managing a social media presence is an essential part of brand-management or whatever marketing term you want to use. I am going to ignore my status notifications for the time being and find ways to move my audiences off of the platform. Messenger and Pages apps are still sitting on my phone — along with Twitter, for now — but I’ve decided that I’m only going to go on FB when I need to post something to one of my client pages or groups, and will start using this blog as much as possible.

The other decision I’m grappling with is this pseudo-anonymous identity that this site is named after. I’m sure that anyone with the time or willingness could figure it out without too much trouble, as I’ve had multiple profiles on various sites linked out across the interwebs under this name that probably has enough personal information scattered within it for someone to make a case for it. I just did a Google search and found one profile that needed a name change, but it looks like things are getting a bit obfuscated now that this reggae dub producer has started using the name.

At some point I’ll need to focus more on what I hope to accomplish with this, but for now I guess I’ll just keep posting.

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Exchange Online Bulk Add SMTP Addresses

We are a Microsoft partner and have been standing up a lot of clients on Office 365, the management of which requires a lot of PowerShell use to administer properly. My last boss told me that Microsoft’s move away from the GUI toward PS scripting is what is going to ‘separate the men from the boys’, and I’ve taken this to heart, trying to script out everything as much as possible. Server 2012 has really made improvements over 2008 as far as this goes, and Exchange Online and Office 365 (AKA Microsoft Online Services) are strongly there as well. Sure, there are web interfaces for them, but Microsoft seems to have a habit of changing the navigation and language every few weeks and the GUI has been inconsistent between the business and enterprise plans as well, so the Powershell commands seem be the way to go.

For this most recent job, we had a client who wanted to change domain names, so we stood up the new domain on O365 and configured client workstations for the new accounts. Once that was done we verified the old domain with Microsoft in anticipation of routing the old domain to the new mailboxes. Rather than manually add each additional SMTP address for each user account, I used the following script. Make sure you connect to Exchange Online using remote PowerShell first.


$users = get-user * #Filter your OU appropriately, this was a blanket change for a flat hierarchy.
foreach ($user in $users)
{
$mailbox = get-mailbox $user.identity
$newmailbox = $user.id + "@yourNewDomain.com"
set-mailbox -identity $user.identity -EmailAddresses @{Add=$newmailbox}
}

You can then verify that the changes went correctly with the following:

foreach ($user in $users) {
$mailbox = get-mailbox $user.identity
$mailbox.emailaddresses
write-host  $addresses
}

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Everything you need to know about the internet

Anyone who considers their self an expert in a field can sometimes be amazed and dismayed by the ideas that lay people keep in their head regarding said field. As someone who has been around computers almost their whole life I often been driven to the point of derangement trying to communicate with people with little understanding of the way that some of the technology works and operates. And it is just as so with the internet. Thankfully, John Naughton at the Guardian has written a very nice primer on understanding what the internet (not just the world wide web, http side of things) has given us and where it might be taking us.

This should be required reading for grade school kids and others who need to realize that the internet is “a global machine for springing surprises.”

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Weeee’rrreee Baaaaaaack!

It’s been too long. It feels like 2 years have gone by since daHIFI was back under our control, not held some cybersquatting domain thieves. We can understand the business plan: Snatch up recently lapsed domains, wait for their owners to come back looking for them and then charge exorbitant rates to release them back. Sorry fuckers, but we don’t play that game. We did learn our lesson however. Never deal with Network Solutions or Register.com. We’re letting our web host handle the details from here on out and hopefully this won’t happen again.

Anyways, here we are again. It’s been too long since I’ve had a proper home on the web. I’ve been doing my thing with epicHoney.net for the past year and change to pass the time, but that site is more for the Hampton Roads music, not my own personal ramblings. It’s good to be home. I’m not going to bother with the archives, they seemed so dated last time I browsed through them, half of the links broken and half of the political venom long since dissipated due to the passage of time. No, we’ll just start anew, fresh from scratch. Just a post when we feel like it, hopefully stretch those creative muscles that have seen better days.

It’s fitting that today’s the first of June, Memorial Day a dozen minutes behind me. My birthday is less than a week away, my 31st. I’ve got a lot to do this next week, hopefully I’ll be starting a new job, and there’s plenty to get done between school, house projects and music. I just hope I can squeeze some more time out of the day to attend to this site. I think I can manage.

That’s enough for now, there’s some things I need to do before I sleep and I think it best if I let my subconscious take control for a few hours before I do anything else here. Ta-ta for now,

welcome back.