Month: March 2020

Week two

More random ramblings..

I started working from home this week and trying out the new normal. I was pretty sure things wouldn’t go back to normal after two weeks. It looks like our social distancing has been pushed out until April 30th. The number of infected individuals has grown a ton since last week. When will we flatten the curve? Does checking the news everyday give you anxiety like me? Does every little pain or ache you have make you wonder if you are getting it? That’s me. The uncertainty is making me crazy, but I’m hanging in there and trust that the people running the show are making the right decisions for us.

Working from home

This week has been an adventure with me working from home and the home schooling going on. I can now play the school bouncer and be there when my boy is giving my wife a hard time about school by helping administer the timeout and bringing order (or chaos) to things going on. It has also been a blast spending lunch with my boy. We went out and did a little “Zoo” thing in our neighborhood on Tuesday. A lot of people put signs up in their window and the kids went around trying to find all the animals on a list. We had fun doing it.

Stolemychair
Someone is always trying to steal my chair!

Learning new stuff

I’ve always been interested in new technologies and programming languages. One that has always scared me was GraphQL, I spent a few nights trying to figure it out by going through a tutorial. I love tutorials, but it makes more sense to me if I can put it to use in a project I’ve done. Once I figured out the basics, I have been trying to place it in a piece of code I did a training on a couple weeks ago at work. I think I have it figured out. I need to finish a few things and maybe present it to my coworkers in a training. It seems pretty powerful.

I’ve also had to do a few things at work this week that have required me to learn a few new things. One of them is how to use the EXPLAIN keyword in SQL to figure out the speed of a SQL statement. One of the problems with inheriting code from old coworkers is being LOST! We have a client that said “Make it faster and make it work”. I asked for help finding inputs for these queries, but they gave me nothing. It’s been an adventure trying figure things out. Wish me luck, because I’m fumbling at this one.

Visiting Friends

Last week we had fun getting out and trying to go on an adventure, to get out of the house. This week, we met at a fast food establishment and got our food and met in a parking lot. We all stayed in our cars and ate our food and talked through the windows several feet apart. It was awesome to get out and see our friends. We have been trying to support local restaurants and this is how we have been doing it. For the most part, we have been staying in and only going out if we need to (groceries, pills, drinks, etc).

Social distancing
Social Distancing in cars.

Random emails

I have the same name as the Comcast CEO and apparently there are several people out there that think if they can find out his email address they can get past the support channels and get what they want from him….or something. Here is an email I received 3 weeks in a row.

Hello Sir:
I am a long time Comcast customer and appreciate the email outreach about the National Emergency.  I’d like to request you consider giving “Limited Basic” cable subscribers access to cable news networks during the National Emergency.  I’ve called and done live chat to see about expanding my service, but the cost is $40 a month.  I can’t do that.  So far I’ve missed most of the real time breaking news:  White House announcements, governor announcements, and even mayor announcements because I don’t have 24 hour news coverage.  I don’t see how it would cost Comcast any money to open up “Digital Economy” services to those of us who can only afford “Basic” for this period of National Emergency.  It would be a smart PR move for you as well.
Thank you for your consideration.

Carol G

Carol has a great point, but I’m not sure if Comcast is going to give her this service. She has the internet, so she has access to all this information. I finally sent her a semi nice email wishing her well and telling her that I was not affiliated with this Dave. Thankfully she agreed to stop spamming me. I hope she finds what she wants I thought about starting a website where I post these interactions. 🙂

Stay Safe!

I hope everyone stays safe during this crazy times! I hope the toilet paper hoarding stops soon, so the stores can rebuild their stock and people don’t have to worry! If my boy keeps using toilet paper like he has been, we are going to be in trouble! How do you train a kid to wipe!? I also pray that people listen and stop spreading the virus.

What is the new normal?

This last week was met with a lot of changes and uncertainty. The first week of homeschooling for my wife and working in an office with only two people in it. Using the hour lunch time to get away from the office to socialize and let steam off. A freaking EARTHQUAKE. That is just a few of the changes.

Homeschooling

Homeschooling has been so crazy. We have a boy that apparently does a lot better when someone else is teaching him. He gave my wife a lot of trouble this week, but things got a little better the end of the week. I think they are getting use to it and I’m hoping this week will get better!

The teachers are doing a good job and keeping the kids going and there is plenty of work for them to do and some are complaining it is too much. It’s rough

Work Environment

Everyone showed up to work on Monday a little curious at how things were going to play out. We all met to discuss our plan and what people can expect. There are 8 of us there in the office and we all have our own room. We decided that if anyone wanted to work from home they could, but everyone decided they were fine working secluded in their offices.

Monday night someone reported that their sister came in contact with someone who came in contact with someone who tested positive with the virus. It’s a major Kevin Bacon situation, but he really didn’t want to get anyone sick, so he decided to stay home. This decision sparked a major scare and everyone decided they should work from home the rest of the week.

I on the other hand, have a school going on in the home and wanted to limit my distractions, so I stayed in the office. The office was so boring this week, but I was productive. I had to give a training on writing unit tests for NodeJS APIs and it was odd to do it all online without a room of people. Very interesting.

Social distancing

I love socializing and i’m going stir-crazy staying in all the time. I miss going to church each Sunday and visiting with my neighbors and all the friendships I’ve made there. I’ve been calling my friends, but seeing someone in person is a lot better. I can’t wait until things are back to normal, so I don’t have to fear being close to someone anymore. 🙂

We have tried to get out of the house over the weekend, but it is a little different. My wife was so ready to get out of the house on Friday, so we stopped at Purple Turtle to grab some food. We then drove up to a lookout and ate dinner and watched videos on my phone. After that, we drove around Alpine/Highland looking at some of the huge houses up there. It was different, but we all had a blast. The boy sat in the back playing games on the phone and checking out the houses with us.

Saturday afternoon, we went up to Bridal Veil Falls and viewed the sights. We were doing a virtual scavenger hunt that is going on, so we had fun getting pictures of various things and having a blast all while not interacting with people. The park in Provo was a bit crowded, so we had to take off.

Earthquake

Wednesday morning, I was getting my boy up for school sitting on his floor and all of a sudden, the house started to shake! It sounded like a huge truck was driving by, but we don’t live by a road with a lot of traffic. I ran downstairs to make sure my wife was OK after the shaking stopped. I ran outside to check on the gas and structure. It was small, but it freaked me out and I wasn’t sure what to do. There have been a ton of aftershocks since then, so it’s crazy. I guess it is normal, but I wouldn’t know. We are not prepared and that freaks me out.

This week

I’m going to start working from home this week and see if I can do it. I cleaned my office up and made room for me to work from home. The 3 monitors on my desk are going to be missed, but I can make do.

We missed the stores closing on Saturday, so I have to go get a few groceries. I’m hoping the numbers start going in the other direction with the infections and thins get better!

Past week activities

What do we talk about.

It’s been an interesting week here and probably everywhere. There are a lot of things going on in the world. Like most people, we have been hanging out in our house and only going out unless we need to. Life is going to change around here and who knows if we or anyone is ready.

Let me just touch on a few things from last week.

Monday

We planned on attending the funeral for my neighbor that passed away. He was a super nice guy, but his health has been deteriorating the last few years. I haven’t seen him much, but when I did, it was usually him coming to tell me to keep my son from messing with things in his yard, or me going over to his house to apologize for my son taking something from his house. We talked a few times about VW’s and his yard. He has some cool trees in his yard that provide a TON of shade for us in the summer. They are awesome, until the winter when I have to rake up the mess. I don’t mind it though, the shade is well worth it!

Unfortunately, that day the school had an early day, so one of us had to go pick up the boy from school and miss the end of the funeral. We went to lunch. I went to work after lunch. Nothing too exciting.

Tuesday

The cold I picked up the Saturday before was getting worse, so I decided to work from home. I have a pretty flexible job, and I’m able to work from home if I need to. The social interaction with my coworkers is one of the highlights of my day and it is definitely different while working at home. I tend to get more stuff done, because there are fewer distractions.

Wednesday

I went to work and tried to stay in my room more. It’s much easier to work on my 3 monitors vs 1- 17″ laptop screen. I also had GDG to attend that night. They were discussing the Firestore, which was very interesting. The presentation had some problems, but it was good. Here is the Stream if you are interested. Check out the guy talking about ServerApp at this timestamp. It is a super cool idea about ordering food from your phone in a restaurant. Having access to the server via your phone. It is a great idea, unfortunately during this time it may not progress like he wants if the restaurants close for dining.

Anyhow, I was pretty fired up about NoSQL databases after leaving and very curious how I could use them more. I usually work in the relational world. I can see the benefits of a Document Database, but i’m not sure how reports and data duplication work.

Thursday

I went to work again, I have been feeling much better. Who knows what I have, maybe just a cold? I had to do a training today for my coworkers. I did a little presentation on creating a simple API using NodeJS. Public speaking is not my strong point, so i’m sure this wasn’t very good. There were only 6 of us in the room and I was still petrified. I’m going to work on it a little bit more improve my skills. Got any tips?

Friday

Nothing special happened today, but we found out the schools will be closed to students for 2 weeks and we’ll be homeschooling the boy at home. This could be entertaining, to say the least. I’m thankful that my wife can stay home and help him with school. We needed some tortillas, so the Mexican market is on the way home. It was super packed with people, so it took about 40 minutes to get through the line.

Saturday

Another day of sticking around at home. After giving the boy his medication he pretty much stayed upstairs playing with Lego’s. I went to Costco to pick up a few essentials and to see the craziness. Unfortunately, it wasn’t bad at all and I made it through the lines without much trouble. I’m going to go crazy if I have to stay inside too much. A nerds life is behind the keyboard, but you need to get out every once in awhile.

I saw the best thing in my neighborhood. There was a family with a table and a pyramid of toilet paper with a sign that read “Stranded on the bowl without a roll?? Here is one on me! Pay it forward! #metootp“. I thought it was awesome!

Sunday

Today has been pretty lazy and great! Our church is canceled, so we did stuff here as a family and it went good. A 7 year old that has a hard time sitting still normally at church has the same problem x3 at home.

Be Safe

I hope everyone can stay safe during these crazy times. Facebook had a pretty epic link floating around to this site: “HERE’S THE ENTIRE LIST OF EDUCATION COMPANIES OFFERING FREE SUBSCRIPTIONS DUE TO SCHOOL CLOSINGS” – Hopefully we can keep our kids happy and not halt the learning that the teachers have worked so hard to do every day. They are working hard to provide learning online and we have to help our kids continue to learn. It’s going to be tough.

More stranger talk

Volunteer

I had an opportunity to do a little volunteering this weekend at the Deseret Industries (DI) in American Fork, Utah. Doing volunteer work is pretty fun and doing stuff that I don’t do everyday is even more fun! If you’ve been following along, The opportunity to meet random strangers and work with them is something I enjoy. For some reason, I have missed out on this opportunity since I’ve lived in this area.

What is it?

For those that don’t know what the DI is, you can think of it as a Salvation Army on the West Coast. It’s run by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. In short, They have a great place where they take in donations from the community and re-sell them. They also provide so much more by providing new skills to people, humanitarian aid, training and job experience, carrier and technical education, and more. It’s a great place and great for the community.

Stigma

The DI takes in clothes and other random stuff that is second hand or new, probably in rare occasions. There are many that think it is the last place they want to be or shop. I won’t name any names, but someone I’m close to that turns up their nose whenever I suggest going there. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, so it is OK with me! The clothes are washed and taken they have a lot of rules about what they take in. I’m sure the stuff coming in is taken care of better than some of the other second hand stores.

The EBAY’ers

The DI is a great place to hunt for deals or old stuff. You want to find an old Monopoly game or Chutes and Ladder’s game, this is the place to go. My son and I have spent a lot of time and picked up some random things that he really enjoyed. One of them was the Mousetrap. If you go in there regularly, you will see people camping out on the couches. You’ll also notice the same ones each week. These guys are the “hunters” looking to find that item that will fetch a great return on Ebay. I’ve always envied these people. Who wouldn’t want to turn $0.50 into $5?

Back to the opportunity

We were given aprons, gloves, and an assignment. The assignment was to work in the part where they take in donations from the community. The people would show up and we’d ask what they wanted to donate and sort it in the right bins. They would then take off. The donations varied from clothes to random household appliances. There were a handful of items that were unopened. The workers sort these things out, clean them up and put them out to be sold.

Seeing the smiles on the peoples face and sharing thank you’s made the experience great. I could write a ton more about what I “read” from each person, but it would probably only be interesting to me. One notable person, I remember looked exactly like Scott Wilson from the Walking Dead. This guy was driving a big dually truck that had some special bed that was welded on which looked like some assault vehicle. Something you’d see from some farmer or some off grid. it was interesting. Scott Wilson has a doppelganger out there. I had a great time and chatted with a lot of the people working there and a few with the people donating. It was fun.

Aftermath

I have a bit of a problem with Planter Fasciitis and after 2.5 hours of walking around and on my feet I was in pain that night and morning. It was rough! If you have never had problems with it, count yourself lucky. I need to get this worked on.

Conclusion

It was a great experience and I’m hoping I get another opportunity to volunteer there again! Another Volunteer opportunity we have is with the Sundance Film Festival, but we haven’t done that for some time now. If you ever get a chance to volunteer for this, I would suggest it. You’ll get to meet some awesome people.

Playing with technology.

Image by Mike Sweeney from Pixabay

The Problem

I wanted to talk about something I’ve been playing with at work (not for work..just at work). Before I start, I want to say that I’m not trying to do a full review or guide on how to set this up. It is just a little story about what was built.. 🙂

We have two entrances to our work. We have the main entrance and then a second door most of us use to go to the bathroom. No one is monitoring the main door, so if a package is delivered, it would sit there until someone happened to go to the bathroom or you go looking for it. If someone came to the office to meet with us, they never knew where to go. Most of the time the visitor would sit up there waiting for someone to greet them. A coworker mentioned that it would be nice to have a webcam to view people coming and going. This is how this little project was born.

The solution. Version 1

My nephew is always up on cool tech toys and had recently built a Raspberry PI garage monitor system. I took that idea and built one for the office. The following items were used:

  • A Raspberry Pi 3 – Raspberry Pi 3
  • Web Cam 1080p – I can’t remember what type this is
  • Raspbian – UI for Raspberry Pi
  • MotionEye – Software used to manage the camera and motion, etc.

Setup

I didn’t want to have a monitor plugged into the Pi all the time, even though I was using a GUI OS (Raspbian), so I setup all the stuff at home. MotionEye has a pretty good page that describes how to install the software, and that was pretty easy. The following script (very simple) was used to post a message to a Microsoft Teams server indicating what the IP Address of the Pi. This would allow me to make a change to the WiFi settings to connect to the WiFi when it booted up. Everything should have been taken care of after that, because I can use putty to connect to the machine.

import teams
import tools, os
import pymsteams

def teamMsg(ip):
    ips = ip.split(' ')

    myTeamsMessage = pymsteams.connectorcard("<secret>")
    myMessageSection = pymsteams.cardsection()
    # Section Title
    myMessageSection.title("Pi Boot")
    # Activity Elements
    myip = ips[0]
    myMessageSection.activityTitle("Here is my IP(s) - %s " % (ip))
    myMessageSection.text("Here is a link to come watch Watch. [Watch here](http://%s:8765) - username: 'user' -- blank password " % (myip))
    # Add your section to the connector card object before sending
    myTeamsMessage.addSection(myMessageSection)
    myTeamsMessage.summary("Camera booted.  Connected to network.")
    myTeamsMessage.send()


import teams
import tools, os

ipaddress = os.getenv("_IP")
print ipaddress
teams.teamMsg(ipaddress)

This code hasn’t been cleaned up.

Motion Detection

One feature of motionEye is to detect motion, so I created some scripts to post messages to Teams when motion was triggered. This was a great idea in theory, but it would never work. MotionEye wouldn’t fire these scripts for some reason, and I haven’t been able to fix it..yet

Plugging it in

I took the Pi to work and plugged it into the network and fired it up. It didn’t go so smooth, but I was able to work it out and get it going. We had fun with it. Unfortunately, it wasn’t doing what we wanted, since it wouldn’t run the scripts during a motion event. We had more fun watching the videos of coworkers going to the bathroom, coming to work, or going home.

Boredom

We eventually grew bored of this setup and thought it would be a better idea to monitor the parking lot. Specifically Nefarious Corner mentioned in The Parking Lot post. It was nice to view this area, because it was more interesting than watching the co-workers go to the bathroom. We found a few problems with this setup and the raspberry pi.

Problem 1

The Pi didn’t have enough processing power to handle the video processing. We were getting pretty low refresh rates, so the videos were very choppy and provided little value.

Problem 2

The machine would crash often, and the only thing we could figure out is that it may be overheating. I have the Pi in a Retro Nintendo case, which is super cool when you are building a gaming machine. The case comes with a fan, but it wasn’t installed…woops!

Problem 3

There wasn’t enough space on the memory card, so it would fill up fast and then freeze up. When this thing freezes up it was difficult to get in without having a monitor plugged in.

Version 2

After the incident mentioned in The Parking Lot and the camera crashing. I wanted to get MotionEye working on a new machine that can hopefully handle the image processing and have more space.

I located an old machine that we haven’t used since 2010 and repurposed it. The new machine was constructed using Ubuntu Server 19.10. It didn’t go as smooth as the Pi due to some mistakes on my part, but I got it running. Things are running and we haven’t seen much action on the camera though.

ParkingLot

I’ve had fun setting this up, but I’m pretty sure it can do a lot more. I have several ideas on how to extend this. One would be to integrate this with the software/service by Sigthound, which is a service that can recognize cars, license plates, people, etc. Go check it out if you haven’t seen it before. I would suggest looking at the Cloud API. I’m going to apologize now, because after you go to the site, your FB wall will be riddled with ads from Sighthound. 🙂

Conclusion

I love exploring and playing with technology and this system is perfect for watching people, especially those misbehaving in your parking lot. I say bring on the summer and the crazy meth-heads.