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Spring Break Sabotage

Spring break was this week and we had big plans to visit Lava Hot Springs and our plan was to stay up there all week. I was going to work part of the week from the resort. Just like everyone else’s Spring Break and Vacation Plans, it was cancelled due to the virus. To try and add excitement to Quarantine and make it fun, I thought we would try and sleep in a couple different rooms.

Basement

We have a Wii in our TV room in the basement. There have been a few times where we have slept down there. The last time, the boy had his bus tent and I slept on the floor, but he has destroyed and outgrown the tent. This time, He wanted to sleep in the couch and I slept on the floor. We ended up going to bed super late and he wasn’t comfortable. He ended up waking up way too early. It didn’t go as planned. He had fun except for the cold.

We were going to try another room, but he said it was too cold downstairs. This is the same boy that wants to sleep with a fan on him when it is 60 degrees in his room. Go figure. We ended up not doing it again.

Our own Rooms

The rest of the week he slept in his room, but he kept waking up at 8am! We kept telling him that “It is OK to sleep in! You are on spring break!”, but he kept waking up at 8am. We tried a few things to try and get him to sleep in but nothing would work.

Jacob loves to sleep with music going in his room when he falls asleep, and he has some Christmas lights that he keeps on. The lights are hooked up to a WiFi controller that allows us to turn them on with a Google Mini.

IFTTT – If This Then That

Here is where the problem comes in. We would ask him “Why did you get up so early?” He would reply “Because it was morning.” Well he finally mentioned “Because the lights turned off, and I wanted to wake up before it got dark.” A few weeks ago, I had checked the WiFi device schedule to make sure it wasn’t shutting the lights off at a specific time, and I couldn’t find it.

This last week, I had an epiphany, I remembered I had set IFTTT up to turn the lights off, because he kept leaving them on when he went to school. Sure enough, it was setup to turn the lights off at 8am! I changed it to 10:15a, because who sleeps past 10:15a? (only my wife). That night he went to bed pretty late, so I wasn’t surprised he was still asleep at 10am the next day. He came down at 10:20a. I asked him “What woke you up?” He said “The lights went off.” SABOTAGE! I found the cause of my boys poor sleep! He is a light sleeper!

Easter

I fixed the lights to turn off at 12p, but unfortunately Easter had generated a lot of excitement in my boy, so he couldn’t sleep past 9am Sunday morning. School starts again on Monday, so I am going to update the schedule to go off at 7:15a, since tat is when I want him up. We’ll see how it works out!

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.

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.

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.

Week Activities

Last week was pretty busy around here. I thought I would just recap how it went, if I can remember.

Monday

Nothing spectacular happened today, but the moon was so amazing this morning while driving my boy to school. Check out this photo.

You can see the moon just above the sign. It doesn’t do it justice, but it was an amazing sight! Never mind the cracked windshield. It has been the last thing I want to get fixed, since it isn’t a requirement and I can still see through the windshield. Cops…Please weigh in below. 🙂

Tuesday

My boys school is always running fund raisers at certain restaurants around the valley and we try and support them when we can. Tuesday, it was at Zupas. I have big problems with this place. Zupas is always busy and you pay an insane amount of money for a salad. Am I the only one that looks for quantity over quality? Maybe that is why I’m overweight? The place was packed with parents and kids, and it took us 40 minutes to get food.

THAI STEAK With Thai Basil Vinaigrette Salad. It was super yummy. Where’s the beef? Good question.

Wednesday

I don’t get out of the house much, so it’s fun when I can get a night out with some friends. Mike, Richard, and I went out to dinner and to play some pool. We had a lot of fun catching up and driving Richard’s VW Bus. The BAD is he took out his heat exchange to improve the performance, which means there is no heat in the bus. Driving 75 on the freeway with no heat in 37 degree weather can make anyone wish they had worn a bigger coat. It was super cold, but we had a blast!

Thursday

We experienced something new today that as very interesting. Our boy doesn’t get sick much, which is a blessing! He woke up in the morning and had a bad case of diarrhea, which was heart breaking. We had to keep him home from school, which tore him up. He stayed home terrorizing the wife, Jen, and plugging the toilet, because he hasn’t learned how to use toilet paper yet. We are learning a new skill around here when it comes to TP and stuff. It’s a never ending battle. I’m not going to include any photos, but he recovered on Friday and was able to go back to school! Yahoo!

Friday

Valentines day! It’s a fun day, and it’s nice to spoil the ones you love. Going out to dinner is a joke on this night, so we have started a little tradition around here. We get the Heart Shaped Pizza from Papa Murphy’s and have a candle light dinner while we eat. Jacob loves it! We had a great night and grandma brought over a ton of candy for Jacob, so he was jacked up on sugar as usual.

The unfortunate thing is, Jen is diabetic and was having issues with her blood sugar. She was getting sick later that night, so it pretty much ended the fun. She ended up being sick into Saturday, which sucked. I think she had Diabetic ketoacidosis. It’s pretty scary and she just wants to sleep, so it’s hard to help her.

Saturday – Sunday – Monday

Jen slept all day and Jacob and I relaxed on Saturday. We had plans to go to dinner with Friends and start a little stay-cation. We couldn’t make any plans during the week, due to the illness that was going on. Jen woke up at 5pm and was feeling better, so we decided to execute the first part of the stay-cation, which was go to dinner with the friends. We had a blast at our favorite spot, Charlie Chows, and stayed there until they closed. They need a new website and If my design skills were good, I’d offer them up.

Sunday we stayed up in SLC at a hotel with a swimming pool and water slide that was pretty fun to play in. The boys had a blast swimming and hanging out for a couple days. We had a blast!

We drove home today after we finished swimming and just tried to recover! Tomorrow, Tuesday, we have to get back to reality. Jacob’s school wanted to make up a snow day today. I think it is ridiculous that you try and make up a snow day on a Holiday that families plan mini vacations around. I’m assuming it wasn’t well attended today. So sad.

Out of my shell

I just want to preface this post with: I am not looking for a new job and I really love who I work with and what I do. If it weren’t for the people, I’d be jumping ship, but the group of guys I work with are awesome.

When I grew up, I was always pretty shy. Talking to strangers has always been hard for me, so making new friends was also hard. It was especially hard if the target of my conversation was a female. At some point in my life I started changing. A blind date, and 2.5 years later, my wife and I were married. If I were telling this story it would be 2 minutes long, but if you hear my wife’s side of story, you better bring chips. I’m not as shy now as I was when I was younger and I find people more interesting and curious now a days (as I’ve mentioned in the past).

Meet Ups

For the last several years, I have been attending several meetups. I have been attending the Google Developers Group (GDG) for about 7 years now (A little break here and there due to guitar lessons). I also try and attend the UtahJS or .NET Group. They are all pretty interesting and have unique attendees. The GDG is by far my favorite, because of the people and their interests. Personally, I like going to learn new technology and to get out of my comfort zone by meeting new people. You have to not take it personally when the introvert sitting next to you doesn’t want to talk.

HackerX

I think I received an invite in my email or found a link to an invite and signed up. I thought it was something completely different, because I didn’t go research it. It sounds like a bunch of people hacking away on computer stuff. Fun right? I didn’t find out what I was in for until a few days before the event. Like it says it is a “Networking and recruiting event”. It’s the perfect place for someone looking for a job! The two events I’ve been to have had about 15 companies there looking for candidates.

How it works

The companies are setup in 4 rows with about 4 to 5 companies in each row. The candidates line up on one side and work their way down through each company. “Speed” Interviews take place at each table with each company for 5 minutes. It takes 20-25 minutes to go through each line and it is a 2-hour event, so you do a lot of waiting and you have to scramble at the end to talk to companies you missed out on. The companies are just as tired as you are and they sometimes get a little grouchy if you are just trying to find out about the company and not looking for a job. haha

Networking

If you are shy or came by yourself, you are going to be pretty bored waiting in line, especially if you didn’t rush to the front of the line. You can do the math, and figure out how long you have to wait to see the first company if you are slow. The best part of this event is networking with the introverts (“nerds”) in line with you.

I’ve met some pretty awesome people in line. There are all sorts of people in these lines. Programmers find their jobs pretty interesting, and when we try and tell others about what we are doing, most audiences are bored. For instance, if I tell my wife how I coded up a bunch of unit tests to test my code, she tries to act interested, but I can see her eyes glossing over. When you talk to other nerds, they usually get it, or are truly interested. It’s awesome and that is what makes it fun to talk to some of these people. I also find it interesting to find out about them personally.

Companies

This time around, I got inline and only had to wait 25 minutes before my first interview. The company hosting the event had a guy going through the line talking to the candidates and taking resumes. Of course, I didn’t bring any but we chatted for a bit.

I went through the line and talked some pretty cool companies. They have swag and various things to hand out. It’s fun to learn about the companies and what they do. I made it through another line of companies and talked to a few others at the end.

I survived

It was a great experience. The fear wasn’t as great this time, but I also had nothing to lose. It would be a lot different if I was looking for a job. I could write more about the people I met. I will post the most interesting individual I met here. Is name is Admiral Potato. I’m glad I talked to him. He has a lot of interesting interests. He can be found here on tumblr.com and on twitter.

A few companies that I think would be great to work for are:

https://degreed.com/ – They allow you to work remote and work in C# and Javascript

HireVue – They use some interesting technology. They help companies make better hiring decisions. Video Conferencing Interviews? They use AI to predict information about the candidates going through the interview process.

Parakeet – Vacation Rental Home Automation. I’m interested in home automation. They work in Python, which is interesting. I’ve used it in a few projects and on some pet projects. It’s fun.

Work is fun part 2.

The Quest Begins

I have a bit of an update on the Amazon fiasco I talked about in the “Work is Fun“.

We have been trying to get into that AWS Machine for sometime now. The client contacted Amazon, but they would only do so much unless you paid for a “Premium Plan“. He was on the Developer plan, but they wanted him to go to the Business or Enterprise. The Business price is pretty pricey and the Enterprise is even more! If you have some time, I would check it out. Looking at the Business plan, you can see how crazy your bill could get.

First Attempt

On Monday the Amazon support gave us a link to try, but I was too busy to try. The next day, Tuesday, I started attempting this fix.. Half way through the page, I came to the realization that this is exactly what I tried before and it wasn’t going to help much, but I was willing to give it a shot. I was sure they understood the problem and gave good advice.

I shut down the site and started copying the VM and doing as instructed. The whole process took about 2 hours to complete, due to a lot of paranoia and double checking. The client was contacted and he switch his account to the Business account and summoned someone from support to call me. Of course, when they called it said “SCAM LIKELY” so I was a little reluctant to answer.

Lets try and fix your problem

The person on the other end talked to me and was trying to understand our problem. He wanted me to try the process again, because the tech who send us that list must have known what he was talking about. The support guy even offered to READ it to me. Feeling a little annoyed, I said to him:

Me: “Sir, my goal here is to try and recover the admin password, right? Do you see anything in these instructions that will help me accomplish my goal?”

Support: “Oh.. You are right. Let me check something”

He later came back with nothing that could help. He did see that we were now on the Business plan, which allowed the case to be escalated to the people who have the technical skills to help. Come to find out, He explained that he was in accounting and he couldn’t help anymore than he already had. I had to wait for someone to call me.. .. Oh great.

Trying to sync up.

Tuesday night, We were getting the boy ready for bed and I looked down at my phone and noticed I was getting another call but it was from an “Unknown Number”, so I let it go to voicemail. The voicemail had some guy from amazon saying he was calling about our case. What the heck!? Why would they be calling me from an Unknown Number? That is ridiculous. I turned off all spam blocking on my phone and allowed all unknown numbers to come through. (read: ANNOYING)

The next day, Wednesday, I sat around waiting for another call. About 3 in the afternoon, I emailed the client asking if I should just be waiting for a call, or what was going to happen? He got on the site and summoned Amazon again and they called right away, from an “Scam Likely” number. Of course, I answered the phone. It was the same people in accounting. They looked over the case and said they would put in a note to have the tech call me during MY work hours (9am – 5pm), not theirs so we could hook up. They were informed that the number had to come from a legit number, or it wouldn’t get answered.

The call.

Thursday morning around 10:10am, I was sitting in a weekly call with a client going over some recent changes and I get a call and the caller Id read “2”. Just the number 2? That was pretty odd, but I had to answer the phone. The phone call was from Amazon and he wanted to work through the problem right then. The decision was made to do it right then and skip the other meeting, so we proceeded.

The guy wanted to send me a link so he could see my screen. I’ve heard this before, where they want to steal all your stuff after they take control, but this was Amazon calling and they wouldn’t do that right!? No, they wouldn’t, but the thought went through my mind.

I was sent a link through the AWS Console, attached to the case, and it was pretty safe and actually really cool! He could see my screen, but had no control. He had a pointer that would show up where he wanted me to click. It was quite cool. He guided me through each step to try.

Come to find out, I had found a video earlier that didn’t work, I had a few things set up from that video that helped us accomplish our goal. All we had to do was turn on some Management stuff and pull up a Powershell window and we were on the machine.

Changing the password

The first thing we tried was resetting the Administrator password, but that failed. It looks like the previous company had deleted the Administrator account, which I think is valid. It makes it harder for someone to break in.

The second thing we did was add a new user with Admin privileges. This was super easy and slick. After creating the account I was able to RDP into the machine without any problems!

The work begins

I was able to get in and the client was super excited when I reported back to him. The process of learning the system and making some important fixes begins now. It doesn’t help that I’m super swamped at work, but i’m going to do my best to try and make this client happy. It is a fun project that I’m excited to work on.

I’m super impressed with the amazon support. It may be expensive for support, but it seemed worth it. Especially since I wasn’t paying for it!

The Parking Lot

Back Story

We have the most interesting parking lot. I’ve tried to mark up the map, but it didn’t turn out the best, so bear with me! As you can see we have a big parking lot. We are located on the border of Orem City. If you go down the back hill you end up in Provo. There is a path that leads down the hill, where a ditch runs north to south. If you cross the ditch, you end up in the back of a house and onto a street in Provo. The path is frequently used by people that stop at the bus stop or …something. There is a pawn shop near by and various other places that some might frequent. We use to think it was just a shortcut that people used until we started noticing the same odd people hanging around.

The Fight

One day we noticed an individual, Jacob (I know his name, because one day I went out to question him), come up from the hill with a backpack on and he went out by the Bus Stop and took his shirt off, put deodorant on and put on another shirt. A nice mustang pulled up later and they chatted for a bit. Then the mustang left after giving him some groceries. It was an odd sequence of events, so we were curious what was down that hill. Jacob took his groceries back down the trail.

The Adventure

On April 8, 2019, we decided to go on an adventure for lunch. The spring rain made it hard to explore a ditch, so we had to pick a dry day. The trail down to the ditch was a little sketchy. The hill is steep and the dirt is compacted, but there is a chain link fence to hang on to. We crossed the ditch and were checking out the house (See “Meth House” on the Map). and some lady stuck her head out of the window and said “Can I help you”. We were a little shocked, so I just said “Yeah, where does this trail lead? “. She replied with “People take it to the Mall. You can go through our yard if you want”. It was interesting, but she was the one that we keep seeing on the trail and going to the “Bus Stop”.

Walking up the trail to the “Mall” seemed like the best way to go, and it required us to dodge twigs and puddles. There were several strange things we ran into, and a few are the reason why we call it the “Meth Trail”. We found some gloves, which we thought was very strange! Then we turned around and found a giant bottle of “Fernox Antifreeze Protector Alphi-11”, Bucket, and Broom. “What The!?!?!” It was an interesting find. We finished walking up the trail to find a big tunnel under the road, but decided not to follow it any longer. The tunnel was full of spider webs and bird nests. The mission had to be aborted, so we got out of the tunnel and took the road back to work. The whole trip was about 3 miles, so it turned out to be some good exercise! 🙂

Meth Route

We have put camera’s in our windows to try and watch the activity of these people and it has provided many hours of entertainment trying to figure out what is going on. The lady living in the house has pretty much stayed the same, but there are new guys walking back and forth with her. They tend to do shady stuff in the parking lot on the weekend. I know I’m convinced they are selling drugs and doing other stuff.

Nefarious Corner

We have the Meth Heads and over the summer we started noticing a guy that would pull into our parking lot and sit for hours in his car. Of course, we started getting curious and started watching him. We noticed that there was always a trail of water that would be flowing down the parking lot under his car. We would joke that he was using the bathroom on his tire, because he was sitting there so long. This guy has been coming round for about 6 months or so.

The Confrontation

On Tuesday, the guy was there from 9:30am until 5pm. We were watching him during a meeting. He gets out of his car and smokes and throws his empty pack of cigarettes on the ground. We tried to see if he was relieving himself out there and it looked like he was, but we couldn’t tell. We went to lunch and walked by the car and noticed a puddle, but was it snow? Who knows.

When we got back from lunch, we two down from his car. He was fast asleep in his car with his phone in his lap. Not the best place to take a nap. We were curious about his story!? Why is this guy sitting out here all day? Is he OK? What is going on?

I left work a little after 5pm. He had moved his car 2 spots away from mine and still in there. I was determined to knock on his window and find out if he was OK! As I approached, I noticed that his windows were a little foggy. Something you’d expect when someone was in their car for a long time. I didn’t think anything else. I did start my phone recording audio to see if I could catch anything interesting when we chatted.

When I reached the car, I noticed he was kicked back in his chair, hands on his crotch pleasuring himself!!!! I didn’t know what to do! I knocked on the car and told him we had noticed he was parked there all day and asked if he was ok. He said he was fine. Of course he was, but I had just interrupted him. I turned away and said “BTW. You shouldn’t do that here anymore”. He took off. I was super scared and you can tell in the recording. Here is the recording so you can hear the interaction.

The audio. Lots of dead air at the first due to walking to the car.

…

I don’t think we will be seeing this guy again in the near future. He probably thought he had the perfect spot and I had to go ruin it!

I’m looking forward to more adventures in the parking lot this summer. It’s been pretty slow lately, because it’s hard to get up and down the hill in mud and snow. When spring rolls around again, I bet it will pick up!