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Home Office Ergonomics
When UMBC abruptly switched to full-time telecommuting back in March 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic, I had to make some adjustments to my home office setup. Prior to then, I never telecommuted, and our basement home office sat mostly unused. Our printer is there, and I used to have a desktop Linux server…
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Emergence
I have not been motivated to post much here recently, because quite frankly, life has been kind of repetitive over the past few months. I wake up, eat breakfast, bike/walk/hike/run/climb/etc., work, sleep, repeat. Not much to write about, but there are signs that normalcy is slowly starting to return. In a few weeks, our entire…
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Winter Routine
We’re coming up on a year since everything shut down in mid-March 2020, so this is the first January that I’ve been full-time working from home. For most of 2020, my morning routine several days a week was to take long bike rides before work. I would get out of the house at around 6:30am…
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Xmas Break
It’s that time of year again, when work shuts down at the end of December. Most years, this is a complete break from my daily routine, with a 2-week absence from the office, and all of the usual holiday gatherings and activities filling our family schedule. I always look forward to the holidays, but usually,…
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T-Day Week
It’s a short work week, so I’m working on wrapping a few things up at work ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday. Next week, we have our second virtual Shibboleth training class of the year. These seem to be popular, as the last one sold out, and we’re pushing 30 registrants for this go-around. I think…
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Electric
I don’t post much about work on my blog, unless you count the act of getting to and from work on my bike. This past weekend, UMBC lost power for around 72 hours, and the IT support/admin guys in our area were scrambling around madly the entire weekend, almost 24/7, trying to keep key systems…
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Saturday update
Got a start on winterizing the pool today, with occasional breaks to shoo Andrew off the pool cover. I drained the water down below the tile line and added chlorine and algaecide. The water was nice and clean even after a month of neglect. Wonder if the algaecide I added last month helped. Anyways, tomorrow…
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Calendaring revisited
It’s been a year or so since I gave up on my home-grown calendar sync setup. It was nice for awhile, then we upgraded our Oracle Calendar server, it broke, I tried to fix it and didn’t get very far, and that was the end of that. Well, as it happens, there’s been some recent…
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Retro coding
’tis been a while.. but I’m currently writing some code (the Student Parking Registration rewrite) that communicates directly with our system of record for SIS, the HP3000 mainframe. I haven’t done this for 6 or 7 years (although I’ve made tweaks here and there, this is the most I’ve done with it since 2000 or…
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Kids are back
Just got back from my first outdoor run in what seems like forever, so I’m sure I’ll be nice and sore tomorrow. I’ve really fallen off with the biking (and exercising in general) recently, and I do hope to ride in several more times this year, but this is definitely the time of year when…