Realignment.

Earlier this month I received word at work there would be a change in the BYOD, or “Bring Your Own Device” policy at work. Since last year I have been using a personal Mac mini for all of my work from the home office. While I work for a company that full embraces Microsoft’s business offerings, Microsoft has shifted their approach over the past couple of years and have made their products much more friendly to operating systems outside of Windows. The official approach at work has been if you’re participating in BYOD you can use the Citrix-based VDI (Virtual Desktop Instance) to get to company applications. While connected to the work VPN with my Mac Mini I could do pretty much what I needed to do without delving into VDI and I was a happy camper.

Since the Mac Mini is a desktop device, I also had a work issued Windows 10 Dell laptop, which is my official work computer. I figured I would use that for travel and I would log in with it every couple of weeks to keep it up-to-date with the latest patches from work’s desktop services.

At least that was my intention.

A couple of weeks ago I received word that I hadn’t logged in with the laptop since late March and I needed to log in to get important updates. Not a problem, I’m always happy to oblige, so I did just that. The only thing I don’t like about that Dell laptop is the screen resolution; at 1366×768 it’s a little compact for me to do what I need to do on a daily basis. I have my own 32-inch USB-C monitor and the Dell laptop has a USB-C port on it so I hooked up the whole affair and was actually delighted to see I could use the monitor at it’s fullest resolution without throwing the laptop’s fan into fits.

Since I was tardy with the updates this must have brought some attention to my account and I received another message from desktop services, this time advising I could make a choice of staying on my personal Mac Mini or I could use the company issued laptop, but not both. The company is moving to Microsoft’s WVD, or Windows Virtual Desktop, and the way the licenses are managed the company allocates either a laptop OR a WVD license per user, not both.

Staying with my Mac Mini would result in me not having a mobile solution for when I start traveling for work again, so that wouldn’t work. So, I decided to give up the Mac Mini approach to work and set up my Windows 10 laptop for full time use.

It has been a surprisingly smooth and pleasant move for me.

As a software developer and systems engineer I work in Linux all day long. I primarily work from the “command line” when doing much administrative stuff and the reason I liked the Mac Mini was because it had a Unix terminal baked right into the operating system. But over the past year or two Microsoft has done a complete 180º on their feelings around Linux and now offers “Windows Subsystem for Linux”, the ability to run Linux right inside of Windows 10.

This too has been an amazing experience for me.

My transition to the Windows 10 laptop, with Ubuntu Linux running in the “WSL” has met all of needs for work both effortlessly and easily. I am surprisingly pleased with the setup I’ve been using for the past week; today I took the opportunity of the quiet afternoon to put the finish touches on my setup and I’m ready to go after the long holiday weekend.

A while back I told my husband and family that my requirement of sticking exclusively to the Apple ecosystem had come to an end. With this proclamation we purchased a Windows 10 gaming computer from Jamie and Chris, with my intention of turning it into a flight simulator setup over the next couple of months. My husband has been enjoying playing online games with friends on it. It’s a fast machine for about a third of what we’d pay for a similarly-spec’d Mac.

I’ve also been moving back towards Linux full time with my personal computing needs. The hardest move for me was my task management system. I’ve been using OmniFocus for over 10 years and while it has served my needs well for all this time, the web version was just not powerful enough to meet my needs on the Windows 10 work computer. I solved the issue in a very simple way. Using the framework of the simple todo.txt text-file based system, I simply wrote my own automations and other task management routines that run on a nightly basis for both work and personal tasks. When I get up in the morning my day is already planned out the way I want it. When I have flight on the schedule, I can go to any computer in the world, log into my little Linux server I have running, and type “flight (date)” at the command prompt, and tasks reminding me to charge devices, update iPads, plan flights, get the weather, and pack all my gear, will appear on all of my task lists with the proper date and intervals necessary to accomplish everything I do before a flight.

I’m getting old. It’s easier for me to type a command at a prompt instead of point and clicking and moving things around on a screen.

The truth of the matter is two-fold, not only was I not able to work effectively within the closed-ecosystem of Apple based products, I’m quite frankly also getting bored with my Apple products. I’ve had an iPhone X since they came out in late 2017 and aside from some battery issues I’ve been experiencing over the past couple of days, I do not feel compelled to get the latest and greatest in any way. My MacBook Pro is a mid 2015 model, the last version before they went to those awful butterfly keyboards, and my iPad Pro works great and does everything it’s suppose to do, the exact same way every iPad I’ve had has done it for the past 10 years. The iPad Pro is a 2018 model and I don’t feel the need to update that anytime soon.

What I really want is to get back into Linux full time, but I can’t justify selling and buying things just for the sake of change. So in the meanwhile I’m running the latest version of Ubuntu Linux in a VirtualBox on my MacBook Pro and it’s running great. Canonical has done great things with Ubuntu over the years. A lot of the diehard Linux community is grumpy about Ubuntu and Canonical, some even going so far as to saying it’s not “really Linux”, because of some commercial software in the distribution. But I find Ubuntu’s implementation to be beautiful and stable and it gives me the ability to just get things done.

Because Linux gives me options, I’ve even gone so far as to install the older “Unity” desktop environment on my Ubuntu install. I simply like the way Unity works better than anything else out their in the Linux world and because Linux gives me freedom to set my computer up the way I want to, I’m going to use that freedom to do just that.

Apple hasn’t done anything wrong and I still recommend iDevices for folks that aren’t super tech-savvy and still want to maintain their own data privacy. I think Apple does that very well when compared to some other solutions out there. Microsoft is making great strides in keeping things open and giving folks choices, and Linux is awesome for those of us that want to know exactly what makes our computer tick and make it the exact way we want it to be.

My only family rule with the technology now is data can’t be confined to a specific device or ecosystem. This cooperative approach is keeping us a happy open family.

22 May 2020 by Geek 0

Reality.

Tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of human beings are going to die from COVID-19 before the end of 2020. This is in addition to the 95,000+ Americans that have already died from Coronavirus. This is an unfortunate reality.

The more unfortunate aspect of this reality is that too many Americans have pretty much grown bored with the whole COVID-19 news cycle and feel they’re entitled to nights out at restaurants and bars, nail appointments, board meetings, and movie theatres because that’s the American way! Being able to watch blockbuster movies about killing things in IMAX is a symbol of freedom and no one is going to take away their freedom.

Social distancing is falling apart. Even here in Chicago where Mayor Lori Lightfoot has become little more than a meme with her “No!” stance in a poorly tailored pantsuit, folks aren’t really trying to maintain social distancing as much as they were a couple of weeks ago. My morning walk has become an exercise in frustration as I walk between cars, jump over grassy knolls, etc. to isolate myself from someone walking down a sidewalk, phone in hand, no mask or other protective covering in site, cluelessly schlepping along in their only little bubble of liberty.

I’m determined to keep me and my family and friends off the statistics board of COVID-19 deaths. I used to be focused on doing my part to keep that worldwide statistic as low as possible, but because American society is what it is, it’s now every man or woman for themselves.

The latter half of 2020 is going to make the first half of 2020 look like a picnic. History has shown us, people are talking, but few people are listening.

But hey, freedom.

22 May 2020 by Why. 0

Darkness.

This is the Sears Tower*, as seen from our balcony. Notice there are no lights shining in the Sears Tower. That’s because the electricity is still off in the Sears Tower.

The power distribution center in the basement of the Sears Tower was flooded with over four feet of water during the heavy rain last weekend. Power needed to be turned off to the entire skyscraper so repairs could be made in a safe manner. Fried repairmen are not productive.

Four days later, the famous skyscraper still stands in darkness. It’s rather creepy to look out there and see the tallest building in Chicago completely dark.

* The Sears Tower actually became the Willis Tower in 2009, but everyone I know, and from what I understand, most of Chicago, still calls it the Sears Tower. Because it’s the Sears Tower.

21 May 2020 by City Life. 2

Klymaxx.

I don’t know why this song popped into my head but I’m happy that it did! From the summer of 1986, here’s Klymaxx with “Man Size Love”.

20 May 2020 by DJ 0

Timely.

Taken 5/20/20.

There are people working everyday at the local elementary school. For the past 60+ days I’ve noticed March events on the marquee. I guess they’re too busy cleaning the building to share well wishes or even a blank message on the sign.

The lingering messages of events in March are a reminder of what was and what is now.

20 May 2020 by Ponderings and Musings 0

Scents.

My favorite scent of the season is the scent of lilac. Dark purple, light purple, white, doesn’t matter, lilac is a glorious scent that makes me feel centered and happy.

Grandma City had several lilac bushes along the back fence of her backyard back in the day. I wonder if the lilac bushes are still there. Every spring she’d cut a couple of flowers and have them in a vase on the kitchen table. The scent was wonderful in the carpeted kitchen. She took a couple of shoots of one of the bushes and planted them near our mobile home in the early 1970s. It grew slowly but sturdily and would have a couple of flowers for the rest of the springs we lived on that lot. I missed the scent of those lilacs when we moved across the street to the new house. Curiously, we had no lilacs at the new house. I always wondered if there was just too much sand in the soil. We lived over what had once been Lake Ontario thousands of years ago. There were sand dunes not too far from our little village, even though the shore of Lake Ontario was seven miles to the west.

When my husband and I moved into our first house together in 1997 I was happy to see there were lilac bushes along the back deck. When we had new landscaping installed a couple of years later the lilac bushes all stayed; the new landscaping was designed around the lilacs. Over the years a couple of smaller bushes started popping up in the vicinity of the older bushes. We took one of them with us to the new house in 2003. When we moved to Chicago in 2017, the relocated lilac bush was tall and strong and doing quite well. I hope it’s still there.

There are a few lilac bushes along the sidewalks in our neighborhood. At this time of year I stop and smell them during my morning walk. I think of Grandma City. I can hear her saying, “Hi, John”, in her Grandma City voice.

It all makes me smile.

19 May 2020 by Ponderings and Musings 0

Push Button Magic.

We are the point of quarantine where I just watched a 25-minute infomercial advertising a General Electric Stratoliner Cooking Range. The advertisement is dated 1950. Push button technology. What will they think of next?

18 May 2020 by Geek 0

Escape.

I spent nearly three hours in the air yesterday. The time was split between two different airplanes. The first flight was my annual “proficiency check” with the flight school I rent the DA40s from; this is a requirement of the school, not the FAA. I like this requirement, it keeps me on my game. I probably don’t spend enough time practicing some maneuvers when I’m up punching holes in the sky. It’s good to have a sanity check. Adoption of bad habits can be stopped faster if you’re going up with an instructor more often. The flight went very well. I was able to do everything the instructor needed me to do and I did it well. I really like flying the DA40.

The second half of the flight time was in the Cessna 182 RG (Retractable Gear). “Large Marge” flies quite a bit differently than the DA40 but an airplane is an airplane. It’s all about learning how it handles, the extra equipment and procedures around the retractable gear, and the workflows and thought processes around the high performance engine. When you’re going faster and getting there faster you need to be thinking faster.

I still record all my flights but I don’t share them on YouTube like I used to. My primary focus is to review my flights and take notes to keep in mind for the next flight. There’s a couple of things I should have done quicker, some things I should have done better, but overall I’m coming right along with the requirements for this next endorsement.

Mother Nature has been kind the last three Saturdays in a row. Let’s hope she maintains the same mood for next weekend!

17 May 2020 by Pilot. 0

About J.P.

Just a guy with a husband. We’ve been together 28 years and he still makes me see fireworks on a daily basis. Hiker. Storm Chaser. Private Pilot. Tech Guy. Hackerish.

Weird? Eccentric!

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