02/21/2025 - Resighcling

Today's Rating: 6/10

Song of the Day: Mr. Blue Sky - Electric Light Orchestra

Current Book: Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde

Day 5 - Friday!

Like most people, Fridays tend to get an automatic bump in how they are rated solely due to the fact that it's typically the last day of the work week. I think that boost did quite a bit of heavy lifting yesterday (I probably would have rated it a 4/10 if it was any other weekday).

My woes began early in the day as I went to take our trash out to the curb for Friday pickup. When I opened the garage door, I was greeted by an absolutely beautiful (albeit cold) day outside.

Seeing that made it incredibly hard to go back inside to start working on my computer for the day, but alas, someone has pay for my dad's chumba casino coins. In case that joke doesn't make sense, I rent a house from my parents, and my dad likes online gambling.

I do work in front of a window which I think helps, but sometimes makes me feel more like Tantalus taunting myself with something that is out of reach.

P.S. I absolutely did not remember Tantalus off the top of my head; I found it with the following Google Search:

Back on topic though, I came back inside and booted up my computer for the day. Due to the work I had done yesterday and the fact that it was the start of a new sprint, I decided to take it easy and do the bare minimum. Unfortunately, my least favorite client had other ideas for my Friday.

They pinged me early in the morning stating that they could not connect to one of their databases via their tunnelhost. To avoid overexplaining what a tunnelhost is, it's essentially a secured computer that allows clients to connect to it which in turn has the ability to securely forward those connections to services (like databases downstream). If you want to read more about it this article seems toexplain it well from a quick glance. This client loves making mountains out of molehills and will quickly escalate the tiniest of inconveniences to the invertebrates that run my program. To avoid the endless stream of pings that come with that, I got out ahead of it and let them know that I was looking into it. The fix was simple and was due to the databases not being added as a permitted downstream connection in the ssh config. I updated this, and the issue was resolved.

I proceeded to slack off for the remainder of the day until we had the "retro" for my team. A retro (retrospective) is a meeting conducted by the scrum master to review the past x amount of weeks to see what went well and what could have gone better. I like the concept of these meetings, but they rarely provide any benefit as no action is taken from them. As an example, we conduct our retros every 8 weeks. In the last retro, I mentioned that one of the scripts we use for maintenance was broken and was making maintenance more cumbersome than it ought to be. This was recorded in the meeting, and an "action item" (hate that term) was made to look into it. I never heard anything about it until the retro today where we reviewed the last retro. Coincidentally, this was the script I happened to fix yesterday, but I give no credit to the retro.

After the retro, my calendar was free, so I decided to just monitor my computer for the rest of the workday. Around 1:30, my wife and I decided to go to the grocery store to get our weekly shopping done. It was supposed to be a small trip, but Kroger was doing a savings event that gave a decent discount if you bought five or more of a couple of items we buy weekly: cereal and yasso. We've been really enjoying the Mom's Best cereal line and decided to buy another five boxes to add the existing four boxes we already had. We did the same thing with Yasso, another six boxes. Yassos are an incredible sweet treat if you are trying to lose weight.

Remember how I said my calendar was free before I decided to go to the grocery store? Yea, one of my coworkers saw it more like this:

I'd been helping him with a ticket he'd been struggling with which I don't mind. However, I do mind someone putting a meeting on my calendar with less than 30 minute notice especially if that meeting is with a client. I'd been helping him with this ticket for three or four days but had not read the ticket myself (more on this later). From what I'd discussed with him, the client was having issues using the AWS CLI with a user account we had provisioned for them that had access to some IAM roles. This is a fairly simple fix, so I hopped in the meeting and helped them setup some profiles to use the user/roles appropriately. This took about 25-30 minutes to get setup for them, and they were able to connect using the CLI.

As I went to start wrapping up the meeting, one of the developers chimed in that this was great, but that what they really needed was programmatic access via the SDK and that they didn't really care about the CLI access.

After discussing it further with the client, I found that my coworker had completely misunderstood the ticket request and had been leading them down the wrong path the whole time. I decided to finally open the actual ticket itself, found the issue, and pointed them to where their app configuration was wrong. In total, that took me about five minutes for a ticket that had been in his queue for over a week.

After that debacle, I decided to just shut down my computer for the week. I always turn my work computer completely off to make sure I don't feel the temptation to check in over the weekend.

Maddie and I headed out to drop off our cardboard recycling at the place in town that still offers that (Alexandria recently ended their contract with the recycling service so there are fewer bins to use now). While we were out, we went to Sam's to get some protein shakes and fiber gummies. The temptation for Sam's food court pizza was too great, so we decided to grab a slice before heading home. However, the last slice that was ready was stolen right before our eyes, and the next one would not be ready for another eight minutes. We decided not to wait and to head home. However, I decided to pull an audible as Sam's is fairly close to a new international market called Nader's that had opened in Alexandria.

We went there and picked up a few snacks: a soft drink, a bon-bon candy, frozen pide margheritas, and something that strongly resembled a pizza. At checkout, we were gifted two turkish delights which was extremely nice! We decided to eat the pide margheritas and "pizza" for dinner.

They were both tasty, but the non-cheese side of the "pizza" wasn't our favorite. We ate this while watching some more Keith Eats the Menu. After finishing that, we finished the second season of Silo together and head to bed. I read another chapter of Picture of Dorian Gray and fell asleep around 10:15 PM.

Thanks for reading and see you tomorrow!