Essential Worker fun

 So... the last 2 years or so Covid.   Short answer: I can't tell the difference.  Nothing changed.   People wore masks.  Then they didn't.  People didn't go to work.  Then then did.  

Two years later?  Nothing has changed.  Some people still work from home.  Others don't.  

The behaviors that were caused by the global pandemic that was pretty pathetic in its death toll have all fallen back into the same behaviors that existed before.  For all the lessons learned, the only one really learned is that buildings are expensive, and having people work from home works just as well.

What budding capitalist doesn't want to get rid of ridiculous capital expenditures and blur the lines between home and work?  Because that's really what happens.  The business no longer has to pay for that giant building any more because all the employees are working from home.  And those work from home employees are fighting to keep job away from home.  It's a losing battle from most people.  Most of us just aren't that rude. 

What's going to be interesting in all this is the collection of leadership lessons in managing a remote work force.  And finding out how many of those managers are a simple waste of time.  But that's a discussion for another day.

System changes and Dead Horse

Innocuous changes can have large results on a program.  They can take the form of some very simple changes.  

But not all those changes are easy or small.  And "the way things are" isn't always the best method of operation.  But that's the way the operation runs.  And many operations run this way for years without anyone changing the operational procedure. 

There's a meme running around with a person on a dead horse, complaining that businesses are stupid and are unaware the horse is dead.  It's not just businesses.  It's all people.   The pull of the familiar is universal, but that doesn't make it accurate or correct.  And realizing the events that are occurring in your life and of your creation are altogether more complicated.

How many people are out there right now causing drama on social media, wishing they had a drama free life?  

How many people are living paycheck to paycheck, without realizing their own behaviors are causing them to live paycheck to paycheck?

See: the noticing the dead horse is a lot more complicated than it seems.  And doing something different in the midst of "effective" solutions is exceptionally hard.

There are a lot of good books on why we don't notice these things.  Scarcity is one of them.  But that only deals with a portion of the problem.  Despite what people say, memes are just another political format.  Another way of getting that specific piece of knowledge that set in just a way to get a specific set of people to react.  To build up your base camp.  To get people to agree with you.

Even if it ignores the broader consequences and truth of what is going on.

A bit more Java here and there

 Some days, the cost of code is crazy.  The ability to build and code solutions to problems is not something everyone has the capability of.  But then when you see how little code it can take to solve a problem, you realize just how expensive code can be.  

With a bit of messing, I figured out how to write an event messenger in Python to handle a built in system integration.  It took me about 300 lines of code.  

Funny thing: a few weeks after I figured it out, a vendor offered me their solution.  For $15 per month, per site.  I kindly told them no.  At 20 sites, that's about $1 per month, per line of code.  Which is pretty nuts to say the least.

So I moved on, and decided I wanted something a bit more permanent.  My code runs as a nohup process on an old Ubuntu box that is acting as a syslog receiver.  Which made me think: why can't I write my own syslog receiver?  

Nothing really prevented me from doing it, but I didn't have a decent IDE in order to do what I wanted.  I've used syslog collectors from SolarWinds and Graylog.  Both were functional for what they do, but that don't do what I want them to do.  Alerting is part of it.  Data collection is another part.  But there's so much more that I think should be and could there.  Somehow that blend of SIEM and syslog collector always seems to appeal to me.  That gathering of "EVEN MORE DATA".  And I do understand that more data doesn't necessarily mean better decisions.  It just means more data to sort though.  And the need for more algorithms that handle that data, so the alerts generated off that data can be reduced from the thousands to individuals.  

But like I said, no IDE.  Microsoft makes a good one, but it's not free.  I like Visual Studio.  I just wish they gave it away for free until you get to a certain level.  Like the SQL Express model.  So I quit using their stuff.  And I moved to Eclipse.  

Eclipse is pretty decent.  The autocomplete makes me mad here and there.  But it's functional, and it allows me to build complex, multi-hundred lines of code applications.

Like my syslog collector.   That I finally wrote in Java.  

And that's about all it does right now is collect syslogs.  But I've got plans for that sucker.  Because eventually I'm going to take that 300 lines of Python code and turn it into Java.   And I'm going to attach a SQLExpress database to it, along with an IIS front end for a web application view of the mess I'm creating in the background.  Why?  Because I like web front ends.  

And because I want to learn more about SQLExpress and IIS.  And that's generally a good enough reason for most of these projects.  Or at least I think so.