To Whom It May Concern...

In the heart of a buzzing tech fortress, Leo stood tall—keyboard in one hand, coffee in the other. His CI/CD pipeline had become a battlefield: flaky builds, rogue dependencies, and mysterious YAML errors lurked in every corner. First came the Broken Build Beast, a creature born from mismatched versions and forgotten environment variables. Leo summoned his ancient scrolls of msbuild incantations and vanquished it with a single, well-placed /p:Configuration=Release . Then appeared the Dependency Hydra, its heads regenerating every time a NuGet package failed to restore. With a mighty swing of his PowerShell blade and a clean packages.config , Leo restored order to the realm. But the final foe was the most cunning: the Silent Failure Phantom, which passed all tests but deployed nothing. Leo, wise to its tricks, traced the logs, found the missing publish profile, and cast it into the void with a custom PublishDir . With the pipeline purified and the build green, Leo stepped away from his ...

Leo had survived schema madness. He’d outwitted deployment dragons. But now, he faced his final boss: passwords. Every system had one. Every environment had a different one. Some expired every 30 days. Others required uppercase, lowercase, symbols, emojis, and the blood of a unicorn. Leo’s password manager looked like a cryptic novel written by a paranoid wizard. One morning, Leo tried to deploy a hotfix. The CI pipeline failed. The database login expired. The VPN needed re-authentication. The cloud dashboard prompted for MFA. And the coffee machine? It asked for a password too. Leo snapped. He stormed into the server room, eyes blazing. “I am DONE remembering secrets for machines that don’t even say thank you!” He grabbed a stack of sticky notes labeled “Prod_DB_P@ssw0rd!” and flung them like confetti. He yanked out a cable labeled “Auth Proxy” and shouted, “You authenticate this!” A junior dev peeked in and whispered, “Is this failover testing?” Leo turned, wild-eyed, holding a keybo...

Leo’s rebellion didn’t start with a raised fist—it began with a whisper to his IDE. Instead of creating yet another schema for a new module, he wrote a comment at the top of his SQL file: sql  -- This schema is imaginary. It exists only to satisfy expectations.  -- I reject your reality and substitute my own. He declared a new philosophy: Flat is beautiful.  All tables lived in a single schema called `Freedom`. Columns were wild and free—some had names in lowercase, some screamed in ALL CAPS. Foreign keys? Optional. Stored procedures? Banished.  Then came the real statement: a README.md titled _“The Schema Rebellion Manifesto”_. It read like a blend of data modeling principles and punk rock lyrics. Leo posted it to the company wiki, shared it in the #db-architecture channel, and added ASCII art of a flaming ER diagram. Naturally, chaos followed. Test environments imploded. CI pipelines wept. One DevOps engineer sent a slack message: “Is this performance art?”  B...

I've started toying around with CoPilot. It's been helpful at times, but it's also some fun. I've started expressing some of my frustrations with being a developer, and I've decided to share what we have come up with!  Leo and the Schema Revolution! Once upon a deployment cycle, in a quiet corner of a bustling tech company, lived a developer named Leo—who had officially reached his schema saturation point. Leo had spent the past six months architecting a sprawling network of microservices, each wrapped in its own meticulously named schema. There was `UserData`, `AuditTrail`, `ReleasePipeline`, `FeatureFlags`, even a mysteriously empty one called `Legacy`. Every morning started the same: update a table, refactor a stored procedure, tweak a foreign key. The schemas multiplied like rabbits, and Leo found himself diagramming them in his dreams. One rainy Thursday, after triple-checking the naming conventions in `Deployment...

Okay... I'm looking at this, and thinking, 'Maybe I should do something here.' We'll see.

There are different ways to be happy. I like to classify them in two ways: Fun and Satisfaction Fun is truly a roller coaster. It seems that for every up fun gives you there is a down. You have a party... you have to clean up when everybody goes home. Summer fun... fades to autumn. Satisfaction comes from a job well done, a life well lived, and friends to share it with. It comes from a life full of purpose and accomplishment. The world tells us that we evolved, and as such, the only time we have is now. This begets a life of 'fun', trying to get all you can while you can. This is sad, since a life of satisfaction can be so much fuller. Many people have been discouraged by things such as religion when they see the hypocrisy that is so prevalent. And they're right to be upset. Most religions preach traditions that have no factual basis, and drift over time, offering no lasting foundation. So, if satisfaction is so much better, how can we find it? It may be time to look a litt...

First, I've added a Facebook badge to this blog. (It's over there on the left with my picture.) For those of you that use Facebook, you can friend me. If you don't use Facebook, no rush... don't worry about it. What's been happening? Well, we moved. Bought a house. Started getting it settled. Spring is coming, and so is yard work. It's about time, we're eager to get out in the fresh air after a winter of 'nesting'. For the technical... My linux server, running on an 800MHz CPU was finally dying. It seems that one-by-one all of my systems have been crashing lately. It's fine, it's good to start fresh again. I had another box somebody was getting rid of, with a faster AMD processor, and put the newest version of Ubuntu on it. It's already running. But I moved my site, http://www.greatwhitedata.com/ to my Windows server for the time being. I'm running WAMP (Windows Apache mySql PHP) on it. Wow! It was actually pretty easy, just copy the ...

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Well, we certainly have had a lot going on, namely, we bought a house. Hadn't really been planning on it, but we saw it, we went for a showing, and the price was right, really really right. Once we signed the paperwork... (some poor tree gave it's life for all that paperwork) we had work to do. First paint... since we were going to pull out the carpets... we started with paint. Then the carport roof needed to be redone. We started out just doing the roofing, but when we got underneath, and saw how bad the wood was, we had to replace that too. Then we went back inside. We had to take the carpet out of the main floor... bedrooms, living room, bathroom, dining room. Underneath are hardwood floors. (Except for dining room and bathroom.) These had stains that needed to be sanded out... this turned into a 4 day project... with follow-up coats of polyurethane. After that was move in day. We had been taking boxes and small items, so all that was left were the larger pieces of furniture...

This and that and CAMPING!!! After last year's camping adventure ( see here ) we weren't sure camping was in our future. But then we found a deal, on a 2000 Coleman Santa Fe popup camper. So, this past weekend we took it down to Pine Grove Furnace state park in PA. So it's July in PA, and the weather was nice. But it got cold at night. I'll give you the highlights, and the funny bits. I got out of work early Friday. The PUP (PopUP) had been loaded earlier in the week, but we had to load the food, clothes, and doggie into the SUV and hitch up. The DW (Dear Wife) had gotten most of the gear out on the back porch, out of the rain, but real easy to load into the TV. Took a little longer, I think I was slow cause of the rain, but we got it all loaded. Then I put the bike rack on the back, and loaded the bikes. Nothing left to do but hitch up the PUP. (Funny bit) I usually store the ball hitch and pin in the storage under the trunk of the SUV. Guess where it was at this point...

Some of my readers know Joel Gott. I found out last night that he lost his battle with Colon Cancer April 9th. I don't have many details other than that. Sorry for the bad news.

So... I set up my GnuMP3d server again. What that means is I can access all of my audio over the web. Including on my new Web enabled SmartPhone (Only $74.99!!!) So, I have my audio with me where ever I go. The cool factor, for me, is up there. I probably won't stream music all day... it could catch up with me at some point. Perhaps my cell provider will get cranky, or my ISP at home throttle me. I'd like to get my videos streaming though. I can access them through GBPVR's Enhanced Web Admin. But it doesn't have a very good mobile interface. Perhaps in the future?

See honey... this explains it all! ...

As you learn to develop and/or program, you eventually have to deal with users. You are, after all, trying to create something people will use. When trying to develop a tool for a user they will give you their requirements. This process has been discussed and, more frequently, mocked throughout the Internet universe. Eventually some simple 'truths' are concluded by developers. Generally they are (and I loosely quote): Users Lie Users don't know what they want The accuracy of those statements is debatable. Users don't purposely lie, they want something and they want to make sure it gets done their way and they're gonna tell you about it. Maybe just not up front. Also, they know what they want. So, to boil down to the truth, it comes down to: Users don't know how to communicate what they want. How To Deal With It So, what do we do? In my opinion, the best way to determine what a user wants is to walk through the job they are trying to get a tool for. This is where...

We took a vacation. It was the first week long vacation that didn't involve relatives (no offense) since our honeymoon. We went to Virginia. I'll like to the pics now: http://mark.phillk.net/gallery2/v/mkenyon2/Massanutten+Trip/ Sunday - Washington DC Zoo . Lot's of cool animals. Monday - Veg out... we drove around a bit and ate at Outback, but that was it. Tuesday - Tubing and more vegging out. Maybe a board game... definitely eating! Wednesday - Shopping The guys played Racquetball , not much else. (Isn't vacation great?!) Thursday - The guys went Snowboarding !!! My first time in 10 years. It was fun, but sadly, no pictures. Later to the meeting. Friday - Went to the pool, played more racquetball. Vegged out. Finished the second package of Oreos. Saturday - Steph and I went on the Skyline drive for a bit. More movies and vegging out. Sunday - Time to go home, but we didn't want to. So, let's swing by Baltimore and find Dave and Buster's . The girls did m...

I walked in to get some water, and there was a puddle of coffee on the counter, dripping down onto the floor. Somebody had filled the water and filter, but did not put the empty pot on, instead, they left the half full pot on... 'Cleanup in aisle twelve!'

I've got my Digital Picture frame working at last!!! So, I used DSL (Linux), a Dell 233 CP laptop, and feh. I used mostly the scripts and instructions from this guy: http://www.thewares.net/item/33 I did not use the built in sound card, but added a USB sound card. I added an external momentary button to trigger the on/off functionality. I added an external DPST switch to turn the 'built in' speakers on and off. They are the speakers that were in the laptop, and with a few small holes in the back, they come through loud and clear. I took the guts out of some unpowered PC speakers that allowed for an external 1/8" jack if I want. I put that on the side, but if I did it again, I'd make my own PCB board and mount the jack on the back. I mounted the dongle from the network card so that it is accessed from the back. I may revisit WiFi at some point. I put a DC power jack on the back, and cut the power supply cable, wiring it to have the nice jack on the back, and it'...

We love the movie The Princess Bride. Here's a little trivia: http://www.neatorama.com/2009/01/11/movie-trivia-the-princess-bride/ Also, in regards to the muppets: http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/21354

This is pretty good advice for anytime you would wear a suit. I think I'll print out a copy and pin it on my closet door. http://artofmanliness.com/2008/12/18/interviewing-in-recession/

With a few tweaks, this should be standard rule-of-thumb for all of us. How to Be the Perfect Party Guest