Planned Projects for 2024

Ongoing projects

1. Caring for this family: A cool wife, 2 cool kids, and a decrepit cat.


2. Working 30 hours per week: With health insurance!


3. Being the webmaster for Janny Wurts and Don Maitz: Probably the most constant side project I deal with right now.


4. Keeping the URI! Zone alive: Lying dormant for its inexorable return to popularity, like the 17-year cicada.


5. Being on the HOA: Monthly meetings and litter pickup.

Projects that will probably happen

1. Tune my 8 year old cloud empire: Specifically, find out why my cloud compute bills have spiked over the past 2 months with "EC2-Other" charges when nothing in the configuration has changed, rebuild my older end-of-life Linux servers with the latest versions, upgrade from IPv4 to IPv6 if possible, and add more automation to my monthly backup scripts.


2. Earn another Amazon Web Services cloud certification: Probably the Security specialty cert, even though it sounds more boring than Gosford Park.


3. Buy a new couch: Both my couch and my cat turn 20 in 2024.


4. Overhaul and upgrade the Maitz and Wurts Studio Shop: This has been back-burnered for far too long, and is now holding up other server upgrades in this website architecture (Thanks, PHP 5.6!).


5. Add the final book from the Wars of Light and Shadow to the Paravia Wiki: The final book comes out in May!


6. Do Advent of Code 2024: As if doing the puzzles isn't enough of a time expenditure, I'd also like to learn some animation / graphics basics to do cool visualizations of the puzzles.

Projects that will probably slip to 2025

1. Give the URI! Zone a much needed makeover: The look and feel of this website has not evolved substantively since 2009.


2. Rip all of my old CDs onto a house-accessible NAS: Amazon Echo is the worst for music now.


3. Play the trumpet occasionally: I should have picked an instrument where embouchure maintenance was not a thing.


4. Compose new music: I finally took down all of my hopefully-configured MIDI equipment last year but it will return someday.

What do you hope to accomplish in 2024?

Music Day

Here are 20 of my favourite songs in different genres, mostly off the beaten path. Discover something new and go down an aural rabbit hole!

S Tier

1. Lab Rats - Devil's Train (US Hip-Hop) [link]
2. Fratellis - Imposters (Rock) [link]
3. Delirium feat. Emily Haines - Stopwatch Hearts (Rock) [link]
4. A Fine Frenzy - You Picked Me (Singer / Songwriter) [link]
5. Just Jack - Astronaut (UK Hip-Hop) [link]
6. Wallis Bird - To My Bones (Singer / Songwriter) [link]
7. Dirt Poor Robins - Love Again (Rock) [link]
8. Hilltop Hoods - Leave Me Lonely (AU Hip-Hop) [link] (explicit)
9. Bliss n ESO - Cadillac Outta Hell (AU Hip-Hop) [link] (explicit)
10. Cosmo Sheldrake - Comg Along (Electronic) [link]

A Tier

1. The Hoosiers - Goodbye Mr. A (Pop) [link]
2. e-dubble - Wait (US Hip-Hop) [link] (explicit)
3. Trashcan Sinatras - All the Dark Horses (Pop) [link]
4. Electric Guest - This Head I Hold (Pop) [link]
5. Mika - Elle Me Dit (Pop) [link]
6. Plan B - She Said (UK Hip-Hop) [link]
7. ODESZA feat. Zyra - Say My Name (Electronic) [link]
8. Thundamentals - Sally (AU Hip-Hop) [link]
9. Von Smith - Long Ago Maybe (Singer / Songwriter) [link]
10. Shawn Wasabi - Marble Soda (Electronic) [link]

Review Day

There are no major spoilers in these reviews.

Bodies:
This limited series about similar events occurring in different time periods has serious Dark vibes but struggles to carve out its own space in the first few episodes. It gets better around episode 4 as the characters and relationships start to deepen and has a few actual surprises in its worthwhile conclusion. The final tag diminishes the impact of the conclusion, as if the writers wanted to lay the groundwork for another season, just in case. On Netflix.

Final Grade: B-

House of the Dragon, Season One:
After the cafeteria meatloaf that passed as the final season of Game of Thrones, it's a pretty ballsy HBO executive who would green light a prequel series in the same universe. Everything about the way this show is presented (down to the reuse of the music over the main credits) wants to remind you about Game of Thrones, but the show is surprisingly good in spite of that connection. Although there are dragons everywhere, the show focuses closely on the politics and interplay within the Targaryen family as they rule over Westeros. There are a few episodes where the momentum is arrested by long brooding reaction shots, but these epsiodes always culminate in an exciting conclusion (so the brooding shots were likely necessary to optimize the special effects budgets).

Final Grade: B

Cobra Kai, Season Two:
This season gets a little more serious, and the middle episodes lose some of the show's cheesy charm. However, the last two episodes tie everything back together and bring back some of what made the first season worth watching. The return of one more specific character from the Karate Kid movies felt a little obligatory and unnecessary fan service, but perhaps that angle will improve in the next season. On Netflix.

Final Grade: B

Rockland by Katzenjammer:
The third and final Katzenjammer album is polished and mature -- less quirky and fewer catchy hooks but overall higher quality. It kind of reminds me of The Cardigans releasing their country-music-inspired Long Gone Before Daylight album. Curvaceous Needs is a good representative track.

Final Grade: B

Cloud Troubleshooting Day

originally posted on LinkedIn

This is the play-by-play of my investigation into an abnormal Amazon Web Services (AWS) bill: how I traced back to the root cause, how I learned that Amazon itself was partially to blame, and the resulting outcome. There are no brilliant deductions or magic bullets here -- smart cloud administration usually boils down to (1) the availability of relevant, explorable data, (2) simple proactive alarms, and (3) the patience to wade through Google's increasingly irrelevant search results for answers.

Setting the Stage

I run a modest web empire with very predictable month-to-month costs and web traffic. This array of sites and services has run entirely on AWS since 2015, mostly because the cloud was cool back then and I needed to justify the cost of my first 3 AWS certs.

Halfway through the month of December 2023, I received a CloudWatch alarm projecting a 172% increase in my monthly bill. I did what all busy cloud administrators wish they could do: I turned off the alarm and resolved to figure it all out after Christmas!

Finding the Root Cause

My investigation began in earnest on December 28, using the AWS Cost Explorer dashboard. The basic view of my cost data showed the spike occurring in the cryptically-named "EC2-Other" category, which is like a pu pu platter of miscellaneous charges related to the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. I had to filter the graph on "EC2-Other" data and group by "Usage Type" to get a more detailed breakdown of what's in this category.

Applying Filter and Group By criteria will make Cost Explorer data more useful.

The detailed breakdown showed me that only two subcategories of activity were abnormal: DataTransfer-Regional-Bytes which measures data traffic between Availability Zones (AZ) in a Region, and CPUCredits:t3 which is the Uber surge charge you get slapped with when your EC2 instance is working too hard. It made sense that my server would have high CPU utilization to handle the spike in data transfer, but I knew for certain that all of my web empire was in a single AZ, so there should have been no new intra-AZ traffic.

Step 2 in the investigation was to look at the CloudWatch logs for each server in my cloud architecture to see which ones were working too hard. The culprit jumped out immediately -- while my servers usually hovered under 10% CPU use, one server's energy levels matched those of my six-year-old on each successive day of Winter Break.

"Why don't you go outside and run another lap around the house before bedtime?"

Step 3 in the investigation was to log into the stressed out server and examine the access logs for unusual requests. I used the tried and true log analyzer, WebLog Expert, which has served me well over the past 20 years and immediately found out what was causing the extra web traffic.

Misbehaving web crawlers is so 1998.

According to its developer page, "Amazonbot is Amazon's web crawler used to improve our services, such as enabling Alexa to answer even more questions for customers." While I concede that Alexa needs all the help it can get in this regard, this charity case is not worth $20 more in cloud spend.

Putting the Pieces Together

With all of my investigative steps documented, I was able to do some research and figure out the root cause.

1. In November, the Amazonbot discovered an instance of MediaWiki running on one of my servers (a book wiki for the Wars of Light and Shadow series by fantasy author, Janny Wurts) and decided to index it.
2. This is educated conjecture based on my logs, but the Amazonbot seems to fail at recognizing that certain URLs represent the same page. For example, it may think that https://test.com/?sessionId=12 and https://test.com/?sessionId=34 are completely different pages even though the number at the end of the URL is just used to identify different visitors. This apparently caused it to build up a backlog of wiki pages it thought it hadn't visited yet and the number of requests skyrocketed in December. In other words, the Amazonbot is playing SessionID Go: Gotta collect 'em all! and isn't responsibly throttling the resulting requests.
3. Most importantly, the Amazonbot itself is running in AWS but it's in a different AZ than my servers. So I'm getting charged once for the extra CPU utilization needed to handle the bogus requests (CPUCredits:t3), then charged again to move the requested data into another AZ (DataTransfer-Regional-Bytes).

After Actions

1. I added a "Disallow" rule to my robots.txt file, which is effectively a polite way to tell the Amazonbot to pound sand the next time it wants to visit my server. If the bot continues to visit, I can rudely block it in my Security Groups instead.
2. I reactivated my billing alarm so I can stay ahead of the next impending crisis.
3. I should probably contact the Amazonbot team and let them know about this problem, but it appears that others have already done so and it doesn't seem like there's been any response.

So far, so good!

Lessons Learned

1. Explore Before You Deduce: Gather as much data as you can before you commit too hard to any one debugging path. Making sense of what's in front of you is a different skillset than figuring out what's going wrong, and jumping to a likely root cause too soon might dissuade you from other possibilities.
2. Use CloudWatch billing alarms: You don't need a vast array of alarms hooked into the innards of your servers' performance to stay financially responsible. A simple "Warn me when my bill goes over $X" alarm is sufficient.

Math Teacher Day

My high school calculus teacher, Lou Kokonis, recently passed away at 91 after 64 years of teaching in the Alexandria City Public School system.

Mr. Kokonis was not the most personable teacher -- he would quietly slip into the school with his head down and make his way to the classroom where he'd immediately begin writing the day's formulas on the chalkboard. His hands and glasses were perpetually caked in chalk dust. He had trouble remembering people's names so when someone was acting up in class, we'd hear, "Uh, Nate, I mean, John, I mean Derek, please stop talking when I'm teaching".

I think his dedication to math was stronger than his dedication to being a teacher, as he didn't always have great pedagogical ways to get the material across. Still, he was still teaching at age 74 the last time I visited the high school in March 2006 -- I saw him from a distance, gliding down the hall with an oxygen tank in tow.

Mr. Kokonis was big on graphing calculators and I got on his good side by knowing how to program the TI-85. He came to me after class one day with a TI-82 program for graphing with polar coordinates and asked me to port it to his new TI-85. (He was unaware, and probably would have been less impressed to know that I was creating all of the games that people were playing on their calculators during class). Later, we were the only two people to own the boondoggle TI-92 although he had not realized how many of his test questions the TI-92 could solve automatically by the time I had graduated.

Every year in May, there'd be crew regattas that required a few days of travel time, like the Stotesbury Cup. Whenever I told Mr. Kokonis I'd be missing some classes for crew competitions, he'd earnestly say, "Oh that's too bad. Well, I hope you all lose early on so you don't miss too much class time," and then go right back to preparing for his lessons.

Chad Darnell's 12 of 12

12 pictures of your day on the 12th of every month

5:38 AM: Showered and ready for work.

5:59 AM: Bagel for breakfast.

7:00 AM: Readying for the bus stop.

8:23 AM: Reviewing a paper about software factories.

8:30 AM: Reading before preschool.

10:08 AM: Minor run to Costco.

11:31 AM: Running on the treadmill and watching Cobra Kai.

3:39 PM: Off work and doodling with Maia.

4:06 PM: Looking out over his domain.

6:03 PM: Diner is more about the accessories than the food.

6:55 PM: Storytime.

7:08 PM: Exchanging books from the Basement Public Library.

Maia's Art Day

Scale maps of Cat Town, Bunny Town, and Dog Town, all along Route 7 in Loudoun County. Maia lives in Bunny Town on Hop Court. The guy who put Mew Ct next to Mew Rd in Cat Town probably designed North Arlington too.

"Let's play ninjas. Whoever gets spotted is out. Everyone is a ninja."

Maia created a pet store one night when she was supposed to be going to bed. Each cat had a storybook describing its temperament and what other cats it enjoyed being around. Rebecca drew the cat sketches as a kid.

Over Christmas, Maia watched the Super Mario Brothers movie, played Untitled Goose Game, created a butterfly and Amber using her 3D doodler, and went ice skating. I don't recall what the two lower right images were supposed to be.

Time-lapsed Blogography Day: Twenty Years Ago Today

Twenty years ago today, on January 17, 2004, I was traveling across the region in search of a new house. I had picked out 4 houses to view with my realtor, Marion White, in the coming week and on the 17th, I drove around by myself to get a feel for the neighbourhoods.

The first house (shown on the left) was in south Reston, which has since become "the Green Line of living in Reston", with all of the high Reston Association fees and none of the lack of crime you'd get from living north of the toll road. I liked this house although I had always been negative about ground-level basement windows ever since someone tried to break my childhood home in the 80s.

The second house was in a nice neighbourhood that I now know turns into an island surrounded by gridlock during rush hour. Still, I would have been within walking distance of Evil Mike had I purchased this one (although my HOA fees probably would have been 10x as high).

The third house caught my eye because of its orientation, "That's not how houses are supposed to look!" and it reminded me more of a Red Roof Inn than a house. I was impressed with how much extra room you get in the house when the foyer isn't in the way right in the center of the long wall. (Spoilers: This is the one I picked).

Finally, the fourth house was down in north Centreville and had already gone off the market by the time I arrived, so I never got to see inside. However, its shape looks just like the shape of any number of my friends' houses growing up so I could imagine what it'd be like.

Here are some of the house criteria I sent to my realtor.

As it turned out, I met all of my criteria! I paid $303,000 (20% up front with the help of my parents) to get a $1400 mortgage that I finished paying off last year. HOA fees started around $120 per year and have since risen to $350 per year. Every time I hear that someone in our neighbourhood has complained about the fees, I think of poor Herndon / Reston and how they pay that much in a couple months.

Review Day

There are no major spoilers in these reviews.

Love Hard (NR):
This is a pleasant Christmas movie about a woman who gets catfished on a dating app by Jimmy O. Yang. It passes the muster as a "not awful movie to watch around the holidays when you're tired of Home Alone". On Netflix.

Final Grade: B-

Feast of the Seven Fishes (NR):
A surprisingly good, understated holiday movie about a large Italian family in a Rust Belt town. It emphasizes slice of life over plot and has nice roles for half the supporting cast of the Sopranos. The tone of the movie reminded me of the second season episode of Bear where the family prepared a similar meal, but with a happy family. It used to be on Netflix but seems to have disappeared -- it can still be rented on Amazon Video.

Final Grade: B+

Cobra Kai, Season Three:
Cobra Kai has perfected its "karate soap opera" tone, where every episode is silly enough to play on 80s tropes but serious enough to not dismiss out of hand. Some of the questionable casting / plot decisions from Season Two are nicely embellished in this season. On Netflix.

Final Grade: B+

This Unruly Mess I've Made by Mackelmore and Ryan Lewis:
There are a few great, catchy songs on this album but the overall weight is dragged down by too many lengthy songs you'd only want to listen to once. I love that Mackelmore secured Idris Elba as the voice-over for Dance Off.

Final Grade: B-

Weekend Wrap-up

Friday

• Woke up to 5 inches of surprise snow and shoveled out the cars.
• Worked for 5 hours then went back out for more shoveling and playing with the neighborhood kids.
• Rebecca took the kids to Richmond during a lull in the snow.
• I took a nap on the couch with Amber, only to be woken up after 20 minutes by Loudoun County Public Schools who notified me by email, text, and call that schools would be closed on SATURDAY.
• Had a flat iron steak and a glass of sangiovese at Local Provisions and started the book, Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
• Soaked my snow shoveling muscles in the bath then watched They Cloned Tyrone! on Netflix.
• Went to bed at 9 PM.

Saturday

• Woke up at 7:30 AM to a quiet house.
• Cleaned said house then spent 2 hours learning stuff for my next cloud certification.
• Spent the afternoon playing with a new AI/ML library, Nightshade, that messes with AI art algorithms by convincing it that cats are actually dogs.
• Joe's Pizzaria wings for dinner, followed by more studying and episodes of Dave, Season Three.
• Went to bed at 10 PM.

Sunday

• Woke up at 7:30 AM to a quiet house.
• Studied for my next cloud cert.
• Rebecca and the kids returned home around 3:30 PM.
• Baked chicken thighs, corn cobs, and tater tots for dinner.
• Got the kids to bed then started the movie, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.

How was your weekend?

Maia Year 6 Month 6 Battle Report

Maia is now 6 and a half, halfway to the teen years! She's an absolutely awesome little person. Here are some factual fragments that stand out to me:

♣ Bunnies are out and cats are in. Maia will sometimes speak more in cat language than English (2 meows is YES and 1 meow is NO).

♣ She takes good care of Ian and is surprisingly patient with his tantrums. They sometimes play together without adult interaction and I can hear them talking in the other room.

♣ She has her own style that involves 1 - 2 headbands (usually cat ears), multiple bracelets and her favorite cat-face boots.

♣ She took a weekly ballet class last year and is now enrolled in a weekly gymnastics class that she loves even more.

♣ Her areas are pretty cluttered but she does a great job of cleaning up when reminded. Her spaces in the house are a warren of unfinished crafts -- construction paper detritus, pipe cleaners wrapped around everything and stray shoelaces used to tie things together with ad hoc knots. She has a few half-written storybooks scattered around as well.

♣ She is incapable of sitting at the dinner table for very long. Most dinners involve her taking a bite then getting up and standing somewhere else in the room.

♣ She likes board games from the new generation (both she and Ian help Rebecca take her turns on Board Game Arena) and will play both sides of a game against a stuffed animal when no one is around. Once a game is done, she'll invent her own rules for the game using all of the pieces.

♣ She got interested in DuoLingo when I was studying Spanish and Korean last year so I let her play on her own a few times per week. She's done a whole unit of Russian/Cyrillic and occasionally falls back on Korean/Hangeul or Spanish when the Russian gets too hard.

♣ She is getting better at playing video games on her own but we still only let her play a few hours per week. Favourites include the educational games on her school laptop (Starfall and Prodigy), Contraption Maker (PC), Minecraft (Switch), and Mario Kart with auto-steering on (Switch). She is starting to watch me play Hearthstone and has recently started making her own cards.

♣ We put a climbing rope around a massive tree in the woods and (before the weather got cold) she would always stop there on the way home from the bus to practice climbing. Since then, she and Rebecca have cleared out a sizeable clearing in the woods that has become "Cattown".

♣ She loves reading and will consume books fast enough that the library makes much more financial sense right now than the book store. During Christmas, each time she unwrapped a book, it derailed the unwrapping process while she started the book. She will sometimes read multiple books in parallel, or pick a chapter at random to start from.

Review Day

There are no major spoilers in these reviews.

Que Ta Tete Fleurisse Toujours by Mika:
Mika's latest album is completely in French. A few of the melodies are recognizable from his Sinfonia Pop concert, and the whole album is a pleasant confection that's just a little too short (37 minutes).

Final Grade: B

Reacher, Season Two:
This show gets progressively worse as it goes on. Season one was barely held afloat by the bromance between the two leads, but the bulk of this season consists of the main characters standing around spouting exposition and really bad dialog that may have been written by AI. Robert Patrick is wasted in the role of the main villain. On Amazon Video.

Final Grade: D

Super Mario Brothers Movie (PG):
This movie is much better than it probably should be -- a perfect homage to the game nad people who grew up with it that doesn't absolutely demand knowledge of every Easter Egg it throws your way. On Netflix.

Final Grade: B+

Super Mario Brothers Wonder (Switch):
The 2D iterations of the Super Mario franchise are consistently bland and lacking in creativity. This latest game starts strong, with crazy one-off situations to spice up the gameplay (thematically similar to Wario Ware: Smooth Moves), but I was still bored after just a few worlds. I'm probably seeing things through the rose-colored glasses of someone who got Super Mario World to 100% because we only owned a handful of games, but still, nothing in this newest game compelled me to keep playing.

Final Grade: C+

Data Day: Health and Wellness

healthy stuff I've done in the first 28 days of 2024

• Performed aerobic exercise every single day, encompassing 4 hours 45 minutes of VR Beat Saber, 20 miles of jogging, and 2 hours of snow shoveling.


• Reduced daily alcohol consumption by 38.39% from 2023 average. Replaced habit with daily black tea (2 - 4 mugs per day) and chewing gum.


• Continued treating steaks as a "not in the house" food (only in restaurants or on vacations). Had just 2 red-meat-heavy meals this month (steak at Local Provisions and Korean BBQ at Kiwa).


• Eating a piece of fruit, generally an apple, on a daily basis.


• Total Fast Food Consumption: 1 McDonald's, 1 Chickfila, 0 Popeyes.


• Weight down from 143 to 139 today.

I'm heading back to the doctor next week for the annual game of "how close can your cholesterol level get to the DANGER ZONE?!", and will let you all know if I'm still alive.

End-of-the-Month Highlights Day

New photos have been added to the Life, 2024 album. Also, I have now been doing End-of-the-Month Highlights posts for 10 years!

• Events
  • Maia started a weekly gymnastics class on W 1/3.
  
  
  • Solo dad dinner at Local Provisions on H 1/4.
  
  
  • Rebecca took the kids to visit Tom and Peggy on S 1/7.
  
  
  • Family dinner at Fire Works Pizza on H 1/11.
  
  
  • Rebecca and the kids got COVID boosters on S 1/13. Dinner at Kiwa Grill with Tammy and Patrick.
  
  
  • First real snow, M 1/15 - T 1/16, an inch during the day then 2-3 more overnight. Ian and Maia got to go sledding in the common area.
  
  
  • Snow day on W 1/17. Went to the monthly HOA meeting in the afternoon.
  
  
  • Another snow day on F 1/19, this time with 5 inches of snow. Rebecca took the kids down to Richmond to see the Edwardses for the weekend. Solo dad dinner at Local Provisions.
  
  
  • Went to an art event at Maia's school on T 1/23.
  
  
  • Date night at Local Provisions for the first anniversary of their grand opening on W 1/24.
  
  
  • Took the kids to see my parents on S 1/27. Soup Night (chickpea and chicken) with Tammy and Patrick in the evening.


• Projects
  • Solved the problem of my high cloud costs on T 1/2.
  
  
  • Updated ancient urizone.net software dependencies (Spring 3.2 to 6.1, Java 8 to 17, Tomcat 8 to 10). Deployed a new IPv6 version of the URI! Zone webserver on S 1/7.
  
  
  • Updated ancient paravia.com software dependencies (PHP 7.3 to 8.2, MediaWiki 1.35 to 1.39). Deployed new IPv6 version of the two Paravia servers on H 1/11.
  
  
  • Started studying for the AWS Security Specialty cert on F 1/12.
  
  
  • Upgraded all of my database instances from MySQL 5.7 to 8.0 on W 1/17.
  
  
  • Upgraded all of my servers to use free auto-renewing SSL certificates from Let's Encrypt on H 1/18.
  
  
  • Passed the AWS Security - Specialty exam on T 1/30.


• Consumerism
  • Enjoyed reading Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
  
  
  • No amazing new shows, movies, or music this month.
  
  
  • Not playing any games at the moment.

January's Final Grade: B+, the most productive month I've had since Ian was born