Yet another song parody...

This one is a bit older and relates to an "incident" at a client. I'm not able to share details of the incident, so feel free to make something up...

Copilot Certainly! Here's a playful burrito-themed adaptation of the classic song "Don't Fear the Reaper" by Blue Öyster Cult: "Don't Fear the Burrito" (Verse 1) All our fillings have come, Wrapped up tight, but now they're gone, Tortillas don't fear the burrito, Nor do the beans, the cheese, or the guac. (Chorus) (We can be like they are) Come on, foodie, (Don't fear the burrito) Baby, take a bite, (Don't fear the burrito) We'll be able to munch, (Don't fear the burrito) Baby, it's your delight. La, la, la, la, la La, la, la, la, la (Verse 2) Carnitas are done, Here, but now they're in my tum, Chicken and rice, together in harmony, Salsa dancing on my taste buds, Every bite, a spicy symphony. (Chorus) (We can be like they are) Come on, foodie, (Don't fear the burrito) Baby, take a bite, (Don't fear the burrito) We'll be able to munch, (Don't fear the burrito) Baby, it's your delight. La, la, la, la, la La, la, la, la, la (Bridge) 🎶 Instrumental Salsa Break 🎶 (Verse 3) Love of flavors is one, Here, but now they're in my tum, The last bite of satisfaction, And it's clear I can't go on, The foil unwraps, and I'm free, Burrito bliss, my culinary song. (Outro) (Saying, "don't be afraid") Come on, foodie, (And savor every flavor) Take another bite, (Then you'll start to crave) Look back at the empty plate, (You've become a burrito connoisseur) You've taken that last delicious stand, Come on, foodie, (Don't fear the burrito) 🌯 Note: The original song "Don't Fear the Reaper" by Blue Öyster Cult is a timeless classic that explores themes of love and mortality. In this playful adaptation, we celebrate the joy of burritos instead! 🌯12 Feel free to sing along with your favorite burrito in hand! 😄🎶

One of the only things that AI does sort of well...

One of the few things that AI does well is song parodies.

Now, nothing beats the human creative skills of Tom Lehrer https://tomlehrersongs.com/ or "Weird Al" Yankovic https://www.weirdal.com/ but it does an OK job in a pinch.

OH, THIS IS NOT AN ENDORSEMENT OF AI, IT IS A PARODY OF IT.

So, anyway blame this on me... and MSFT Copilot.

Apologies to R.E.M.

It’s the End of the Net as We Know It (And I’m Offline)

Cloud Chaos Karaoke Edition

Intro (0:00 – 0:08)

(Instrumental – get ready!)

Verse 1 (0:09 – 0:28)

That’s great, Wi-Fi’s late, outage starts to escalate,

Cloud crash, DNS smash, streaming’s in a dire state.

Zoom’s gone, Slack’s wrong, TikTok’s taking way too long,

Gaming queues, crypto blues, Twitter’s down, we sing the news!

Pre-Chorus (0:29 – 0:36)

ISP meltdown, servers spin around,

Refresh, refresh, but nothing’s inbound.

Click, click, click, but the page won’t load,

Feels like the end of all our nodes!

Chorus (0:37 – 0:52)

It’s the end of the net as we know it,

And I’m offline!

It’s the end of the net as we know it,

And I’m offline!

Verse 2 (0:53 – 1:12)

Netflix freeze, YouTube tease, memes are stuck in JPEG seas,

Email fails, shopping bails, can’t confirm my checkout sales.

Discord’s mute, no dispute, Reddit’s gone, no substitute,

VPN’s in a spin, nothing works, where to begin?

Verse 3 (Cloud Humor) (1:13 – 1:32)

AWS down, Route 53 drowned,

CloudFront’s gone, no CDN around.

GCP’s freeze, IAM keys tease,

Azure AD lost in policies!

Buzzword Verse 1 (Rapid Fire) (1:33 – 1:52)

EC2, S3, VPC, IAM,

CloudFront, Route 53, DynamoDB,

Lambda, RDS, EKS, Fargate,

BigQuery, Pub/Sub, GKE, AppState,

Azure Blob, Cosmos DB, AKS,

Functions, Logic Apps, Service Bus stress,

Terraform, Helm, Ansible, Chef,

Docker, Kubernetes, Kafka’s a mess!

Buzzword Verse 2 (Rapid Fire) (1:53 – 2:12)

Cloudflare, Fastly, CDN blast,

Istio, Envoy, service mesh cast.

OpenShift, Rancher, Prometheus charts,

Grafana dashboards tearing apart.

ElasticSearch, Kibana, Splunk logs,

RabbitMQ, Redis, Kafka hogs.

Snowflake, Databricks, ML ops spin,

TensorFlow, PyTorch, AI within!

Bridge (2:13 – 2:32)

No Insta scroll, no TikTok feed,

No cat videos to fill the need.

Back to books, back to walks,

Talking face-to-face—what a shock!

Final Chorus (2:33 – 2:52)

It’s the end of the net as we know it,

And I’m offline!

It’s the end of the net as we know it,

And I’m… still fine?

Finch-ing around

​Folks have spoken well of how this game is good for gentle self care reminders. So…

Tap the link to add me as a friend, or add my friend code 8W2A8GVSW4. https://finch.go.link/2XWNC?adj_label=PWhgf

Health Insurance 2026

Well, just finished "Open Enrollment".

As Ron White would say (sarcastically), "There's some good news!"

While I added one thing, the majority of the increase in cost was due to price increases.

So a...

16%

...increase just to maintain the same coverage.

This is not sustainable for anyone in the USA. We need a better system.

Ordering Food in 2025

​The average app for ordering food is about as bulletproof as tissue paper. 

If everything works, fabulous. 

If it breaks, expect that no one will help resolve it beyond “cancel your order, and you will get your money back sooner or later.” Basically that has been a common mantra lately. No longer is “how do I make this right, quickly?” In the vocabulary. 

Error handling is often complicated by the fact that you may be buying from Company X (restaurant), but the actual delivery is handled by Company Y (gig driver). And they don’t communicate well with each other. 

So, iHOP and McDonald’s you are slowly losing all my business because of this crap. What happened to customer service?

A quick post on open source intelligence - United States National Airspace System

This is a quick post, since I'm hoping to get out of the house and finally see Tron: Ares tonight.

With the NAS having issues driven by the government shutdown, I figured it would be useful to folks to know where to get Open Source Intelligence on aircraft flying in the United States. Here are some of my favorites:

• https://acarsdrama.com/ - Listening to aircraft to airline operations center traffic. A lot of housekeeping traffic, but also discussion of delays and reroutes.
• https://www.flightradar24.com/ - Where are the planes now? (user friendly, FAA-driven filters, delayed five minutes by FAA, data from official sources)
• https://globe.adsbexchange.com/ - Where are the planes now? (no filters, ADS-B only, crowd sourced, useful for military and planes who asked to be blocked) 
• https://www.flightaware.com/ - Tracking, Data, Tons of Detail, Favorite of the News Media.
• https://nasstatus.faa.gov/ - A peek into what the Air Traffic Control System Command Center sees, the learning curve is a bit steeper here.

I speak air traffic control technobabble at a reasonable level. Feel free to hit me with questions.

FLYNN LIVES

NEXT TIME, GO AMTRAK

Have a good weekend.

Predicting the future of posts on the FAA Home Page

​

(Future Spot Ad from the FAA)

For those of you in Florida, you can get a free small Frosty at Wendy’s tomorrow if you go to Miami or Jacksonville Center and participate in “Be an Air Traffic Controller day!”

At best, the 10% reduction in flights may slow down the ATC staff deterioration. I don’t think it will stop it. 

That assumes the cuts actually provide relief in the right places. Getting it right will take time, and frankly they don’t have the time.

If things are not back to normal a few days before before “the day before Thanksgiving”, it will be a mess… and that mess will be bigger news than folks trapped in an airport on Turkey Day. 

Login Frustration

A blog, which is basically intended as some sort of public exercise in narcissism sharing your thoughts with the planet, is pretty useless if people can't access it. 

When I put this thing together... 

OK, threw it together... 

OK, flipped some switches in the UI and hoped for the best...

I clicked on the "adult content" switch because sooner or later I'll say something a bit out of bounds. Seemed like the right thing to do. Try to make the Internet a bit better through individual action.

NOTE TO SELF: Next time I run tests WITHOUT being logged into the Google ecosystem...

Basically, while my intent was good, instead of getting just the typical click through "Hey, be careful in there" type UI control... it was asking folks to log in to verify age.

Now, Google at best can take a guess at your age. And, AFAIK, they don't offer age verification as a service. So, why do this?

Likely because someone at Google saw an opportunity to collect more data. Not really a benefit for me, or you. Sure, there is that content warning speed bump. And, yes... I get the whole "free so you are the product" thing... but we don't have to make it easy for Goog...

So, in theory, you should be able to read this post without a login.

Of course, how would I know if you can't? LOL.

AI is scary, but...

I've been dabbling with AI. Like many overly hyped IT technologies before it, I'm skeptical. One of my clients sees the potential in AI, so I'm trying to give it a fair shot. So far, AI isn't winning me over.

I recently needed some code to run in an environment from Vendor X. Even though Vendor X is huge, their documentation sucks. Some basic things were eluding me, and where search engines used to help with this easily... not any more. A ton of slop, 20 minutes ad padded videos, and the usual snark from certain "help from the expert" websites is all you get nowadays.

So this is a Vendor X tool set. I turned to Vendor X's AI for some assistance.

Much to my surprise, it gave me a working example of the function call I had been struggling with. That was 100% useful to me. 

Then I made the mistake of asking it to define some constants for me. This should have been trivial, find the constants table in the documentation, and a little rewrite to turn it into code. A lookup table of colors, like "red" pointing to a set of numbers that define red in the UI.

Should have trivial... Uh huh, pull the other one.

The code for the table looked perfect. Until you realize the colors are wrong. And their system is very careful about colors. In fact they warn you about it in their documentation... which the AI apparently read and forgot about it.

It took quite a number of tries to get the AI to actually look at the correct documentation. And a few more to get it to read it... Just a stupid mad lib generator with short term memory issues. Useless.

So, overall... it was a lose. More time correcting the idiot than saving time/effort. This stuff sucks and a lot of people are ignoring that. So, short term... yes, be concerned because people have too much faith in this matrix math garbage.

But long term, it will still be junk. And like any human fad, it will collapse under its own weight.

That's a totally unscientific opinion. But, unlike AI... it is an honest and truthful one. We will get through this... let's hope the next trend in IT is something fun, like large scale resurrection of legacy hardware level fun.

My advice, learn the AI tools and figure out what small things they can do to make your life easier. But, remember that it is a clumsy, random tool like a blaster. Not a civilized weapon for a more civilized age...

Tweaks

I'm still on Mastodon, although my experiences there this year have been less than stellar. Not a platform problem, a people problem. Mastodon is still generally less nasty content-wise than BlueSky or Twitter.

After trying to use the default RSS gadget for Blogger for my Mastodon feed (works, but useless and ugly) I am now trying https://mastofeed.com/ with the HTML embed gadget. We will see if this works, and if so... I'll start contributing to their hosting fees.

Blogging with a broken compass?

Well, I decided to start a blog again. This is probably driven by my general distaste in Social Media trends. Or perhaps, I just need a place to ramble on. No idea. We will see where this goes, if anywhere. It is easy to start a blog, keeping it up to date... and interesting to anyone, including me, is the difficult part.

Why use Blogger? Sheer laziness. Managing such systems can be fun, but it interferes with the process of content creation.

No ads here. 

We will see where this goes.