Thank you for finding my eight grand in your suspense account

So the weekend when I was doing the accounts I checked on my pension fund, I did an end of year payment back at the beginning of March. It was nowhere to be seen. I found the confirmation email so no it went through. Contacted Standard Life, to be fair they got back to me within a few working hours. Apparently it was in their ‘suspense account’ and will be applied as soon as possible I wrote back and said that it wasn’t really growing in a suspense account, I had a quick reply to say it would be backdated, we shall see.

In other news I’ve managed to get acme.sh setup on the server and after buggering about with endless file permissions it’s produced a certificate. I need to play around with it a bit more as I’m not overlay happy at the moment, will have to probably run three cron’s, one for each web user and root to copy the certs to the correct place, will need to think on that one.

So ACME almost worked

So fiddling with ACME trying to get it to add the backup route, but annoyingly as the backup is a dynamic IP address it doesn’t exist as an A or a CNAME record, it therefore doesn’t recognise the domain name, tried a few aliases and stuff but it really wasn’t having it. I have a feeling actually it’s the webroot on the firewall which is the issue rather than the domain name itself. Still, it’s working with the primary domain name and it’s a free certificate which should hopefully renew itself, so fairly happy days.

In other happy days I paid my corporation tax, was unable to issue my final dividend as I’m waiting on one savings interest payment. I did though do a complete financial planning spreadsheet, it makes interesting reading, actually it doesn’t, but the results are interesting. It’s certainly something I’m going to be very mindful of.

Meanwhile, I wonder if I can use that ACME thing to generate certificates for my main server….

He had the demeanour of a rent boy who hadn’t had a client since New Year’s eve

So walked the dogs and then finally did some cleaning (cleaners, whole different rant). Did some accounts stuff, but much more to do as it’s the end of the tax year. Walked into town, while doing so designed a complete financial planning spreadsheet in my head. This will give me the numbers I need so I know when I can retire.

Went to the Bristol Old Vic and saw ‘It’s a motherf**king pleasure’. Which was dark and very funny. It was all about ‘ablism’. Staged by two blind men (actually only one was blind as there was an understudy). Tomorrow there is more accounting to be done.

Acme, pfSense and easyDNS

So I’m not going to mention cheese, or getting soaked, both of which happened.

So this evening I’ve been having fun with the firewall. The challenge being to get a secure connection via an SSL certificate. As it’s only internal I’m certainly not going to pay for one. So found this ACME package that can be setup with ‘Let’s Encrypt’ which is a free CA. There is a handy YouTube video on how to set it up, it does have one flaw though in that it does the domain validation via a local HTTP server and as I have the ports blocked for remote access that wasn’t going to work. However, there was an option to use easyDNS for validation. First you have to sign up for the REST API, this is painless. Don’t bother with the sandbox. Go straight for the production and regenerate the global token, this will then give you the key. I went diving down into a secure shell and edited the damn script by hand. However if you add a new entry on the certificate rather than edit the default it then gives you the boxes to put the keys in. My method worked anyway, but tomorrow I may try and add the secondary domain to the certificate so will delete my edits and try the interface way instead.

Back to the cheese.

Cheese will be my downfall

So I’m very good on measuring out the exact amount of wine. What I’m not so good at though is measuring cheese. Start with four slices. Then drink the wine. Then randomly slice more cheese. It’s like getting the munchies but without the drugs. Sleeping is still going fine.

Getting bored of being pissed on again. Took Sasha out lunchtime, big time hail stones. Got soaked. Went to the track this evening and got drenched. It seems to be pretty much everyday now.

Well okay for the first night

So stuck to the plan last night and all was good. Managed to sleep no problem at all and had no bad head. Got to work reasonably on time and had a good day. Weather was shite as usual so managed to get the dogs out but beyond that didn’t get out until later this evening, meaning I didn’t get back in until almost bed time. Added my calories up and know exactly how much Pinot I can drink. Booked some culture for Saturday and if all goes to plan will go to the cinema tomorrow.

Another one over, brief reality break

So I put on 4.3Kg which as a percentage of my body weight is quite staggering. Still, I now have six weeks to lose it all again. Decided to take a slightly different strategy, I don’t think it’s worth continuing with this ‘four days not drinking’ thing as all that’s happening is I’m not sleeping for four days. In Gran Canaria I slept great, although woke up with a bit of a head. So now I’m doing the trading game, I have to keep within a certain calorie range in MyFitnessPal. So the more exercise you do the more calories you have to spare, these can then be used on alcohol, may sound daft but there is a physical limit to how much exercise you can do and what you can eat, I’me very good with limits. Lets see how it goes over this week, I think going from what I was drinking in GC to zero would probably be very dangerous anyway.

Am I the solution or just part of the problem


So after last nights rather confusing post about the state of the nation I’ve had several enquiries asking to explain more. You are brave people. So let’s just look at a parallel, Las Vegas. I think it’s probably the most tacky and awful place on earth. It exists for one reason only and that is to empower people. But sadly it’s to empower people to gamble. So an entire city has been developed for the pure purpose of encouraging people to visit to lose money. I guess you could say the same thing about ‘Disney World’, but that’s when one giant corporation decides to do the same thing, and as that’s just capitalism then ‘that’s okay’. I’m not singling out the USA for being the criminal in this by any means, places like Dubai have developed areas purely for tourists that offer lush accommodation and vast shopping malls, providing of course you are not gay. 

The point is you are either developing a place or expectation to fulfil the needs of a person. But why is this any different to any other normal business transaction? A bakery sells bread as people want to eat it, a plumber mends a boiler as someone is freezing their arse off. So what’s the difference? The difference is no inherent person has ever had the need to buy a Mickey Mouse backpack. But isn’t this just classed as entertainment? Absolutely. This splits materialistic things between two extremes, necessities and desires. What does confuse matters though is where the boundary is placed, what personifies that Mickey Mouse backpack as being a ‘must have’? 

So we are now in a situation where we are both the purveyor and consumer of the exact same item, no longer in a materialistic sense, but from the point of view that if you you are the consumer of anything, there will always be someone out there to supply it, or corollary the case there will always be someone out there to exploit the potential that you want it. But that basis is no different to the analogy of if no one believed in God, does God then not exist? Or the more pessimistic view that if God existed and no one believed in him (her/it) would they be slightly pissed off? I digress. I’ll get back on track to my point. And we will reorientate to my current location, Gran Canaria, or more specifically Maspalomas and the Yumbo Centrum where you have almost the perfect dichotomy, love and hate in the same simmering cauldron of what’s architecturally just a shopping centre.

So here I am in a  mass concentration of gay / lesbian people in one location, who on the one hand are celebrating the fact that I ‘can be liberated’ and ironically on the other hand, pointing out the fact that I ‘can’t be liberated’ because I can only do it in the one location. There will sadly always be a stigma between the straight and gay communities, and in part it is brought on by myself. If I feel that I need a ‘special area / place’ to be who I am, then I am doing nothing to integrate with the same society I’m opposed to, if anything I’m just reinforcing stereotypes and the same problems will manifest forever more.

Sometimes I feel that rather than being part of the solution, I’m actually part of the problem. 

Thank you for not reading my email fully

Well after yesterday’s rant email I finally got a reply later this afternoon. Ironically it stated that he ‘tried to find my at the snak bar at midday’, he didn’t try very hard, I was sat right next to him.

He wrote a basic corporate email stating that if the hotel happened to be full then there wasn’t much that could be done about the room allocation, I still dispute this considering I booked it back in November.

Oddly he didn’t mention the food once.

Dress for dinner

So when I was kid going on holiday with the family to Jersey, I used to hate ‘dressing for dinner’. My mother would insist that we got changed into some ‘nice clothes’ so we could eat basically ‘slop’ in what was basically a cheap ‘Butlins’.

But now in my older years I can see the point. I have clothes for the day, clothes for dinner and then clothes for ‘going out’. And you know what, I do enjoy going back to the hotel room and changing into my ‘party wear’. To the point where I have an audience waiting to see what I’m going to turn up in, and boy do I not want to disappoint!