Replying to
@jalefkowit Thoughts and prayers for your food budget
Remote
Bill Fellows
@billinkc@beige.party
mastodon 4.6.6Independent consultant on the mostly Microsoft stack. SSIS, SQL Server, Azure, C#, python, etc. Coming to you live and in person from Kansas City, MO, USA, Sol
Likely to talk about #Chickens (egg layers acquired May 2025) my #dog (Vizsla of unknown age but at least 12 years old) attempts at #GlutenFree baking (family member with celiac disease) and my attempt to learn the Irish language #Gaeilge
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Joined December 27, 2025
Pronouns:
he/him
Location:
Kansas City, Missouri, USA, Sol
Formerly of:
dataplatform.social/@billinkc
Chicken Videos:
If you need a #SamNeill comedy, check out the "Hunt for the Wilderpeople"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunt_for_the_Wilderpeople
Imminently quotable
Psssst, yeah, you.
Are you thinking about #trains and train tracks? Wonder what lines are around you, even if they're defunct? This is the fediverse, of course you are.
Check out if you've not seen it https://openrailwaymap.org/
Replying to
@tayfonay But now we don't have to pay for door attendants to count the number of butts in the seat!
And for an additional fee, we will report to your employer which sessions you attended.
And for an additional, additional fee, you can buy your attendance data and correct it in case your device malfunctioned.
If you're not great at changing smoke detector batteries at the time changes. Or swear to God you *just* changed them, here's a handy tip:
Write the date on a slip of paper and put it in the battery compartment. It won't remind you but at least you'll have a record of when you did the task
Well, thanks Dicks Sporting Goods for really, really identifying that I am an "OLD"
Also, if you'd be so kind as to validate email addresses before blindly adding them, I and my East Coast doppelganger could keep our email lives from being intertwined.
Tree guys have shown up and I appreciate that this gentleman spent the first 15 or so minutes sharpening his blades before firing up his chain saws
I use my corporate email in as few places as possible. I have spam blocking turned up to the max and yet, someone sells me out.
What I truly do not understand is this wave of spam. They want to offer some business line of credit but sincerely, WTF is "nan" because that's Not A Number to me.
Did they scrape some bad data or is this, "nan" some finance term I am not familiar with?
Maybe they meant naan because that is an operation I am both familiar with and will support.
Two items arriving today and I can't tell which is more exciting:
* New glasses with a stronger prescription
* "Happy Hen foraging seed mix" (a mix of grasses and grains that are beneficial for chickens)
Today's productivity has been courtesy of the 32 year young album "Weight" by the Rollins Band.
Genre was not my thing in the 90s but the guy who was the head of "The Quad" residence halls would universally greet me with "Henry!" as I bore a decent resemblance to him, minus the chin dimple, tattoos and gorgeous musculature.
And as I'm typing this, "Liar" is playing and this could very well be the anthem for A.I.
We should start our working lives retired and then actually work. I should have spent my twenties traveling the world, riding a bicycle across northern New Zealand and Ireland. Taking trains... anywhere really.
Develop skills, learn lots of cultures and art and then be ready to apply them in a working environment
Replying to
@geekysteven No, we do not need to have our airwaves infected with their craft music. Whether it's "GOLD", "Gold, gold, gold" or the standard "Gold Gold Gold" We have enough problems already
Welp, voice mail for Senator "Definitely Lives in Missouri" asking him to show some leadership but given his support of J6, I don't expect much.
Now I gotta look up the maga mouthbreathing junior chud senator because he's such a nothing
Hahahahhaaha get fucked
A.I. "invents" ingredients for a cookie recipe, OMG these are terrible. *Chuck 'em in the bin*
A.I. "invents" invoices. Cool, either I under-bill or I over-bill which *when* a client discovers either results in me looking bad and losing their business or me explaining to a Federal judge why I am attempting electronic fraud across state lines.
There's just no fucking upside to this shit and plenty of fucking up sides to go around.
Replying to
@RickiTarr@beige.party Depended on the point in time but I have memories of both parents cooking and baking (7 of us in the house) suppers.
My paternal grandmother's yeast roll recipe is the standout. Mom made it for holidays and every now and then, Dad would convert it to cinnamon rolls.
The vibe though was "Midwestern white people" circa 1970s to 90s (ashtray on the table).
Hard to say as a general rule what we had because until Senior year, I was ...a little picky. Taste, texture, smells, unfamiliar items, they'd all light up the NO reflex.
e.g. baked potato but nothing on it, never mashed. Hamburger but if cheese, mustard, onion or pickle had been within a foot of it, I'd go without. Swiss cheese was the only acceptable cheese outside of pizza. Beef stroganoff or tuna casserole for supper? I think you mean cereal or a bologna and ketchup sandwich.
Lots of pan fried food in my food memories. Canned vegetables, not that I ate them.
No asian, even whitey asian, food as far as I can remember but that could have been my influence.
The family joke now is that I am the most cross culture "weird" food eating one of the bunch.
On the cooking front, I was probably 10-12 and "Mom, I want cookies". She opens a drawer and tosses me a bag of chocolate chips. "Recipe's on there"
I think that, plus Boy Scouts (you're going to go hungry this weekend if you can't cook) were foundational to my love of cooking.
As always, intriguing conversation starters
Replying to
@User47 I had to do that a few weeks ago as the family members living on zyrtec couldn't outpace the allergens...
Still, this weekend was nice
I made the lying machine angry. Instead of cancelling out of spicy autocomplete in Databricks, I decided to just keep mashing Tab to see what bollocks it churns out (based on the name of my method).
It's like a toddler caught in a lie where it just keeps saying things hopping you'll forget or get distracted
I have no idea what one of my clients has done w/r/t to their Azure settings but good grief. The azure portal has always been weird with them, maybe 8 hours of being logged in and you get logged out but it forces the full MFA dance (user name, password, Keep me signed in, 2FA).
Yesterday, their Teams instance forced a full reauthorization and then this morning, storage explorer.
Meanwhile, my primary client is also connected to storage explorer and I don't remember it ever having to reauth in the 5+ years we've been there. 🤷♂️
"Microsoft is also simplifying the review process for managers, so they can choose from five pay options for employees instead of nine."
Final sentence from https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/23/microsoft-plans-first-voluntary-retirement-program-for-us-employees.html
That's too complicated for my silly caveman brain
Replying to
@User47@vmst.io Yay! That timeline tracks with how it went here. Jealous of your numbers, it only made sense to light up the western exposure of our house so we're sitting around 10 kWh produced a day for the past two sunny weeks. But, every little helps, especially when the corresponding surge pricing come summer
Replying to
@bflipp@vmst.io @pmpjr@techhub.social what's weird is if I join like a minute late, the staging screen tells me there's X people already here and it's muting my mic. /shrug