Sometimes you don't play games...

 In my mind, I'll eventually have time to do all the things I want to do right now, but don't have time to. Sometimes I'll see a "sale" for a game I would like to play, so I get it. Aaaaaaand then reality strikes, and I never actually get to. It's funny I guess, but I have a loooong list of games I've bought and haven't had time to play. Here are some examples: 

• Warcraft I - April 2019 (haven't tried it at all)
• Warcraft II - April 2019 (played a few single player missions, haven't done much more)
• Warcraft III Reforged (January 2020, fired it up, but it felt laggy and I'd look into it later, haven't had time to yet)
• Mortal Kombat 11 (literally played a Rambo vs Terminator battle to try it out lol, that's it)
• Jedi Fallen Order (bought in October, waiting on a controller to play) 

These also were bought in May of 2019! And I've yet to play ANY of them...

	STAR WARS™: Knights of the Old Republic $ 9.99 $ 3.49

	STAR WARS™ Knights of the Old Republic™ II: The Sith Lords™ $ 9.99 $ 3.49

	STAR WARS™ Galactic Battlegrounds Saga $ 5.99 $ 2.09

	STAR WARS™ Battlefront™ II (Classic, 2005) $ 9.99 $ 3.49

	Star Wars™: Jedi Knight™ - Jedi Academy™ $ 9.99 $ 3.49

STAR WARS™ Battlefront (Classic, 2004)                                                                 $8.49

I also have a growing library of free games from Epic Games, currently 45+ games. So yeah...I'll play soon...hopefully. Thankfully, I am fortunate enough to actually have a plan to retire way earlier than is normal. In today's climate, retiring at all is a luxury. But hopefully soon, I'll be able to play some video games, more guitar, wake up whenever, nap whenever, work on hobbies more, take more photos, enjoy the outdoors more...okay, even then, I probably won't have enough time for all that haha.

Sometimes you can't figure out the syntax...

 I know, I know, another work post. But it really has been taking up a lot of my mind and time lately. I worked at my previous job for over 11 years, and I was always part of a team of many other people with the exact same role as I had. So I definitely took it for granted that I could take time off at almost any time, provided we weren't all off at the same. Or that I could ask a co-worker a question about the issue at hand, or how to resolve something, or bounce ideas off of them. At my current job, I am one of two systems engineers, there's a Database Admin, and 3 help desk techs. And the other systems engineer is also the networking guy and he mostly deals with maintaining the hardware and server side of the systems work. I manage the email system exclusively, and the cloud presence(Azure AD, Office 365, Intune endpoint management, Microsoft licensing, etc.) almost exclusively. All this is to say that I really don't have overlap in most of my functions with anyone else on my team. So anything that falls in my realm, I pretty much have to figure out myself. When I'm trying to figure something out, or don't know how to do something, there's no one to ask or bounce ideas off of. Aaaaaand, I'm the end of the line for anything email, Office 365, Azure AD, etc. Recently we ran into a situation where after the migration into our M365 environment from GSuite, it became apparent we needed to convert most of our newly migrated M365 groups into Distribution Lists (DLs). I figured most of that out, wrote some scripts for it and ran them. One of the last pieces of the puzzle, was being able to set multiple owners for DLs that came from Groups with multiple owners. I could get my commands/scripts to work for setting single owners, but when I tried to set multiple owners, it would either error out, or set the first or last owner only, depending on the syntax I used in my CSV file. 

I had to move forward with the conversion, and I figured I'd run a script against all the groups with single owners first, and that would give me some time later to figure out the ones with multiple owners(about 670 DLs out of a little over 2000). This is the gist of what I am trying to do:

$owners = Import-Csv .\GroupOwners.csv
Set-DistributionGroup -Identity $_.GroupEmail -ManagedBy $_.OwnerIDs 

And the CSV looks like this: 

That works, as long as the OwnerIDs field only has 1 owner. If it has more than one, it fails. And this is the syntax for running the command with more than one owner: 

Set-DistributionGroup -Identity testDL@mercycorps.org -ManagedBy owner1@mercycorps.org,owner2@mercycorps.org,owner3@mercycorps.org

That works. But if I try and feed this a CSV with the list of DLs and owners, it won't work. I looked into it, and in a CSV file, if the field contains a comma, the escape characters are quotes. You wrap the comma in quotes, and it treats it as an ordinary character, instead of a separation in the CSV. But no matter what I tried, it would still error out. In the CSV 'OwnerIDs' field I tried:

user1@domain.org,user2@domain.org,user3@domain.org
user1@domain.org","user2@domain.org","user3@domain.org
"user1@domain.org,user2@domain.org,user3@domain.org"
"user1@domain.org","user2@domain.org","user3@domain.org"
"user1@domain.org"",""user2@domain.org"",""user3@domain.org"

And probably other variations that I can't even remember right now. All would either only read the first, last, or the whole thing as 1 invalid user/email and error, or error for some other reason. I was even working with a Microsoft engineer that wasn't very helpful...I would expect them to know their own damn syntax, but apparently not. So I resorted to a not so elegant, but nevertheless functional alternative. I just started with a txt file and copied this into it: 

Set-DistributionGroup -Identity  -ManagedBy
Set-DistributionGroup -Identity  -ManagedBy
Set-DistributionGroup -Identity  -ManagedBy
Set-DistributionGroup -Identity  -ManagedBy
Set-DistributionGroup -Identity  -ManagedBy
Set-DistributionGroup -Identity  -ManagedBy

and made 670 lines of that(copy+paste ftw!), then used Sublime text editor to do a vertical edit, where I can paste the entire column of DL email addresses after -Identity right into the text file and then paste the whole column of owners after -ManagedBy and save as a .ps1 file, and run it. 

Set-DistributionGroup -Identity DL1@domain.org -ManagedBy owner1@domain.org,owner2@domain.org
Set-DistributionGroup -Identity DL2@domain.org -ManagedBy owner1@domain.org,owner2@domain.org,owner3@domain.org

Set-DistributionGroup -Identity DL3@domain.org -ManagedBy owner4@domain.org,owner5@domain.org,owner6@domain.org,owner7@domain.org

It shouldn't have been this difficult or ugly, but it's what I had to do to set the damn owner field to multiple values. Anyway, it is done, and I have about a week of relatively chill time before I have to migrate an organization we merged with into our Microsoft tenant...so another email migration. About 100 users, so should not be nearly as bad, hopefully. 

Sometimes you get throttled...

I've been working on a way to convert most of our M365 groups into DLs/Distribution Lists. And that's not super straight forward because it's not something people have to do often. But we had a bit of a miscommunication during the migration about what the requirements were, so now I have to correct it by converting M365 groups back to DLs. I have to first export all 2500+ M365 groups from our tenant, make sure I capture the current owners, members, names, and email addresses (creating a monster CSV file with over 25,000 lines). Then I have to exclude the groups that already have data in SharePoint or are using Teams (since these functions are not available to DLs). Part of the reason for the conversion to DLs is that in the old GSuite environment, these groups had external members and also nested groups. M365 groups can do neither of these things, so I also have to capture all the external users and nested groups from the old GSuite environment so I can add them to the DLs once they have been created. 

I finally have to delete the M365 groups, create the DLs, and add the members and owners. I also have to create mailContacts for any external users (a pre-requisite before you can add them to any DLs). Then I have to do a final pass where I add the external users and nested groups(that should now be DLs). 

I opted to break down our massive group and member list (around 25,000 lines) into 10 batches, to keep it a tad more manageable. I've been running batches since around 9am. It's 4 pm and only 4 batches have finished...So I decided to run 3 PowerShell windows so I could run multiple batches at a time and finish this today......and I got hit with a throttle warning by Microsoft...

So hopefully I didn't make things slower by running more than 1 at a time. I'll be babying this the rest of the afternoon just to make sure it doesn't error out or crash on me...

Sometimes you play futsal...

 I started playing Futsal some years ago. It's basically indoor soccer, 5v5, with a keeper/portero and some slightly different rules to adapt to the smaller space. 

The courts I play in. Looking over from upstairs while I wait for our court to open up. 

The ball is slightly smaller (like a size 4 ball more or less), but it is heavier, and bounces way less than a standard soccer ball. 

I usually only play once a week, very seldom I'll play twice a week in a league here. Anyway, this is all to say, I recently had to buy shoes because I kept getting blisters under my foot with my current shoes (I'll spare you the photos, they aren't pretty haha). They don't seem "worn out". I don't know what changed, but I got tired of the blisters and bought a different kind. 

Old shoes on the right

I decided to go with a more substantial shoe, with more of a sole and more cushion, while still being futsal shoes. I really liked how light the old shoes were and how thin everything on them was, but apparently my actual feet disagreed. I already used the new shoes a couple times and so far so good, no blisters. So either the old ones are worn out or lost what little cushion they had, or I'm just too old and need more cushion now haha. 

I enjoy playing quite a bit, so I hope to be able to keep playing for many years to come.

Sometimes you eat membrillos...

 So we've been trying to decide what trees to plant in our yard. It's not "easy" haha. We don't just want to plant whatever without being sure it will do well in this particular climate. And we're also kinda lazy and don't want to be fighting pests and disease with very delicate tree varieties. So we've been delaying getting and planting trees because of this. One of the trees we were considering was Quince, or membrillos in Spanish. I remembered eating them with limon, sal, y chile when I was a kid, and liking them a lot. But almost every description of the quince trees that do well in this climate mentioned they are not for fresh eating, that you have to cook or process them. I was skeptical, and felt it was really just that people here are more picky and less creative with their produce haha. So a neighbor was giving away quince because they had too many and we got some, which was perfect because we could confirm if the membrillos here were the same or similar enough to the ones we grew up eating. And here they are: 

For some reason, I don't remember them being quite so yellow, but apparently they are. 

So we tried them fresh, with some limon and tajin, and they were delicious! I thoroughly enjoyed it and it definitely brought me back to my childhood haha. 

We also made jam with them, and left some chunky and did the other one smooth. 

And we also made dulce de membrillo (Quince paste). 

cracker, pecan, dulce de membrillo, and "cream cheese". 

And this also, has a very specific taste that I remember eating and enjoying many many years ago. Pretty cool how a flavor can transport you to a long ago time and place. Also the fruits themselves were super aromatic and smelled amazing. Kinda like pineapple. It was unexpected and welcome. All this to say that we will definitely be planting a Quince tree, and I can't wait to get some fruit off of it, many years from now haha. 

Sometimes you pick plums...

Still on the garden theme, there was a plum tree in the front yard when we moved in to this house. We pretty much ignored it for the first 7 years or so and it turns out, you're not supposed to do that to fruit trees. Some years it would give a little bit of plums, some years a lot, and some no plums at all. We had no idea why, and that was fine, until the pandemic got us gardening haha. It is one of the few trees we have and it is very pretty in spring, they bloom and look like white cherry blossom trees: 

A tiny Bushtit pollinating the plums!

A Lesser Goldfinch hanging out on the plum tree

A Black Capped Chickadee pollinating the plums!

The Lesser Goldfinch having some nectar too...

A crow on our power line, with the flowering plum tree in the background. 

So the birds and bees love it, and it looks really pretty, and is signals the start of spring, so all around a win for everyone haha. This happens in spring, around mid March, and then the blossoms fall off, and the pollinated flowers turn into plums over the coming months. Eventually, in mid to late August, this is where it's at: 

The plums we have are very different from store plums. They're smaller, green, and more sour, but also sweet. I really like them. And I'm not huge on plums, but these are really tasty.  We suspect it must be a wild variety perhaps. Around August 2020, while we were harvesting the plums of that season, the neighbor saw me struggling to pick the plums up high. We had let the tree get like 20+ feet tall, and that was not smart. Most of the fruit was unreachable, even with a ladder. So he offered to help me trim down the tree, a lot. We easily chopped more than half of the tree off. It was hard because we needed to make sure the main trunk fell in a specific place and not crush his roof or ours. Usually I'm very reluctant to trim plants, I always think I'm going to hurt them or make them less productive. It's not intuitive to me that you chop things off, and the plant would respond positively. But that's how it works. We chopped it down to like 6 or 7 feet tall, and it looks funky, but this year it gave the most plums it ever had, even at this reduced height. We got over 40 pounds of plums! 39 pounds from the older tree, and like 5 from the younger one, it was crazy! For reference, in 2020 we got 13 pounds of plums from both trees and that was a good year, so this year was a lot! 

From just the big tree!

We're supposed to thin the fruit before it goes crazy like this, like the branches were almost touching the floor because of how heavy with fruit they were. This is not good because a branch could break and lose all the fruit but also damage the tree. Thankfully, it didn't happen, but we'll be thinning the fruit next time....maybe haha. It's hard to remove fruit for this reason haha We shared some with the neighbors, we made jam, we ate LOTS of plums and didn't buy any fruit for like 3 weeks. 

Plum jam, lots of it!

Removing pits from the plums was definitely the most tedious part.

Sophia helping us pick plums -_- Notice the funky tree shape due to the heavy pruning. 

Froze a gallon of plums, maybe for a future plum pie. We may not get many or any plums next year, because we got so much this year, but hopefully we still do. 

Sometimes you don't eat ground cherries for 10 years...

 The pandemic definitely got us to finally pay attention to what little land we have and start gardening. The extent of our gardening before this was to allow the neighbors raspberries to expand into our yard by clearing weeds around there so they could "walk" into our side and picking said raspberries when they were ripe. Luckily, our neighbors to both sides have raspberries that have expanded into our yard. And the neighbor behind us gave me a raspberry cane years ago that I also planted and has since created it's own patch of raspberries also. So basically, we have a lot of raspberries and a plum tree that before these couple of years, would sometimes give plums, and sometimes not. 

Well in 2020 we ordered seeds, made a plan of sorts and decided to start a permaculture food forest in the very little land we have. This meant getting rid of the grass (thought it was mostly weeds at this point haha) by sheet mulching (covering in cardboard and then a thick layer of mulch or wood chips to smother the grass) and then trying to plant a garden. 

Before I write too much, I'll expand on that later in other posts. I'll just say for now that we love trying new produce. Any fruits or vegetables we either haven't tried or new varieties of familiar produce that we've never tried. So back in Milwaukee, we tried for the first time a fruit called "Ground Cherries" at a farmer's market. They are like tiny (size of a dime) sweet and tart yellow tomatillos. 

They were so good! 3 year old Sophia loved them back in Milwaukee, and so did I. And we had not tried them again since then until last summer when they started fruiting! And so we grew them again this year, and it's one of the highlights of the garden for me. I absolutely love these little fruits. But they're not available in supermarkets or stores. So we hadn't seen them in 10 years. 

Cute little yellow flowers with purple streaks in the center

Little "easter eggs" to collect every day!

You harvest them when they drop. And they start dropping in july, and don't stop until like October. Every day, cute little gifts to collect under the plants. 

And they're so easy to grow. Our soil isn't super fertile (yet). And these little plants keep on doing well and giving fruit for months on end. It's great! 

Ah, and lastly, this is what Paw Paws look like inside:

(The fruit that we're going to plant that Geli wrote about in her blog)

Sometimes you're late to the party...

 So we hadn't bought a game console since the Wii in 2008. In large part, it's because we tend to do most things together and we've yet to find a video game we both enjoy or all three of us enjoy. Geli likes single player open ended games (Zelda, Metroid, that kind of thing), Sophia likes games where she can be social in, and the game itself doesn't really matter much to her (Minecraft, Little Big Planet, Among Us). And I like many kinds of games, but haven't really played much recently. Some of my favorite games have been Mortal Kombat (II and III/Ultimate mostly and on the SNES or arcade), Golden Eye(N64), Perfect Dark (N64), Smash Brothers (N64), Super Street Fighter II (SNES), Donkey Kong Country (SNES), Super Mario World (SNES), and on PC I was obsessed with Warcraft II and III. You get the point, I think. Old ass fuckin' games haha. Never had a NES (sadly, and badly wanted one). Never had a GameCube. And we bought the Wii once we were working and living in Milwaukee. And it was a bit of a let down, but mostly because we never found a game we could all enjoy (outside of World of Goo, but it didn't have a lot of replayability) and we didn't use it very much. I ended up buying a bunch of old NES, SNES, and N64 games from the WiiShop or whatever and played those, though not much either. Fast Forward to a couple months ago, and Baudy upgraded her Nintendo Switch to an Animal Crossings version, and offered to sell me her old Switch. I bought it off her, and she sold it to me with Smash Ultimate. And let me say, I've been quite into it. I hadn't really played newer Smash games more than a few matches here and there when at a friend or relative's house. And they were different enough from the N64 version I was used that I always felt like a noob haha (we had never bought Brawl for the Wii either). All this to say, that I hadn't played a console game in over a decade and probably 2 decades since I played for any significant amount of time. But since I got the switch, I've really gotten into it. The graphics are so good (give me a break, this is where I left off in graphics)! 

Not gonna lie, I still think this one is the best! 

These graphics were amazing haha

And Smash has soooo many play modes! haha I've completed Adventure mode. I've unlocked all characters, and currently, I am trying to collect all spirits. 

100% w00t! 47 hours play time?! Yikes! 

Not even sure if that's possible (since there's DLC spirits and what not), but I'll wait to get every single one I can and then see how many are left. Currently at 1417 out of 1486 spirits. Definitely hits the "collector" in me haha. 

1417/1486...almost there!

So anyway, I have yet to play online, I will eventually. I just didn't expect to get this much playtime out of the Switch or Smash Brothers Ultimate. Pleasant surprise, definitely been enjoying it :) I know the Switch is old news, but it's new to me. 

Sometimes you migrate email...

 I've been pretty busy with work lately. The last month or so have been pretty crazy. We migrated our email systems from GSuite to Office 365(Exchange Online), which has been in the works for a while. I was actually hired to help lead this effort to migrating everything (not just email) out of the Google world and into the Microsoft world. Well email was officially migrated on the 16th, but as with any migration of this size(~5500 users + ~2000 groups/distribution lists/shared mailboxes), there's always loose ends and things to work through afterwards. 

What the migration tool looks like. Only some backfill email left to transfer over. 

I am still in cleanup mode, but the heaviest workload is behind us. The next portion of the migration will be the Teams and SharePoint parts, which someone else will be leading, so that will be a lighter workload when that comes around. Just today I finished catching up with all my work email, so some sense of normalcy is returning. 

Sometimes you build spaceships out of wood...

We went to a holiday "geek" fair a few weeks ago, and after wanting to buy pretty much everything, Geli got me these super cool Star Wars wooden models to build. They're super simple, but it was really neat to see something that is usually made of metal, or plastic, made with wood. They looked cool and it was lots of fun building them too. Sophie got a wand, and some stickers for her laptop. It was pretty much a craft fair, but for things "geek".

It was really cool, so I hope they do it again next year. There were lots of booths, making all sorts of things. Clothes, wallets, swords, shirts, collectibles, pixel art, paintings, lamps, you name it. The lady that made these Star Wars models, also made a TARDIS! So here are the models I am talking about: 

We got these like 3 weeks ago, and I barely finished building them. Not because they were complicated, but because time. There's never enough, I swear. The first one I built was the Imperial Shuttle: 

Then I built the TIE Fighter. I actually painted the inside of the wings myself with sharpie, because these are all 1-sided and I thought it would look much better that way. I was right haha

Then I did the AT-AT, or as Sophie calls it, the metal dog: 

And I saved the X-Wing, a personal favorite, for last: 

Though, in these models specifically, I probably like the AT-AT best. Or the TIE fighter. Probably the AT-AT. Though I really like the contrast in the TIE fighter. 

All in all, they were super easy to build. Some required a little persuasion to fit through means of sanding the parts a little bit. And others required glue to stay together firmly, which to me is totally expected in these kind of crafts that aren't mass produced and are made of something as naturally varying as wood. I enjoyed putting them together and will have them on my desk now :) In case you wanted some, here is the seller's page.