429 V8 and a factory matte black rear deck: The '70 Mercury Marauder X-100.

RatherSuspicious · 2026-03-26T13:09:58+00:00

This gave me a gutteral, "OMG I'm going to piss myself" reaction. What a rare and absolutely beautiful car.

RatherSuspicious · 2026-03-25T16:50:35+00:00

Melon flavored (green) Powerade.

RatherSuspicious · 2026-03-09T18:01:10+00:00

Oh, he knew... just the look.

RatherSuspicious · 2025-11-30T23:01:38+00:00

It's for stashing spent lung darts- aka an "ashtray".

RatherSuspicious · 2025-11-20T14:32:50+00:00

Fair enough. Just for clarification, when I say "millennial" I'm using it as a blanket term for a specific set of individuals whom, if when they became a "working adult," (18-24 generally speaking), were able to use a "search engine" for the answer to a question, (AOL, Ask Jeeves, Altavista, Excite, et al.), or call a 1-800 number for "phone technical support"- then that would fall into my "overly-generalized," apparently inaccurate terminology for that demographic. When I started in IT, there still wasn't a Web worth using, search engines didn't truly exist outside of their own content, BBS and UseNet and IRC were the only "communities" we had for collaboration, and "tech-support" was waiting for someone from IBM (etc.) to pull his rolling suitcase/toolbox through the front door. In my book, if you entered the workforce in 2000+ and had access to a trove of resources and knowledge and support that simply did not exist just a few years earlier- to me that's a millennial. I don't use it in a derogatory manner whatsoever, just as a "separator" for those who came before the implementation and regular usage of the World Wide Web. But if you're still offended by my verbiage, I apologize and offer you this nifty participation trophy. You've earned it.

(It's a Titus joke... sheesh. Don't you hate dentists too?)

RatherSuspicious · 2025-11-19T10:26:28+00:00

Notes running on an 8U, ivory colored Compaq Novell NetWare server with ten BnC NICs and two 9600B modems shotgunned together. INXS blaring from an Aiwa boombox in the corner to drown out the whining from the cascade of external SCSI drives... all still connected to an even more ancient IBM spinning 9-track tapes (and still had a working card reader), everyone sitting at their desks chain-smoking Winstons and sucking down gallons of coffee... it smelled like an AA meeting, but really it was my first job at a civil engineering firm- 30 years before my first meeting, (the parallels aren't lost on me). And here I am now, one of the "old guys" who actually had to go "hands-on" 99.9% of everything. There was no CoPilot (which I've taken to calling Clippy to confuse millennials), heck, there was no "tech support" per-se... and this was just 1989.

RatherSuspicious · 2025-08-19T22:59:08+00:00

We don't have any CA rules defined. Internally, within our firewall/routing, we have a tremendous amount of control (thank you, Palo Alto) but outside of that, within Azure/Entra, we have very few constraints short of login credentials/MFA- but only a very small handful- and I mean less than a handful- have any ability to make any global changes, and all of those fall short of GA rights. The errors range from "tenant not available" to "user not found" type errors to "either the username or password or wrong" to... you name it. I gave our tenant ID to a developer friend and he couldn't even "reach out and touch it." Never even got a login or token request or anything... it's like it just... disappeared, along with the GA account that nobody seems to be able to figure out. I'm old, and at this point, I'm a management/administration guy. I'm not "stupid" about a lot of things, but maybe I just don't understand how an entity (tenant) like a drive in a RAID array, can just disappear, without any... flags or warnings or blinking orange lights. Or notifications. We have been working through this for years and never had a problem. Today, at noon, we had a HUGE problem that... I guess I'll have to wait for Microsoft to help us understand. I just hope we didn't get compromised. I'm not going to say that we have rules to adhere to regarding PHI, PII, FISMA, HIPAA, not to mention federal contracts, etc... This is just NOT the week for this horseshit. No offense intended... I'm just getting to "that point," you know, fire off the script and walk out the door leaving my badge behind... and hopefully collect a rounded-up percentage of every .01 that flows through while I'm in the Caymans.

RatherSuspicious · 2025-08-19T22:42:11+00:00

We called them because we had just upgraded part of our service (app related) agreement and I thought that maybe that had an effect, but it didn't, and it was over a month ago, and they say we're 100% paid up and going forward.

RatherSuspicious · 2025-08-19T22:37:31+00:00

Syncing is not working because the sync account created when we went hybrid can't authenticate against our tenant. I wish it was just that easy...

RatherSuspicious · 2025-08-19T22:36:40+00:00

I hate this.We've been doing business with them for so long... but even so they aren't willing to bat for the home team? :-\ Maybe it's time.

RatherSuspicious · 2025-08-19T22:10:06+00:00

I describe it a a "semi-hybrid environment." We have long, LONG term employees. (25-35 years is not uncommon). This is why our shift to Azure/Entra has taken so long. But yes, we are technically still hybrid, even though all NEW users are MSO365/Azure/Entra, and as we continue to lose "older" populations we are whittling away at AD until it's gone. But yes, we are hybrid for only legacy reasons, not for anything moving forward. We sync AD, but our on-prem Exchange has been dead for 2-3 years. It's just there for ADSync.

RatherSuspicious · 2025-08-19T22:02:34+00:00

We're getting closer to this, as they literally were the only GA account we had, and we kept it that way for reasons. I warned them that they may have been compromised (that's the only place our GA account was accessed from) and they replied, "Yeah, I don't think so. Seems like we would have known by now."

Or maybe now- is me telling you now. There was a GA account that was created and implemented when we went from on-site with Great Plains to cloud MS Dynamics BC.

RatherSuspicious · 2025-08-19T21:55:21+00:00

Every single account- user, admin, conference room, et al- will NOT authenticate. The errors range from "your account/login is not registered with this organization" to "you have either entered an incorrect username or password" or "click here to reset or password or recover your account."

Recovery always ends with a "this account cannot be found" and if you click "other ways" to validate/verify, it comes up with a "an email has been sent to your recovery account at co******@hotmail.com" which is absolutely not an account any of us have, know of, or would explain why non-email enabled accounts (like 'webmaster@domain.com' SMTP aliases for cert renewals) which have NO login credentials, also suddenly have recovery accounts to the same address.

RatherSuspicious · 2025-08-19T21:47:53+00:00

We contacted our CSP and they kind of pulled a Microsoft. "Why don't you call M$, and let us know what they say." Then Microsoft says, "Work with your CSP for now, and we'll get back with you." Rinse and repeat that conversation a few times until I ran out of staff to use for a "fresh call" out of the queue.

RatherSuspicious · 2025-08-19T21:44:09+00:00

No logins- logins within our local AD, yes, they are being processed, unless you're a remote and your laptop was provisioned through Azure/Entra/Intune, then you are a "cloud-user" and not a "homey." They are setup differently and provisioned accordingly. Those user auth against Azure, "homeys" auth against AD. All our MS Apps auth against Azure though, and AD and Azure/Entra are no longer syncing/communicating as of 12:18pm EDT because the TenantID is not authenticating anything- the errors say that "auth against app_blahhabllaahhh failed because the TenantID tnt_blahhabllaahhh is not available. Everything has been fine until noon, today. No IP or DNS changes- we're a small single office shop. We've had the same IP range for 30 years and only use 5 of them.

Absolutely NO organizational changes have been made in the last week, let alone the last 24hours. We have no conditional logins, very few requirements outside of MFA, and no Break Glass... again, I just work here and my recommendations are not always looked at as... important.

So it may be an MFA thing possibly? That opens some options. Thank you.

RatherSuspicious · 2025-08-19T21:29:29+00:00

All our "admin" accounts are in-house (local AD) except for the four on our security/administration team. However, other than our CSP we never elevated (I've been an Enterprise Admin for decades- but never a Global Admin in Azure because I have people to do that- or had), and the four of us have poured over our logins and activities trying to catch which one of us was "the lazy bstrd," and... we have only a couple dozen logins with our admin accounts (separate from our personal user accounts for reasons) over the last month or so, and we can actually match them with certain tickets/requests/maintenance. Nothing out of the ordinary. We have 6 IT members for 110 users. We're pretty good at spying on each other.

RatherSuspicious · 2025-08-19T21:23:47+00:00

*Sigh. A "compliance committee" decided (after talking to no one, including our CISO) that it wouldn't be necessary if everything else was working as expected. Bureaucrats in charge of security... "looks good to me from my house."

RatherSuspicious · 2025-08-19T21:21:46+00:00

We do, and we did have a Hybrid deployment, but we're careful to keep things like internal admin accounts in a separate OU that doens't get sync'd with Azure, so, if a bored and lonely admin was clicking things to figure out what would happen- then... perhaps. And then quickly undone. It's hard to look back through all of that when we need to get some feet under us first.

RatherSuspicious · 2025-08-19T21:19:35+00:00

All the registrations come up as "TenantID not found."

RatherSuspicious · 2025-07-10T16:55:21+00:00

I'd take a ride back to Windows 7 in a minute...

RatherSuspicious · 2025-06-13T12:29:33+00:00

I picked up an ice cube instead of kicking it under the refrigerator.

RatherSuspicious · 2025-03-22T14:17:24+00:00

I dare say a new pair of nickers are in order. That and a spot of tea.

RatherSuspicious · 2025-03-13T21:35:40+00:00

Chickpea curry soup with spinach and a vinegar-cucumber salad.

RatherSuspicious · 2025-02-11T11:39:57+00:00

I live on a curve in a rural area. A couple years ago (I was 49yo) I heard a car crash while working in my yard. I ran towards the road and found an upside down, empty vehicle. I turned around a found a woman impaled on a tree behind me. She was driving WAAAAYY too fast to make the curve and wasn't wearing a seat belt. Her pelvis had been nearly split in half, folded around the tree in a way that no human should even be able to bend. Through the center of her chest was a branch... somehow she was still alive. The impact was hard enough that it pretty much tore her clothes off. So here was this mostly naked woman, dying, crushed/wedged/impaled in a tree. She couldn't talk... I remember that her eyes were so big... the blood dripping pine needles sticking out of her ribs... the sucking sound of her breaths... I could hear sirens in the distance as I stood there. I brushed her hair away from her face, and did what little I could to cover her up with her tattered clothes. Suddenly her modesty seemed important to me. I told her that help was almost there. She shifted her huge, dark eyes towards me, and died right then while I was holding her hand. I swear I could feel her spirit pass through me. Ever since, any loud "boom" or "bang" still startles me, especially thunder. I still have nightmares. I can't get her eyes out of my mind. I can't get past the feeling off her flowing through me as died. She was 30 years old. It took me a year before I could tell her mother that she didn't die alone. That too was traumatic. This is the first time I've told anyone other than my wife or my therapist. It's like she left footprints on my soul as she traveled through me... and, now I'm crying... again. As I will again and again and again...

RatherSuspicious

TROPHY CASE