The Blog of Michael Lee Mitchell

This post details my experience with MXRoute and MXGuardDog for email hosting and spam filtering. I've been using MXRoute for my email hosting since January 2025. When I started looking for a new web host, my previous host included email in its shared hosting plan, which worked well initially. However, I explored several alternatives, including Fastmail, but found it too expensive for my needs. I also considered using my paid ProtonMail account. While I could have used it for myself, it would have introduced complications for my parents, who are in their 70s and not very tech-savvy. Therefore, I began researching other email hosting providers and looked into Purelymail (purelymail.com), Migadu (migadu.com), and finally, MXRoute (mxroute.com). After reading various reviews, MXRoute stood out as the best option. I was particularly drawn to its affordability: 25GB of storage for just $30 for three years (essentially $10 per year), with renewals at the same price. Best of all, tran...

Employee-Provided Healthcare I've been wanting to write about this topic for a while, but the December 2024 killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson allegedly by Luigi Mangione has been weighing on my mind. First and foremost, healthcare in this country has been in shambles for a long time. Throughout my career, I've always had employer-provided healthcare—through two government employers (state and county) and one private employer. I can say that the state-provided plan was the cheapest but middle-of-the-road in terms of quality. The county government plan was a little more expensive, but it was by far the best coverage I've ever had. Now, I work for a private employer, and while I'm grateful to have insurance, it has been the worst plan I've ever had—and I work for a hospital.

I went to my cardiologist today for my last visit with him. Dr. Patrick Chang of the University of South Florida is moving to Orlando, FL, and leaving the university, so if you’re looking for a great cardiologist, he’s definitely one to consider. His fellow will be taking over for him, and I like him too—plus, he’s young, so I should be seeing him for the next 20 to 30 years or more! 🙂 The news I got today is that they want me to see a cardiomyopathy specialist at USF. I’ve been feeling tired all the time, and I’m already on the maximum dosage of my medication combo for hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. My last ECHO showed some improvement, but my left ventricular outflow tract (LVOT) gradient is still elevated at 55 mmHg. #Cardiology #HypertrophicCardiomyopathy #HCM #BigHeart

Well, I’m glad I only have 9 years until retirement. Hopefully, Social Security sticks around, because who knows if my 401(k) will rebound. The President keeps shooting us in the foot economically 🦶🎯. It took years to get this bad—it’ll take years to fix, but he thinks months will do! #politics

There’s nothing more frustrating than waking up and thinking, I’m going to do a simple task to start the day. 😤 I planned to clone my nearly full 2TB NVMe drive to a new 4TB drive. I grabbed my external drive case, connected the new drive, and launched EaseUS Clone Disk. The first 566GB copied without issue. Then, suddenly, the speed dropped to a crawl. 🐢 Around 70%, I got the dreaded blue screen of death and a reboot. After three failed attempts with the same result, I tried installing the new drive and cloning in reverse. One more blue screen later, I gave up after nearly 12 hours of troubleshooting. 🤦‍♂️ Frustrated, I ordered a disk cloner so I can copy directly between the two NVMe drives without interference. Both drives check out fine, so I have no idea what’s causing the issue. This whole experience was a headache 🤯, and I didn’t get around to the other things I had planned for the day. Tags: #NVMe #SSDUpgrade #TechFails #PCProblems

Why is a civilian tech CEO with significant business interests in China being briefed on potential US-China conflict scenarios? Seems like a concerning conflict of interest.

I have a new avatar! It’s now live on Micro.blog, Bluesky, and Mastodon. This was my first time using Fiverr, and I think it turned out pretty lifelike. Let me know what you think!

Today, I leveraged my single Mastodon instance, my Raspberry Pi, and my paid Claude AI account to create an automated weather posting system for my home location. Using Claude AI, I generated code to automatically post weather updates and other information—tasks I previously relied on IFTTT for. It was an interesting project, and I plan to extend it further with additional automated posts. I can see IFTTT and Zapier either having to step up their game or eventually fading away. AI is a game-changer for those of us who aren't coders. While I’m sure the code isn’t the most optimized (Claude AI is supposedly the best at code generation right now), it’s incredible how AI allows regular people like me to experiment and bring my ideas to life. This is how I envision AI—not as a replacement, but as a helper and a great equalizer. I know this technology will inevitably change lives (not necessarily for the better) and eliminate some jobs, but it’s also making powerful tools and knowledge...

📺 This week’s Watchlist: Matlock – S1 Ep. 15 – Game Face ⭐⭐⭐ Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage – S1 Ep. 14 – A Sportsbook and a Breakup, This Is That Moment ⭐⭐ From NetFlix: The Night Agent – S2 Ep. 2 – Disconnected ⭐⭐⭐ The Night Agent – S2 Ep. 3 – Government Property ⭐⭐⭐ Hoping to squeeze in a few more episodes this weekend! 🎬 Tags: # TV # Entertainment # NetFlix

I canceled my Paramount+ subscription on Saturday, just before the renewal day yesterday, and I’m thinking of dumping a few more. I canceled Apple TV+ a few months ago. There are TV programs I like on both, but I just can't justify it anymore. These subscriptions are like vampires, siphoning a few dollars here and there until my budget is bled dry. These little charges are starting to eat away at my budget.

You know, the Republicans through Trump and Musk have found the key to cutting money to everyone but their rich owners and hiking taxes in the form of tariffs so they can say they don’t raise taxes. But a tariff is a tax. #Taxes #Tariffs #politics

I totally agree with Leo's perspective in this YouTube video . If I could easily move all my PC games to macOS or Linux, I'd jump ship in a heartbeat. The problem is that not all of my games are compatible with macOS or Linux, and the cost of switching would be significant. If there were a one-time platform transfer option, that would be a game-changer—I’d be gone in an instant. While there's a lot to like about Windows 11, there's also plenty to dislike. My biggest frustrations are the forced OneDrive integration and the Outlook fiasco. Microsoft should reconsider some of its recent decisions, as they’re pushing away users like me who prefer more consumer-friendly choices. Tags: # Microsoft # Windows # Consumers

Watched on Sunday March 9, 2025.

It all started with a simple question: Can I take an RSS feed from one blog and feed it to another? I knew that my Write.as blog automatically generated an RSS feed and that I used to import posts directly into Micro.blog. However, I was running into issues with duplicate posts. So, I had an idea—why not see if ChatGPT could help me or if there was already a program that could parse an RSS feed and pull it into Micro.blog? ChatGPT confirmed that it was possible. It suggested that I use my Raspberry Pi to run a script that would fetch the feed, filter out what I didn't need, and then push the cleaned-up version to Micro.blog. Diving Into the World of AI-Assisted Coding My coding experience was minimal. I had learned QBasic in college over 30 years ago and had taken an introductory Python course about a decade ago. In other words, I had just enough knowledge to get myself into trouble. So, I knew I’d have to rely almost entirely on AI to guide me through this project. To ensure...

All my life, I’ve been told that Russia and Putin are bad for the U.S.—which I believe. But now, we want to get closer to Russia just because they’re big and powerful? Republicans were once at the forefront, saying Putin’s Russia is evil. Now, Russian assets are in charge of our country, and suddenly, Republicans say Russia isn’t bad? This is exactly why I’ve given up on party affiliations—neither party cares about the average moderate citizen, as the Constitution was set up to protect and as our Founding Fathers envisioned. Something is happening in this country that I can’t wrap my head around. What’s next—normalizing relations with North Korea and kicking South Korea to the curb? I can see why people voted for him. They really thought his talk was all bluster and that he would actually help with inflation. Well, nope—I don’t see that happening. And no, I didn’t vote for either candidate because both were bad in different ways, and the party system desperately needs reform. I v...

I enjoyed Heart of Champions. It could have been a little shorter, but the performances were strong and the story was compelling.