Category: Uncategorized

Took a stroll to look at everyone’s lights tonight; some really impressive displays out there.

I also find it interesting how much blue LEDs have changed the color of the holiday. 😀

The new lease for the townhouse arrived the other day, because I have to give them 60 days notice. So I need to accept or refuse the new lease by January 6th for the March 6th deadline.

It’s already been most of a year? Time definitely flies…

Anyway, the complex was sold to some new company a couple months back. This has, of course, come with certain changes — some good (hopefully), and some bad.

The good stuff is that it sounds like the new company might actually start enforcing a few rules around here, like people cleaning up after their dogs and not parking in front of the garages at night.

The latter is a problem because all of the garages face each other across a fairly narrow driveway, and when someone parks out there, the rest of us with anything bigger than a bicycle have a hard time getting out.

The down-side is they’re raising the rent $150 a month; from $1890 to $2040. And while this wouldn’t be too bad, by the time they get done with ‘grounds fees’, ‘storm drain fees’, ‘trash fees’, ‘common area gas, electric, water and sewer fees’, ‘pest control fees’, ‘administration fees’ and even ‘payment processing fees’, that $1890 turns into about $2200. So I’m guessing $2040 will work out to about $2500 a month — or $625 a paycheck just to keep a roof over my head.

My CFO / real estate mogul is still working on the details for the place I mentioned a while back, and says to give him 10 more days to work it out — but even then it’ll still be close to $2500 a month… Though in a larger, nicer place.

It’s just getting too darn expensive to live in Denver.

I walked over to the local Village Inn to get a little outside time and to pick up my breakfast. With the zombies and all, even at T-minus-5 days until Christmas everything is deserted…

The above is the sad little strip mall near my place… Most of the stores are empty now; out of business because of the lockdown that’s lasted most of a year. The theater is the taller bit there on the right. Not sure if they’re going to make it either…

I don’t normally get much in the way of gifts during the holidays; my few friends will ask if there’s anything I’d like for the holidays, and I’ll say “that you have a really great Christmas”. 

See, it’s easier if I just buy myself something. While there’s no real surprise with this method, there are also fewer hassles with returns. 🙂

Conversely I like giving the few friends I have something out of the blue. So this year I sent the gift of meat.

Christensen Ranch is the place I’ve been buying my meats from since the zombie apocalypse started. Well, it turns out they do gift boxes too, so that’s what I did this year.

Painless and Griffy, friends of mine from down in southern Colorado (and technically my neighbors down there), returned the favor and got me this ginormous gift box from Swiss Colony:

I love Swiss Colony meat and cheese sets, but rarely get them for myself because it’s super easy to burn yourself out on the stuff— so this is awesome! 

I definitely need to go get more crackers though…

And last but not least, my custom watch band arrived this evening. 2-day delivery took two weeks thanks to the USPS — but the band is really nice and even fits my 8.5″ gorilla wrists.

It’s brand new, so it’s stiff and a little tight, but that will work out over time because it’s leather.

The Apple Watch works with it; ECG, Blood Oxygen, Heart Rate — all of the sensors appear to function just fine.

It was made by Rockstar Leatherworks, and now that I’ve seen his work first-hand — I can recommend him if you need something leather made.

I’m on “vacation”, which just means it can take 30 minutes to an hour for me to get around to the current world-ending problem at work. My roommate also starts vacation today, so if anything physical happens at work, one of us will have to drive in — which takes all of ten minutes — so they’ll survive.

This morning I splurged and had breakfast delivered from Black Bear Diner over by work.

I’ve been meaning to get over there and try their reportedly epic breakfast which apparently results in hour-long lines at the other locations, but they opened right as the zombie apocalypse happened. So, it’s just not been possible to actually go there when I have had the time.

It turns out that they do pickup and delivery as well, but they don’t open until 8am, which is several hours after I get to work or have already eaten on weekends and that’s made it difficult too.

This morning though, I finally pulled it off and got the “Breakfast Combo Family Meal”; which appears to be the sort of thing they offer for catering and says it feeds four. After adding a coffee, a sweet tea for the roommate, the delivery fee, and taxes it was about $50… It arrived in 30 minutes, in various serving trays, and was really good; scrambled eggs, bacon, country potatoes, biscuits, condiments… The works!

Of the lot, the biscuits were the impressive/scary part; they basically fill a ten-inch cake-pan with biscuit, bake it, and cut the final product into four pieces. The end result is a really good biscuit, but it’s a really dense four inch cube… I ate half of one and hit my bread limit. 

The roommate seems happy with the breakfast spread as well, and he’s super picky — so I guess it’s a win.

In other news the USPS says my new watch band is apparently going to be delivered today… I’m not going to hold my breath, but it’s nice to get some kind of indication out of them that the package still exists.

I’m also currently tracking the UPS delivery truck that contains my Atari VCS as it meanders around the neighborhood.

Soon ™.

I’m still waiting for my new Apple Watch band to arrive; apparently the USPS is having some problems and packages are backed up nation-wide.

The website says it’s still on a truck somewhere between Minnesota and Denver, even though the artisan who made the band shipped it on the 6th… So much for paying for 2-day delivery.

From what I’ve been reading on sites like Esty, where lots of artisans are having the same issue getting products to purchasers, I’ll be lucky if I see it before Christmas.

Then there’s FedEx, who tends to always be a day or two later than they estimate (because it takes time to mangle the package or something). They also like to leave things at my visible to the world garage door (where if I didn’t have a backup camera I’d run over the package) versus the secluded and covered front porch — because that would require a dozen more steps I guess. This is how the case for my MacBook Air arrived; fortunately the case was fine even if the box looked like it was delivered via WWII.

UPS on the other hand is super professional, doesn’t load their trucks via trebuchet, delivers on time (usually within a three hour window even), and has no issue putting the package on the porch.

Which leads to the next thing UPS will be delivering to me…

Back in May of 2018 I paid into an Indigogo campaign for a bit of reimagined retro wizardry; the Atari VCS.

Atari and I go way back… The family had an original PONG machine in ’76, then a four-switch 2600 sat on top of the living room TV back in ’80. I still recall coming home from school to my mother playing breakout, which was so incongruous for my totally non-technical mother that it sticks with me to this day.

In 1986 I got an Atari 800XL, and used that machine until I picked up the Amiga 500 in ’89 after making the really hard decision between it and an Atari 520ST.

Here we are a couple of decades later and Atari has re-embraced their console roots with the new VCS — and I joined them in the name of 80’s memories.

Initially the new VCS was supposed to be delivered July 2019, then October 2020 — which came and went with louder portions of the Internet proclaiming that the new VCS would never amount to anything but cash-grab vaporware.

Much to their chagrin I’m sure, my “collector’s edition” VCS, two classic joysticks, and two modern controllers shipped yesterday and UPS is telling me it’ll arrive Friday at around 5pm.

I’ll be sure to post some pictures and my thoughts on the thing next weekend — shipping willing. 🙂

It’s been a few years — five in fact — since the infamous Bigfoot of fast-food last roamed the Rockies.

Of course I’m referring to the McRib; McDonald’s here today-gone tomorrow BBQ pork sandwich. Which is available for some random period of time right now.

The McRib is pretty polarizing; people either love it or despise it. I’m in the former group as I’m a big fan of BBQ anything — even if calling the McRib BBQ is being extremely generous.

Either way, I like them and decided that today I’d go get one.

I personally think that the mystique comes from the sandwich’s random availability. It’s ‘okay’ as far as pork product goes, but because it’s such a once in a long while thing it makes it perceptually better.

The patty is basically Spam, the sauce is what you get in those little cups with your McNuggets, the onions and pickles are typical burger fare, and the bun is pretty basic — but combined it’s just unique enough to be a special treat.

Special enough that I went out in the snow to slog over to the local McD’s to get one.

I used to eat these a lot back in the 80’s, back when McRibs came with a special hot sauce that was a lot like Wendy’s chili sauce. So when I do manage to score one of these things, it’s a bit of a way-back moment for me… Sitting in my ’69 Toyota Corona at the McDonald’s just down the road from Golden High School during lunch.

Good times. 🙂

I got my end-of-year bonus, and that handily paid off the M1 laptop and the bespoke case I had made for it.

The case arrived last evening, by the way, and it’s really nice. It’s black calf-skin with blue stitching and my initials embossed on the cover in metallic blue. There’s something about leather that just makes things nice to carry around. And it’s more ‘grippy’ than the bare aluminum of the laptop, so the M1 Air is less likely to get dropped.

I’ve mentioned here a few times that my CFO is primarily a real estate mogul first and the CFO here at work second, and due to this he’s usually got some ultra-nice property he’s trying to set me up with… Well yesterday he signed on a place over in Pioneer Hills and mentioned that I should take a look at it.

It’s a 3br, 3bath, with a study and a ‘pro’ kitchen that includes a gas range — which is a rarity here in Colorado. The pictures are really nice; front of the house opens to a wooded nature preserve, so it has a lot of that wilderness ambiance I like. And it overlooks Cherry Creek state park, which means it has an unobstructed view of the mountains to the west. Which is also nice.

The garage is bigger, which would be really nice given the 1.75 gar garage I have now, and the house itself is about 600 sq feet bigger than the townhouse… Not that I really need any more room, but the layout is better and more ‘upscale’. There’s an unfinished basement as well, which isn’t included in the square foot numbers — so tons of storage space for all the stuff I don’t have.

The Pioneer Hills area is pretty nice and there’s quite a bit in walking distance. And just to the south are the Corner Star and Arapahoe Crossing malls.

My current lease is up in March, so I have some time to kick it around… I’m really not interested in moving again, but it is a pretty nice place and the numbers are right.

Welp, here we are — December 2020. TDay is now firmly behind us, Christmas is still ahead of us, and the long shadows of winter sunshine makes for short days and chilly evenings.

Things at work are starting the wind-down that happens in the last few weeks of the year — when everyone is either on vacation, or at work but still mostly on vacation. 🙂

I’m setting up for my personal end-of-year rituals; data storage and archive maintenance, physical paperwork filing maintenance, password and login maintenance… All of the things one needs to do in this robots and flying cars era to make sure they don’t get digitally mugged.

I’m also starting the acquisition of supplies for Christmas dinner. Today was making sure I have enough paper and plastic supplies for the event.

I’ve been using “Instacart” quite a bit over the last six months or so — in fact my latest grocery order for the above items just arrived a little bit ago. It’s a bit more spendy than actually going to the shops myself, but I don’t have to actually go to the shops so it allows me to get more done in less time…

The hour that someone else is spending driving to the store, making sure their mask is on according to mandate, going the right way down the isles, and maintaining social distance is an hour I get to spend cleaning the house, working on the car, doing laundry, or some other chore that needs to be done over the weekend. So it works out for me.

Lets see… Oh, the M1 MacBook Air is still impressing me. I’ve been using it daily as both a replacement for the 16″ MacBook Pro I used for work and the iPad Pro I used for watching “TV” in bed.

With regard to work, I have a hard time seeing the performance difference between the thousand dollar Air and the five-thousand dollar Pro. At the same time the Air makes a better iPad than the iPad because it runs longer on a charge, has a better screen, and has far better audio.

Definitely a win for Apple — it’s a really impressive bit of kit.

The new iMac is impressive as well. the 5K screen is gorgeous (as expected) and it runs all of my x86 tools and games with aplomb. It’s amazing with this new remote work paradigm as well with its new webcam and pro-grade mics. With the amount of time I spend in front of a computer for both work and entertainment, it’s nice to have top-of-the-line gear.

So, I guess my Christmas / Birthday gifts to myself worked out this year. 🙂

The last two Christmas gifts to myself are custom-made leather accessories. One is a bespoke case for the Air and the other is a custom watchband for the Apple Watch…

I seem to have a bit of an issue with the Apple Watch in that it irritates my wrist where the sensor sits. I’ve had similar issues with glass-bottom watches in the past, where they don’t allow my wrist to ‘breathe’ and I get a bit of a rash.

The leather band that’s being made is pretty similar to the bands I used in the 80’s in that it’s a leather cuff that the watch sits on top of, though now said cuff has a round hole in it for the watch sensors. Hopefully this will still allow the watch to do all of its watch-things while getting the sapphire sensor off of my wrist.

We shall soon see, as the shipping notification for the watchband just arrived in my email. 🙂

My four days off went better than they usually do in that I actually took four days off.

I was technically at work until about midnight on Wednesday working out why these new (for work) Fanvil IP phones wouldn’t do VPN. Once that was resolved, I spent Thursday through Sunday either doing the food coma thing or playing World of Warcraft.

The holiday lunch/dinner/leftovers for several days went off without a hitch. There was ten pounds of bone-in glazed spiral-cut ham, green bean casserole, mashed potatoes, turkey gravy, diner rolls, and a chocolate mouse cake for desert. I still have probably three pounds of ham, and most of the cake left.

The cake was amazing, but I’m not much of a sweets person and one slice was enough to sate me for another year. And I’m about ham’d out — I’ve had ham, ham sandwiches, ham cheese and crackers, ham and baked beans… I’m done.

I tend to set out a pretty big spread for the final two holidays of the year as I want to make sure I have plenty in case anyone I know doesn’t have anywhere to go. But with zombies and all this year, where the “Guestapo” has been breaking up family meals because of the lockdown mandates, it was just me and the roommate.

 The rest of the time off was spent plumbing the depths of the afterlife in World of Warcraft’s latest expansion.

“Shadowlands” has been pretty good so far. I really like the look and feel of Ardenweald and Bastion, and accordingly that’s where I’ve spent most of my time. My Tauren Paladin is working with Ardenweald and my Draenei Mage is teamed up with Bastion, and both are level 60 and working on the “Torghast” quests to get access to the Runecarver.

As I surmised with the Endless Halls maze for the “Lucid Nightmare” mount, the Endless Halls was a tech-demo for procedurally generated dungeon content… And Torghast is, quite literally, the end-game for that tech demo.

Ultimately Toghast is pretty ‘rinse-repeat’ and I can already tell I won’t be spending a great deal of effort on it. For now though it adds enough variation to the theme to allow me to slog through it for specific quests.

Of the two characters I think the Mage is having the easier time. While the mage dies quite often and the paladin has yet to be killed, the improved damage output of the mage just improves the overall flow of the game.

Also the storyline for “Shadowlands” has been quite good; at least the two small slices I’ve seen so far have been. Ardenweald wins the contest though with one deft storytelling move; bringing back a beloved character in a well constructed non-cringe fashion.

WoW, as a game, has had a few deeply emotionally impactful quest elements over the years, such as “Crusader Bridenbrad”, and the death of Ysera in the Legion expansion. You can now add the return of Ysera in Shadowlands to that list.

As of Friday we’re back to March lockdown levels:

Just when things were starting to feel ‘normal’ again…

And in case that wasn’t enough, this morning at 9am we all got the emergency alert on the phone:

I’m officially tired of zombies…

While I hear that celebrating Thanksgiving is frowned upon these days for reasons ranging from ‘catching a case of the zombies via direct eye contact with someone’ to ‘some people did something several generations ago and we should all be mad about it now’ — as an official crotchety old dude I don’t care and plan to put myself into a food coma anyway.

The biggest hassle for me is actually acquiring the fixin’s for said food coma.

Given the semi-perpetual state of paranoid delusion in today’s world, going and physically participating in the act of shopping is entirely too ridiculous for me… The sight of someone masked up behind a face shield, wearing gloves and a painter’s jumpsuit, and eyeing everyone around them as if they are plague personified while manhandling the produce tends to make me point and laugh. And that tends to label me as an uncaring jerk by everyone in the vicinity…

They’re not wrong, but I should still maintain appearances in order to prevent a visit from the Ministry of Love.

Fortunately there’s this new system called the ‘gig-economy’ that exists to turn mechanical wear on a vehicle into minimum wage. So I just order what I need and wait patiently for it to magically appear on my doorstep via underpaid delivery fairy.

In general I’ve been averaging an 80 percent success rate in actually getting what I order via dice-toss-delivery, which is apparently good enough to keep me using it.

Anyway, this sort of process is how I solved the Thanksgiving dilemma; I have a full-on feast arriving via UPS from HoneyBaked Ham.

My usual holiday ritual used to involve standing in line at the local HoneyBaked Ham store a few days prior to whatever food-based holiday was on the calendar. Now I have a big box of frozen stuff showing up, which will then go into my freezer until a few days before the event.

Shipping added a bit to the overall cost, of course, but I think it was worth it to avoid the potential problems with visibly exceeding my festivity ration for a verboten holiday.

I don’t really “cook” all that much outside of microwaving stuff, mostly because I have a roommate who kind of leaves the kitchen in a shambles all the time and I’m anti-cleaning up after other people.

But that doesn’t mean I can’t cook — after all, I was once a sous chef. I think Wolf might still have my apron from the restaurant I worked at back in the 80’s.

Well, tonight I decided to do some cooking and after dicing, chopping, caramelizing, and boiling made sour cream and onion chicken penne.

Broccoli, diced chicken, penne pasta, cream cheese, and chicken demi-glace base finished with sour cream, caramelized and crispy fried onions, and a pinch of red pepper flakes.

It was delicious, and being as my roommate literally won’t eat anything more complicated than mac and cheese, I have plenty for lunch tomorrow.

Had to go up on the roof to check on the fiber switch for the outside cameras, so here’s I-225 looking south on this snowy Monday…

It snowed all night and in fact is still snowing right now, which made the drive into work fairly interesting.

Not that the Murano has any issue in the snow, quite the inverse actually — it’s pretty amazing in the snow. It’s all the other people out there who aren’t amazing in the snow that creates those unneeded tense moments…

To compound this, the CDoT snowplows were just getting going when I hit the road at 6am. So, everything is snow-packed and icy from the traffic — which means your stopping distance is roughly a zip code and any sort of hill will have some ill-prepared economy sedan (with optional out of state plates) spinning its front wheels and going 2mph.

I know I say this every year, but CDoT used to be so much better at this winter thing than they have been for the last decade or so. I’m guessing it’s a blend of beancounters nibbling away at funding and tree-huggers whining about too many 5-ton plow-trucks on the road…

Anyway, I got here to the office about 5 minutes before our plow company, so I moved from my usual parking spot to the front of the building to make his job easier. I need to go move the Murano back to my usual spot now that he’s done with the south lot.

Have a great day out there!

It’s pretty typical here in Colorado that the first real snow happens right about halloween — this year is no different.

I’m a big fan of winter, so to celebrate having actual snow I made meatball marinara and garlic toast for lunch… It was delicious, and it was also nice to put on some old Fleetwood Mac, kick back in the chair, eat lunch, and watch the snow fall.

Just a couple of photos I thought were interesting.

The first is something of an alert:

I stopped in at the local Carl’s Jr. for breakfast (they make amazing breakfast burritos) on the way in, and got a reminder that the new expansion is ‘soon’ ™.

When the new expansion drops, I’m sure I’ll be busy delving the new content for a little while — so expect some WoW related posts. 🙂

The second photo for today was taken from the roof of my building:

Today’s draw distance is set pretty low and the neutral density haze setting is cranked all the way up.

For being so bleeding-edge technologically, I’m a bit of a Cro-Magnon when it comes to trendy high-tech gig-economy services. And accordingly today was my first use of “GrubHub” which has been around for years apparently.

Today I’m here at the office, am the only one here, and there’s a very important package that will be delivered today for a project and it needs to be signed for… This of course means there’s about a 100% chance the package will arrive if I step out to get lunch.

Enter crowd-sourced food delivery.

I’ve had Burger King deliver here several times back when they did “BKDelivers”, but apparently they don’t offer this any longer and the URL redirects to GrubHub.

Ordering through the GrubHub website was pretty straight forward; chicken fries, some onion rings, and a large diet soda; about $8 in today’s money if you actually go to BK.

By the time GrubHub was done with fees, tips, charity round-up, and other assorted charges it was $20 even.

I ordered at about a quarter to 11. This is when I usually go get my lunch as it avoids the lunch rush so it takes me 15 minutes to go to BK, order, and get back here. 

It took GrubHub almost an hour to do the same thing, leaving my order at just slightly above room temperature when it finally arrived.

So, from my sample size of one, GrubHub costs over 200% more for nearly 400% worse service. Which I guess is pretty much par for the course here in the 21st century.

It was May in 1980 when the sequel to Star Wars was released; The Empire Strikes Back.

I remember standing in line for the theater there in Longmont with my father. The line wrapped around the front of the theater, into the alley next to it, and around into the parking lot behind the place. The theater was old, the seating was those old steel framed fold-up seats with numbers riveted to the back, and they were super close together to pack as many people as possible into that tiny 1-screen theater…

But it was worth it!

Tonight I revisited this 40 year old memory — though with no line, better popcorn, and nice comfy recliners…

But the movie really stands the test of time.

Something that really stood out to me was that the original trilogy wasn’t afraid to stop and smell the roses; there’s periods of time where nothing happens save for some cinematography.

I think this is a sin for the newer movies, which are frenetic from start to finish.

Also practical effects can often be nicer to look at and more immersive than green screen and CGI… But that might just be because I’m old. 🙂