Category: Uncategorized

I haven’t posted much, mostly because there hasn’t been much noteworthy the last several weeks; wake up, go to work, go home, go to sleep — rinse and repeat as needed.

Deciding to squirrel away every last penny to perform the monumental insanity of buying a house in the next 8 or so years really curtails the adventures as well.

Anyway… I typically get to work between 6 and 6:30am, which is 2-ish hours before everyone else does, simply to get a chance to get some work done before I get interrupted every 5 minutes with whatever the current most important thing in the world is.

Well this morning I pull into my appointed parking spot, get out of the car, and am met by this very pleasant little old lady and her dog.

It turns out that she lives across the street at the upscale retirement community (starting at a mere $3300 a month) and her balcony faces our parking lot, so she sees me arrive every morning. And this morning she decided to stop by and say hi.

We chatted for about 15 minutes; she was curious about what I do, why I’m always the first car in the lot, where I’m from, etc., etc. She was super nice and clearly a bit lonely, and was just looking for someone to talk to I think.

For my part I got her to laugh and when we parted ways she had a smile. I promised to wave when I get to work in the morning, and told her I’d be happy to chat any morning that she was out and about.

“My secret? Social services are well funded, orphanages are places of love, the pediatric wings in hospitals are state of the art. Thanks to these efforts no child has the tragic backstory necessary to become the hero that dethrones me.”

Had some guys from “College Hunks Hauling Junk” come by today and haul off some old furniture; three lawyer’s bookcases (basically a book case with a full-width glass door for each shelf), a credenza and shelf unit, and a matching legal filing cabinet…

It took them all of 20 minutes to get rid of it all. Well, 20 minutes and $300…

Anyway, another step towards a nice easy move whenever the day comes.

I picked up some air-tight plastic storage bins for all of my files, old artwork and supplies, and all of the miscellaneous computer parts I tend to acquire, which really helped consolidate things. So now all of the ‘stored’ stuff fits in my closet, which means it will also fit in my car.

Progress!

It’s been a couple of months since my last post. In my defense though, it’s been crazy-busy at work and that always curtails my desire to do much more than stare at a wall when nothing is going on.

My adventures in RoE came to an end about a month ago — for similar reasons as last time…

I’ve been running RP sims in Second Life for over 15 years now, so I can say with some authority that RoE’s biggest hurdle is literally the people running it.

It’s somewhat frustrating to see so much potential frittered away on nepotistic hugbox politics, railroaded MacGuffin story-lines to support Mary Sue staff, and the fact the place is little more than a sex sim.

I don’t want to get too far into the weeds on the subject, but RoE just isn’t a nice place to spend time — for me.

Some of the folks I’ve worked with on previous RP sims in Second Life have continued to work on the idea of spinning up another effort… But they are all systems people, so I figure they’ll be agonizing over fiddly combat rules, the statistical analysis of randomness, the economic vagaries of money sinks, and how to automate all of it pretty much forever.

Whatever keeps them entertained I guess. 🙂

I got a proposal for the genera, setting, races, ability templates, major plot arcs, and all of the other story stuff done back in September. So now I just tune in to watch the discussions of how to subtract numbers from numbers with style.

On my side of things I’m still working in my Caerth setting. Once things settle out I’d like to pen a short story or three in setting and see if there’s any interest in publishing them. If so, I’ll add ‘write novels’ to my list of things I’d like to do when I retire.

Speaking of Caerth, I had a reference sheet done for Painless (an RL friend of mine) for his inclusion into said stories.

I might overwrite Raeshlavik with Painless as Valinye’s ‘guardian and confidant’ in the setting, just so I’m not writing both parts. That and it’s a role Painless filled for many years in Roanoak for the Empress, so he kind of fits already.

I’ll probably not run a version of Caerth in SL though… SL is such a cesspit these days, and even thinking about it has exhausted my desire to mollify the masses there.

I can use it to illustrate things though…

Anyway, outside of that my ten year plan is still inching along. The multitudinous number of government folks who involved themselves in this effort have all finally aligned, so now I can actually purchase the land I agreed to purchase almost a year ago.

The meeting with the attorney to sign the paperwork should happen this month, depending on schedules.

Not a ton of things to update this time around.

The land stuff for my Ten Year Plan is slooooowly moving forward at bored government functionary speed… The right of way has been settled, as well as the road leading to it, and none of the ‘neighbors’ had an issue with it. So there are now two flags demarking where the gate will eventually be, and in another few weeks I’ll have the paperwork so that I can start on the utilities.

In other news, I’m still playing around in RoE even though two of our party of ten have already fallen.

One was for not really fitting the theme, which as someone who has run a dozen RP sims I can understand the admin request. The character wasn’t really ‘sci-fi’ — right down to the elvish name, and the admin that took then player aside to see if they could fit theme a bit better was actually really nice about it… But the player didn’t take it well and rage-quit.

The second was for somehow having access to the admin section of the sim’s forums, and then going to an admin with ‘look what I know’ — and then being banhammered for it.

The rest of us though are still progressing with our plans to be a cross between the Mafia and the Illuminati.

Myself and a few friends are back in “Remnants of Earth”, a roleplay sim in Second Life that takes place in a fictional future version of our solar system where alien races and humans – both natural and genetically engineered – vie over the scraps of a long-abandoned Earth.

And this is, of course, an opportunity for me to make things in 3D.

The “Monte Cristo” is one-part lounge and one-part secret base for a mysterious group known as ‘Zenith’.

Last night I dipped a toe back into “Remnants of Earth” aka “RoE” on Second Life.

I left that setting about six months ago due to how the administration handles the place, and the fact I was in a pure combat faction because everyone I know in SL was too — but I’m not an endless combat sort of person and it was frustrating.

Since then everyone else has bailed on the setting as well — for the admin reasons. There have been a few false starts on getting our own setting running again, but as of yet not much traction.

During this I’ve poked around a few other RP sims, and if I’m allowed there due to my avatar choice the settings usually leave a lot to be desired… And I wind up back at square one.

I have my own sim which I usually use for my own settings, but I let an old acquaintance use it and it’s mostly turned into yet another adult-rated heavy-petting sim — just like the other 20,000 adult sims in SL. So I don’t spend much time there either. That stuff just isn’t my scene.

Sooo, it’s back to RoE — at least for a bit.

Right as I was departing RoE they were amidst a big update to their RP and dice rules. So upon my return I’ve not only had a chance to re-do my character a bit (free respec!) but I’m also having to re-figure everything out… RoE is remarkably complicated and generally user-hostile as far as systems are concerned, so there’s a learning cliff to conquer.

My character was still in the database, so I still have my inventory and my amassed wealth — which is handy as I need to sell all of my magical paraphernalia and replace it with ‘speech craft’ stuff.

See, the magic stuff in RoE was comical at best when I last played, but in the intervening six months it’s gotten downright ridiculous. So I’ve re-styled Valinye as a semi-famous recording artist and given her a selection of the new Speech Craft skills, which makes her more of a support character — and that suits me just fine.

I’ll probably write up the new back story today between work-related things here at work today. It’ll be good to get in some writing.

It’s been a few days since the last update.

A little over a week ago one of the players from one of my RP settings in Second Life passed away, and that’s hit me pretty hard. It’s one thing to see people you know of pass away, but it’s another when it’s someone you spend time talking to and hanging out with — even if it was only virtually.

I never got to meet Melissa in the really real world, but I’m not sure that really matters in this day and age.

She had been in the hospital dealing with an illness since late November, and we rode the roller-coaster of better and worse with her right up to the end.

My settings in Second Life have seen literally thousands of players come and go, but losing someone who was so close to the ‘inner core’ is an uncomfortable first. And I’m still processing it.

Other than that, I’m still working on my ten year plan and doing whatever I can to make that goal… It’s tough though. It seems like every time I turn around there’s another issue that needs to be dealt with or an unforeseen expense that sets me back, and I continue to not make much headway. But I’ll keep beating my head against the wall in the hopes it gives way before I do.

In about a week I will hit the big Five-O, and that has me a bit o.O as well… Fifty years is frightfully long period of time; it’s been a fantastic ride though. I’m pleased with all I’ve done and seen so far, and that’s all anyone can really ask for I guess.

Oh, and here’s a picture from my office window for anyone who might be winter impaired. 🙂

The latest variant of plague started making the rounds here at work early last week, and by Thursday the other I.T. person here was out sick.

By Sunday I had fallen as well, and I was pretty much dead until last evening.

I’m doing much better today, but still would like to avoid the yearly bouts of flu… Being sick is simply no fun.

Other than that, I’ve been doing some writing…

For work I’ve been generating ‘blog posts’ for the web site to try and generate traffic. It’s all boring long-headed stuff about how ARM will probably change the CPU landscape in 2019, or how the current ‘fix it in a patch’ software release mentality is ruining developers and publishers.

Personally I’ve been kicking around a series of adventures in my Caerth setting — which is the magipunk world of anthropomorphic people, magical technology, Victorian sensibilities, and unspeakable extra-planar horrors. I might get pieces of it running in Second Life for giggles, though the SL setting will be more of a “Jorkens Story” in that the in-world location will exist in parallel to all of the other SL RP locations.

My “rifts” that form such a central piece of my settings and allow for the import and export of characters are invaluable when working with a system like SL which offers limitless character possibilities… So, I might as well amplify that a bit and set up the sim as an RP hub of sorts.

I’m still fighting with CenturyLink over them taking six months to not get service connected at work, and then billing me for two months of that service which, as mentioned, doesn’t exist.

I keep having to email the regional supervisor because no one else at CenturyLink will respond to emails or phone calls. And while my last email to him was answered with a “I’ll look into it for you” on Monday, I’ve not heard anything since.

Which is completely par for the course.

What’s really humorous is that the exact same thing happened to the realtor on the second floor when they tried to get CenturyLink service a couple of years ago…

A communications company with zero communications skill.

Anyway, a month ago Comcast Business showed up at the door asking if they could put an amplifier in the utility closet on the first floor so they can get service over to the couple hundred new apartments to the east of the building… I said sure, and then given CenturyLink’s general ineptitude asked Comcast what they could do for service.

Comcast’s initial bid was exactly the same as Level-3’s cost, ~$3000 a month, which is what I’ve been paying for like 15 years now. I mentioned this, and they came back with a price that was about $1200 a month cheaper.

Nice!

But I also know Comcast, so I eventually got the salesman to cough up the complete cost per month — hidden fees and charges included — and it was still a decent enough savings… So I signed on the dotted line on the 12th of December.

And, as salesmen do, as soon as I signed he vanished; I didn’t hear anything until Monday, which was an email stating Comcast wants a deposit of $4300 for “reasons”.

I emailed back asking “why?” My company has been in business for 20 years, our credit is stellar, and as mentioned I’ve been paying ~$3000 a month to Data-393/TimeWarner/Level-3 for over 15 years now. I can’t see any reason to eat into any savings over Level-3 with some arbitrary ‘just-because’ deposit.

Well, he finally responded about an hour ago with the same request; no reasons, no explanation. Just a number and a question about how soon I can cut the check.

I need to figure out how hardball I want to play this… I have Level-3 service, which is truly stellar (though this is slowly changing now that CenturyLink owns them), and don’t really need to change providers.

But I also don’t want to waste any more time on this project…

Decisions, decisions…

The glasses I ordered a few weeks ago to replace the ones that broke like a month ago came in today!

Now for the acclimation to the stronger prescription, and the progressive lenses… I won’t have to look over my glasses like some sort of angry librarian anymore.

It’s taking some effort to not move my head when I change my viewing distance though, and because I still do, the random focus changes are making me a bit woozy. :/

I’ll adapt though.

The glasses are extremely high-tech and examples of the latest in material sciences; automatic polarization as well as darkening, blue-blocking to make my 17 hours a day in front of a monitor easier, made out of some sort of plastic that they use for astronaut helmets, and the variable focus length based on where I’m looking.

All in all, living in the future ain’t half bad…

There were no mid-week updates as I was just too busy; there are only two I.T. folks at work, and the one who isn’t me was on vacation.

There isn’t a lot to talk about, but I should do some sort of status ping on occasion, no?

Yesterday and today have been a marathon of transcoding all of my old DVDs into files on a storage drive. I’ve not watched an actual DVD in probably a decade, so it was funny to see just how small DVD video is compared to today’s video card and monitor capabilities…

The above is a screenshot of the desktop on my 3440 x 1440 monitor as I write this. And the unicorn picture on the left is raw output from my 25th anniversary remaster of The Last Unicorn.

That’s 1:1 DVD video… 720 x 480 29.97 fps straight from the disc… It looks like a postage stamp these days.

Handbrake is currently transcoding Dragonheart — A New Beginning from the raw mpeg-2 DVD files (~6 gigs) to smaller and easier to store h.264 files (~1.5 gigs). To do this I have a custom profile that I use to ensure it looks as good as possible — which also takes about an hour to do the job even with an i9-9900x cpu running at close to 5ghz.

And that’s about it. I’m just enjoying some quiet time here at home and wandering down memory lane via the movies I’ve collected over the years. 🙂

Welp, here we are — 2019.

The first of the year holds several rituals for me; one of which being the great annual password reset… 

I generally get January 1 as a day off, so I have all day to go through and change passwords. And being as I use very complex passwords and never use the same password twice across a hundred or so web sites, it really is an all day ordeal.

But I’ve never had an account hacked, so I guess it’s working.

Another ritual is the paperwork purge; where I go through and destroy any filed paperwork that is too old to be useful anymore… It puts a couple more hours on my poor old shredder every year, but better safe than sorry. 

I finished my big backup and archive transfer yesterday too — so that’s a hundred pounds of old media I don’t have to deal with anymore.

Tomorrow it’s back to the grind though; my first order of business is dealing with CenturyLink who, once again, billed us for services that never worked or were never even connected… I’m really not sure why this is so hard for them, but with each passing interaction I see that telling them to pack sand was the better idea.

Other than that, I’ll just be trying to stick to my few New Year’s resolutions;

Downsize.

I’ve already started on this one.

Spend less and bank more for the upcoming land and house expenses.

This one will impact my friends more than it will impact me, as over the years it’s become well known that I’ll cover pretty much anything in the name of fun… Not anymore. If there is to be an night out, trip to a restaurant, or some other event, folks can pay their own way.

Write more short fiction.

This is cheap and entertaining, so I should do more of it.

Spend less time and energy trying to appease problematic people.

I always try far, far too hard to work out some mutually agreeable resolution with people who don’t want to agree on anything. I should really just be washing my hands of the problem and moving on if they don’t want to meet halfway.

In other news, I’ve been playing around with “Crowfall”; that game I invested into a few years ago. Crowfall has hit a point where it’s really quite playable, even though it’s still pre-alpha — and I’ve been having a lot of fun with it.

As an investor, I got to submit a bunch of names and such for the procedurally generated worlds, and the very first United States ‘campaign’ map was named Roanoak after my roleplay setting — so some interesting history there.

So far I’ve generally stuck with the “Elkin” ranger I decided on when the races and classes were announced years ago… There’s just something about being a half-deer woodsman / archer that I find entertaining. A deer that hunts humans… 😀

I even have an illustration from about two years ago based on how I pictured things eventually working out in the game:

I’m happy to say I wasn’t far off. 😉

I’m sitting here today copying my giant stack of ancient backup CD/DVDs to SSD. Some of these CDs date back to when CDs were invented — here’s one from 1992, from the old NEC CDR-83 I had on my 386/40 which had 20 megs of ram and used a Future Domain 1680 SCSI adapter…

And they still work!

But I’m tired of lugging them around, and eventually there won’t be any way to read them.

For example; I still have some stuff from my Atari days, and a box of mementos from my decade with Amiga… Some day I’ll find a way to pull all of that old stuff into a new format for my personal museum, but currently it’s all locked into formats that cannot be read.

Over the weekend I DoD wiped the big collection of external drives I’ve had floating around forever… Like an old TowerStor that uses Firewire 400, an antique 2-bay NAS drive from when when NAS drives were the new hotness, and two 5-bay SansDigital eSATA towers full of 750G Caviar Black drives…

It’s been an adventure trying to get adapter cards that haven’t seen use since the Y2K bug to work — but so far so good. You can always count on the Linux community to keep a candle burning for antique hardware. 🙂

I’m also down-sizing my furniture and a lot of the extracurricular cruft I’ve accumulated, and expect to be back down to a single car trip to move myself by the end of 2019.

I’ll still have all of my original inked artwork from back when I did art, and a rather large collection of collectibles from five decades of conventions… And all of my character stuff for my stories and RP settings too… But, in general, if I’ve not touched it since I moved into the condo a year and a half ago — it’s going away.

And that’s one of my New Years resolutions — downsize!

Roughly two weeks left in 2018; what a ride.

Next week starts the big vacation period here at work — no one will be here, which is always nice as it means I can get some real work done without interruptions.

I.T. always does its best work when the rest of the company is off partying, mostly because we can turn things off without people panicking.

Which shows the dichotomy in job descriptions; if I need information from a project manager or one of the sales drones it might take a week to hear back, if I hear back at all. Meanwhile if one of my file servers is down for 30 seconds it’s curtains for the free world, cats and dogs begin to cohabitate, and I have a line of torches and pitchforks in front of my office…

I guess it’s nice to be needed. 😀

There seems to be a never-ending supply of Mondays…

The art project from the weekend was approved with no alterations, so that was nice. I handed over the .png files (a 300 dpi 2500px and a 72dpi 600px) and haven’t heard anything since, so I’ll assume the marketing folk figured out how to resize a graphic in whatever they’re using to compose emails.

Yesterday morning my six year old spectacles finally succumbed to the second law of thermodynamics. After some clever wire-wrapping though (a skill we elder nerds possess) I got them back together well enough to hopefully last until the optometrist appointment.

The earliest I could get in was the 27th — so here’s to hoping my patch job holds together for a couple of weeks.

Work-wise, as I was walking out yesterday the sales director caught me in the halls and started in about needing a graphic for something… He wasn’t exceptionally clear on the intent for said graphic, but it needs to be ‘non-denominationally holiday-like’ and incorporate the company logo — and he needs it by early next week (naturally) — so that’s what I’ve been up to today.

I’ve sent in a rough idea, but marketing doesn’t work weekends because that’s what us little people do — so I won’t know if this stab in the socially woke holiday advertisement darkness is close until Monday.