Category: Uncategorized

I’m coming up on the 55 in a couple of days. Wednesday in fact… I still find it hilarious that I’m a ‘senior citizen’ now.

Normally my birthday is celebrated with some new computer, but this year things are a bit more low-key given the economy and whatnot – and I don’t really need a computer better than the one I built back in October.

So, this year I splurged on a new coat…

I’ve had the same Wrangler fleece lined jean jacket since winter 2008, and a few weeks ago the zipper finally succumbed to entropy – so it was time I guess. Initially I was just going to replace it with the same thing, but after perusing the local ranch store I discovered that Wrangler hasn’t made that jacket for a decade now, and the closest thing they offer these days is really cheap and flimsy and probably won’t last a year.

So I got to thinking about what was probably the best, warmest coat I’ve ever owned – my Navy issue pea-coat from back in the 80’s. And this sent me down the rabbit hole to locate another one.

It turns out that it’s not exactly easy to get a quality wool coat these days. Everything is cheap Chinese crap designed to put you on a yearly subscription to replace it, so things like ‘rugged’ and ‘heavy duty’ are just buzzwords now. That and everything these days is all about how high-tech it is with fancy shell composites and tricky synthetic fibers to make the coat as light as possible for shipping reasons.

If you want an old-school, heavy, animal-based fabric coat you need to do some legwork.

Anyway, after a week of wandering the Internet I stumbled over Sturm in Germany. Sturm gets mixed reviews from the hardcore tacticool people who think a plate carrier is a fashion statement, but their reproductions tend to get rave reviews from reenactment fans, movie prop people, and normal Joes.

Anyway, I took a chance and ordered an old pattern USN pea coat from them, which took about two weeks to come in from Germany…

I’d have to say this is pretty authentic, having actually worn the real deal back in the 80’s. It’s just as heavy and just as warm as the original, even if it’s a wool blend versus wearing a sheep like in the old days.

Like the original, the threading on the buttons is the weak point, but I’m familiar with how to fix that. The rest of the stitching looks and feels really solid, the liner is pretty nice, and the fit is pretty good… The sleeves are a bit long, but I think I can have that tailored out pretty easy.

Overall the coat was about a hundred bucks, or $40 more than the cheap replacement for my old jean jacket.

I think it was worth it.

Listening to "Roll with the Changes" by REO Speedwagon

Since my last post I’ve had to load Linux Mint on my MacPro 5,1 at work – a MacOS “security update” a couple of weeks ago did in the OCLP instance I had set up to run Monterey, so I muttered a quiet “fuck it” and loaded Linux on it.

Initially I was going to load POP!_OS on it like I have on my PC at home, but Pop didn’t like some antique bit of hardware in the MacPro. Mint on the other hand installed just fine and after some under-the-hood wrenching I got all of the fiddly hardware bits working.

Then over the last weekend the SSD in my super cheap refurbished 2013 MacBook Air called it quits, so I replaced it – and that’s where things went pear-shaped…

The 2013 MacBook Air still has a user-serviceable SSD in it, but it also has the “T2” security chip in it, and I was unable to get MacOS to install on the new SSD for ‘security reasons’ – probably because I didn’t install a $500 Apple-blessed M.2 in it.

Fine…

So I spent yesterday getting Ubuntu 23.10 running on the Air, which was kinda complicated because of that thrice-damned T2 that both controls everything and is ridiculously proprietary. The system will run bog-standard Linux just fine, but the keyboard, backlight, trackpad, webcam, sound, wifi, thunderbolt, etc, etc wont work because the T2 controls them and Apple isn’t talking when it comes to reverse engineering the thing to make drivers for anything not-MacOS.

Luckily people aren’t easily dissuaded from doing whatever they want with the stuff they buy, and there are some complicated solutions for the T2 available… All you need to do is recompile the kernel.

Long story short, after about five hours I had “Mantic Minotaur” running on the MacBook Air – along with all of the peripherals. Interestingly, the Air runs better (and cooler) with Linux than with MacOS, probably because Apple doesn’t want people using circa 2013 1Ghz dual-core i3 systems – even if they are obligated to support them for another year or so.

And that’s about it for this update. I’m coming up on my 55th birthday in about two weeks, I passed 20 years in Secondlife last month, and I hit 20 years where I work this year. Some stability I guess. 🙂

Listening to "Subdivisions" by Rush

Well, I gave up on Windows 11 after an entirely too long 90 days…

I installed it as my home desktop OS on October 6th, fought with it on and off over the holidays, and finally dumped it this afternoon in favor of Linux.

What really sealed the deal was the news that came out this morning about the next major update for Microsoft’s OS, which was pretty much nothing but what services and applications Microsoft has managed to shoehorn their pet AI “Copilot” into.

Microsoft is all-in on their AI… I mean, Microsoft is making all of the OEMs replace a key on the keyboard with a new one just for Copilot:

Meanwhile I’m just not interested in offering up more of my personal data to the Machine God. And given that MacOS is now nothing but a glorified iPhone interface the only option left was FOSS.

Not that this is a ‘bad thing’ really. I’ve used POSIX compliant operating systems pretty much since POSIX was a thing – which was 1988 if you’re curious… The difference is I’ve not really used a desktop version of UNIX/Linux since the late 90’s, preferring my command-line operating systems to remain command-line.

So, it’s been a pleasant surprise to see just how far the Linux desktop has come in the last 30 years. For example, I plugged in my backup data drive and dropped to the terminal to mount it – only to discover that it was already there – and the distro I’m using understood all of my bleeding edge hardware without me having to compile anything…

Now, Linux still has some issues that prevent it from being the every-man’s OS – namely that there are still 1×10^32 ways to install a piece of software – and all of them more or less expect you to figure it out. And while there are very few applications that you can just double-click and make go, it’s better than it used to be! (see the above comment about not needing to compile anything)

Overall it took about five hours to get Pop!_OS (a distro from System_76 – a local Linux hardware manufacturer) installed and configured with all of the stuff I need / want. This included Photoshop CS6 – which I’ve been trying to get installed somewhere all year to get off the Adobe SaaS model, Second Life, World of Warcraft, my various office apps, work apps, development tools, music stuff, and other compu-cruft. And three items on that list are Windows apps running in WINE, which required some fairly advanced fiddling to make them work.

All in all the new OS is pretty nice and I’m enjoying the figure-it-out-ness of it… Keeps my think-meat limber.

Listening to "Saved By Zero" by The Fixx

Lines join in faint discord
and the stormwatch brews
a concert of kings
as the white sea snaps
at the heels of a soft prayer
whispered.

Listening to "Dun Ringill" by Jethro Tull

One more trip around the local star complete – on to the next.

Listening to "Wheel in the Sky" by Journey

It’s that time again; the semi-annual review of the year to somewhat consolidate things into a single post.

2023 was, in most ways, a repeat of 2022; the economy is still tits-up so most of my extracurricular efforts happened around the house – usually involving some computer.

Most of the fun stuff of 2023 was reconnecting with a lot of old computers I’d used / owned in the past:

This led to my working with OpenCore for a couple of months, and that led to turning an old Dell XPS into a Hackintosh – which led to buying a new PC over several trips to Microcenter…

The new PC, which is now an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D running 64Gigs of DDR5 and an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX video card has been pretty great, though Microsoft’s insistence on monetizing all user data regardless of system usefulness or stability really lets it down…

I also bought a new MacBook Pro, and then sold it seven months later… The M-series CPUs are pretty great, though Apple’s insistence on everything being an iPhone really lets it down.

I may make the jump to some *nix variant this coming year…

The birthday present I got in 2023 is still working great though. I’m not sure I can ever go back to simple LCD monitors.

Car-wise, my Chrysler 300 is still doing great – I love the gas guzzling monster and I don’t have any plans to replace it any time soon. And speaking of cars my roommate got a truck this year, and he seems pretty happy with it as well.

Other than that, the level of dystopia in 2023 continues to rise – homeless people setting fire to the forest, my roommate’s truck getting broken into, my office getting broken into… All things that, just a few years ago, were things we only read about as happening on the left-coast.

Let’s see, I also engaged in a little geneology and then attempted a new position at work that didn’t work out – I’m not an actual accountant, I just play one for my I.T. department. So, I’m still the CIO – a position I’ve held where I work for about fifteen years now. I’ll hit my 20 years at the company in 2024 – so there’s that I suppose.

Speaking of 20 years – this journal hit 20 years this year, and the domain rihahn.com hits 25 years in August. I’ve been doing this for too damn long.

Other than that, it’s been a year – much like every other year. I can’t complain much as I seem to have made it to the finish line once again.

Listening to "Gypsy" by Fleetwood Mac

In keeping with tradition, my car just passed 5000 miles and here’s the update.

Interestingly, I purchased the 300 on the 10th of August, 2022 – which is about 500 days ago.

5000 miles in 500 days – convenient. That puts me at 10 miles a day on average.

I need to get out more.

Listening to "Crystal City" by Robert Parker

It’s hard for anyone who wasn’t there to understand just how amazing the Amiga was when it arrived in the mid 80’s…

See, prior to the Amiga pretty much everything was 80-column shades of green or amber – or maybe 8 colors via RF modulator on the family NTSC/PAL TV if you were lucky – and suddenly in 1985 there’s this “Amiga 1000” machine that was doing stereo sound, 640×400 resolution, and 4096 colors!

The A1000 was a bit too pricy for a highschooler like me, but it was fun to drool over the thing none the less.

Then, in 1987, the Amiga 500 came out. It did everything the machine above did, but at a price normal people (like me) could afford!

I still remember the first time I saw an A500 in person, in late ’87, which had “that” King Tut image on the screen – and I was totally blown away…

Contrast this with the Atari 800XL I had the year before, in 1986…

Anyway, I really, really, really wanted an Amiga – but I was in the Navy in ’87 and that had a way of messing up my computer plans… I did eventually acquire that dream Amiga though, a year later in 1989, and I used the absolute crap out of it – eventually replacing it five years later in 1994.

Roll the clock forward a few years (30-ish) and I once again have an Amiga 500… Well, at least the soul of one at any rate.

A quick tour:

• The bottom edge is ATX power, MicroSD, USB2, and various power, reset, and status lights.
• The lower left is the voltage regulation section.
• The middle left is 6 megs of ram that the system can access as a mix of chip, fast, or slow ram.
• The top edge is I/O – PS/2 ports, VGA, stereo jack, serial, joystick ports, and 12v barrel.
• The middle right is filled with an MC68SEC000 and level converters, so this uses a real 68K CPU.
• The center of the board is the Xilinx FPGA that synthesizes the Amiga 500’s chipset.
• And just under the FPGA is the ARM controller that handles drive I/O.

And after some fiddling here it is running:

The MC68SEC000 CPU is stable at 60+Mhz, so this is basically an A500 with a 16-bit limited 68030 processor in it. Meaning it’s extremely high-performance while still being electrically 1:1 with an original A500.

I messed around with it for a few hours over the weekend and had a blast rummaging through my old applications and files. I do need to source a 9-pin joystick though… Mostly so I can play Shadow of the Beast. 😀

Listening to "Somebody's out There" by Triumph

Thought this was funny…

Listening to "Dreams" by Van Halen

Back on the 4th I mentioned the Minimig I ordered on the 27th that, in theory, was to arrive on the 6th.

Oh, how wrong I was…

See, in this globalist utopia of nations without borders and third-world manufacturing, things still need to go through customs to ensure all of the fingers in the pie get their piece. And this makes customs its own little circle of bureaucratic hell.

Here’s what my dev board’s trip has looked like so far:

You’ll notice the “Missing Mail” note on the 11th…

This was me taking a hint from the dozens of threads in r/USPS and r/USPS_complaints about Chicago being a postal black hole and suggesting that an official missing mail search often gets packages moving again…

Basically, it’s as close to “I want to speak to your manager” as you can get with the postal service – and it worked! In as much as the package started orbiting around Chicago again…

Anyway, the moral of this story is: Don’t Ever Ship Anything Important Internationally Via USPS… Spend the extra $10-$20 for an actual parcel service like UPS or DHL.

Listening to "The Mountain" by GUNSHIP

As of today, the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) is no more…

The end of an era.

Here’s a couple of my E3 badges: one from 2009 and the other from 2010 – for posterity:

Unlike a lot of folks, I’ve edited out my name, company name, and the barcode for security… It’s never “if” you will upset some crazy on the Internet who will try to get you fired – but “when”.

Listening to "Magic" by The Cars

As I mentioned a few months ago; I’m kinda into music and accordingly I always have some nice stuff for the reproduction of it.

Now I’m not some mental-case audiophile who needs four-figure interconnects for my six-figure component setup… I prefer to do the best I can while still being able to afford things like groceries, so in that vein I tend to acquire gently used stuff like my B&W DM640 speakers or my old Denon AVC-3000. I’ll occasionally spend a couple hundred on some piece of new gear like my Bose Companion 20 computer speakers that I’ve been using for over a decade, but that tends to be once every few years.

For example, for a few years now I’ve been using Audeze LCD-1 cans and a Soundblaster X3 – which is quite respectable for the $500 I spent.

The LCD-1’s are really nice, but the leather cups aren’t big enough for my ears, so they get annoying after an hour or so and I don’t use them as often as I would like. And while the Soundblaster X3 still sounds good, Soundblaster has a real software bloat problem and I hate loading its 20-something apps on the system to make it go… So, for Christmas this year I bought myself a new set of cans and a DAC/AMP…

I tend to prefer planar headphones, but planars that fit my ears tend to be in the $600+ range and that’s just too much in this economy… So, this time around I figured I’d try some regular old speaker headphones and I’ve always liked the fit of Sennheisers – so I found some HD 660S2s on sale and picked them up for $399.

The Sennheisers will support a balanced amplifier connection, and the Soundblaster X3 won’t, so I figured I should replace that too – which is where the FiiO K7 comes in, also on sale for $199.

So, all told it’s the most I’ve spent on audio hardware in a long time – but it sounds amazing! And as a bonus the FiiO doesn’t even need drivers. It just shows up as an audio device and works.

I’ve spent the last few hours just sending random FLAC files to the FiiO / Sennheiser setup and grinning like an idiot. 😀

Merry Christmas indeed!

Listening to "Trashin' The Camp" by Tarzan (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

My roommate is on day three at the hospital; surgery went fine and they got what they were after without complication, so now it’s just recovery from having his insides manhandled for a few hours.

Yesterday was apparently a lot of pain, and today is just sore and tired – so improvement of a sort.

In other news, the roof on my house started getting replaced yesterday, which was a hellish racket for about ten hours; they expect to be done by Sunday… Also, the Minimig I ordered has disappeared into the black hole that is ISC Chicago (International Service Center). No updates on it since the first.

Apparently this isn’t unusual for the Chicago customs office / USPS center, and there are entire reddit forums dedicated to “things being lost in transit through Chicago”… I have to give them 45 days, then I can file a missing package form and possibly order another Minimig.

If I order another one I’m going to offer them whatever it takes to not ship it via Mangle-Mail… UPS, FedEx, DHL all have their own terminals with their own customs and things work sooooo much better with them.

And that’s about it for this update.

Listening to "Magic Power" by Triumph

About once a week for years now I’ve stopped at the Carl’s Jr. near the office and gotten breakfast. And in that time the morning crew and I have gotten to know each other.

The usual process goes something like this; I pull up in my big rumbly sedan at a few minutes after they open at 6am and the voice over the speaker says “Good morning Mr. Miller – the usual?” And I answer “Good morning Rose, yes please.” I then pull around and spend a minute or so chatting with Rose about the weather or whatever before I’m given a large Coke Zero and a steak and egg breakfast burrito, and then head up the street to the office.

Rose is a single mother with two teenagers who works the morning shift at Carl’s Jr. and spends three afternoons a week with some rental maid service. She’s a really nice lady in my experience.

Anyway, this morning I wasn’t greeted by Rose – instead it was a halting synthesized voice welcoming me to Carl’s Jr. and asking if I would like whatever the current special is.

I say no and ask for a steak and egg breakfast burrito – and it assumes this means I want a sausage and egg biscuit. I correct it and after a pause it asks if I would like that as a large combo? No – just the burrito. Would I like a large coffee? No – just the burrito. Would I like two apple pies for a dollar? No – just the burrito.

So, I go back and forth with the robot for a good 5 minutes as it struggles to either upsell me or figure out how to make an order that’s just an entrée and a drink. Meanwhile cars are piling up behind me.

Once I’m satisfied that the robot has understood my order I pull around and encounter a disinterested teenager instead of Rose – and am given a sausage and egg biscuit and a large coffee…

I miss Rose.

Listening to "Los Angeles" by FM-84

Leading up to September 1989 I’d had quite a few different home computers – Sinclair ZX-81, Commodore VIC-20, and an Atari 800XL – but it was in the afternoon of a chilly September in Connecticut, 34 years ago, that I set up the first computer that I actually purchased for myself – an Amiga 500.

I used that Amiga 500 from late 1989 until early 1994 when it was replaced with a generic PC, which is about the longest I’ve ever used a single machine…

Anyway, I’ve always wanted another one just for ‘old time’s sake’ as well as maintaining access to all of the stuff I made on the Amiga over the years, but 30+ year old computers are fraught with complications such as failing components, brittle plastics, weirdly non-standard I/O, and a need for actual CRT-based monitors. And Amiga’s in general are surprisingly expensive here in the sci-fi future – a good condition A-500 that has had the 30+ year old electronics updated can command $600 to $700, and when you throw in a monitor and some shipping you’re looking at a bit over a grand for some nostalgia.

That’s twice what I spent for my original machine and its monitor…

To maintain access to my Amiga files I’ve since used a selection of software emulators such as Cloanto’s “Amiga Forever” to create ADF files, which are bit-copies of the original physical media that I can archive and load into various emulators as needed / wanted. But software emulation, while functional enough, feels ‘fake’ and I want an actual physical Amiga – but one without the above problems.

Basically I want a new A-500 made with new parts and that connects to modern peripherals such as SD cards and LCD monitors.

The current solution to this quandary is a thing called the MiSTer, which uses an Altera Cyclone-V FPGA to create system that emulates the actual circuitry of things like upright arcade machines, old home game consoles, and even a few old computers such as the Amiga.

This thing is very close to an electrical 1:1 to the original hardware of whatever core you load into it, but in its broad scope it leaves a bit to be desired when trying to get an authentic experience. For example, it will emulate anything from an Amiga 1000 to an Amiga 4000 with whatever chipset you desire (OCS, ECS, AGA) and with options for memory and ‘extras’ that never existed back in the day… But it’s weird to just dial-in more ram or processing power on your Amiga whenever you want, and the 680X0 ‘processor’ is also emulated, so there’s some weirdness there too.

And a MiSTer setup runs about $600 – if you can find one – because the DE10 nano board it’s based on can be hard to find.

Enter another FPGA project I discovered called the “MiniMig” for Mini Amiga…

This uses the same type of FPGA magic as the MISTer, but in a more authentic fashion… What the MiniMig does is use a Xilinx Spartan-III FPGA to create the custom chipset in the first-gen Amigas (Agnus, Denise, and Paula), and presents that to an actual Motorola (now Freescale) MC68SEC000 processor (basically a modern package for the old DIP 68000 CPU), an authentic 6MB memory bus, and PIC-based peripheral controller that can handle SD cards and VGA monitors.

In effect, what you get with the MiniMig is an authentic A-1000 / A-500 / A-500+ made with modern components that interfaces to modern peripherals – without all of the puffery one finds on the MiSTer – and all for a mere $350.

Soooo – I bought one as an early Christmas present for myself and it should arrive this week – customs willing – from the Great White North…

— Update —

The NOS KeyTronic keyboard and mouse for the MiniMig came in this evening.

The MiniMig only really understands PS2, so I had to source a keyboard and mouse for it as I had a worrying lack of PS2 peripherals on hand. This has been remedied with a big-ass enter key. 🙂

Listening to "1984" by Saffari

My CFO / real-estate mogul has been renovating a new house for his family for about a year and a half now – and now that he’s moved in, he has discovered a network shortcoming that I’ve been tasked to fix.

See, he bought the place off of some relatives who moved back to Taiwan, and then decided he’d live there after a quick $750,000 renovation. But during this renovation he decided to run everything with wifi as to not see cable jacks / cat6 anywhere… Which isn’t necessarily a bad idea these days, but said house is probably 6000 square feet over three floors and easily a hundred yards from end to end. Hell, the living room area is almost the size of my entire house… There’s even a new six car garage separate from the main house (which has a three-car garage), and it needs internet access as well…

It’s an amazing house, but the scale alone is a challenge for wifi – and that’s before he filled the place with a half dozen TVs, ten Sonos speakers, a wifi-based security system, a dozen wireless cameras, five computers, and all of the general wireless stuff that people have these days like phones, watches, appliances, etc.

Another challenge to this whole thing is said CFO is very much “form over function” and will invariably hamstring himself in order to not see the tech he’s so reliant upon. This is how you get things like the Comcast router, the old wifi router, the camera servers, the security system, and the two IoT hubs for the dozen wireless temperature / water sensors down in the basement in the tiny room that houses the two furnaces and two water heaters and is generally over 100 degrees…

And this is where I come in…

The first thing to fix was the old wifi setup he was using; an Amplifi HD with mesh extenders. This is a really good unit that I’m sure he bought for its looks, but it’s more designed for apartments and small houses – not palatial warehouse spaces that you can use a scooter to get around in. 🙂

So, I had him pick up a new TP-Link BE800 and three RE705X range extenders to replace the Amplifi, and then talked him into relocating his network gear from the basement furnace room to the main floor in a cabinet… And after he installed a bunch of holes in this cabinet and we patched the cable back to where the TV used to be – behind said cabinet – I installed the new Arris S33 modem, the new wifi router, and all of his old IoT hardware.

The hardest part of this was getting Comcast to let us use the new cable modem… That took about an hour.

And once this was done, we did some speed testing around the house and things were definitely better, but other things still didn’t work quite right… Like the Sonos speakers.

Doing some research on those Sonos speakers I’m fairly convinced that it’s not the wifi setup. My CFO has probably the most high-tech home wifi setup possible currently, and the Reddit r/sonos board as well as the official Sonos forums are pretty much wall-to-wall connectivity issues… I have an idea though; I’ll make an SSID specifically for the speakers on one of the 5Ghz radios, which should avoid band steering which seems to confuse them, and see if that helps.

It’ll take some tuning over the next few weeks, but I’m pretty sure I can get his remaining issues ironed out.

Listening to "Follow You Follow Me" by Genesis

My alt.save.the.planet neighbors with the gargantuan SUV, the bad air-conditioning habit, and the alter to Greta Thunberg have struck again…

Apparently said neighbor saw a field mouse on their deck and put out a few kinds of poison to fix it. See, we need to protect Mother Nature as long as she keeps her shit out of our yards – or something.

Anyway, the end result of this – according to the flyer from the HOA about not using rodent poisons – has killed two hawks and an owl so far.

The flyer doesn’t name names of course, but the flyer did mention they were contacting animal control to evaluate the situation, and a day prior the city was over in the neighbor’s yard picking up her bait stations. So it’s pretty easy math…

Life in the big city I suppose.

Listening to "She's Out With a Gun" by Van Zant

We’ve had centralized OS updates in one form or another for about thirty years now, and they still can’t install them when you’re not using the computer…

This morning my MacPro 5,1 that I’m using at work – which runs logged in, 24/7, for a few cron jobs as well as remote access – decided that being as I’d turned the monitor on and fired up my email that it was time to install 12.7.1 whether or not I wanted to.

It literally had all weekend to install this while I wasn’t using the machine…

I remember actually looking forward to Win95 patches, because they legitimately made the OS better – like adding USB support in OSR 2.5. But these days it’s mostly reactionary bug fixing or exploit patching, which isn’t nearly as fun.

Or, maybe I’m just getting old. 😀

Listening to "Graduation" by Sunglasses Kid

It’s been a bit, so I should probably post something for proof of life.

The roommate’s hospital visit on the 9th turned into a fiasco; I delivered him at noon and was back there again at 4pm because they had to cancel the surgery. Apparently, the day before someone from the hospital had sent instructions for pre-op that stated that he needed to stop taking his potassium for the procedure – and then once they got him wheeled into the OR noticed that his potassium levels had crashed…

1.5 on a 3.5 to 5.0 scale…

Low potassium causes heart malfunctions, so they couldn’t operate, and I got to spend the next four hours in the hospital waiting as they valiantly tried to get him back up to at least 3.0.

Anyway, that ended, and they re-scheduled for the 6th of December.

Other than that, I’ve just been busy with work and when not busy with work have been puttering around with a couple video games…

Baldur’s Gate 3 kinda fell flat for me at the end of the third act and I’ve not finished it. Starfield is, well, bad – it’s all of the grindy mission bits of Fallout 4 without any of the inspired storytelling and I got bored in a hurry. World of Warcraft released a bunch of new content, so I’ve been playing that mostly when I’m not building stuff for folks in SL.

On the home front the neighborhood’s HOA settled with their insurance company and a bunch of the local roofs are being redone due to some hail last year, so there’s a lot of heavy equipment, rollaway containers, and teams of roofers all over the place. My house is one that’s getting the roof replaced apparently, so that will be annoying when the time comes.

Oh, and my plan to take next week off didn’t happen either due to the HVAC company we use at work not being able to get their act together last week. So, I have to be in early tomorrow morning to let them into the building and get them access to the roof.

And that’s about it.

Listening to "Sunset" by The Midnight

So, back on the 24th I had a tussle with some food poisoning which landed me on antibiotics for ten days. Antibiotics tend to make me woozy and slightly ill, so I don’t get much sleep.

On the 30th my roommate had a guest show up for a week which precluded me from getting any rest. See, I’m a really light sleeper, and having new people in the house making noise more or less keeps me up all night. I was also at the office every day so that my roommate could entertain his guest.

Then Monday the 6th my roommate had a colonoscopy appointment where they insisted on him having a chaperone who stayed in the building for the duration, so I got to spend half the day wandering around the local hospital.

Tuesday the doctor called my roommate and said he was suddenly scheduled for surgery, and to be at the local hospital by noon tomorrow for what will be a 3-4 day stay. So, I’m taking a half-day tomorrow to deliver my roommate to the hospital.

And I expect to be running back and forth as a courier until Monday when they let him out again, and I don’t expect he’ll be in any condition for work next week.

So, maybe by the 20th of this month I’ll get a chance to unwind a bit… Maybe I’ll take the entire week of the 20th off and just sleep… Well, and eat some turkey and ham too. 🙂

Listening to "The Spirit of Radio" by Rush