Summer has finally arrived here in Colorado, and over the weekend it went from rainy and mid-70’s to dry and mid-90’s. And, being as the local utility company has raised the rates for electricity into the realm of painful, I’m determined to not use the AC at all this year.
See, my AC is a 2-ton unit which pulls about 13 amps of 240v just for the compressor/condenser. When you add the 10 amps of 120v furnace blower and whatnot it’s about a $120 a month just to keep the house cool in the summer. And $120 is like a whole bag of groceries per month! (sigh)
Anyway, where I live in Colorado is essentially a desert – which means evaporative coolers work really well and can usually pull off 10-15 degrees below ambient on just a water pump and a fan. So, last night my roommate and I both bought a Bonaire “HI FLO 800 CFM” portable evaporative cooler from the local Home Depot for $250 each.
Mine is in my office and the one my roommate bought is in the living room, and other than sounding like a waterfall while they’re running they do a fantastic job of cooling the house off with a mere 5 gallons of water and 1 amp of 120V each.
As an added bonus they also raise the humidity a bit, so less getting struck by lightning every time you walk across the floor and touch something metal.
All in all I’m pretty happy with my $250 purchase, and in theory it’ll pay for itself before the end of August when it cools off again.
Just got back from my Saturday morning run to King Soopers; $27 in gas and $111.70 ($93.43 after coupons) in groceries.
Gas was $0.50 off thanks to grocery points, so a mere $3.60 a gallon for the good stuff – and I burned a bit more than I usually do with the extra trip to MicroCenter with my CFO… He’s also a car guy, so any chance we get to leave work in one of our cars is generally taken and it tends to not be very casual once we get on the highway. 😀
He’s got a resto-mod 67 Camaro SS that’s pretty nice, but my 300 demolishes it. So, because I can’t have the fastest car in the company, he has money down on a new Lotus Emira that will arrive “someday”…
I’m betting the 300 will demolish the Emira too… Well, maybe not in a corner…
Anyway, I also spent a bit more than usual on groceries hoping that I can front-load some costs and in turn save some money in the longer term – because I have a fridge in my office at work now…
Story time!
My company owns the entire building we’re in, but we don’t use all of it, so various spaces on the first and second floors are rented out – and as a small perk for renting from us you get ‘as available’ IT support from my company… We supply wifi on our building-wide Meraki mesh setup with a VLAN’d SSID for your business, VOIP phones if needed, and we can help out with small computer or network issues on an as-available basis.
Until recently we had a lawyer’s office on the second floor… Said lawyer decided that with everything going to shit now was a good time to close his practice, retire, and head for a more sane state. And when he moved out, as a thank you for all the tech support over the years, he gave us some of his office stuff; a couple of all in one printer/scanners, some computers, some furniture, and a dorm-sized refrigerator.
I’ve since moved that fridge into my office on the third floor…
We have a pretty nice break-room at work with couches, huge TV, game consoles, foosball and arcade machines, a couple of microwaves and refrigerators, a snack vending machine and soda machine. And my CFO offsets 50% of the cost of stuff in the snack / soda machines, so up until 2020 everything in either machine was a quarter.
Well, now we live in different times and the snack machine is full of tiny $1 bags of junkfood and the soda machine is always empty because it’s just not feasible for the snack company to sell sodas for even a buck anymore.
But now I have my own fridge in my office, which is locked when I’m not there – so last month I bought three 12-packs of Coke Zero on sale and that lasted me all month. And today 12-packs were on sale again, so I bought another three 12-packs for next month for $15. On sale, each soda works out to about 42 cents, which I can live with.
King Soopers also has a new Kroger store-brand breakfast bowl that’s actually quite good, and they come as a 5-pack for $14 – if you can find them. As mentioned, they’re pretty good, and Kroger can’t seem to make them fast enough to keep up with demand… This morning they had a few available, so I got two 5-packs which is breakfasts for two weeks – at a dollar less per breakfast than the Jimmy Dean bowls I usually get.
I also buy pints of Kroger ‘nuclear milk’, which cost a bit more ($1.29/pt), but the shelf life is insane – the three pints I bought today expire November 17th, for example…. Honestly, I’m not sure if the milk is actually irradiated, but whatever it is they are doing makes it so I don’t have to toss out expired milk because I didn’t get around to using it quick enough… So I spend a little more for less waste.
I also splurged a bit today and bought a deli chef salad ($6) because cheap food generally doesn’t have any real greenery and – man – I just need a salad on occasion.
Music is a pretty large part of my life, which is one of the reasons good reproduction of it has been so important to me over the years… I’ve always had high-end hardware for my listening pleasure – be that a home stereo setup, a portable player, or even my cars.
This is mostly because there are songs that are indelibly etched into some decade of my life or act as a soundtrack to some carefully preserved memory. A few bars of some tune can play back an entire event in the dimly lit past, so I like to make sure that the music of my life sounds as good as possible.
So, accordingly, I’ve had a lot of neat audio equipment. Like the Panasonic RX-CD70 ‘boom box’ I had in ’87, or the full stack of SAE gear that ran ADCOM amps that pushed Acoustat speakers that was my home setup on the later 80’s. I even tend to put high-end equipment in my cars… Hell, my current car’s audio system was tuned by Jimmy Iovine – you know, the former producer / chairman of Interscope Geffen-A&M Records…
Because of all this musical reproduction hoopla I’ve always been into well engineered audio as well, so a lot of those afore-mentioned ‘memory tunes’ are from various Alan Parsons albums, like “Days Are Numbers (The Traveller)” instantly takes me back to driving around Worcester Massachusetts in the late 80’s. Or “Eye In the Sky“‘s memory of sitting in front of an Apple ][ is so strong I can still see the output from the hex editor I was using on the green 80-column monitor in the computer lab at my high school in ’84.
For my more modern musical tastes I’m heavily into modern progressive like Porcupine Tree and ‘synthwave’. I got into Porcupine Tree because of the engineering… Steven Wilson is such an amazing engineer and each track he works on is incredibly well crafted… His remixes of my favorite Jethro Tull albums are incredible as well.
Listening to "One Brown Mouse" by Jethro Tull (Steven Wilson remix)
It’s been a long time since I’ve made Hamburger Helper… In fact, the last time was probably back when I was in the Navy and living in New London – that would be the late 80’s for those keeping track.
‘Burger Helper was a staple when I was growing up, which is probably why I’ve shunned the stuff over the years; connotations of hard times. But I have some Keystone canned ground beef in my long-term food stores that I need to rotate through and they had a sale on ‘Burger Helper “cheeseburger” and “stroganoff” running at my local grocers…
So tonight’s meal is post-apocalypse beef stroganoff – made with shelf stable canned ground beef, reconstituted powdered milk, and a box of talking-glove meat-mix… The only thing I didn’t use was one of the water filters, my camp stove, or the hexamine fuel to make it a truly SHTF meal.
Being former military and a bachelor for most of my adult life, I’ve eaten a lot of sketchy meals – and accordingly I’ve learned a lot of tricks to make pretty much anything palatable… For example, dill weed in small amounts is a savory flavor enhancer – so if you want to turn up the savory in a dish use a pinch of dill.
Ultimately my evening meal was probably indistinguishable from any other box meal and if I didn’t mention it no one would know it was all made with ingredients pushing five years old.
It’s nice to know that when the end times come I’ll still get a nice warm meal on occasion. 😀
Back in August I decided to take on the challenge of re-reading / reading the entire Xanth Series by Piers Anthony.
In January I was most of the way through the tenth book, “Vale of the Vole”, and as of this morning I have started on “Faun and Games”, the 21st book in the series. So, moving right along.
One nice side effect of this challenge is that I’ve taken to spending at least an hour every other morning during the week sitting outside in the sunshine just to read… See, I switch off days at the office with my roommate, and the days I work from my office here at the house I start the day with an hour of reading.
This may not happen in the winter as sitting outside becomes problematic, but I’ll see what I can do. 🙂
The additional reading time has meant I can add a few other books into the mix as well, and I just finished A.A. Atanasio’s “The Dragon and the Unicorn” – which is a far, far more complicated read than your typical Xanth novel.
So far the biggest issue is I’m using my Kindle and e-books – and some of the e-books are terribly done; bad formatting and bad scanning being the foremost issues. The current book, “Faun and Games” is one of the bad ones where I have to literally translate things to read it. For example, the scanner had a real issue with ‘n’s and tended to turn them into ‘h’s and it randomly missed or added periods and carriage returns, so there are pages without sentence breaks and other pages where each paragraph is broken into 3-4 pieces.
So it’s not as fun as it could be.
But I soldier on and will finish all 46 novels! (It just may take another year…)
Listening to "Edge of Oblivion (Instrumental)" by New Arcades
Back on march 31st, we had a bit of a fire nearby… A fire that caused about a dozen homes to be evacuated while the local fire department spent most of a day containing it.
The little wooded area out in front of my house was looking pretty rough for quite a while, but while I was out on my walk today I noticed things were pretty much back to normal…
I think most of the regrowth has been do to how wet it’s been the last few months; right now it’s easy to forget eastern Colorado is a desert.
Normally by mid June we’re already seen temperatures approach 100 degrees and we’re living under a perpetual wildfire warning, but this year we’re not cracked the mid-80’s yet and there’s a flood watch until Tuesday night.
I’ll take it.
This is a cyclical thing though. Every ten years or so we get one of these cool and wet spells – which is just occasional enough that everyone forgets about the last one and freaks out because it’s raining. 🙂
Listening to "Journey to the Second Sun" by WOLFCLUB
If you’ve ever wondered what it was like being in Highschool in the mid-80’s – here’s the musical version:
“Mixtapes” by Moonrunner83 – featuring N8TVS
Waking up in the middle of the night
Time's a shadow creeping over us
Lost a minute but it seems like a life
Where did everyone go?
Keeping it together, holding on to the edge
Without a second to lose
Feeling like forever is just all in your head
Can anybody hear you?
Chorus: Love songs don't fade
So we put our hearts on mixtapes
We can keep every moment all on cassette
Making memories on a Memorex
Share a kiss or take a shot in the dark
No one's looking for anything
Wild fires always start with a spark
And they never die down slow
We're talking on the phone until we both fall asleep
And waking up - afternoon
And feeling like forever is just a day of the week
By Friday I'm in love with you
(Chorus)
Looking for the perfect song to put at the end
So we don't forget you and me
Writing down forever in a permanent pen
A final sunset symphony
(Chorus)
(Chorus)
(Chorus)
Listening to "Mixtapes (feat. N 8 T V S)" by Moonrunner83
On a lark, this weekend I was engaged in one of the traditional pastimes of “old people” – the Family Tree.
In short, like most things with my life, it’s complicated…
Most of the complication is that I left home in 1986 and that was pretty much it for my family ties – I’ve spoken with my mother once since then, for about a half an hour back in 1994. So all I really have to go on is pre-’86 information and 1970’s era memories of the summers I spent in Ohio with my grandparents.
Another part of the complication is that I’m adopted, which means that all of my birth records were altered in 1973 and there’s no real indication of what things were prior to this. The original documents won’t become public record until after I kick the bucket, so I’m left to piece things together from altered or partial information.
For example, the copy of my birth certificate I got from Ohio is a weird inverted photocopy of a microfiche file from 1969, complete with embossed stamp of authenticity, but has the name of my adoptive father on it – which didn’t happen until 1973. I’m guessing this is done for legal / privacy reasons – but it’s annoying if you’re trying to piece things together.
Fortunately I have a really good memory for details and still recall a few key bits of information from the early 70’s…
All in all the whole process has been fascinating, and it turns out some of the tall tales I was told as a child were true – like my great-great grandmother on my mom’s side was one of the Hatfields of the infamous Hatfields and McCoys.
My mom’s family is pretty well documented as they came in from Germany for the most part and not only filled out all of the immigration paperwork in excruciating detail, but were also very helpful any time a census rolled through the neighborhood.
They also tended to stick together until one or the other died, and only then would remarry – which limits the number of name changes and step-children. Good Catholics I guess.
The Bendix line were generally machinists going all the way back to Germany. For example my grandfather worked in the shop his father ran that was built by his grandfather – Valentine Bendix – in Hamilton Ohio. Valentine’s father, Jacob, was born in Prussia in 1834 and is as far back as I can go without paying for access to international records… Maybe someday.
That machine shop, according to a series of 1920’s and 1930’s business listings, was located at 1740 See Avenue in Hamilton Ohio…
Funny story: one of my earliest memories was being in a bassinet on an upper floor that had a half-wall overlooking the lower floor, and there was a baby gate with a “child proof” latch on it… I defeated the latch on the gate, then the sliding part of the bassinet, and then took a tumble down a flight of stairs much to my mother’s terror…
The house where this happened belonged to my great-grandmother Creech according to my mom, and great-grandma Creech was listed as living at 1740 See Avenue in Hamilton when she passed away in 1973.
I vaguely remember the front of the house, but didn’t have the address until I went poking around – and then ran into the current Google street view being an empty lot. Fortunately Google Earth has a nice view of it from 2010, before it was razed in 2011, and it looks like how I remember.
The view in Google Earth also shows the large machine shop on the other end of the property. So my first real memory took place in a house that saw, counting me, five generations of the Bendix family through some hard times. Pity it’s gone now.
I’m guessing as great-grandma Creech passed away in 1973, that my next memory being at my grandfather Bendix’s house was because she became ill. I recall being in the north-east bedroom which was painted yellow, in a bassinet, playing with a tracked Tonka-Toy and working out why I couldn’t get the rubber tracks off it because the carrier for the wheels wrapped over the treads and formed a loop that I couldn’t get them past…
I was a weird kid – even at the age of 3.
My grandfather, Elmer, was my hero as a kid – he was an amazing human being. But when my grandmother, Dorothy (Link) Bendix, passed in 1984 – two years later he remarried to Dorothy (Miller) Bendix… So both wives have the same first name, and the second one has my adoptive father’s last name – unrelated – and this confuses things to no end when you’re looking through fifty year old hand-written notes.
One discovery this weekend was the life and times of my biological father, who passed in 2010… My mother never really talked about the Hampton side of the tree, and I still don’t really know why they broke up.
The divorce was a big enough deal that my mother converted from the Catholic faith to the Seventh Day Adventists for a few years…
Anyway, finding this information required all of my skills, as all I had to go on was a last name and a memory of a week at my grandfather’s house when I was like 5 or 6. The house was on the outskirts of Oxford Ohio, at the end of what I recalled as a twisty road. Beyond the end of the road, behind a large chainlink fence, was an area I wasn’t allowed to enter under any circumstances… My grandfather drew out some examples of these hourglass-shaped concrete pits that had been filled in, but occasionally had to be filled back in as the fill dirt fell from the upper part, through the narrow neck of the pit, and into the lower area. If anyone ended up in one of these things, it was pretty much game over.
In researching I discovered this was a design used for settling ponds used in older waste water systems. So all I had to do was find an old 70’s era wastewater treatment facility near Oxford – and here in the 21st century everyone has access to satellite imagery at will…
Once I found a few potential locations, one stood out as being on McKee Ave – which rang a bell – and the last house on the street, from street view, has a gazebo in the back that I remember being built during the summer I was there.
Now I had a street address and a name – and the rest took about four hours to uncover.
It turns out that William Allen Hampton was born in Oxford Ohio, spent most of his life in Oxford, was a mechanic by trade, was married and divorced several times, and passed away in Nevada a year after my grandmother Hampton passed in 2009.
If I’d not been adopted I would have been William Hampton IV – which is kinda cool.
Another funny story: The joke is that every Gen-X kid had to deal with a kidnapping before the age of 18 – in my case this is absolutely true…
It was 1972-ish when my biological father came to the carport door of my grandfather Bendix’s house, and I toddled over to him and we left to go to my grandfather Hampton’s house… The problem here is he didn’t tell my mom and apparently they were divorced at the time – so the police were called as a kidnapping had occurred.
Nothing much happened from this as it wasn’t nefarious – it was just my dad wanting to spend time with me before I was moved to Colorado – permanently. I recall the ride back to my mom in the patrol car, where I got to wear the policeman’s hat and play with the switches in the console that ran the lights and siren.
My adoptive father’s family information is incredibly sparse, which is weird (or the reason) for a guy who was so obsessed with family lines.
I now know that my adoptive grandfather was a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine for the USDA. He passed away on the 14th of July, 1975, in Indiana. I would have been six years old – which is probably why I never met him.
Oddly, I found this newspaper clipping from the 21st of April, 1975 – just a few months before Samuel Miller passed:
It appears he was attempting to divorce my adoptive grandmother, but never finalized it because he passed away before everything could be filed.
My grandmother lived out the rest of her years on his government pension, eventually buying the house in Golden that my father acquired when she passed in 1985.
I guess things do work out for people on occasion.
In the process of doing this I’ve also tried to track down portions of my ex-wife’s family – which is even more complicated than mine… I’ve still not figured out who her father was as her mother was married at least four times, with children in each marriage, and some marriages overlap – so there are a lot of obfuscated lines to follow.
My ex-wife’s mother passed away in 2005, and a two of the husbands have also passed on, so some of the marriage records are public record now – it’s just a matter of taking the time and effort to unravel it all. Something I’m just not that interested in, to be honest.
I met my ex’s mom, Deb, and my ex’s nine year old at the time half-brother, Adam, on our way back to Colorado in 1990. It turns out that Adam unfortunately passed away in 2012. He was a pretty cool kid and it’s sad to hear he passed on so early in life.
The overlapping marriage thing isn’t unique to my ex’s mom… In 2005, when I got divorced from my ex, I discovered she was still married to her first husband, Paul, when she married me in 1990 – making my divorce an annulment. So I was never technically married even though the paperwork is still available…
And she divorced Paul a year later in 2006.
Speaking of Paul – I met him a few times in Framingham and he was a pretty nice guy – anyway he passed away in 2018… This makes me feel old…
My ex remarried in 2016 – and I really hope this one works out for her.
All in all it was an interesting waste of time over the weekend.
Everything I did was in the free trial of ‘ancestry.com’ with the ‘newspapers.com’ free trial, and I’ve set it all public so it’ll be there forever if anyone gets a wild hair and wants to reference any of it.
I’d give the work I did between 80 and 100 percent accuracy, depending on which family. My mom’s family is easy and several people have bits and pieces done already, so I could cross-reference things. The two fathers are a bit more sketchy because no one seems to care. And my ex’s family is a horror show – good luck with that future investigators. 🙂
This morning at 0500 I got a text from my CFO asking if I was up – and of course I was because 0500 is when I start the day…
Then my cell rang and I was informed that the building alarms had gone off at 0315 and that he was there at the office with a dozen police officers since about 0330. So I rolled into the office fifteen minutes later to start the process of figuring out what happened…
My company owns the entire building, but only operates out of the upper of the three floors. The first and second floors are tenant spaces we rent out. And while the third floor is much more secure than the other two, the entire building is rather secure.
I designed the building’s physical security to follow a nested access plan – meaning that the level of intrusion prevention escalates as you make your way into the building from the common areas. The core hallways, for fire escape reasons, are generally open and are only secured at the building perimeter – so if you get past the main entry doors you have access to the two stairwells, the elevator, and the core hallways that lead to either tenant spaces of the nested security rings of the third floor.
The lobbies and core hallways have about a dozen cameras, which form a small portion of the 63 cameras in / on the building, and to leave the core hallway on the third floor requires proxcard access to get anywhere – even the break room.
With that said, at 1930 yesterday the first contestant, who I will call 80’s hair guy, arrived via bicycle and was recorded wandering around the perimeter of the building for about a half an hour before defeating the mag-lock sliding doors at the main entry… Defeating sliding doors is trivial as the fire code mandates that there be a motion sensor on the inside of the door that will unlock and actuate them in event of an emergency, so all one really has to do is stick something though the gap in the door and wiggle it for the sensor.
80’s hair guy then proceeds to case the core hallways of the three floors, where I get dozens of high-rez images of his face, hands, body, etc. He manages to jimmy the lock on a janitorial closet on the second floor and acquired a backpack vacuum before hiding out in the south stairwell for a half an hour. I assume he was waiting to see if the police showed up, and the vacuum was an “I’m with the cleaning crew” excuse.
Being as we really do have a cleaning crew that operates in that time window on random days, no alarms were triggered.
All told, 80’s hair guy was in the building for about an hour from 1930 to about 2030 before exiting.
At about 0230 80’s hair guy returns with an accomplice who I will call ball cap guy. 80’s hair guy is now in antifa-style black-bloc with the stereotypical black bandanna mask, black hoodie, black t-shirt with optional doofus slogan on it, and black skinny-jeans. Ball cap is in a gray sweatshirt and beat up bluejeans.
80’s hair guy once again defeats the sliding doors and they spend the next half an hour spray-painting the core hallway cameras, looking through the empty third-floor common area lockers where testers leave their cellphones and whatnot to go into the biometric-secured special project labs (these were empty as it was after hours), and trying various doors on the third floor… Said doors are probably two-hundred pound solid core fire-doors set in steel frames anchored into the concrete floor/ceiling with cross-bolted steel strike plate covers and security-grade electric strikers… They are really quite resistant to tampering.
This didn’t stop these two from attempting to fish under the doors to catch the inside handle and open them – which never worked for the above reasons. Also, all of the security cameras they spray-painted simply went into infrared mode and filmed them through the paint, which is why I have a minute-by-minute replay of both trips into the building, in glorious 4k resolution, which has been turned over to the local police.
All of the third floor doors have bright red LEDs next to them to indicate the space beyond them is armed, save for three emergency doors. Team Knucklehead, after spending ten minutes rifling empty lockers, eventually decides to try and force the emergency door on the third floor into the admin section…
They fish the door for a few minutes and get nowhere, then take a pry-bar to the strike plate cover and don’t really get anywhere there either (did I mention these doors are serious business?)… Eventually Ball Cap guy gets frustrated, places a foot on the door jam, and tries to simply overpower the striker which is rated for something like a half-ton of force…
This moves the door about a half a centimeter in the door frame, which is enough to upset the magnetic reed switch, and instantly the entire building is filled with 110db alarm sirens.
Roughly 30 seconds later the alarm company has called the police, my CFO, and me – though I had my phone off because sleep is kinda cool.
Team Knucklehead dives down the back stairwell, grabbing a janitorial trash can and a backpack vacuum, and heads out the main entry – where they drop the vacuum and trash can, grab their bikes, and sneak around the back-side of the building to escape across the street.
Interestingly, 80’s hair guy left a digital camera under the stairs where he was hiding out and stashed his backpack on the first foray into the building, which I then analyzed and ran an undelete sweep on. It had some video and photos on it of some apartment full of probably stollen junk, a few guys, and tons of drug paraphernalia… This has also been turned over to the local police.
And that was my day.
I hope they return; it was funny watching them bumble around and bounce off of my security… My systems are up for another round if they are. 🙂
In my continuing analysis of life in the idiocracy timeline, today I present another grocery run…
A few variables:
I do my grocery shopping at around 0630 on Saturdays, because that’s when my local grocer marks down all of the fresh food that’s close to expiry.
I clip coupons and use them whenever possible.
I buy myself one (1) snack thing per trip – usually popcorn.
These days we have to bag our own groceries and supply the bags, so I got myself a nice thermally insulated and compartmentalized bag.
The above is
a half loaf of discount wheat bread and enough lunchmeat / cheese to make sandwiches out of it
a discount box of chicken tenders for three meals this weekend
four breakfast bowls for work next week (coupon – buy 3 get 1 free)
three potpies for dinners next week (coupon – $0.30 off each, making them $3.49 for the big ones)
three cup-noodles and two frozen burritos for work lunches next week
two pints of store-brand milk, a small box of store-brand stick butter, and two Knorr pasta sides
and a bag of pepperjack popcorn (coupon – $0.50 off).
Total? $82.52 ($77.63 after coupons)
When the tech bubble burst the early 2000’s I ate a lot of Knorr pasta sides because they were $0.49 each and made two meals. Three years ago they were $0.79 each. Today they are slightly smaller and $1.49…
Back in the 70’s / 80’s my mom would make an olympic-class event out of coupon clipping, which is something I’ve taken to as well – when possible. Coupons really only work if you’re meal-planning for a family where the economy of scale kicks in though – and I make meals for just me. And while I do tend to eat a lot of leftovers, I can’t get through family-of-four portions before they go bad in the fridge – so I avoid ‘family size’ discounts.
Anyway, that’s today’s window into life in 2023… I really hope I can look back on this in a decade and chuckle.
You can tell things are getting tight economically by the number of organizations shaking down my company for loose change right now.
This month started with a tax audit by the city we reside in, then being as we’re a NIST certified laboratory NIST wanted to do an audit (which runs about ten grand), and this morning I have a call with Microsoft to audit our licensing so they can determine how much more money I need to give them.
The correct answer is “none”; I run mostly linux internally and the two Windows servers are running 2008r2 with cals that were both paid for ages ago – and all of my employee Microsoft needs are managed via Office 365 – so at least it’ll be a short meeting.
Anyway, I need to run and get on this 7am call with Microsoft. Have a great day out there!
Listening to "Severed" by New Arcades and Droid Bishop
Took the 300 over to the dealership to take care of a TSB… Apparently a few 2022 cars have flakey tire pressure sensors and people are too stupid these days to manually check tire pressure occasionally – so the Feds had to step in and have Chrysler check the TPMS system in every 2022 car.
While I had the car there I had them change the oil and rotate the tires. I’ve only put about 2500 miles on the car, but it’s entirely possible I’ll be moving across the country ‘soon’ and I figured it was best to be prepared for that.
Things at work aren’t going well with the economic situation and all, so we’ve been laying a few people off and tightening the belt where possible… But between the crap economy, our sales team being pretty bad even in the best of times, and the city of Aurora deciding to do an egregious tax audit in the middle of an economic down-turn, my boss / CFO looks to be just about done with it all.
The random tax audit is really the icing on the cake… They are auditing everything over $1 for the last bunch of years – across all of our various business interests (including my boss’ real estate endeavors) – which has the entire company scrambling for receipts while we’re also scrambling to keep the doors open. But someone has to pay for all of that free stuff the current regime promised, and I guess that’s us.
I don’t really fault my boss for being done with it all; he started the company in ’99 and while things were really good for a long time, since 2020 it’s just been one body blow after another… Whacky regulations, stupid lockdowns, tax insanity, economic shitstorm, industry brain drain, etc, etc.
I’ve been with the company since August of ’04, so I’ve been around for both the good and bad – and right now it’s the worst I’ve seen.
My current “SHTF” plan involves heading to South Carolina where my roommate has a little land and a trailer we can hole up in until things improve or fall off a cliff. I have my property in south Colorado, but I wasn’t able to get anything built on it before the economy caved in… I should probably convert it into liquid assets while I still can.
If my boss decided to end things today, I’ve probably got another six months or so to spin everything down so it won’t be “Surprise! You’re unemployed!”. But as a precaution I’ve been turning off the non essentials and reducing my monthly outlay as much as possible to bank as much as possible.
I’m still a bit over a decade away from retirement, so I’ll have to land on my feet and keep running for a while. And I’ve never been on unemployment, ever, so I hope that counts for something if I have to call on it for a bit between jobs.
Basically everything sucks.
Listening to "The Ride (Into the Midnight)" by Kalax
I’ve always been into ‘space stuff’, so I tend to always have an eye on whatever the new space-thing is… And today the new space-thing was SpaceX’s test of the super-heavy booster and ‘Starship’ stack.
It looked a bit like this when they lit it off:
This really shows off the scale of the rocket
I kinda grew up in the space program – from sitting on my great grandmother’s couch in Ohio watching Saturn-Vs fling people to the moon as a toddler in the late 60’s and early 70’s, to my father working at Beech Aircraft / Raytheon on the Shuttle program in my teens. Even my aunt worked at Ball Aerospace on the Star Tracker for the Shuttle program.
I guess the Space Shuttle was kind of a family thing for us and the house was always chock full of odd bits of memorabilia… I even went into the US Submarine Force because it was as close to space travel as I could get without being an astronaut.
Anyway, today’s launch kinda gave me the same vibe as those early Saturn V launches – which was cool. I mean, sure, things ultimately went pear-shaped and the big-ass SpaceX rocket blew up shortly after non-separation, but that was mostly expected with something as ground breaking as this.
It looks like they lost several engines after clearing the tower, and while they still made it through MaxQ with only 27 of the 33 engines running, I’m guessing the loss of thrust stability on the ‘backflip’ probably prevented stage separation…
Here’s what the rocket looked like while going uphill:
Not something you see every day
I’ve been asked why I wasn’t this jazzed about the recent NASA Artemis flight back in November, and truth be told it’s because Artemis isn’t anything new.
And I mean that literally…
Artemis is 100 billion dollars spent on pulling Apollo and Shuttle era stuff out of mothballs and blending it all together in some single-use Frankenrocket that is so single-use that they can’t even reuse the launch pad.
The booster SRBs, orange fuel tank, and RS-25 engines were swiped from the Shuttle program, the second stage engine is an Apollo era Pratt & Whitney RL10, and the crew module was lifted pretty much intact from Apollo – and only really updated with computers that don’t use core memory and some touch screens because that’s what SpaceX did with Dragon…
Like I said; Frankenrocket.
Contrast this with SpaceX’s super-heavy which is all new tech aiming to be mostly reusable while sending even more payload uphill on cheaper gas…
And it cost less – a lot less – than refurbing 70’s / 80’s era rocket parts.
Some new residents out in the forest in front of my place… Wild turkeys.
Potato pictures because I was zoomed in quite a bit on my phone as to not pester them. These things eat their weight in bugs – which is a good thing – so I’m happy to see them. 🙂
Back when I was in the Navy I did a lot of scuba training – for obvious reasons… That whole submarine, underwater, living near the ocean thing.
Anyway, once I got out I didn’t have much call for all of that dive training. Not a lot of ocean front property in Colorado after all. But once I moved to Virginia seven years later there was a bit more opportunity, and once the Yacht was acquired and things like props and hull fittings needed to be inspected, it was once again a valuable skill.
My roommates at the time got into it a lot more seriously than I did, eventually spending thousands on drysuits, fancy full-face masks, and high-tech air systems. I suggested they get their nitrox certification if they were going to go all-in – and so they did. So there were three of us with mixed-gas training and the ability to stay under the boat for as long as we had air.
In the late 90’s I lived on a 40-acre farm, and on the farm we had a six-stall barn for the horses. Above that was a one bedroom apartment that Pegasus lived in… And this meant that to get to Peg’s place one had to go up about twenty feet along about forty feet of steps with no landing.
So one evening Zeze, Peg, and myself are hanging out in Peg’s apartment and Zeze’s ex decides she wants to visit as well. She wasn’t the world’s healthiest person, and getting up to the apartment winded her.
Well, about ten minutes pass and she starts to complain about being light headed, and then passes out in the middle of the living room…
I check, get an erratic elevated heart rate, and judging by her lips her oxygen levels have plummeted.
Thinking quickly I sent Zeze to get blankets, Peg to call an ambulance, and then grabbed his nitrox setup, checked the mix (32% oxygen, which while above the 21% for regular air, wasn’t so high as to burn the lungs), and then manually breathed for Zeze’s ex using the purge valve on Peg’s regulator… For the 15 minutes it took for the paramedics to arrive.
Ultimately they arrived, put her on medical oxygen, and hauled her off to the hospital, where she made a full recovery and is still around to this day.
I’m told that, at a minimum, I prevented brain issues from oxygen starvation and probably saved her life.
And so that was that one time I saved someone’s life.
The 80’s were a pretty wild time, and despite the rainbows and day-glow the decade had a bit of a dystopian undercurrent that showed up in the pop culture of the time… The cartoons we watched, comics we read, and lots of movies of the time were typically based on a failed future premise – and many of the table top RPGs we played often had a decidedly dystopian flair as well.
Probably had something to do with the whole Cold War thing and the ever-present threat of getting nuked…
Anyway, I like to think living through the 80’s prepared me for the modern day – because the modern day more resembles Cyberpunk than Star Trek.
On the way into work this morning I got another heavy Cyberpunk vibe from it all… See, Denver – being a suburb of L.A. at this point – has a bit of a homeless problem… And one of my various routes to the office goes past a couple of camps that move around as the politicians take notice and evict them to some other space.
So, like a page from a Cyberpunk story, I leave my burbclave and drive my high-powered high-tech executive sedan past the favelas to get to my corpo tech job on the top floor of some glass and steel high-rise. Once I arrive, cutting edge biometrics let me into the building so that I can spend the day working on the company’s Gibson that I built over the last two decades…
It makes for interesting stories, but I’m not sure I’m happy living it…
Had a little excitement in my neighborhood this afternoon in the form of a small wildfire in that wooded area in front of my house.
I was working from home today, and after lunch I heard what I thought was a trash truck outside followed by some yelling and the sound of my neighbor’s gate being opened. And while this wasn’t really unusual, with the added yelling I decided to go open my garage door (which faces the street) and see what was up.
Surprise! Fire Truck!
Sitting behind my house was a fire truck, which is pretty unusual, so I walked out to look up the street…
Okay, so something was definitely going on…
It turns out the wooded area that runs in front of my place had somehow caught fire, and the yelling was the fire department going door to door evacuating people. My neighbors were apparently evacuated but I was just far enough away to avoid the warning.
The burned area as viewed from my front porch.And the view from the mailboxes…
All in all there were eight fire trucks and a slew of other emergency vehicles that responded, and it only took them an hour or so to get it put out. The news says there were about three acres burned, which includes the wooden foot bridge they just rebuilt last year.
The local fire department is very on the ball, and it was neat to see them in action… Pity about the woods though – I guess it’ll grow back.
