Category: Uncategorized

I was listening to Space Radio this morning on the way into the office and Duran Duran’s “Ordinary World” began playing… It’s a very poignant song and one of my favorites in their catalog along with “Save a Prayer”, but the bridge really stood out:

Papers in the roadside
Tell of suffering and greed
Fear today, forgot tomorrow
Ooh, here besides the news
Of holy war and holy need
Ours is just a little sorrowed talk

Another song from yesteryear that fits even better in {current year}. Just replace ‘papers in the roadside’ with ‘headlines on the TV’ and the song could be referencing CNN this morning…

Listening to "Ordinary World" by Duran Duran

Listening to "Flashback" by Morgan Willis

A few weeks ago I signed up for this virtual adventure / exercise thing called “Conqueror Virtual Challenges”, and then walked the length of Hadrian’s Wall on Northern England in a bit over three weeks…

Hadrian’s Wall is 90 miles. I averaged 3.75 miles a day even with all of the bad weather and work stuff, and got this cool medal for the effort.

Over all it was a lot of fun to clock my walks and read about the cool places along the wall. Maybe I’ll do another one come Spring.

Listening to "Damier Club" by Morgan Willis

Well, it’s happened again; as of this morning I’m 54.

It’s interesting to me to be one year away from the Seniors Menu at IHOP… Me, a “Senior Citizen“. LOL

The perception of time really does accelerate as you get older. When I was in my 20’s the years felt like decades, but now five years ago may as well have been yesterday. Everything is conceptually compressed into a much shorter impression of time than it really was, because there’s so much of it blurring together behind me.

For example, there is very little difference for me between memories of dialing into CSNET (the proto-Internet) in 1985 and dialing into EOTD (a local BBS) in 1993 – both could have happened on either side of a weekend. I mean, it seems like a year or two ago I was setting up my first web server on a PowerMac 8100/100 using WebSTAR – but that was 1995.

I think that’s why I picked up the journaling hobby back in the early 2000s; it’s partly to keep everything organized, separate, and unique from everything else packed into my head, and therefore referenceable, but also to have some sense of permanence beyond my span of days…

At least until the web hosting stops getting paid for I suppose.

Aurora, the Empress I played in Secondlife, was nutty about archiving her memories because while she was effectively immortal, her memory was finite and she would eventually forget her past – and the only immortality she could offer anyone who impacted her life was simply to remember them…

I think a bit of that character affectation is a reflection of my own desires. When I shuffle off this mortal coil, my entire existence goes with me – save for what people remember of me. So I write things down to try and aid that process a bit.

Not that I figure I have much to worry about just yet; 60 is the new 40 after all. 🙂

Listening to "Chasing Yesterday" by FM-84

Today I finished going through all of the posts I imported from LiveJournal and fixed up all of the media. I also removed all of the duplicate media that got imported as well…

It turns out LJ makes several sizes of attached media just like WordPress does, but unlike WordPress LJ didn’t dynamically craft the HTML for the target display back in the old days. So old posts on LJ had links in the HTML to all of the media sizes, which meant my scraper dutifully pulled all of the sizes and stuck them in WordPress’ media directory.

An easy fix really, it just took some time to clean up. And while I was at it I sequentially redid all of the old posts in WordPress’ block format versus raw imported code.

I’m still missing a lot of my personal ancient history from when I shut down my Google account due to the Gawker screw up in 2010…

I set up my gmail account in late 2004, and as people tend to do I wound up doing everything through various Google services – and this eventually included all of my photos and whatnot. Now, while I did back up everything that was in Google at the time, that DVD backup was promptly lost in the move that happened six months later…

In an ironic twist of fate, much of that backup also existed in my DropBox at the time, but DropBox wants me to change the password and will only send the link to my gmail account I had at the time… And being as Google simply won’t reactivate or reissue my old email address, that old data is just beyond my grasp.

Sometimes technology is stupid.

I’ve tried a couple of times to convince DropBox that I really am that guy. I mean, I have the same email ‘name’ at mac.com, which existed for several years before gmail existed – and I even own a domain with that name that traces back to the mid 90’s… I can even point out the various cameras used to take the photos that are in that DropBox! But, nope – the robot cares not for my pleas.

Oh well, such is life here in the future.

Listening to "We Never Got to Say Goodbye" by New Arcades

Scott Adams over on Twitter has been engaging with his detractors over his pro-mRNA stance. And while it’s mostly disingenuous trolling on his part, which is fine – it’s the Internet after all, he does bring up an interesting thought experiment:

“How did you ‘know’ the COVID vaccine was good / bad?”

It’s not a secret that I opted out of the mRNA treatment; I’m in a position where I couldn’t really be threatened into compliance so I consciously became part of the control group just to see what happened.

So, how did I come to this decision? It’s a really good question and forces some introspection.

First off, I’m not an ‘anti-vaxxer’ by any stretch of the imagination. I get my general vaccines, like Tetanus, from my doctor whenever it’s time. I get the current round of flu shots every other year (I skip a year to reduce my reliance). And I’ve routinely gotten the kitchen sink set whenever I travel out of the country…

I’m also not a media consumer. I don’t watch TV in general or the news specifically, so I’m forced to go find out and form my own opinions when important things crop up… This takes time, but it also prevents knee-jerk reactions on my part – and I’ve not really encountered anything that can’t be examined for a while before taking action.

So, what made the mRNA different?

Well, it was new technology – and I’m kinda into new technology – so I started to read up on it as I tend to do. And early on there were a lot of papers on the research leading up to the COVID version that didn’t have the best results, mostly because corona viruses in general are hard to pin down due to their propensity to mutate. And while that wasn’t a red flag in and of itself, it did get added to the dataset.

I’ve also been in various tech fields for nearly forty years now, and I have a pretty good grasp of how long it takes to go from ‘good idea’ to ‘safe and effective’, which tends to be exacerbated by how much of a fire drill the whole process is… In my opinion there were a lot of shortcuts being taken in the name of an emergency, which is the exact time you shouldn’t take shortcuts. And because of the emergency nature of the thing and a similar understanding of dangerous shortcuts by everyone involved, the EUA absolved everyone involved of any responsibility.

This was a pretty big red flag for me, but I was still undecided.

What really formed my opinion was the unprecedented coercion to get the shot… It raised a simple question; “If they have to force / bribe / guilt-trip people to take it, what am I missing?” – which redoubled my research.

I’m in my 50’s, so I’ve been around the block a few times – and I’ve never seen a state or federal government offer money to get a shot. I’ve also never seen people get fired for not getting a shot… And the harder the mRNA was pushed, the less I trusted the whole process.

Then came the logic problems; apparently if I didn’t get the mRNA shot I was putting people who did at risk – which is pretty much exactly how vaccines don’t work… And then mRNA efficacy went from Biden telling everyone that they’d not get sick if they got the shot to needing a booster, to needing a second booster, to needing boosters every year.

And then the folks who got the mRNA vaccine started to get sick – so they redefined vaccination…

So, to answer Scott’s question, my determination of good / bad wasn’t really an instant decision gate – it was more of a process that involved a lot of reading and asking questions mixed with some pattern recognition.

I currently figure my desire to methodically come up with my own opinions on things versus leaping to televised conclusions may have been a really good thing this time around. It makes up for all the times I missed a good stock market move because I spent too much time thinking about it. 🙂

Listening to "Images of You" by FM Attack

I’ve been involved in the furry fandom, in various aspects, since the early 80’s…

For me it all began with “Albedo Anthropomorphics”, an independent comic published by Thoughts & Images that I discovered and became enamored with in ’84… Back then there was no Internet or anything, so the “funny animal” culture that was available only really existed in comics – and I was lucky enough to have a pretty amazing comics shop in my home town.

I suppose technically my decent into furry hell actually began with “Cerebus the Aardvark” in the early 80’s, but Albedo was the first ‘pure’ anthropomorphic setting and story I became engrossed in.

In 1986 I left home, joined the Navy, and ended up within easy driving distance of a Newbury Comics in Worcester Massachusetts. This dramatically increased my exposure to independent comics full of anthropomorphic critters from publishers like GraphXpress, Eclipse, Warp, Thoughts & Images, and others.

I still have some of the comics I picked up from that Newbury Comics…

While I was a definite devotee of all things fury by 1987, I didn’t get my high-priest’s robes until 1988 with the publication of Vicky Wyman’s “Xanadu”… Xanadu, with its interesting social caste system and high-fantasy setting quickly became a part of the roleplay setting I was running, and that not only cemented my furryness but also drug a dozen other people into the fandom as well.

The RP setting carried the funny animal torch through to the early 90’s when I left the Navy. Fortunately with the advent of newsgroups such as alt.fan.furry and alt.fan.dragons, and then things like IRC, FurryMuck, and Alfandria throughout the 90’s, I was able to keep not only the RP setting alive but stay active in the fandom.

While I had attended numerous gaming and scifi conventions since my high-school years in the 80’s, I didn’t attend a dedicated “furry” convention until Confurence East in 1996.

I did CFEast in ’96, CF8 in ’97, and CF9 in ’98.

CF9 was my last “furry” convention as the fandom convention setting in general seemed to be departing ‘funny animals’ and was instead becoming more of a ‘furry kink’ sort of thing… Which is fine, different strokes for different folks and all – but it wasn’t my scene anymore.

After CF9 I mostly dropped out of the fandom, only getting involved again in early 2004 with SecondLife where I’ve continued to haunt the virtual world to this very day.

Listening to "Take Me Away" by FM Attack

Back in August I mentioned that I was embarking on re-reading the “Xanth” novels from my childhood, in order, from one to forty six – and I figured I should post an update…

Number	Title	Released
1	A Spell for Chameleon	Sep-1977
2	Source of Magic	1979
3	Castle Roogna	1979
4	Centaur Aisle	Dec-1981
5	Ogre, Ogre	Sep-1982
6	Night Mare	Jan-1983
7	Dragon on a Pedestal	Oct-1983
8	Crewel Lye	Dec-1984
9	Golem in the Gears	Jan-1986
10	Vale of the Vole	Oct-1987
11	Heaven Cent	1988
12	Man from Mundania	Oct-1989
13	Isle of View	Oct-1990
14	Question Quest	Oct-1991
15	The Color of Her Panties	Sep-1992
16	Demons Don’t Dream	1992
17	Harpy Thyme	1993
18	Geis of the Gargoyle	1994
19	Roc and a Hard Place	1995
20	Yon Ill Wind	1996
21	Faun & Games	Oct-1997
22	Zombie Lover	1998
23	Xone of Contention	1999
24	The Dastard	Oct-2000
25	Swell Foop	Oct-2001
26	Up In A Heaval	2002
27	Cube Route	Oct-2003
28	Currant Events	Oct-2004
29	Pet Peeve	Oct-2005
30	Stork Naked	Oct-2006
31	Air Apparent	Aug-2006
32	Two to the Fifth	Oct-2008
33	Jumper Cable	Oct-2009
34	Knot Gneiss	Dec-2010
35	Well-tempered Clavicle	Nov-2011
36	Luck of the Draw	Dec-2012
37	Esrever Doom	Oct-2013
38	Board Stiff	Jan-2014
39	Five Portraits	Oct-2014
40	Isis Orb	Oct-2016
41	Ghost Writer in the Sky	Apr-2017
42	Fire Sail	Nov-2019
43	Jest Right	Jul-2020
44	Skeleton Key	Feb-2021
45	A Tryst of Fate	Oct-2021
46	Six Crystal Princesses	Jun-2022

Right now I’m about 3/4 of the way through “Vale of the Vole”, so there’s a ways to go yet.

While I tend to be a fairly fast reader, I’m limited in how much reading I can do per day because of ‘real life’… I generally get about 15-20 minutes a day where I don’t have to fix stuff, do something, or go somewhere, so it takes a while to get through a recreational book. 🙂

Either way it’s been a lot of fun to re-visit the first eight books from my school years, and then continue on in the setting!

Listening to "Back to You" by Timecop1983

Listening to "Sophie" by Morgan Willis

I’m a big fan of “Long John Silver’s”, a fish / chicken place from back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.

It was supremely unhealthy stuff, but that’s probably why it tasted so good – and being so unhealthy (and being picked up by Yum!) was eventually their downfall I think. Either way, I miss the place.

So, the other day I found a copycat recipe for the batter they used on everything, bought all of the listed ingredients, and passed it all off to my roommate who deep-fries 2-3 meals a week and has experience with hot oil and food…

And last night we had a pretty close emulation of Long John Silver’s chicken planks.

All in all it was pretty good chicken, and there were even the trademark ‘crumblies’ which is just batter that dribbled into the hot oil.

It was a good treat, but I’m too old to eat this more than really occasionally. 🙂

Listening to "Panopticom" by Peter Gabriel

As I mentioned back in November, back in July I’d submitted for an itemized list of every place I’ve worked over the years from the Social Security Administration – and that paperwork came in today!

It’s fascinating to look back over the years and suddenly remember things that are mere dim memories, because the name, location, and date is readily available.

For example, here’s the “Mr. Steak” (#106) I worked at in Longmont right before the family relocated to Golden in 1985… All I remember about that place was the quirky 60’s era cartoon cow logo.

Like most 80’s teenagers, I worked a string of restaurant jobs starting out; Café Marnie (Longmont), Mr. Steak (Longmont), Señor Frogs (Wheat Ridge), and finally the “Royal Fork” or “King’s Table” depending on what year it was (Lakewood).

In ’86 I went into the Navy for four years, getting out at the end of 1990.

The 90’s were a pretty weird time for me; the economy sucked, my ex was issueful, and it seemed like 1991 lasted about a decade…

Once I got out of the Navy I promptly started work at Prairie Tek working on bleeding edge 2.5″ laptop hard drives – which lasted until Prairie Tek moved everything overseas in February of ’91.

I was self-employed for a while in the middle of 1991 where I worked the convention circuit for about six months and then worked in a call center third shift for a month before landing a job at EDCON doing gravity and magnetic oil surveys in December of 1991.

EDCON lasted through late ’92 before things went weird with my ex again and everything fell apart. I subsisted on temporary jobs until I landed another job doing building maintenance and management at Town View Plaza in early ’93 and did that until late ’94 when I started at Intelligent Electronics – 3rd shift assembly on IBM EduQuest machines.

I left I.E. to work at a local computer store called “Action Computers” in mid ’95, then went back to I.E. to take over the network operations from early ’96 to mid ’97.

In 1997 I moved to Virginia and landed a job at Amerind in Alexandria, and in early ’98 struck out on my own to start “PFM Technologies” with some friends, and built some amazing things for anyone who paid me. One of these was the “Sticker Station” for APBI / foto fantasy.

From 2000 to 2001 I lived on a yacht in Baltimore and made all sorts of amazing things with Scott and Ken.

2001 to mid 2002 was teaching CompSci at Marianapolis Prep in Connecticut. And from there I worked a temp job for about a month, and then ran the computer repair side of a store in Vail until August 16th, 2004 – when I started at the company I currently work for.

All in all it’s a really interesting look at my past, and now I need to go and adjust things in my memoirs that felt like they were years apart, but were really only weeks… Especially 1991 – 1991 is very problematic because a decade of things happened in the span of about nine months.

It’s a tapestry of failures and successes, ups and downs, but it’s mine. 🙂

Listening to "The One" by Jessie Frye

Just got back from King Soopers, my local grocers, and things have gotten weirder here in Colofornia…

Starting yesterday you have to pay ten cents per plastic bag – ostensibly for ‘recycling efforts’, but I couldn’t find anything proving that. In fact, I found the following: “All across the state, 6 cents will be given to the county or municipality to be used towards a program of its choice. The other 4 cents will be given back to the establishment/ grocery store.”

So – profit… And they sell reusable store-branded bags that get around this for a buck, which is probably 90 cents profit as well as advertising.

What really frustrates me is that I’m old enough to remember the push to use plastic bags to “Save the Trees” in the first place…

Anyway, now you have to bring your own bags and ring up your own groceries at the store.

And today I spent $50 on four “Jimmy Dean” breakfast bowls, two TV dinners, and a twelve-pack of “Hint” flavored water – which makes the added hassle / expense of going to the store all the more unpleasant.

Sigh…

Listening to "Never Stop" by FM-84

Listening to "Oblivion" by At 1980

As I’ve mentioned in previous entries; going to Waffle House for breakfast is usually punctuated by myself and some other former Navy guy talking about ‘the old days’. And as my roommate tends to hit the local Waffle House once a week, I end up there about once a month.

Today’s trip ended with another fellow Navy guy… He’s a retired Navy, Vietnam vet, wheelchair bound hell-raiser with a penchant for spending his leftover government checks on the slots in Blackhawk – and apparently hit it big last week to the tune of $350,000.

Anyway, I was contemplating buying his breakfast just to say thanks for his service, but he turned it around on me and bought my breakfast – which I’m still processing as I’m usually the one doing the buying.

I double checked that he was okay with getting my ticket, which is where he explained the sudden windfall and that he was happy to spread the wealth. We both thanked each other for our respective service, shook hands, wished a happy new year, and went on our way.

Definitely a strange turn of events for me – enough that it’s worth writing down. 🙂

Listening to "Hotel Crowne" by At 1980

Had a bit of a blizzard last night, and the snow outside is deeper than the ground clearance on my car – so it looks like I’m working from home today.

Yes that is a Jeep on the left of the picture and yes I could get out of the garage if I really wanted to – but I don’t want to. 🙂

And a photo from the front of the house…

Listening to "Saved by the Bell" by Miami Nights 1984

Brought to you by Waffle House.

Listening to "Neon Sun" by At 1980

Colorado has seasons, which means it occasionally gets colder and cloudier than “72 and sunny” – which also means that things designed for California fail here. Which is unfortunate as many home builders are based in sunny California.

For example, it’s -17F outside right now, which means I need to go out once an hour and de-ice the intake for my water heater…

See, my house was built by a company based in California and to keep costs down they vent the water heater and furnace on the side of the house instead of the roof – so the exhaust and intake are about a foot off the ground and ten inches apart, which is fine when it’s mid 70’s year ’round.

It looks a bit like this:

The problem is when you burn natural gas you get water vapor, which condenses into a huge cloud when it’s below freezing – and when it’s below freezing that water vapor collects on the critter screen in the intake ten inches away and freezes into a sheet of ice. Which ultimately means no more hot water.

This isn’t the first time this has happened either… The apartment I had in Parker many years ago was built by a California contractor and had the hot water heater in a closet on the patio – and they would freeze, rupture, and flood the apartments on the first floor.

The solution there was to put electric space heaters and powered pipe tape in the closets – which completely negated any savings from the super efficient mechanical stuff they installed.

Not that I’m complaining really; at least I have hot water with a little manual intervention – which these days isn’t guaranteed what so ever.

Listening to "Chemistry" by LeBrock

I don’t really own a “TV”; I do all of my media consumption online and I don’t see any real reason to sit across the room from a panel the size of a pool table when I have laptops with better resolution. And, if you’re 18 inches or so from the laptop, it’s perceptually just as big as an olympic-size TV twelve feet away.

So, with that thinking, I generally use my old circa 2011 15″ MacBook Pro as a TV… I like to lay in bed and watch whatever has caught my interest for an hour before passing out – so it works out.

Unfortunately I’ve limped that 15″ MacBook Pro along about as far as I can. It’s on it’s third battery, which is failing, the wall-wart is some aftermarket thing that mostly works, and the AMD Radeon HD 6750M video card in it went out years ago so I hacked it to use the CPU’s integrated graphics full-time – which is sketchy with modern video compression. It’s also big, heavy, and with the second generation i7 in it, runs pretty warm…

So, the other day I retired it and picked up a refurbished “Early 2020″ 13” MacBook Air at Microcenter for $450. It’s an education version of the last Intel laptop Apple made, with a tenth generation i3, 8gigs, and a puny 128G SSD in it… But it still runs better than my 2011, has a better screen and sound, and even runs the latest version of MacOS.

So, yet another Mac to add to the list.

Listening to "Los Angeles" by The Midnight

2022 has been routinely weird… Which is worrisome that the weird is becoming routine.

Once again I didn’t really go anywhere; thanks to the one-two punch of covid and crap economy it’s been several years now since I really left the house for more than dozen hours. The sad thing is I’m getting used to it.

I did pick up a bleeding edge MacBook Pro early in the year, and that has proven to be money well spent. As I mentioned in a previous post, I pretty much live out of this laptop eighteen hours a day. It also has all of the hardware-level encryption and biometric security I need to allow me to leave work with it… With the laptop I also relented and moved back to an iPhone mostly for the GPS enabled camera and iCloud photo support, but also to work on some SwiftUI / Xcode stuff that went pretty well.

In August I traded in the overly sensible Nissan Kicks I acquired last year as a hold-me-over until the new “Z” came out in 2022 – it still hasn’t – on the hemi-powered Chrysler 300-S I’d been eyeballing for over a decade. This has also been money well spent so far; the car is really entertaining and just caveman-technology enough to be fun to work on. I’ve hacked it quite a bit electronically and mechanically, and probably totally voided the warranty, but such is life in the modern world.

Work-wise it’s just another year filled with hijinks I can’t talk about for projects I can’t talk about related to clients I can’t talk about. I’ve done hardware design work for some mechanical test harness stuff, lots of coding for everything from script-based user-modeling to routine application development for in-house stuff, and a metric ton of wild and wooly network engineering to support isolated offline testing of cloud-based stuff.

I love my job, I just wish I could talk about it more.

Other than that, the latest expansion for World of Warcraft came out a couple of weeks back and I’ve been having an absolute blast with it in my scant free time. It’s really the only “game” I’ve had much truck with this year – other than Second Life of course. Second Life isn’t so much a game for me though as much as it’s a weird hybrid of a script engine, Blender, and Photoshop that I use to kill time creatively.

Anyway, I hope your 2022 was at least passable, and here’s to hoping both of our 2023s are truly excellent!

Listening to "Nightland" by Droid Bishop

While I was out on my daily stroll around the neighborhood I noted that the mountains were really pretty – so here, have a picture.

I also noted that there was a lot of excessive jet noise, and then two f-16s from Buckley flew over…

It looked like they were doing laps of the Cherry Creek state park across the street for some reason…

Either way, super loud. They did two laps and then flew off, but it was enough to set off the neighbor’s dogs and a few car alarms.

Listening to "Who You Run To" by The Bad Dreamers