Category: Uncategorized

I’m old, so I’ve seen a lot of weather maps in my time…

One of the things I’ve noticed over the years is that weather maps seem to be experiencing ‘red shift’, but not in the cosmological connotation.

Back in “The Old Days” (TM), it wasn’t really hot outside until it got into the mid-to-high 80’s, and people didn’t really complain until it was in the 90’s. I mean, I can still hear my father’s routine “It’s over 90, that’s too damn hot!” every summer growing up.

And this was reflected in the color gradient maps of the day; if you saw yellow or orange in the area of your city, you knew it was going to be a 90+ degree scorcher.

But now, yellow/orange starts to appear in the mid 60s!?

I mean, according to this the green-ish tinted ‘comfortable’ end of the spectrum is 63 degrees, and apparently the world is on fire at 88…

Either people have gotten soft, or someone is playing with perception.

Compare the above Apple Weather map to one from NOAA:

On this map pretty much everything between 70 and 80 is green, or perceptually comfortable, and we see the yellow/orange appear in the 90 to 100 degree range – which seems less sensational to me.

I attempted to find old temperature maps on the Internet to compare against, but wasn’t too successful – they apparently have no historic value and are scrubbed from reality pretty quick. And most sites that offer historic data tend to generate maps using old data versus having old images – so that didn’t work either.

So, my personal jury is still out on this – but it certainly seems like there’s some marketing going on when it comes to the weather… Just like everything else I suppose.

Listening to "No Way Out" by Jefferson Starship 

Went out to top off the gas tank and get a few groceries today; it’s a pretty crazy world out there…

Firstly, I paid $5.20 a gallon for gas today – a new personal record!

The reason that’s a new personal record is I used to buy 100LL AVGas for racing, which was about $5 a gallon for someone without an airplane.

So, after a healthy fleecing at the pump I drove up the street to Walmart – mostly because it’s close to the house…

---

Walmart is still the most miserable place on Earth to do any shopping.

Today is pretty warm, about 95, and I tend to buy a lot of fresh produce and frozen items – so my goal was to get in, get out, and get home (about a mile away) in as rapid fashion as possible before everything wilted and thawed…

The place was packed, and I wound up parking at the bank in the parking lot as it was as close as I could get. And the store itself was full of zombie-like people wandering aimlessly through the isles; basically shopping via Brownian motion.

And the place was seriously low on stock too… I had to buy name-brand stuff because all of the cheaper store-brand versions of what I was after were sold out.

Anyway, to walk the grocery side of the place took about 45 minutes because of the traffic… I mean, why does someone stop in the middle of an isle and carefully examine a box of Hamburger Helper for ten minutes? Fortunately I know this happens on occasion, so I employ strategery to make sure my refrigerated and frozen goods stay cold by picking them up last.

My local grocery stores don’t really do cashier checkout anymore, and Walmart is no different. They have replaced all but three of the isles with “self checkout”… This was probably an amazing idea on paper, but half of the self checkout lanes at any time are broken in some fashion and the other half have a 100% chance of befuddling the octogenarian trying to use them.

Today, for example, I spotted an open self-checkout lane, walked over there, and unloaded my cart onto the belt – then saw the post-it stuck to the screen stating it was cash only… So I reloaded my cart and got into another line behind a family of 12, only to discover that the machine there was broken and they were just kinda hanging out.

30 minutes later I managed to get my groceries paid for and headed out.

Getting out of the parking lot was a bit like departing a concert, and it took another 15 minutes just to get onto the main road – and 3 minutes later I was unloading the car and throwing everything into the fridge in the hopes I caught it in time.

There’s a reason I got my groceries delivered for the last few years… But now with all of the gas surcharges and whatnot, I can get almost twice as much food for my hundred bucks by braving the masses; four whole bags instead of two…

I miss the good old days of 2019…

Listening to "Lovin' Every Minute of It" by Loverboy

It’s been a hot minute since the last time I went to the movies… Between needing a space suit for one year, and then the economy being pure suck for the next, it’s just not been feasible.

Well, I finally decided to bite the proverbial bullet and go see “Top Gun : Maverick”.

Unfortunately, by the time I decided to take out a loan to go see a movie, every local AMC was sold out for the weekend. So I tried the nearby Alamo Drafthouse and it was the same story…

Eventually I found a Harkins theater up at the mall that use to be the old Stapleton airport, and not only were their theaters almost empty, the seats were $9 each.

That’s a bit more than 50% less than what AMC wants…

So I drove up to the theater, which is about 40 minutes away, and made sure to leave myself plenty of time for the terribad traffic on I-70. And arrived at the mall just in time for a random hailstorm; so I sat in the car for a few minutes imagining that it was about to look a lot more like a golf ball.

Never fails.

Fortunately the hail was essentially slush and my car is fine.

Anyway, the new Top Gun movie is really, really good. It was very respectful of the original movie, had lots of great action and meaningful interpersonal scenes, and thoroughly wrecked modern CGI green-screen movies with practical effects and literal fighter jets.

All in all, a worthy movie for my hard earned cash. I’m glad I decided to pay the theater tax to see it.

Listening to "Let the Day Begin" by The Call

It snowed all night, so here’s how things look here in Colorado this morning…

If it looks cold, that’s because it is; it’s 28 degrees outside. 🙂

Listening to "Explorers" by The Midnight

Yesterday it was almost 90 outside, today it is…

Listening to "Girl Can't Help It " by Journey

I’m a big fan of hot sauce and tend to put it on everything, because everything can use a bit more spice in my humble opinion.

I’m also a bit of a hot sauce snob; I like the heat and appreciate anything that can make a little sweat break out on my brow – but it also has to be flavorful… There is a lot of sauce out there that simply tastes like burning, and I’m not a fan.

So, my refrigerator has a door pocket reserved for various hot sauces, but the one I tend to use the most often when I have it, is “Diablo” packets from Taco Bell.

No, really. “Diablo” is really, really good sauce – good enough that once a month I get a couple of soft tacos and ask for as many sauce packets as the nice person at the window will part with, and then squirrel them away for later…

Now, the astute among you may be telling their monitor, “Just buy it in the bottle at the store – they sell Taco Bell sauce there!” And while you would be right, at least around Denver all you can get is yellow (mild) and red (hot). The “hot” is essentially spicy catsup and I’m not a fan of that either.

But recently Target of all places started carrying Diablo bottles, so yesterday I picked up a couple…

What’s interesting is Diablo does not appear to be exceptionally shelf-stable; the bottles I picked up were just put on the shelf, and expire in mid July. So this may explain why it’s so hard to get outside of a trip to Taco Bell.

Either way though, this makes me pretty happy. I’m off to scramble some eggs, make a Denver omelet, and slather it in Diablo sauce – back in a bit!

Listening to "Private Eyes" by Hall and Oates

Blizzard, owned by Activision, owned by Microsoft (Microblizzavision) announced the next expansion for World of Warcraft (WoW) about two weeks ago.

It piqued my curiosity…

See, I more or less gave up on WoW during “Battle for Azeroth” (BfA) as I mostly play for the setting, and the setting had ceased to be “Warcraft”. The current expansion, “Shadowlands”, is such a radical departure from the overall setting that even the company’s writers have no idea where to go with it. So it’s a mess of disparate systems with a janky storyline and a lot of pointless time sinks that only serve to annoy.

In short, WoW is a mess right now and has been for several years. And the abysmal user numbers these days prove this out.

So Blizzard went off to have a rethink apparently; they pulled people off of the current expansion (cancelling an entire content patch) and set about working on all of the broken stuff… And announced the end result two weeks ago.

“Dragonflight”

Dragonflight makes all of the right noises from Blizzard management; “going back to a grounded Warcraft setting”, “getting rid of borrowed power”, “more focus on core functionality instead of layers of systems”, and “putting the RPG back in MMORPG”.

Basically my laundry list of gripes were being addressed, so I re-upped for 6 months to signal my approval of the better direction and have been playing catch-up this week.

When I quit during BfA, I canceled my account completely, so I had to start up a new account and begin from the ground floor; level 1.

Last night I made it to 53 (out of 60) and have started on the Shadowlands content… Fortunately Shadowlands is 2-3 content patches along and most of the truly bad stuff has been edited out. So it’s still a weirdly disjointed story with too much emphasis on Mary Sue NPCs, but at least it’s not painful to level through.

Once I hit 60 I’ll attempt to meet up with a few friends who still play, and bum around the world doing things like unlocking mounts and looking for fancy armor bits until Dragonflight launches.

Given how expensive it is these days to leave the house, $12 a month for WoW, if it’s fun, seems like a good deal…

Listening to "Sailing" by Christopher Cross 

No matter how complicated life gets or how convoluted the world seems, there’s always some solace at Waffle House…

Waffle Houses are interesting in that they are always there for you…

It’s 2am, you’ve been on the road for 18 hours, and you’ve pulled off into a town time forgot? Waffle House is open.

It’s Christmas Eve, you’ve got no where to be, everything is closed, and you forgot to get groceries? Waffle House is open.

It’s the apocalypse and you’ve managed to stick to the shadows and avoid roving gangs of cannibals for days now, but you’re running low on supplies? Head to Waffle House to get a hot meal and more ammo…

I’m serious! Waffle House being closed is so rare that FEMA actually has a disaster scale called the Waffle House Index based on it.

The index has three levels, based on the extent of operations and service at the restaurant following a storm:

• GREEN: full menu – restaurant has power and damage is limited or no damage at all.
• YELLOW: limited menu – No power or only power from a generator, or food supplies may be low.
• RED: the restaurant is closed – Indicates severe damage or severe flooding.

Anyway, this is where I went to tune out the crazy in the world for a bit and have breakfast this morning; and it was nice.

Listening to "More Than This" by Roxy Music

I guess the biggest news in the universe at the moment is that the world’s richest man – Elon Musk – just purchased the world’s most problematic domain – Twitter.com.

Yep. For 44 billion dollars.

Twitter, for me at least, has always been a mixed bag; I’m far too wordy for the short post format, and I rarely have anything so important to say that it requires an audience. That and the place is a bit like a philosophical particle accelerator; it creates opinions of such energy and instability that they cannot exist in nature.

But, all that aside, I’ve returned to the Twitterverse to see what can be seen.

Listening to "Layin' It on the Line" by Jefferson Starship

The is the first time I’ve seen a bare shelf at my local Walmart… I guess I won’t be making eggs for breakfast this week.

Listening to "Even Less" by Porcupine Tree

The weather here in Denver was a bit windy yesterday, which stirred up a bit of a sand storm that eventually ended up in my house…

Today is all about cleaning up the mess, and the vacbots are already on the case after getting new filters.

I need to dust everything as soon as they are done…

Listening to "My Life" by Billy Joel

So I got an email from a sales-drone at Amazon today stating that they had noticed my EC2 usage had increased – so they wanted to discus my usage and how things might be adjusted…

Well, this was worrisome as I’d closed my work account with Amazon Web Services over a decade ago, so an increase would mean someone was doing something they shouldn’t.

So, I went to the AWS site and logged in (after changing my password because I’ve not used the service in forever and had pulled the password from my manager) and lo:

Long story short, even Amazon is resorting to shady emails and sketchy business practices these days…

One literally cannot believe anything anymore.

Listening to "Hold Me" by Fleetwood Mac

Today, when I had to go and clean out the bin on my upstairs Neato vacuum, I noticed some interesting empathy.

See, my upstairs Neato is a “Botvac Connected”, and it has faithfully cleaned my floors 2-3 times a week since 2015… And last year it was augmented with a Neato D8 to do the main floor, and the Connected was moved upstairs to do the bedrooms.

Today after I replaced its dirt bin and it chugged up to speed and started off on its rounds, I felt a pang of sadness for the old soldier. See, it has a lot of miles on it, and it rattles and bangs and one wheel drags a bit so it kind of limps around – and it’s battery is weak so sometimes it doesn’t make it back to its base to recharge and just kind of falls asleep somewhere.

It’s a machine, made of motors and electronics, and it has one basic function which is to vacuum – but the fact I can feel sadness for it, the same sadness that one experiences when they realize a cherished pet has reached its sunset years, is an intriguing observation of what makes us Human…

Humans have anthropomorphized the world around themselves since the dawn of civilization, and apparently said civilization hasn’t ground me down so much that I can’t still feel empathy for an old robot vacuum…

And that makes me happier than it probably should.

I just ordered a new $80 battery for my old robovac upstairs, and I’ve added a teardown and restoration to my list of projects for the summer.

I’ll try to keep VacBro around for a few more years.

Listening to "Jane" by Starship

My 32 year old, fifty pound, wondrously analog Denon AVC-3000 receiver finally succumbed to entropy today…

I knew the end would come soon. See, the left channel had been weak on startup for a couple of months, but after 15 minutes or so would balance out with the right channel. So I was just kind of limping it along and hoping I could get to my year-end bonus before it finally gave up the ghost.

No such luck.

Leading up to this I had been looking at options for when the inevitable happened – but the available options tend to start at about $600. And the economy isn’t conducive to buying $600 receivers right now…

The AVC-3000 is from a time before digital, so it does things like switch S-Video and has about a hundred RCA jacks on the back, so getting audio from a modern digital device requires being inventive…

See, I have a 4K Apple TV feeding an old 32-inch computer monitor via HDMI, and then was taking the headphone output of the monitor and converting that into the RCA that the Denon required.

It worked, even if the sound quality out of the D/A in the monitor was a bit lacking.

Anyway, the left channel in the Denon completely failed right before lunch and steadfastly refused to be recussitated.

I was planning to run over to Walgreens for some toiletries and hit up the Burger King in the parking lot during lunch, and there’s a pawn shop that shares the parking lot – so I decided to drop in and see if there was anything that I could replace the Denon with that didn’t cost a thousand dollars.

And I returned home with a really good condition Onkyo TX-SR353 that ran me $90.

It came with everything; antennas, remote, manual, HDMI cable, etc. And, as an added bonus, it understands 4K HDR – so I can run HDMI from the Apple TV to it, and then HDMI from it to the monitor – so the audio sounds really good now.

Now my enormous 30 year old Bowers & Wilkins DM640 speakers do a wonderful job of illustrating the weakness of lesser hardware, and the Onkyo is a bit ‘brash’, but it beats only having one channel.

And it was $90…

Listening to "Relax" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood

Back on March 23rd I mentioned that I’d sold a few things on eBay, and that one of the items was a rather high-end motherboard. Then on April 3rd the fellow who bought the motherboard couldn’t get it to work and requested eBay refund his money.

I responded to his request with an attempt to help him get it set up, because it’s a pretty advanced board and really punishes you for not reading the manual. That and I know the board worked fine – unless he blew it up by not reading the manual.

And got no response.

eBay essentially offers three responses to a refund request; send a message, refund the item, or ask eBay to arbitrate things. And it’s all on a timer, in this case the 8th, with the default being eBay arbitrating.

Well, given the buyer’s radio silence I assumed he was just expecting me to refund his money and wouldn’t respond to my suggestions in the hopes eBay would judge in his favor when the clock ran out.

So I decided to just sit and wait; the 8th came and went with no response and I started to wonder what was up.

This morning I got a series of emails from eBay. The first, at 07:57, stated the buyer had asked them to arbitrate and that they would review things and that it would take 48 hours.

I kind of expected this.

At 08:00 the next email comes in stating that eBay had judged in favor of the buyer and that the buyer would be sending the board back to me by the 22nd. eBay would then bill me for the purchase price as well as the return shipping…

That was a surprisingly quick 48 hours, but I kind of expected this as well. I figured I’d deal with the bank stuff and move the $650 into the eBay account after breakfast…

Then another email arrived at 08:10. This one was the buyer finally responding stating that he got the board working and that he was closing the return request.

…

So, I spent a week fretting over all of this for no particular reason other than someone neglecting their email.

Anyway, long story short, I’ll never sell anything on eBay again… It’s stupidly expensive to sell things on the platform and the robojudge makes it shockingly easy for people to mess with you.

I’m sure I will continue buying things there just because it’s a handy source for bits and pieces of the past that cannot be found elsewhere.

Lesson learned, and I got lucky this time in that it didn’t cost me anything but a hundred dollars in fees and shipping.

Listening to "Subdivisions" by Rush

Some excitement this morning; the elevator at my office failed – while I was in it.

I got in, pressed three, the doors closed and the elevator got to about the second floor before there was a kind of ‘thump’, the elevator dropped a few inches, and then began to bounce fairly violently.

I pulled the emergency stop and the bouncing stopped, but the elevator was between floors and the doors wouldn’t open.

Eventually, by using the emergency stop to “turn it off and on again” a few times, the elevator bled down and let me out on the first floor.

I get to work between 0600 and 0630, or about two hours before other folks arrive, so it would have been a fairly long wait for someone to notice the elevator alarm going off – and I wasn’t relishing that idea. But I got out, secured the power to the elevator, and put up out of order signs.

It’s an older hydraulic elevator, so I’m guessing there’s a valve in there somewhere that’s failed… But the elevator guy can figure it out when he gets here.

Listening to "Who's Behind the Door" by Zebra

This morning’s breakfast is “Le Peep”; there’s one just south of my place on Parker road, but I’ve not eaten there until this morning.

I think the last time I ate at Le Peep was probably the early 80’s in Longmont… Back then the place had just escaped Aspen, so it was kind of designed (and priced) for SoCal women visiting their Aspen house with their staff and designer dogs.

It was good, but back then $15 for breakfast was borderline insanity, and no one in Longmont even knew what an avocado was let alone why it should be an ingredient in everything on the menu.

Fast forward 40 years and the prices haven’t really changed much, the ambiance of the place is about the same, and there’s an avocado in pretty much every dish – but the clientele are now the median age of Joe Biden.

While waiting for my to-go order a balding fellow with an ironic ponytail and an actual Izod polo shirt walked in and was seated… I assume he’s been eating at LePeep since the 80’s. Then there was the elderly lady who spent the entire time I was waiting attempting to park her beige late 80’s 300-series Mercedes; she must have pulled in an out of the handicap space a half dozen times while I watched – mostly because my car was next to the handicap spot and I was expecting a costly confrontation at any moment.

She evidently gave up because she followed me out of the parking lot and eventually ended up at the IHOP just up the hill. It has RV parking, so might have been easier for her to navigate.

All in all though the food was good when I got it home. I ordered the ala carte biscuits and gravy with a scrambled egg and a side of sausage, and it was pretty inexpensive for what I got; $17 including the mandatory tip (for a carry out order)…

I was initially going to get the biscuits and gravy menu item, but they don’t offer scrambled eggs anywhere but ala carte… Only peasants eat their eggs scrambled I guess. 🙂

Listening to "It's My Life" by Talk Talk

Over the years I’ve collected a great many things, and most of them involve my various stories in writing and roleplay and tend to be artwork of various settings and the characters who inhabit them.

Since 2008 or so I’ve primarily used Second Life as the engine for my stories and settings because I can build them in 3D for the enjoyment of anyone interested.

In 2011 I set up a little place called “Trotsdale” for the fans of the pop-culture phenomenon that was “Gen 4” MLP – but as a different place with different stories and heroes from the TV show.

Initially the location was to simply be a town where players could hang out and soak in the ambiance of a place similar to the TV show. The town proper was mostly built by a fellow on SL named OldVamp who was my right-hand man for the whole thing. None of it would have went very far without his help.

In any roleplay setting you need a ‘storyteller’ character to illustrate the world and it’s history for the players, and in MLP this function is fulfilled by Alicorns… So, I had to make my own, and Aurora was created.

After a year or so I decided to expand the setting to the lands Aurora controlled, and this became the setting of Roanoak, of which Aurora was Empress.

Aurora has had a bunch of very epic artwork made of her – mostly concerned with her talent and the history of her lands…

Roanoak ran for about four years until, in 2015, some friends of mine wanted to start a new roleplay setting in Second Life – one based upon the fanfiction “Fallout Equestria”.

I was happy enough to oblige, and using the backstory set up years earlier rolled Roanoak’s clock forward about 200 years…

In doing this though, I had to move beyond Aurora’s world and Aurora herself. And through a complicated series of events, Iridae came onto the scene to illustrate the next chapter.

Unlike Aurora, who the players met in the middle of the story, Iridae began along with the players… Initially she was a unicorn, and through a year long series of trials and tribulations eventually became Aurora’s successor. Iridae got the same all-star treatment as Aurora, but this time the art included physical items…

My ‘pony period’ in SL was from 2011 to 2021 – a decade of world building and adventure imagined, penned, and often built by yours truly… It was a pretty epic time and was filled with fantastic people – and the conventions and general vacation trips to Disneyland and Las Vegas just to hang out with them were equally memorable.

I kind of miss it, truth be told. But as I enter year two of my forced vacation from the second job that it was, I’m content to continue missing it.

Listening to "The Grey Havens" by The Lord of the Rings & James Galway

It’s a pretty typical March outside…

Under that snow is probably a half of an inch of ice as it rained for a few hours last evening before getting below freezing all night. So, I’m not driving into the office today unless it’s an emergency…

I just don’t see the sense in risking a $30,000 car for the opportunity to sit in a different office and do exactly the same thing I do right here in my home office.

That and it gives me a chance to finish moving into the new MacBook Pro before the 10am Teams meeting…

Yep, back on a Mac – specifically the top-end 16″ M1 Max 32-core GPU version – for a couple of reasons.

• My PC is currently worth about $7000, or about $3000 more than I paid for it. If I can find someone to buy it, that more than covers the cost of the new $4000 laptop.
• My PC uses a bit over 150watts at idle and 600watts at full-tilt, which with the increases in utility cost is slightly painful each month. The MacBook on the other hand tops out at 140watts.
• My PC is basically a space heater I can plug a monitor into, which in the summer will suck as I need to run the AC as little as possible to keep costs down. The MacBook basically generates no heat.
• My circa 2014 UPS has finally failed and replacing it is $250. The MacBook comes with a built-in 6-10 hour UPS.
• And lastly, Windows 11 is just “okay” as an OS, but gets immeasurably worse when Microsoft adds all kinds of unavoidable advertising to it. MacOS is the better OS in broad strokes, but also isn’t an ad platform with a file browser tacked onto it.

Overall, the new MacBook is nice; great CPU/GPU, super nice screen, and the build quality is just as stellar as always… But the return of some actual ports is my favorite part, one of which is an actual SD card slot! So it’s really easy to get photos off of my cameras!

The above pictures came from my Canon G12, in fact… I still need to get Photoshop installed so that I can do the lens correction for it.

Overall the new MacBook really, really reminds me of my old G4 PowerBook; it’s chunky, heavy, has actual ports, and is kinda bleeding edge for {current year}.

Listening to "Faded Memory" by Jessie Frye

For most of my childhood – so the 70’s and early 80’s – radio was a kid’s social media. If you wanted to know what the new fad was, the latest music was, news, culture, whatever – radio was how you did it.

There was also TV, of course, but TVs were expensive so they tended to belong to your parents, and in turn showed what your parents were interested in; usually a game show of some sort. A cheap radio on the other hand could be had for lunch money, and because it was yours it played the stations that played your music.

Your radio also tended to be portable, so you could do you wherever you happened to be – and you could even listen to whatever your social group was into while out and about with them.

Back in those days, the DJ for whatever genera of music you were into occupied an interesting space – they were a disembodied voice that no one could put a face to, but were also a kindred soul for everyone in range of the transmitter who was into that genera. In school, there was as much to-do made about the specific DJ as there was about the music they played.

For me, the radio station of choice was “KBPI” at 105.9 – the “hundred thousand watt blowtorch of the rockies” as they called it.

There were also cassettes of course – everyone had a Walkman in the 80’s… Not many people had an actual Sony Walkman though, as they tended to be pretty expensive. See, anything you could carry that played a cassette and had headphones was a “Walkman” back then, much to the other manufacturers chagrin I’m sure.

But the blue and silver Sony with the orange foam headphones was ‘boss’ at the time, and the pinnacle of coolness. And having an actual Sony Walkman made you conversation-worthy in the school halls… Now, where you got the music for your Walkman was either copying a friend’s mix-tape, or making your own off the radio.

Sure, you could go buy the hot album of the week and then tape the tracks you wanted – but albums were expensive for that 1-2 tracks you were really interested in. And a cassette held 10-12 tracks per side, so that’s a dozen albums you’d need to buy for one tape… So, the better solution was the radio mix-tape, but that required heaps of patience and some skill…

I remember sitting in front of my grandmother’s home stereo on weekends, for hours, finger on the record/pause button, patiently waiting for a song I wanted to record to come on the radio.

It was always my grandmother’s stereo because my father wouldn’t let me within a dozen yards of his stuff, and my receiver at home didn’t have a cassette in it. So, I always enjoyed being shuffled off to my grandmother’s place in Golden on the weekends.

Listening to "The Spirit of Radio" by Rush