Category: Uncategorized

Ye olde website has moved servers once again.

The long and short of it is I found I could get three years of hosting at GoDaddy for a bit less than one year at Dreamhost. And while Dreamhost is really, really good – my site here requires something between the cheap shared hosting and the $300 a year VPS hosting, which they don’t offer.

And with looming WWIII, rampant inflation, an energy crisis, crashing stock markets, a housing bubble, and the general cost of living almost exceeding my income – I need to save money where I can.

I’d actually thought about just shelving the site here, but I have fun with it and now it’s cheap(er) fun.

The problem I’ve run into in exfiltrating my data from Dreamhost is the backup they sent me isn’t complete… It’s missing pretty much the entire last year. So, even though the dump date is February 13th, 2022, the last entries in the database are from March 28th, 2021.

So, I’m thinking I’ll just start again from here. I’ll put the memoirs back up for the occasional curious tourist, and maybe I’ll do a ‘year in review’ for each year leading up to today just to condense things.

Listening to "Thief in the Night" by Yutaka Yamada

For some time now I’ve been plotting a method of extricating the thousand or so entries I have here on Livejournal, images and all, and hosting it all State-side.

Now, I’m not one of the people who were upset by the rule changes wrought by the Russian ownership of Livejournal — I don’t really do anything that rubs anyone the wrong way. Nor has the location of the servers or the Cyrillic users bothered me much — I was actually learning a bit of Russian on the side from the folks here…

My worries are more government-driven; politics ruins everything, and I’d rather not lose two decades of memories over some international spat brought about by something stupid.

Anyway, with the announcement of the fees for Livejournal switching to Rubles which possibly starts to incur foreign transaction fees, I figured it was probably time to get serious about whipping up a data translation method and moving everything to WordPress.

So, today I spent some quality time pouring over XML exports from LJ, writing a bulk-exporter, translator, and image duplicator. And getting everything settled at a new home.

Said new home is www.rihahn.com.

Everything that is here will continue to be here for as long as it can be here, but anything new will be posted over yonder.

I still have some cleanup to do on posts older than 2019 on the new site, but everything is stable for the most part.

Thanks for the couple decades of faithful service LJ!

~RiHahn

I don’t do “news”, so it can often appear that I either live under a rock or that I’m emotionally detached — because I’m not in a panic over whatever today’s panic is scheduled to be.

Outside of just eschewing ‘news’, I’m also fairly resistant to sensationalism, because I tend to skip headlines and seek out the underlying reason for the article.

Here’s a current example:

Sounds bad, right? Outbreaks everywhere! And won’t someone please think of the children!

But, let’s get beyond the headline here… My first instinct with anything that quotes numbers is to see what story the numbers really tell. So, to the Internet!

With a quick internet search I find that there are 4,126 public schools in Michigan, so 62 is just about 1.5% of all the schools referenced in this headline. Also in this internet search I discover that, as of last year, there were roughly 1,745,300 public school students in Michigan, so 247 is 0.01% of the student body.

Now if we average 247 cases across 62 schools we end up with about 4 students per school.

I know I’m old, but “4” doesn’t strike me as an “Outbreak”. I mean, pre-covid, would four students coming down with the flu even be known by the students in the school? Would it make the school paper let alone regional news?

Probably not, but hey — fear sells clicks.

People online are often shocked to discover that I have a roommate… 

I’m not sure why, other than I’m in my 50’s and roommates are a thing you do when you’re younger, just getting started down the road of life, and things are more expensive than your meager income will afford.

But, have you seen what things cost these days?

Sure, I make a pretty good wage; I’ve been with the company going on seventeen years and I’m in upper-management… But the cost of living in Denver these days is shockingly similar to living on the Left Coast, and even with my income I’m very much ‘blue collar’.

Elections have consequences, as they say.

For example, my new house is a fairly nice place in a nice location, but it’s nothing super-special — and it’s worth almost a half million dollars in the Denver economy right now. 

Granted, there are less expensive places to live in Denver, and that’s always an option — but I’ve lived in those less expensive places and one does get tired of the wheels and tires being stolen off of their car after a while.

The solution to affording Denver is to find ways of reducing the cost of living; marriage is the method most folks use as it usually comes with dual-income and lots of tax breaks — but I did the marriage thing ages ago, and I’m not interested.

The other option is a roommate, but that can come with its own complications in the form of generally crap people.

Fortunately I’ve known my current roommate, Scott, since 1996 — and we get along pretty well.

We met over a shared history of working sci-fi/fantasy conventions. 

See, back in the early 90’s I drove around the country selling local artisans’ stuff at conventions — art, costumery, and other hand-made objects of geekery. Scott did basically the same thing in the mid-90’s, but more from a publishing perspective.

In the late 90’s I was just going to conventions for fun, and met Scott and his wife at a convention in Cleveland in late 1996. This prompted another convention together in California in 1997. Later in 1997, the company I had been working for was bought by Ingram Micro and Scott offered me a job where he worked in D.C. — so I moved, became a roommate for Scott and his family, and went in with them to buy a ranch in central Virginia.

Since then we’ve started a couple of successful companies, made some amazing things, done a lot of interesting side-jobs, and just been good friends.

I moved back to Colorado in 2002, and in 2006 the place Scott, now single, is working on the East Coast gets bought… So I move him out here to Colorado, hire him, and he becomes a roommate. Which balances the events of a decade earlier.

And Scott has been a roommate ever since.

By far the funniest thing is when people assume we’re a couple — I mean, it is the roaring 20’s after all and nothing is off the table anymore, and we’ve known each other for so long that I guess it can seem that way… But, no, we’re just friends and have a rent-share arrangement so we can afford to live in Denver.

My roommate eats out a lot; lunch at work is always out and about and on weekends he’ll go get breakfast somewhere. This morning he was down in Parker at Waffle House, for example.

I’m more of a cheapskate and tend to just buy groceries and fix food at home, with the occasional splurge for something nice.

Anyway, he mentioned this afternoon that it looked like “Hickory House” down there had succumbed to the controllavirus and they appeared to be closed.

That bummed me out, because when I lived in Parker Hickory House was a routine venue… When anyone came to visit, that’s where I took them for dinner — because it was amazing.

The news sent me scurrying to the Internet and I’m happy to report that they’re still open. Apparently the place just looks closed…

To do my part to ensure they remain open, I ordered to-go for us and sent the roomie back to Parker to pick it up.

So, tonight’s repast is jalapeño cheddar sausage, baked beans with brisket, corn on the cob, and garlic toast… And it’s just as amazing as it’s always been. 🙂

In my scant free time I’ve been messing around with “classic” World of Warcraft a bit. It’s mostly just to have a change of pace from Final Fantasy 14.

FF14 is still a really good game, and I’m looking forward to the next ‘chapter’, but while I got to Chapter Two before my friends, I don’t have their availability and they blew past me in a couple of days.

So it was back to soloing the game, which prompted me to take a break from it. Blizzard also announced the return of “The Burning Crusade” (TBC) via ‘classic’ last month, which piqued my interest.

See, TBC was my favorite expansion of the game and it was generally viewed as peak-warcraft; Blizzard had transitioned from “Hey, let’s see if we can make an MMO” to “We now run the biggest game on the planet and are making ten-thousand dollars in profit per minute”… So TBC has the benefit of a couple of years of bug fixes, essentially infinite funding, and the original team that made the game in the first place was still calling the shots.

So, it was still true to the original, but better — and also pre-Activision merger which, arguably, screwed the pooch in so many ways.

Technically “Wrath of the Lich King” (Wrath) was also created before the ActiBlizz merger, but released after it — and is also regarded fondly and for many players was their fist brush with WoW.

The first actual ActiBlizz expansion was “Cataclysm” (Cata) — which literally and figuratively broke the world — of Warcraft, and is generally thought to be the beginning of the decline.

So, I’ve been puttering around with a warlock in the original 2006-ish version of the game and having quite a bit of fun.

The original game was so much more “RPG” than the post-ActiBlizz versions, where the ability to create a character was slowly supplanted with the ability to pick a cookie-cutter class. So, yeah, you can gimp yourself on original WoW by not choosing the optimal skill and ability progression — but that’s actually part of the fun. Everything is viable, and everything ultimately comes down to player skill — and apparently it’s wrong to expect players to get better at playing or something.

Anyway, I’m on the “Pagle” server, Alliance-side, as Raeshlavik the warlock. 🙂

As is par for the course; today I rolled out Office 365 to my users with instructions on how to set up 2FA and everything…

And an hour ago Microsoft had a global Azure failure that caused 1×10^32 emails from user-land about how the instructions, they do nothing!

Sigh…

“The Cloud” is, and always has been, a bad idea with waaaaay too much money behind it.

Cool whites and blues outside, warm incandescent hues inside.

It’s slightly snowy outside, and they’re saying it’ll be like this through Wednesday.

Which suits me just fine; I have plenty of food and no real desire to go anywhere, so I’ll just sit here in my office and watch the snow blow past the windows.

I’m still working on the great Goolag migration, and have made a few breakthroughs.

The big one is that after pouring over obfuscated logs for several hours, I’ve discovered that Exchange 365 despises any local Active Directory that has ever come into contact with a local Exchange server. So I’ve had to reverse engineer what old Exchange servers do to old Active directory installs and formulate a way to remove those entries from every user.

Eventually there was a brief bit of PowerShell that cleared it up… Simply put every user login into a text file, one line per user, and then:

$users=Get-content c:\users.txt

This loads the users into the session variable $users so we iterate through it with:

Foreach($user in $users){get-aduser $user| set-aduser -clear msExchMailboxGuid,msexchhomeservername,legacyexchangedn,mail,mailnickname,msexchmailboxsecuritydescriptor,msexchpoliciesincluded,msexchrecipientdisplaytype,msexchrecipienttypedetails,msexchumdtmfmap,msexchuseraccountcontrol,msexchversion}

And this removes the problematic Exchange objects from each user…

Once that was done all I had to do was remove everyone from O365, resync with the local AD, and presto! Everyone can has mailbox now.

Right now I’m attempting another G-Suite <-> O365 sync again, now that I’m about 80% certain the O365 side is set up right. Now if Google cooperates and doesn’t assume the app I set up on their end, with domain permissions and all sorts of assurances that I’m in fact the guy in charge of the data, is a hacking attempt — I’ll get both systems sync’d up.

Hope shines eternal I suppose.

I’m currently deeply embroiled in transitioning the company to “The Cloud”, so free time has been at a premium these last two weeks.

The difficulty has mostly come from two things: Google and Microsoft.

On the Goolag front, the company has been using G-Suite, now Google Workspace, for many years — so there’s a lot of user-land muscle-memory there that is change-resistant. Adding to the complexity is the big “G” itself being a right pain in the ass to transition out of…

See, I’m migrating the company to Office 365 and that means migrating email, contacts, files, calendars, etc, etc, out of Google. And while a user can “takeout” all of their data from Google, trusting them to know how to import it all into O365 is a bridge too far.

There’s a procedure where you create a Google Cloud ‘app’ and O365 chron process that, with domain admin rights, can set up the forwards and move all of the accumulated user-land detritus from one place to another automagically… But Google keeps breaking this functionality in the name of “security”.

It’s not a security risk if I’m setting it up, and I literally own the domain and the data I’m trying to move Google.

It’s really about the money… Goolag is hoping that if they make it onerous enough, people will simply give up and keep paying them.

Well, don’t give up so easy…

The other player in this sordid tale is Microsoft, who is still a beast of a billion heads, all retarded.

My infrastructure at work runs on a few operating systems; Linux, MacOS, and Windows — and the Windows portion is mostly 2008r2 systems running Active Directory, Terminal Services, Sharepoint, and a Windows-based file server.

Yeah, it’s 2008r2 — because I already paid the tens of thousands in licensing and it works just fine for what I need it to do… That and I briefly toyed with moving to 2012 server when it came out, but the Windows 8 UI tacked onto a server OS sucked so bad I literally burned the installer DVDs.

Anyway, this is where the problem comes in; 2008r2 fell off the support list so Microsoft has completely disowned it, but all of my accumulated user-land data is housed in a 2008r2 AD server…

O365’s “Azure”, the cloudy version of Active Directory will simply import all of that accumulated user-land data — if the AD server is running 2012r2 or later. If the server is 2008r2, you are shit outta luck.

I think I have a workaround for this too — but it involves a bunch of back-end work on my 2008r2 AD server to pull off, and I can’t do that during working hours for obvious reasons, so I’m a vampire for the foreseeable future.

So, went and saw “Raya and the Last Dragon” last evening, in iMax, because why not…

I was pleasantly surprised at how good the movie was — because, honestly, my expectations were set pretty low…

Let’s cut to the chase; the House of Mouse these days is pretty much known for being the Church of Social Justice of Latter Day Woke… A studio where telling a good story is somewhere near the bottom of the priority list, under “browbeat the audience with your agenda”, “be as preachy as possible about a current event”, and “you have two hours to convince everyone your kink is cool”.

“Raya” still had its {current year} elements, sure; Princess Power Hour? Yep. Mean girl redemption arc? Check. Broken family dynamic? Double-check. Kowtowing to all of the Asian money invested in the company? Oh hell yes…

But what made the movie actually good was all of the {current year} it didn’t have…

There was a strong father figure instead of the modern-era useless comedy relief male. The female lead had raison d’être versus being inexplicably Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger than everyone ever because woman. And the moral of the story was simply a good moral, so there was no need to try and convince the audience with forced morality.

In short, the movie didn’t harangue at the audience about woke du jour and instead just told a good story.

And that somewhat made the $75 it cost to see the movie worth it.

I find it funny how the theaters are all “COVID killed us!” — maybe, but $75 for two people to see a flick with popcorn and soda might have something to do with the low attendance numbers as well…

One of my favorite parts of moving is finding all of the really cool hole in the wall places near where you moved.

Yesterday I found a Shipley’s Donuts just down the street, and picked up a half-dozen glazed for my roommate and a large coffee for myself.

Today’s adventure took me to a place called “Doug’s Day Diner” where I picked up breakfast… Gotta love a place that has over a dozen ways to make an egg — including several ways just to scramble them. And you can literally order your bacon soft, regular, or crispy.

I went with my usual; biscuits and gravy. The gravy is pretty good, even if it could use a bit more sausage, but the biscuit is phenomenal. The scrambled egg was pretty good as well!

My roommate hasn’t gotten to his yet, so I’m not sure what his verdict is… Even though I wait until I hear his shower running before I go to get breakfast, and it takes a half an hour to pick up and return with said breakfast, he’s usually still in the shower when I get back.

I’m former military; if I’m in the shower for more than ten minutes it usually means I’m ill — which handily offsets the water bill for his ‘Hollywood’ showers.

Speaking of the roommate, he’s been down with some sort of flu bug for a week now. This, of course, has my boss/cfo worried that it’s a case of the zombies — so I’ve been told to not come into work for a while and that the roommate needs to go get tested for the controllavirus…

He drove over and got tested yesterday, and I’m assuming the test will come back positive… I’m pretty sure a hangnail would test as covid these days. I mean, there have been some fairly high-profile test fails in the news — like someone testing a soda and it coming back positive.

And it appears covid cured the common cold as the flu numbers this season are pretty much zero — because everything’s coming up covid.

Ehh, whatever. I don’t mind working from home, and once again I have a new home to figure out while I’m here. 🙂

The movers are showing up today, so — in theory — tonight will be the first night at the new place.

I’ll have a couple more trips from the old house to the new one before it’s all truly done. One today to gather up all of the essentials I’ve used for a week; computer stuff, some clothes, bathroom stuff, etcetera. Then some spot cleaning over the weekend, and then once more to turn over the keys on the first.

There’s a few things I still need to buy for the new place as well, like a shower curtain and rod — which is probably important for tomorrow morning… I guess I need to try and sneak out of the office a little early today and take care of all of the little stuff that’s required before I can actually ‘live’ at the new place.

Normally I’d just take a day off to deal with it all, but one of the sales guys somehow rendered the webcam in his company laptop inoperable, and while he has a new M1 MacBook Air (because I have one), it’s his personal laptop and apparently he can’t do work on it. So, he’s dragging the company Lenovo in here today for me to fix, ASAP, because he’s got a video call with a client tomorrow.

Meanwhile I’m typing this at work, on my personal M1, that I use entirely for work, because I wanted something better than a $300 Lenovo.

(shrug)

Sales people are weird… 🙂

The movers don’t get here until the 17th, so being as my bed, desk, and other large furniture is still here in the townhouse — so am I.

With the area being bought up by some new property conglomerate a few months ago, the rents have skyrocketed and lots of people have either moved out, or like me are in the process of moving out. This has had an interesting effect in that there are also a lot of new people moving in — and with one or two Virginia and Utah exceptions, they’re all from California.

The number of cars in the neighborhood with California plates now makes the place look like Colorado is just visiting from out of state.

Take the folks who moved in right next door a couple weeks ago. I kind of profiled them as being from the left coast at first glance; hipster haircuts, ironic beards, high maintenance dog, etc, etc…

But this morning my suspicion was proven correct when one of them pulled out of their garage in one of their matching Prius’ as I was pulling out too. I then followed them out of the complex, slowly, because they would get stuck every time they came to a stop because it’s been snowing on and off for a couple of days…

And, yes, California plates.

A little while later someone else who parked their Mini outside had a hard time starting it (it’s -10 F out there), so once the engine finally caught they sat there and revved it over and over. I’m guessing to warm it up? Anyway, there’s this thin blue haze in the air now and I think they killed the car as it’s is still there, but turned off…

And, yes, California plates.

Now, I’m not super militant about people moving in from out of state — it happens and, yeah, Colorado is a pretty nice place. I just expect two things:

1: Colorado has these things we call seasons, and half of the year it’s not 72 and sunny — so read up on this ‘winter’ phenomena… And ditch the high-MPG plastic wheels and buy some decent all-season tires. Yes, I know it will impact your carbon footprint because it’ll lower your MPG slightly — but you also won’t cause traffic jams every time it snows.

2: Don’t move here from the governmental dumpster-fire that is California, and then vote for turning Colorado into another dumpster fire… Please learn from your mistakes and don’t assume you did it wrong and just need to try again. You don’t, we’re fine, enjoy the scenery.

The new washer and dryer for the new house were delivered and installed…

So one more item checked off of the list for this move. Yay.

At precisely 06:07 this morning I managed to arrive at 52 years of age.

I celebrated by going over to the new house and reverse-engineering Centurylink’s fiber access methodology that they use with their POS rent-a-router, and then replicating it with a Cisco RV340.

All in all it took me about an hour to ferret out the mechanics of their security through obscurity… It’s a PPPoE login (lastfirstrandom#@centurylink.net), the connection is using 6RD for IPv6 tunneling, and they send everything over a tagged VLAN (201).

Once that was working I put the Amplifi Alien into bridge mode and did a speed test from the touchscreen on it; 941Mbit down and 894Mbit up.

It’ll do.

For my birthday my roommate is having Chili’s delivered, so I’m getting a “Chiliburger” with street corn for lunch. Mmmmm!

And here’s another picture from the new house:

This is looking south along the fronts of my neighbor’s houses.

It’s really weird to not have a street in front of the house… All that’s out there is our sidewalk, and there’s a foot-path about 5 feet below that retaining wall. Other than that, it’s just an open-space full of trees and critters.

The songbirds out there are pretty amazing; I could listen to that for hours.

After some pondering I decided to skip the $600 cat-6 install into the west bedroom and office, and instead decided to try a couple of Motorola “MOCA” ethernet over coax adapters.

See, every room in the house has coax for TV and most have ethernet, but for some reason the west rooms didn’t get ethernet. Enter Motorola, who makes DOCSIS modems for cable internet providers… Motorola apparently figured if they can send gigabit data a mile or so to a house over coax, sending gigabit data a hundred feet in a house over coax shouldn’t be too hard.

So, I bought two of these: Motorola Bonded 2.0 MOCA Adapter

My first home network was 10base-2 coax strung haphazardly from end-to-end in my trailer, so that my roommate and I could play things like Doom and Diablo over IPX — and that was 1995/1996.

Here I am in 2021 and I’m still slinging data across the house over coax… Things have basically gone full circle — it just took twenty five years to get back to where I started. 🙂

I also picked up a Cisco RV340 router for the house while I was wandering around Microcenter. While I have a really nice Amplifi “Alien”, the house router will live in the basement where the CenturyLink fiber terminates, and basements aren’t optimal for wifi…

So I’ll just put the “Alien” into bridge mode and set it up in the entertainment center in the family room.

Dropped off my end tables this evening and did some investigation on the wiring situation; there are some suspect lights and light switches that I’ll be replacing…

I ordered the new washer and dryer for the new house yesterday, and they’ll be delivered on Tuesday. $1800 for clean clothes, but that includes delivery and setup — and ten years of warrantee.

The bid for the cat-6 wiring to the west bedroom came in; $630. That’s actually not bad as it covers the cat-6 and connectors as well as essentially renting a skinny kid to crawl around in the fiberglass insulation in the attic and run wire all day.

See, I did my time being a wire monkey back in the 90’s and I figure I can afford to pay someone else to do it now.

I also started the bid process to have the movers move the stuff that won’t fit into my Murano; bed, bookcase, recliner, desk, etc, etc… I should have an idea of what that will cost tomorrow.

And I have to schedule the switchover of the utilities this weekend.

But — it’s all coming together and I should have a couple of weeks to make sure the current townhouse is spotless before I turn over the keys.