Month: December 2018

I’m sitting here today copying my giant stack of ancient backup CD/DVDs to SSD. Some of these CDs date back to when CDs were invented — here’s one from 1992, from the old NEC CDR-83 I had on my 386/40 which had 20 megs of ram and used a Future Domain 1680 SCSI adapter…

And they still work!

But I’m tired of lugging them around, and eventually there won’t be any way to read them.

For example; I still have some stuff from my Atari days, and a box of mementos from my decade with Amiga… Some day I’ll find a way to pull all of that old stuff into a new format for my personal museum, but currently it’s all locked into formats that cannot be read.

Over the weekend I DoD wiped the big collection of external drives I’ve had floating around forever… Like an old TowerStor that uses Firewire 400, an antique 2-bay NAS drive from when when NAS drives were the new hotness, and two 5-bay SansDigital eSATA towers full of 750G Caviar Black drives…

It’s been an adventure trying to get adapter cards that haven’t seen use since the Y2K bug to work — but so far so good. You can always count on the Linux community to keep a candle burning for antique hardware. 🙂

I’m also down-sizing my furniture and a lot of the extracurricular cruft I’ve accumulated, and expect to be back down to a single car trip to move myself by the end of 2019.

I’ll still have all of my original inked artwork from back when I did art, and a rather large collection of collectibles from five decades of conventions… And all of my character stuff for my stories and RP settings too… But, in general, if I’ve not touched it since I moved into the condo a year and a half ago — it’s going away.

And that’s one of my New Years resolutions — downsize!

Roughly two weeks left in 2018; what a ride.

Next week starts the big vacation period here at work — no one will be here, which is always nice as it means I can get some real work done without interruptions.

I.T. always does its best work when the rest of the company is off partying, mostly because we can turn things off without people panicking.

Which shows the dichotomy in job descriptions; if I need information from a project manager or one of the sales drones it might take a week to hear back, if I hear back at all. Meanwhile if one of my file servers is down for 30 seconds it’s curtains for the free world, cats and dogs begin to cohabitate, and I have a line of torches and pitchforks in front of my office…

I guess it’s nice to be needed. 😀

There seems to be a never-ending supply of Mondays…

The art project from the weekend was approved with no alterations, so that was nice. I handed over the .png files (a 300 dpi 2500px and a 72dpi 600px) and haven’t heard anything since, so I’ll assume the marketing folk figured out how to resize a graphic in whatever they’re using to compose emails.

Yesterday morning my six year old spectacles finally succumbed to the second law of thermodynamics. After some clever wire-wrapping though (a skill we elder nerds possess) I got them back together well enough to hopefully last until the optometrist appointment.

The earliest I could get in was the 27th — so here’s to hoping my patch job holds together for a couple of weeks.

Work-wise, as I was walking out yesterday the sales director caught me in the halls and started in about needing a graphic for something… He wasn’t exceptionally clear on the intent for said graphic, but it needs to be ‘non-denominationally holiday-like’ and incorporate the company logo — and he needs it by early next week (naturally) — so that’s what I’ve been up to today.

I’ve sent in a rough idea, but marketing doesn’t work weekends because that’s what us little people do — so I won’t know if this stab in the socially woke holiday advertisement darkness is close until Monday.

I had an early morning meeting with Comcast Business to go over the final paperwork before presenting it to my CFO for signature. This comes after I sent the ‘thanks but no thanks’ letter to CenturyLink yesterday… I simply can’t gamble with the lines here at work, and CL spent four months failing to install a circuit and proving that they weren’t capable of handling it.

Anyway, I’m hoping I can get out of here a little early today so that I can pack an overnight bag and get down to Walsenburg before dinner / rush hour. I have a 9:30 am meeting with the county tomorrow to go over my land purchase, so it’ll be another night in a hotel.

Oh well, at least it’s a pretty three hour drive. 🙂

Not a lot of news as I’ve been down with a touch of the flu for the last couple of days.

I stayed home yesterday to try and recover a bit, but they are replacing the balconies on the building. So the entire day was guys on a scaffold outside my condo with a jackhammer…

Oh well. I’ll just try to get to get some extra sleep tonight.

My second Christmas present to myself came in yesterday; a new pillow that is intended to help my perpetual neck issues. It’s this super high-tech foam thing made by a company called Malouf.

So far, so good… I got up this morning without wincing, and that’s pretty amazing.

The down-side, of course, is the cost. Pillows that work tend to be spendy, and the one I’m using now was pretty close to $200.

I also caved and signed up for one of these subscription boxes that are all the rage here in the future… It’s called the “Butcher Box” and is a monthly selection of small ranch meats such as cuts of steak, burgers, bacon, chicken — it’s a vegetarian’s hellscape. But it’s also been very, very good so far!

The NY Strip steaks were really good, the chicken breasts were fantastic, and the bacon was really tasty.

It’s $150 a month for the box, but that’s comparable to what I spend at the grocery store per month on meat and it’s higher quality — so I’ll stick with it for a while I think.

In other news, I need to be down in Walsenburg on the 13th for a land hearing where the county decides if I can actually purchase the land I’ve purchased… It’s complicated, but apparently even if you own a piece of land down to the mineral rights, you can’t just sell it to someone. The government has to get involved, and that grinds everything to a standstill.

So while the agreement to buy this bit of land has been done and paid-for for several months now, I still don’t own it because Huerfano County needed to grant their blessing.

Oh well. I’m pretty sure that after the hearing on the 13th I’ll finally be able to sign the papers… Maybe…

Hopefully…

Yesterday was a one / two punch of failure that has me doubting my ability to split my focus on my day-job and my after-hours art job…

The Christmas card I designed for a client came out a lot darker than expected in the print process. It’s still workable, but it’s not optimal and the client isn’t totally happy.

I’m not sure this one is 100% my fault as VistaPrint is pretty much Diet Print Shop, but it’s still something I should have considered.

The two final designs for the business cards have the font entirely too small for use, which is probably 50% my fault as I mentioned trying to squeeze war and peace onto one side of a card was dicey at best, and the designs were approved by the client… 

But this sunk in after 500 cards were printed, so they aren’t happy…

Normally I do test prints of final designs to find these sorts of things, but this time I didn’t. I’m not sure why other than the fact I finished the final, final, final revisions at like 10 pm and was just burnt.

Oh well. Lessons learned I suppose… Nothing, and I mean NOTHING will be PDF’d for print and sent to the client for print until I’ve printed it myself for final proofing.

This means I need to re-ink my expensive printer… Sigh…

In other news I’m off the hook with the icon client — mostly. They’ll have someone else fight with them over the glyph design in a more ‘live’ fashion than I can manage with my process having to be after 5 pm. But as I’ve kind of patented the process of turning the base icon into the 40-ish variations for the application in a speedy fashion, I’ll still be doing that.

It’s the best of both worlds I suppose; someone else gets the design headache and I still get a few hours here and there of extra income.

I picked up a new sleeping bag yesterday — a Big Agnes Buffalo Park. It’ll be super comfy as it’s one of those new integrated pad/bag setups where there’s a sleeve in the bottom to install an insulated sleeping pad.

No more bag sliding off of the pad in the middle of the night. 🙂

This will primarily be used for “Car Camping” as the back of the Murano is about the same size as a tent, so I don’t see any real need to spend the money on a separate tent.

Next year I plan to spend more time out and about up in the hills, if at all possible. So this is a step in that direction.

Yesterday I talked to Comcast Business regarding competing with CenturyLink and Level-3 for the internet service here in my building… Comcast’s prices are identical to Level-3 (~$3000 a month), so I guess I’ll keep trying to get CenturyLink to pull their collective head out.

I have a meeting with CenturyLink tomorrow for “turn up” on the line they finally got working after two months of hassle… At this point though, even if the line works and has all of the addresses I asked for, I’ll be paranoid that if anything happens it’ll take them months to fix it.

Not a warm and fuzzy.

See, Level-3 is ridiculously expensive — but if anything acts up they’re on it in minutes… Meanwhile I’m not sure CenturyLink will even answer the phone if their routers are on fire.

Oh well; I’ll burn that bridge when I get to it. 🙂

I have a meeting with the client that has me making icons this afternoon. I think I’ll let them know that once they are happy with this one set, I’m done.

I was told via the grapevine that they are upset that I’m not creating what they want, which isn’t too surprising as it’s clear they don’t know what they want… So it’s probably best that they just hire someone full-time to work out what they want and unify the design.

I can apply the time I’m burning on this on other more fruitful endeavors.

Other than that, it’s a Monday… 

CenturyLink finally got the message that the install they were supposed to have finished last month still isn’t done — even though they sent a bill for a month of service that cannot be used.

Back in August I decided to try and switch from Level-3 to CenturyLink being as CenturyLink owns Level-3 now — and this would reduce my internet costs from $3000 a month to $500 a month, bonus!

After they got me to sign they explained that their business-class offering only comes with five IP addresses though. This is problematic as I have a full class-C and a couple of partial blocks as well… The sales guy (who is no longer there) said this was no problem, I just had to submit a form for the wider address range…

Once I submitted for the wider IP range, CenturyLink all but vanished; emails go unanswered, phone calls drop to full voicemail boxes, and no one will return calls. I unplugged the router a week ago to see if the alarm would trigger a phone call — no dice.

Sunday I got an email from someone at CenturyLink though, mentioning that the IP address range has been fixed. I have a meeting with them on Wednesday to go over the issues we’ve had. So — maybe.

The funny thing is this comes after Comcast Business showed up Friday to ask if they could put some gear in my building to expand service across the street to the new apartment complex… This means that Comcast Business is now an option for my building, so I have a meeting with them this afternoon to discuss the options.

Somehow I will reduce my internet costs from what Level-3 was charging. See, I was with Data393 back on 2005, who then got bought by Time Warner, who then got bought by Level-3, who then got bought by CenturyLink — and though all of these acquisitions the costs have stayed the same… So I’m paying 2005 rates for service that is much cheaper these days.

That’s just not working out for me.

A friend of mine likes to bowl, and even though I don’t I still go to watch and get in on some bowling alley food… Bowling alley food tends to be pretty good; lots of repeat customers so if it’s not they complain and things get fixed. 🙂

Bowling alleys also tend to have old arcade cabinets or, in the case of the one last night, pinball tables!

So after dinner and while folks bowled, I was here feeding quarters into the machines. The one that treated me best was one that was themed for the band ‘Iron Maiden’, and had a wide selection of tunes from various albums.

And you can’t have a good room of machines without at least one PinBot themed machine. The one at the bowling alley was a “Jack Bot” table…

There were a lot of classics too, like these three…

All in all it was a fun evening — even if I was out waaaaay past my bedtime. 🙂