Month: January 2019

It’s been a few days since the last update.

A little over a week ago one of the players from one of my RP settings in Second Life passed away, and that’s hit me pretty hard. It’s one thing to see people you know of pass away, but it’s another when it’s someone you spend time talking to and hanging out with — even if it was only virtually.

I never got to meet Melissa in the really real world, but I’m not sure that really matters in this day and age.

She had been in the hospital dealing with an illness since late November, and we rode the roller-coaster of better and worse with her right up to the end.

My settings in Second Life have seen literally thousands of players come and go, but losing someone who was so close to the ‘inner core’ is an uncomfortable first. And I’m still processing it.

Other than that, I’m still working on my ten year plan and doing whatever I can to make that goal… It’s tough though. It seems like every time I turn around there’s another issue that needs to be dealt with or an unforeseen expense that sets me back, and I continue to not make much headway. But I’ll keep beating my head against the wall in the hopes it gives way before I do.

In about a week I will hit the big Five-O, and that has me a bit o.O as well… Fifty years is frightfully long period of time; it’s been a fantastic ride though. I’m pleased with all I’ve done and seen so far, and that’s all anyone can really ask for I guess.

Oh, and here’s a picture from my office window for anyone who might be winter impaired. 🙂

The latest variant of plague started making the rounds here at work early last week, and by Thursday the other I.T. person here was out sick.

By Sunday I had fallen as well, and I was pretty much dead until last evening.

I’m doing much better today, but still would like to avoid the yearly bouts of flu… Being sick is simply no fun.

Other than that, I’ve been doing some writing…

For work I’ve been generating ‘blog posts’ for the web site to try and generate traffic. It’s all boring long-headed stuff about how ARM will probably change the CPU landscape in 2019, or how the current ‘fix it in a patch’ software release mentality is ruining developers and publishers.

Personally I’ve been kicking around a series of adventures in my Caerth setting — which is the magipunk world of anthropomorphic people, magical technology, Victorian sensibilities, and unspeakable extra-planar horrors. I might get pieces of it running in Second Life for giggles, though the SL setting will be more of a “Jorkens Story” in that the in-world location will exist in parallel to all of the other SL RP locations.

My “rifts” that form such a central piece of my settings and allow for the import and export of characters are invaluable when working with a system like SL which offers limitless character possibilities… So, I might as well amplify that a bit and set up the sim as an RP hub of sorts.

I’m still fighting with CenturyLink over them taking six months to not get service connected at work, and then billing me for two months of that service which, as mentioned, doesn’t exist.

I keep having to email the regional supervisor because no one else at CenturyLink will respond to emails or phone calls. And while my last email to him was answered with a “I’ll look into it for you” on Monday, I’ve not heard anything since.

Which is completely par for the course.

What’s really humorous is that the exact same thing happened to the realtor on the second floor when they tried to get CenturyLink service a couple of years ago…

A communications company with zero communications skill.

Anyway, a month ago Comcast Business showed up at the door asking if they could put an amplifier in the utility closet on the first floor so they can get service over to the couple hundred new apartments to the east of the building… I said sure, and then given CenturyLink’s general ineptitude asked Comcast what they could do for service.

Comcast’s initial bid was exactly the same as Level-3’s cost, ~$3000 a month, which is what I’ve been paying for like 15 years now. I mentioned this, and they came back with a price that was about $1200 a month cheaper.

Nice!

But I also know Comcast, so I eventually got the salesman to cough up the complete cost per month — hidden fees and charges included — and it was still a decent enough savings… So I signed on the dotted line on the 12th of December.

And, as salesmen do, as soon as I signed he vanished; I didn’t hear anything until Monday, which was an email stating Comcast wants a deposit of $4300 for “reasons”.

I emailed back asking “why?” My company has been in business for 20 years, our credit is stellar, and as mentioned I’ve been paying ~$3000 a month to Data-393/TimeWarner/Level-3 for over 15 years now. I can’t see any reason to eat into any savings over Level-3 with some arbitrary ‘just-because’ deposit.

Well, he finally responded about an hour ago with the same request; no reasons, no explanation. Just a number and a question about how soon I can cut the check.

I need to figure out how hardball I want to play this… I have Level-3 service, which is truly stellar (though this is slowly changing now that CenturyLink owns them), and don’t really need to change providers.

But I also don’t want to waste any more time on this project…

Decisions, decisions…

The glasses I ordered a few weeks ago to replace the ones that broke like a month ago came in today!

Now for the acclimation to the stronger prescription, and the progressive lenses… I won’t have to look over my glasses like some sort of angry librarian anymore.

It’s taking some effort to not move my head when I change my viewing distance though, and because I still do, the random focus changes are making me a bit woozy. :/

I’ll adapt though.

The glasses are extremely high-tech and examples of the latest in material sciences; automatic polarization as well as darkening, blue-blocking to make my 17 hours a day in front of a monitor easier, made out of some sort of plastic that they use for astronaut helmets, and the variable focus length based on where I’m looking.

All in all, living in the future ain’t half bad…

There were no mid-week updates as I was just too busy; there are only two I.T. folks at work, and the one who isn’t me was on vacation.

There isn’t a lot to talk about, but I should do some sort of status ping on occasion, no?

Yesterday and today have been a marathon of transcoding all of my old DVDs into files on a storage drive. I’ve not watched an actual DVD in probably a decade, so it was funny to see just how small DVD video is compared to today’s video card and monitor capabilities…

The above is a screenshot of the desktop on my 3440 x 1440 monitor as I write this. And the unicorn picture on the left is raw output from my 25th anniversary remaster of The Last Unicorn.

That’s 1:1 DVD video… 720 x 480 29.97 fps straight from the disc… It looks like a postage stamp these days.

Handbrake is currently transcoding Dragonheart — A New Beginning from the raw mpeg-2 DVD files (~6 gigs) to smaller and easier to store h.264 files (~1.5 gigs). To do this I have a custom profile that I use to ensure it looks as good as possible — which also takes about an hour to do the job even with an i9-9900x cpu running at close to 5ghz.

And that’s about it. I’m just enjoying some quiet time here at home and wandering down memory lane via the movies I’ve collected over the years. 🙂

Welp, here we are — 2019.

The first of the year holds several rituals for me; one of which being the great annual password reset… 

I generally get January 1 as a day off, so I have all day to go through and change passwords. And being as I use very complex passwords and never use the same password twice across a hundred or so web sites, it really is an all day ordeal.

But I’ve never had an account hacked, so I guess it’s working.

Another ritual is the paperwork purge; where I go through and destroy any filed paperwork that is too old to be useful anymore… It puts a couple more hours on my poor old shredder every year, but better safe than sorry. 

I finished my big backup and archive transfer yesterday too — so that’s a hundred pounds of old media I don’t have to deal with anymore.

Tomorrow it’s back to the grind though; my first order of business is dealing with CenturyLink who, once again, billed us for services that never worked or were never even connected… I’m really not sure why this is so hard for them, but with each passing interaction I see that telling them to pack sand was the better idea.

Other than that, I’ll just be trying to stick to my few New Year’s resolutions;

Downsize.

I’ve already started on this one.

Spend less and bank more for the upcoming land and house expenses.

This one will impact my friends more than it will impact me, as over the years it’s become well known that I’ll cover pretty much anything in the name of fun… Not anymore. If there is to be an night out, trip to a restaurant, or some other event, folks can pay their own way.

Write more short fiction.

This is cheap and entertaining, so I should do more of it.

Spend less time and energy trying to appease problematic people.

I always try far, far too hard to work out some mutually agreeable resolution with people who don’t want to agree on anything. I should really just be washing my hands of the problem and moving on if they don’t want to meet halfway.

In other news, I’ve been playing around with “Crowfall”; that game I invested into a few years ago. Crowfall has hit a point where it’s really quite playable, even though it’s still pre-alpha — and I’ve been having a lot of fun with it.

As an investor, I got to submit a bunch of names and such for the procedurally generated worlds, and the very first United States ‘campaign’ map was named Roanoak after my roleplay setting — so some interesting history there.

So far I’ve generally stuck with the “Elkin” ranger I decided on when the races and classes were announced years ago… There’s just something about being a half-deer woodsman / archer that I find entertaining. A deer that hunts humans… 😀

I even have an illustration from about two years ago based on how I pictured things eventually working out in the game:

I’m happy to say I wasn’t far off. 😉