RIHAHN.COM

Month: September 2020

  • Changing of the seasons…

    It’s the end of September, which means the first real snow here in Colorado should be less than 30 days away. While it’s already snowed here for a couple of days, it didn’t really amount to much because the ground was still warm.

    For me, mid-to-late September is when I get the car ready for winter; new wipers, seasonal maintenance, tires if needed, swap the regular mats for the WeatherTech mats, a full detail inside, and a fresh coat of wax outside to ward off some of the car eating goop they spray on the roads.

    The Murano is 2.5 years old now and the average OEM battery is only good for 2-3 years… So to prevent any surprises at -10, I had a new one installed at Batteries+ on the way home today. While generally any battery would be better than an OEM one, it was $300 for the really good AGM battery which has a 60 month warranty. That seems like a good deal.

    Batteries+ is also right near “El Chubby’s“, which is home to the best green chili smothered burritos in Denver — so that’s dinner tonight. 🙂

    Chubby’s has been there forever and I’ve been a fan for about as long… In fact, it’s the first place I stopped when I arrived back in Colorado in 2002 after having been gone since 1997; I rolled into Aurora at 6:30 PM, had a “smothered beef and bean, half and half” to go at 6:45, and checked in to the hotel at 7:00 to have a fantastic dinner.

    No such thing as a good Burrito on the East Coast, so I was jonesing pretty bad…

  • The more things change…

    I’ve been working at the same place for over sixteen years now; you can even read about the day I got hired, and it’s been quite an adventure since then. I’ve done some pretty amazing things over the years and worked on some really interesting projects.

    The most challenging aspect of the place is that at any particular time I can be called upon to do pretty much anything. On paper I’m the “Directror of I.T.”, but in reality I wear most of the hats: tester, test engineer, project manager, marketing department, web team, art department, building manager, mainenance man, janitor, and any other title as required. 😀

    This makes it a little complicated to take time off, because any time I schedule some event in advance something invariably comes up at work on that date that I’m needed for. It usually works out in the end, but it’s so routine that, as a joke, if things are slow at work I’m told to schedule a vacation.

    Well, this just happened again.

    Earlier this month I volunteered to work the election as an election judge – civic duty and all that. This entails some training and then five full days between the end of October and the third of November.

    This would normally be no big deal and I’d just take a few days of vacation. But today the employee working a very technical project gave his two weeks notice, and all signs are pointing to me having to pick up the project and run with it. The client on this project is pretty high-maintenance, so there will undoubtedly be some frowning when I tell them I’ll be out for a few days at the end of October…

    They’ll get over it – they always do.

    There’s also a slim chance that the load test engineer might be tapped to do it, and if so everything will work out even better. So, here’s hoping. Haha!

  • Data Loss

    Sadly, even given the precautions I take, it appears I’ve lost all of my photos between August 28th 2004 and August 9th, 2012.

    It’s more than likely a combination of numerous moves and almost as many computer systems over the years, mixed with various online storage systems that came and went.

    For example, I had several hundred photos hosted on my “iDisk” service at mac.com starting from 2008 or so, but that went away in June of 2012 and I clearly missed the window to download everything.

    Oh well.

    These days storage is so cheap that I have a dozen copies of things in half a dozen places, so it’s harder to loose it all.

  • Smokey

    With large sections of the west coast being on fire and the jet stream moving west to east, and Colorado having a few of the yearly blazes as well, it’s been quite smokey outside the last couple of weeks.

    Last evening I had to button up the house to somewhat keep the wood fire smell at bay.

    It’s hard to see in the picture, but everything is foggy – except the fog is smoke.

  • PowerMac 8,1 (The things I do to recover old email…)

    For my mono-no aware project I’ve been sifting though terabytes of archived data, searching for times and dates to try and build a timeline of the past.

    Part of this has been looking through old emails — some of which date back to the invention of email and usually require data conversion as the app that created them hasn’t existed for a decade or more…

    Once such application is Microsoft’s “Entourage”, an email app that came with office:mac back in the early 2000’s and which uses a no longer supported database to store email.

    I used Entourage ages ago and archived the databases with my routine backups, but nothing will open them these days.

    Luckily, I have a lot of antique hardware and software sitting around for just such situations:

    A 1.8Ghz G5 iMac installing Office:Mac 2008.

    Yesterday I set up a 1.8Ghz G5 iMac with OS X 10.5 so that I could install Office:Mac 2008. See, the 2008 version of Entourage will both read the old Entourage 2001 databases and export them as universal .mbox format. So now I have easily importable archives of email from twenty years ago.

  • Went to a show…

    Actual previews! That one was the new James Bond movie.

    Saw “Tenet”. It was very SciFi Channel, but after not seeing a movie since “Rise of Skywalker” nine months ago, I won’t complain.

    And the popcorn was really good.

    Scott and I were the only people in the entire theater — but once the lights went out and the movie started I was still able to pretend things were normal for a couple of hours.

    On the way out we struck up a conversation with some of the staff and they said they had about 30 people show up tonight. They’re only open for one or two evening showings on the weeknights right now, and they can only seat about quarter capacity in a theater — so 30 people is okay they said.

    All in all I was happy to spend $60 on a ‘meh’ movie just to LARP living in a normal society.

  • Waaaay back…

    I was just looking through some old emails and found the email trail I sent back and forth to someone here on LJ in order to get a code to create an account.

    Back in August of ’03 LiveJournal was invite only. 🙂

  • Less Vespa

    Today I sold the Vespa that I purchased back in March.

    It was a fun little experiment; I more or less purchased the thing to see if being on two wheels was just as fun as it was decades ago — even if traffic is ten times more plentiful and dangerous.

    It is.

    I put less than a hundred miles on the Vespa in six months, which isn’t much but with zombies and all there wasn’t much opportunity to really do much with it.

    I ultimately sold it for more room in the garage; between the Jeep, Murano, tools, grill, and general storage there just isn’t room for a motorcycle. Well, there is — technically — but having to do car-tetris each morning to get to work got old real quick.

    Here’s a picture for posterity.

    Scott’s Jeep usually fills this spot from toolbox to garage door.

    I’ll probably get another bike once I get moved down south — someday. I can see it being a fantastic addition down there where it’s 30 minutes to town on mostly deserted roads. 🙂

  • Winter approaches…

    One of the more unique qualities of Colorado is how quickly it changes from “summer” to “winter”. Fall or Autumn here lasts about a week if we’re lucky.

    Next week’s weather

    It’s really like someone flips a switch some years. 🙂