I don’t really “cook” all that much outside of microwaving stuff, mostly because I have a roommate who kind of leaves the kitchen in a shambles all the time and I’m anti-cleaning up after other people.
But that doesn’t mean I can’t cook — after all, I was once a sous chef. I think Wolf might still have my apron from the restaurant I worked at back in the 80’s.
Well, tonight I decided to do some cooking and after dicing, chopping, caramelizing, and boiling made sour cream and onion chicken penne.
Broccoli, diced chicken, penne pasta, cream cheese, and chicken demi-glace base finished with sour cream, caramelized and crispy fried onions, and a pinch of red pepper flakes.
It was delicious, and being as my roommate literally won’t eat anything more complicated than mac and cheese, I have plenty for lunch tomorrow.
On and off for a week now I’ve been attempting to create a Virtual Box VDI from an old set of Norton Ghost CDs I created back in 2003 — mostly for the entertainment value of it.
Tonight, I was successful.
Right where I left it on August 7th, 2003.
It’s interesting to have a fully functional “moment in time” of an evening seventeen years ago… So much of my online life back then was MP3s, MSN Messenger, and Alfandria/FurryMuck.
A few things didn’t work quite right:
Norton SystemWorks 2003 was mad because my subscription apparently ended in 2004.
The MSN Messenger service simply doesn’t exist anymore so the client was convinced there was a firewall preventing it from reaching the servers.
My SimpleMU bookmarks no longer work because the servers have moved.
And Outlook tried to check my email at Comcast and got notification that my account didn’t exist.
But some things still surprisingly worked like a champ… Like, eMule fired right up, found servers, and wanted to resume the torrent of an album I didn’t finish 17 years ago. Ad-Aware 6 automatically did a scan on boot. And Mad At Gravity started playing when I clicked play on WinAmp…
There’s also all of the odd bits of data; old roleplaying game plot lines and hastily jotted story notes, half finished artwork in the ‘recent’ section of Photoshop 7, and pieces of websites I was working on in NetObjects Fusion.
It snowed all night and in fact is still snowing right now, which made the drive into work fairly interesting.
Not that the Murano has any issue in the snow, quite the inverse actually — it’s pretty amazing in the snow. It’s all the other people out there who aren’t amazing in the snow that creates those unneeded tense moments…
To compound this, the CDoT snowplows were just getting going when I hit the road at 6am. So, everything is snow-packed and icy from the traffic — which means your stopping distance is roughly a zip code and any sort of hill will have some ill-prepared economy sedan (with optional out of state plates) spinning its front wheels and going 2mph.
I know I say this every year, but CDoT used to be so much better at this winter thing than they have been for the last decade or so. I’m guessing it’s a blend of beancounters nibbling away at funding and tree-huggers whining about too many 5-ton plow-trucks on the road…
Anyway, I got here to the office about 5 minutes before our plow company, so I moved from my usual parking spot to the front of the building to make his job easier. I need to go move the Murano back to my usual spot now that he’s done with the south lot.
It’s pretty typical here in Colorado that the first real snow happens right about halloween — this year is no different.
I’m a big fan of winter, so to celebrate having actual snow I made meatball marinara and garlic toast for lunch… It was delicious, and it was also nice to put on some old Fleetwood Mac, kick back in the chair, eat lunch, and watch the snow fall.
Today was spent reloading OS X 10.15.7 on my 2019 16″ MacBook Pro.
Not as big as the 2004 17″ Powerbook G4 I had years ago, but it’s much, much more powerful. Come to think of it, it’s probably not as big as the 14″ PowerBook G3 I had in the late 90’s either.
OS X allows you to just move all of your applications and data from machine to machine very easily — but this includes all of the cruft and oddities as well. So the assorted software flotsam in my laptop has been accumulating since I picked up the 15″ MacBook Pro in August of last year.
I’m also a systems engineer and a programmer, so the innards of my machines get an inordinate amount of poking and prodding, experimental drivers for things, and lots of python and java fragments to do things you’re not supposed to do — and this tends to slowly destabilize things over time… And then there’s Xcode, which does all manner of horrible things to the OS in the name of making iPhone apps…
All in all the complete wipe and OS reload, even over the congested wifi here at home, only took 20 minutes. Oh, that’s another thing; Mac recovery media resides on the internet, so you just hold down command-R on boot, the firmware connects to wifi/ethernet, and you’re off to the races.
The rest of the afternoon has been re-installing applications and getting texts on the phone to do the two-factor authentication for dozens of online accounts.
I make extensive use of Apple’s “iCloud” for backups and data retention, which means all of my browser sites, logins, and passwords were ready to go instantly, as well as all of my calendar and contact data. “iCloud Drive”, the data storage portion of the system wasn’t as finely polished and it took some pointy-hat terminal-wizardry to track down the sync processes, kill them and their data store, and get the sync working again… There was some sort of race condition with pending deletes on the server side and pending syncs on the client side. But the mountains of data that lives on my laptop were eventually restored in short order.
It’s nice having gigabit fiber here at the house when it comes time to shuffle an entire HD of data from point A to B.
My backup’s backup is on Backblaze just in case Apple fails me, but it wasn’t needed today…
So, the sum-total to wipe out and restore my entire life still takes about six hours, even here in the bright and shiny digital future. This basically proves that while processing and data speeds are insane now, so is the amount of data we tend to accumulate — so it balances out.
Just a couple of photos I thought were interesting.
The first is something of an alert:
WoW’s “Shadowlands” is coming soon.
I stopped in at the local Carl’s Jr. for breakfast (they make amazing breakfast burritos) on the way in, and got a reminder that the new expansion is ‘soon’ ™.
When the new expansion drops, I’m sure I’ll be busy delving the new content for a little while — so expect some WoW related posts. 🙂
The second photo for today was taken from the roof of my building:
Today’s draw distance is set pretty low and the neutral density haze setting is cranked all the way up.
My first “personal” website went online in January of 1996, and was hosted by dimensional.com here in Denver. It was really just a tech demo and advertisement for my web design services…
Having a mix of programming and artistic skill back then was actually hard to find and turned out to be pretty marketable, and I sort of fell into the trade by accident. Between 1994 and 1996 I’d done several site designs for companies around the Denver Metro area and was pondering making a full-time job of it.
The Internet in the 90’s was all about bevels and drop shadows.
In March of ’97 I created my first non-business related personal site using my Ri’Hahn moniker. It was pretty basic as I’ve never been one for tooting my own horn, and was still hosted at dimensional.com…
I had to censor my actual name… The Internet used to be pretty innocent just like we used to have phonebooks.
Later, after moving to Virginia in 1997 I fired up my first personal domain, rihahn.com, in 1999. It was more or less done for the grins and giggles as I had a T1 running into my bedroom, lots of hardware laying around, and it seemed like a fun thing to do.
The earliest version of the site code that I still have. This is the 4th version of the site from March 2000.
This page is actually pretty complicated for the day; it’s made of a dozen images very precisely positioned to create what looks like a single image. This was to make the page look ‘active’ on a 28.8kbps modem while it was loading… A static image this size would result in a blank page for however long it took to download the entire image — around 10-15 seconds. But all of the smaller images would start loading at once and at least show that something was happening.
The JavaScript I wrote to run this page no longer runs in modern browsers for some reason, but there are mouseover effects and click animations on the buttons as well — also impossible to do on a static image.
The boxes on the lower right are from the non-existent visitor counter that has long since gone the way of the dodo. It would normally be horizontal numbers and the site was apparently in the 6-digits of visitors by early 2000.
Anyways, I used rihahn.com as both a personal website and a toy to play with rapidly evolving web technologies through 2002 when, due to a series of unfortunate complications with “real life”, the registration for the domain was dropped.
rihahn.com was quickly picked up by another registrar and was handed off from owner to owner over the next eighteen years.
I would periodically check and see if it was available again just for old time’s sake, but a six-letter domain with a clean registration history from before the Y2K bug is a pretty hot commodity.
In September I noticed that the current owner in Germany hadn’t updated their site in a long time, and decided to check on the domain registration. rihahn.com was in an expired hold for 30 days, after which if the owner didn’t pay for it it would go into a pending delete status for 5-6 days, and then would become available again.
I whipped up a script that would check the domain status once per minute and if the status changed would then run an Automator script in Safari on the GoDaddy site to register the domain… I kicked off the script in the 4th day of the pending delete status, and five days ago I became the owner of my old domain once again. 🙂
Currently the domain is just receiving emails, but eventually I’ll set up a web server and put up another personal website on it.
For being so bleeding-edge technologically, I’m a bit of a Cro-Magnon when it comes to trendy high-tech gig-economy services. And accordingly today was my first use of “GrubHub” which has been around for years apparently.
Today I’m here at the office, am the only one here, and there’s a very important package that will be delivered today for a project and it needs to be signed for… This of course means there’s about a 100% chance the package will arrive if I step out to get lunch.
Enter crowd-sourced food delivery.
I’ve had Burger King deliver here several times back when they did “BKDelivers”, but apparently they don’t offer this any longer and the URL redirects to GrubHub.
Ordering through the GrubHub website was pretty straight forward; chicken fries, some onion rings, and a large diet soda; about $8 in today’s money if you actually go to BK.
By the time GrubHub was done with fees, tips, charity round-up, and other assorted charges it was $20 even.
I ordered at about a quarter to 11. This is when I usually go get my lunch as it avoids the lunch rush so it takes me 15 minutes to go to BK, order, and get back here.
It took GrubHub almost an hour to do the same thing, leaving my order at just slightly above room temperature when it finally arrived.
So, from my sample size of one, GrubHub costs over 200% more for nearly 400% worse service. Which I guess is pretty much par for the course here in the 21st century.
It was May in 1980 when the sequel to Star Wars was released; The Empire Strikes Back.
I remember standing in line for the theater there in Longmont with my father. The line wrapped around the front of the theater, into the alley next to it, and around into the parking lot behind the place. The theater was old, the seating was those old steel framed fold-up seats with numbers riveted to the back, and they were super close together to pack as many people as possible into that tiny 1-screen theater…
But it was worth it!
Tonight I revisited this 40 year old memory — though with no line, better popcorn, and nice comfy recliners…
The 40th anniversary remaster
But the movie really stands the test of time.
Something that really stood out to me was that the original trilogy wasn’t afraid to stop and smell the roses; there’s periods of time where nothing happens save for some cinematography.
I think this is a sin for the newer movies, which are frenetic from start to finish.
Also practical effects can often be nicer to look at and more immersive than green screen and CGI… But that might just be because I’m old. 🙂
Some of those supplies I mentioned a few entries back came in today… The first was the two one-week boxes of rations.
One week of food, in a handy carrying case!I sampled a few of these before buying a bunch, and they’re actually really good!
As long as I have water, I have food — and I have several cases of bottled water. These will be awesome for camping next year if they don’t need to be used before then.
The other box was three 20-round boxes of 45-70.
These are Sellier & Bellot, made in the Czech Republic. Really nice brass.
People often ask “just how big is that round!?” Well, here’s a slightly larger than standard issue human hand for scale…
This set of 60 rounds are a bit hotter than the Marlin rounds and are 1509 fps and 2044 ft-lbs at the barrel. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, it’s okay — it just means that they work as intended on literally any critter in North America.
It all started with a trip to a HamFest with my parents. A HamFest is essentially an organized garage sale for radio nerds, and this one was held at the Boulder National Guard armory back in the early 70’s.
I was wandering around looking at the junk on offer and spotted what looked like a tape deck. The guy selling it asks if I’d like to have a listen, I say yes, and he hooks it up and puts the headphones on my noggin…
Upon powering up the device makes this tortured electronic screech through the headphones that’s loud enough my mom hears it outside.
There’s a small freakout, but I can still hear people so I’m deemed to be okay. The ringing in my ears is shrugged off as “it’ll pass” and life carries on. It was the early 70’s — people didn’t sue other people for looking at them crossways and kids were made of sterner stuff.
Since that day, if it’s quiet I get a high-pitched whistle in my head that I have trained myself to not focus on. If I do, it quickly becomes oppressive and I need to forcefully move my focus to something else.
Well, they say as you get older tinnitus gets worse — and they’re right. These days I have that infernal whistle in the background 24/7 and I have to keep some sort of background noise going all of the time… Which as an I.T. professional is pretty easy as there’s always AC, server fans, drive noise, etc., etc. in my environment.
But at night it’s different…
For the last ten years or so I’ve had a fan running in my room for the white noise, but as winter comes around this becomes less of a good idea. I’ve tried to replace the fan with music in the past, but the breaks between tracks will wake me up. I’ve also tried a few “sound machines”, but the machines are very looped and I pick up on the repetition in about 15 minutes. Once that happens, I start listening for the loop instead of the sound and I can’t sleep…
But technology marches on and things improve… So, I decided to try the latest high-tech gizmo — and yesterday my new “Sound+Sleep SE” arrived.
Nature in a box…
This is basically a nightstand radio that has 64 channels — all of them tuned to environmental soundscapes.
I turned the big knob to “Meadow” last night and for the first time in weeks I slept the entire night. “Meadow” consists of crickets, an owl out there in the trees, a breeze rustling the grass and leaves, rain patter, and a small brook somewhere in the distance. And what makes this machine different is it procedurally generates the sound from pieces — so it’s not repetitive.
The down-side (there’s always a down-side) is the machine gets a lot of reviews about it failing after a couple of weeks to a month. Either the amplifier craps out and it develops a static hum, or the memory in it fragments and the sound samples stop working.
Hopefully I got a good one, because with my sample size of one night — it works.
Given the sliding scale of crazy out there as the year winds to a close, this week I ordered another 60 rounds of 45-70 and two 7-day ration kits that should be here early next week. This is in addition to my 30-ish days of dry stores — and I now have four 24-pack cases of bottled water set aside as well.
This weekend I’ll be airing out my camping gear and getting all of that organized too. I’ve also gotten most of my friends licensed on GMRS in the last 30 days, and they all have fairly nice HTs or trunk-mounts now, and Scott has a full 50watt repeater in his Jeep.
Now, I’m not a “prepper” by any stretch of the imagination — I’m just being cautious and having a plan in case I need to high-tail it south and circle the wagons for a while. I can live pretty happily in the Murano for a couple of weeks in any weather. And my property is fairly remote, so it should be outside the zone of stupid should stupid happen.
It’s always the situation you aren’t expecting that gets you. And while I don’t expect anything ‘life and limb’ to happen, I also didn’t expect all of the crazy rioting, arson, shootings, and unrest this year either. So — better safe than sorry I guess.
And hey, if nothing happens everything I’ve purchased will come in handy on the next camping trip. 🙂
