Month: February 2021

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.

Everyone has their personal superpower — and their personal kryptonite; that proverbial Achilles heel that succeeds in thwarting them no matter how they try to work around it.

My kryptonite is people… Specifically when having to interact with them.

See, I suffer from some fairly debilitating social anxiety. It’s serious enough that it even affects me in my video games — where if some random person walks up and starts typing at me, I’ll panic and log off.

Really.

This can make it a bit difficult to cultivate friendships, as you can imagine. The few friends I have tend to be the exact opposite of me socially and will undeterredly strike up many-hour conversations with any random person they encounter. Which I envy a bit.

I also assume this is why I end up getting comfortable enough around them to open up a bit; they don’t take no for and answer and just keep trying until I stop running away.

I know this is a weakness, and I try to ‘fix it’ by putting myself into controlled situations where I have to interact with people. For example, the role-play stuff I do on Second Life is an attempt to have some controlled interaction with people. And from behind the safety of a character it does help a bit, but if I stop for any length of time it can be a Herculean effort to force myself back into it again.

This is one of the big reasons I became so good with computers I think, and why I’ve stuck to programming or systems engineering for the last 40 years; I.T. isn’t a ‘client facing’ position, so I’m left to work my arcane spells and build my mad science experiments in some darkened back room where no one goes.

Leave me be, slide a pizza under the door on occasion, and I’ll continue to make the magic that keeps the doors open and the money coming in.

Unfortunately my sales director has never caught on to this, so a few times per year I’m forced to interact with a client for some impossible engagement, and clients can get confrontational — and that never works out well.

See, when I’m forced into a confrontation with people, my entire goal becomes getting out of the situation as expediently as possible… So I’ll acquiesce to damn near anything as long as it means I can get away — and this is generally bad for sales.

Take my current client; I’m a few hours over on the contract, but I don’t really care because I just want to make them happy so they will go away… Sales on the other hand does care because that’s money being left on the table. So the sales director gets irked, I get irked, the client gets irked, and no one ends up happy…

But the sales director gets his commission; so he’ll put me back in this position in 60-90 days, as always, and it will all repeat.

I’ve jokingly mentioned many times that the only way out of this loop is to fail in such a fashion that he doesn’t make commission off of the project… The problem is I’m not good at failure either, and will put in 60+ hour weeks while no one is looking to ensure I don’t fail.

This time though, things have aligned so poorly and I’ve been hung so far out to dry by the lack of people around the office because of zombies, that I think failure is inevitable — so there might be a light at the end of the tunnel…

I started moving over to the new house on Sunday, and moved some of my more fragile items like framed art and whatnot this evening after work.

While doing this I took a moment to appreciate the view from my front porch…