Month: March 2021

For some time now I’ve been plotting a method of extricating the thousand or so entries I have here on Livejournal, images and all, and hosting it all State-side.

Now, I’m not one of the people who were upset by the rule changes wrought by the Russian ownership of Livejournal — I don’t really do anything that rubs anyone the wrong way. Nor has the location of the servers or the Cyrillic users bothered me much — I was actually learning a bit of Russian on the side from the folks here…

My worries are more government-driven; politics ruins everything, and I’d rather not lose two decades of memories over some international spat brought about by something stupid.

Anyway, with the announcement of the fees for Livejournal switching to Rubles which possibly starts to incur foreign transaction fees, I figured it was probably time to get serious about whipping up a data translation method and moving everything to WordPress.

So, today I spent some quality time pouring over XML exports from LJ, writing a bulk-exporter, translator, and image duplicator. And getting everything settled at a new home.

Said new home is www.rihahn.com.

Everything that is here will continue to be here for as long as it can be here, but anything new will be posted over yonder.

I still have some cleanup to do on posts older than 2019 on the new site, but everything is stable for the most part.

Thanks for the couple decades of faithful service LJ!

~RiHahn

I don’t do “news”, so it can often appear that I either live under a rock or that I’m emotionally detached — because I’m not in a panic over whatever today’s panic is scheduled to be.

Outside of just eschewing ‘news’, I’m also fairly resistant to sensationalism, because I tend to skip headlines and seek out the underlying reason for the article.

Here’s a current example:

Sounds bad, right? Outbreaks everywhere! And won’t someone please think of the children!

But, let’s get beyond the headline here… My first instinct with anything that quotes numbers is to see what story the numbers really tell. So, to the Internet!

With a quick internet search I find that there are 4,126 public schools in Michigan, so 62 is just about 1.5% of all the schools referenced in this headline. Also in this internet search I discover that, as of last year, there were roughly 1,745,300 public school students in Michigan, so 247 is 0.01% of the student body.

Now if we average 247 cases across 62 schools we end up with about 4 students per school.

I know I’m old, but “4” doesn’t strike me as an “Outbreak”. I mean, pre-covid, would four students coming down with the flu even be known by the students in the school? Would it make the school paper let alone regional news?

Probably not, but hey — fear sells clicks.

People online are often shocked to discover that I have a roommate… 

I’m not sure why, other than I’m in my 50’s and roommates are a thing you do when you’re younger, just getting started down the road of life, and things are more expensive than your meager income will afford.

But, have you seen what things cost these days?

Sure, I make a pretty good wage; I’ve been with the company going on seventeen years and I’m in upper-management… But the cost of living in Denver these days is shockingly similar to living on the Left Coast, and even with my income I’m very much ‘blue collar’.

Elections have consequences, as they say.

For example, my new house is a fairly nice place in a nice location, but it’s nothing super-special — and it’s worth almost a half million dollars in the Denver economy right now. 

Granted, there are less expensive places to live in Denver, and that’s always an option — but I’ve lived in those less expensive places and one does get tired of the wheels and tires being stolen off of their car after a while.

The solution to affording Denver is to find ways of reducing the cost of living; marriage is the method most folks use as it usually comes with dual-income and lots of tax breaks — but I did the marriage thing ages ago, and I’m not interested.

The other option is a roommate, but that can come with its own complications in the form of generally crap people.

Fortunately I’ve known my current roommate, Scott, since 1996 — and we get along pretty well.

We met over a shared history of working sci-fi/fantasy conventions. 

See, back in the early 90’s I drove around the country selling local artisans’ stuff at conventions — art, costumery, and other hand-made objects of geekery. Scott did basically the same thing in the mid-90’s, but more from a publishing perspective.

In the late 90’s I was just going to conventions for fun, and met Scott and his wife at a convention in Cleveland in late 1996. This prompted another convention together in California in 1997. Later in 1997, the company I had been working for was bought by Ingram Micro and Scott offered me a job where he worked in D.C. — so I moved, became a roommate for Scott and his family, and went in with them to buy a ranch in central Virginia.

Since then we’ve started a couple of successful companies, made some amazing things, done a lot of interesting side-jobs, and just been good friends.

I moved back to Colorado in 2002, and in 2006 the place Scott, now single, is working on the East Coast gets bought… So I move him out here to Colorado, hire him, and he becomes a roommate. Which balances the events of a decade earlier.

And Scott has been a roommate ever since.

By far the funniest thing is when people assume we’re a couple — I mean, it is the roaring 20’s after all and nothing is off the table anymore, and we’ve known each other for so long that I guess it can seem that way… But, no, we’re just friends and have a rent-share arrangement so we can afford to live in Denver.

My roommate eats out a lot; lunch at work is always out and about and on weekends he’ll go get breakfast somewhere. This morning he was down in Parker at Waffle House, for example.

I’m more of a cheapskate and tend to just buy groceries and fix food at home, with the occasional splurge for something nice.

Anyway, he mentioned this afternoon that it looked like “Hickory House” down there had succumbed to the controllavirus and they appeared to be closed.

That bummed me out, because when I lived in Parker Hickory House was a routine venue… When anyone came to visit, that’s where I took them for dinner — because it was amazing.

The news sent me scurrying to the Internet and I’m happy to report that they’re still open. Apparently the place just looks closed…

To do my part to ensure they remain open, I ordered to-go for us and sent the roomie back to Parker to pick it up.

So, tonight’s repast is jalapeño cheddar sausage, baked beans with brisket, corn on the cob, and garlic toast… And it’s just as amazing as it’s always been. 🙂

In my scant free time I’ve been messing around with “classic” World of Warcraft a bit. It’s mostly just to have a change of pace from Final Fantasy 14.

FF14 is still a really good game, and I’m looking forward to the next ‘chapter’, but while I got to Chapter Two before my friends, I don’t have their availability and they blew past me in a couple of days.

So it was back to soloing the game, which prompted me to take a break from it. Blizzard also announced the return of “The Burning Crusade” (TBC) via ‘classic’ last month, which piqued my interest.

See, TBC was my favorite expansion of the game and it was generally viewed as peak-warcraft; Blizzard had transitioned from “Hey, let’s see if we can make an MMO” to “We now run the biggest game on the planet and are making ten-thousand dollars in profit per minute”… So TBC has the benefit of a couple of years of bug fixes, essentially infinite funding, and the original team that made the game in the first place was still calling the shots.

So, it was still true to the original, but better — and also pre-Activision merger which, arguably, screwed the pooch in so many ways.

Technically “Wrath of the Lich King” (Wrath) was also created before the ActiBlizz merger, but released after it — and is also regarded fondly and for many players was their fist brush with WoW.

The first actual ActiBlizz expansion was “Cataclysm” (Cata) — which literally and figuratively broke the world — of Warcraft, and is generally thought to be the beginning of the decline.

So, I’ve been puttering around with a warlock in the original 2006-ish version of the game and having quite a bit of fun.

The original game was so much more “RPG” than the post-ActiBlizz versions, where the ability to create a character was slowly supplanted with the ability to pick a cookie-cutter class. So, yeah, you can gimp yourself on original WoW by not choosing the optimal skill and ability progression — but that’s actually part of the fun. Everything is viable, and everything ultimately comes down to player skill — and apparently it’s wrong to expect players to get better at playing or something.

Anyway, I’m on the “Pagle” server, Alliance-side, as Raeshlavik the warlock. 🙂

As is par for the course; today I rolled out Office 365 to my users with instructions on how to set up 2FA and everything…

And an hour ago Microsoft had a global Azure failure that caused 1×10^32 emails from user-land about how the instructions, they do nothing!

Sigh…

“The Cloud” is, and always has been, a bad idea with waaaaay too much money behind it.

Cool whites and blues outside, warm incandescent hues inside.

It’s slightly snowy outside, and they’re saying it’ll be like this through Wednesday.

Which suits me just fine; I have plenty of food and no real desire to go anywhere, so I’ll just sit here in my office and watch the snow blow past the windows.

I’m still working on the great Goolag migration, and have made a few breakthroughs.

The big one is that after pouring over obfuscated logs for several hours, I’ve discovered that Exchange 365 despises any local Active Directory that has ever come into contact with a local Exchange server. So I’ve had to reverse engineer what old Exchange servers do to old Active directory installs and formulate a way to remove those entries from every user.

Eventually there was a brief bit of PowerShell that cleared it up… Simply put every user login into a text file, one line per user, and then:

$users=Get-content c:\users.txt

This loads the users into the session variable $users so we iterate through it with:

Foreach($user in $users){get-aduser $user| set-aduser -clear msExchMailboxGuid,msexchhomeservername,legacyexchangedn,mail,mailnickname,msexchmailboxsecuritydescriptor,msexchpoliciesincluded,msexchrecipientdisplaytype,msexchrecipienttypedetails,msexchumdtmfmap,msexchuseraccountcontrol,msexchversion}

And this removes the problematic Exchange objects from each user…

Once that was done all I had to do was remove everyone from O365, resync with the local AD, and presto! Everyone can has mailbox now.

Right now I’m attempting another G-Suite <-> O365 sync again, now that I’m about 80% certain the O365 side is set up right. Now if Google cooperates and doesn’t assume the app I set up on their end, with domain permissions and all sorts of assurances that I’m in fact the guy in charge of the data, is a hacking attempt — I’ll get both systems sync’d up.

Hope shines eternal I suppose.

I’m currently deeply embroiled in transitioning the company to “The Cloud”, so free time has been at a premium these last two weeks.

The difficulty has mostly come from two things: Google and Microsoft.

On the Goolag front, the company has been using G-Suite, now Google Workspace, for many years — so there’s a lot of user-land muscle-memory there that is change-resistant. Adding to the complexity is the big “G” itself being a right pain in the ass to transition out of…

See, I’m migrating the company to Office 365 and that means migrating email, contacts, files, calendars, etc, etc, out of Google. And while a user can “takeout” all of their data from Google, trusting them to know how to import it all into O365 is a bridge too far.

There’s a procedure where you create a Google Cloud ‘app’ and O365 chron process that, with domain admin rights, can set up the forwards and move all of the accumulated user-land detritus from one place to another automagically… But Google keeps breaking this functionality in the name of “security”.

It’s not a security risk if I’m setting it up, and I literally own the domain and the data I’m trying to move Google.

It’s really about the money… Goolag is hoping that if they make it onerous enough, people will simply give up and keep paying them.

Well, don’t give up so easy…

The other player in this sordid tale is Microsoft, who is still a beast of a billion heads, all retarded.

My infrastructure at work runs on a few operating systems; Linux, MacOS, and Windows — and the Windows portion is mostly 2008r2 systems running Active Directory, Terminal Services, Sharepoint, and a Windows-based file server.

Yeah, it’s 2008r2 — because I already paid the tens of thousands in licensing and it works just fine for what I need it to do… That and I briefly toyed with moving to 2012 server when it came out, but the Windows 8 UI tacked onto a server OS sucked so bad I literally burned the installer DVDs.

Anyway, this is where the problem comes in; 2008r2 fell off the support list so Microsoft has completely disowned it, but all of my accumulated user-land data is housed in a 2008r2 AD server…

O365’s “Azure”, the cloudy version of Active Directory will simply import all of that accumulated user-land data — if the AD server is running 2012r2 or later. If the server is 2008r2, you are shit outta luck.

I think I have a workaround for this too — but it involves a bunch of back-end work on my 2008r2 AD server to pull off, and I can’t do that during working hours for obvious reasons, so I’m a vampire for the foreseeable future.

So, went and saw “Raya and the Last Dragon” last evening, in iMax, because why not…

I was pleasantly surprised at how good the movie was — because, honestly, my expectations were set pretty low…

Let’s cut to the chase; the House of Mouse these days is pretty much known for being the Church of Social Justice of Latter Day Woke… A studio where telling a good story is somewhere near the bottom of the priority list, under “browbeat the audience with your agenda”, “be as preachy as possible about a current event”, and “you have two hours to convince everyone your kink is cool”.

“Raya” still had its {current year} elements, sure; Princess Power Hour? Yep. Mean girl redemption arc? Check. Broken family dynamic? Double-check. Kowtowing to all of the Asian money invested in the company? Oh hell yes…

But what made the movie actually good was all of the {current year} it didn’t have…

There was a strong father figure instead of the modern-era useless comedy relief male. The female lead had raison d’être versus being inexplicably Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger than everyone ever because woman. And the moral of the story was simply a good moral, so there was no need to try and convince the audience with forced morality.

In short, the movie didn’t harangue at the audience about woke du jour and instead just told a good story.

And that somewhat made the $75 it cost to see the movie worth it.