RIHAHN.COM

Month: September 2022

  • More old iPhones

    It has been a while since my last Old Apple Crap post, so here’s a new one.

    After my original iPhone, I migrated to a 3GS. Unfortunately the 3GS, being made of plastic, didn’t fare very well and I no longer have it… But I still have my iPhone 4 and 5, and like my first iPhone they still function…

    The CDMA version of the iPhone 4 – from 12 years ago
    Like all of my stuff, the phone is in excellent shape

    The interesting bit about the above iPhone 4 is that it’s the phone that broke the AT&T strangle hold on iPhones… It’s the first CDMA version, and was a Verizon phone.

    It has an integrated SIM, so it still shows network connectivity, but the service has been turned down for voice calls – so this phone, like my original iPhone, is only really useful as a collectible now.

    The CDMA version of the iPhone 5 – The best iPhone ever made and a decade old a this point.
    Pristine – just how I like my collectables. It’s still bright white; the sunlight in the room is making it look yellow in the photo.

    My iPhone 5 was another CDMA model on Verizon, but this time in white to break my long history of black iPhones.

    The iPhone 5 was peak iPhone in my opinion; retina screens in a proper wide-screen ratio, lightning connector, LTE connectivity, good battery, good performance… It was the total package, and still fit in the average human hand.

    In theory I could put a SIM in this phone and it would still work… Probably not worth the expense of another carrier service though, so it too is just a collectable at this point.

    Listening to "Late Night Calls" by At 1980

  • Tags and Title

    So the notice regarding the county having my title work done came in a few weeks back, so I set up an appointment at the DMV to get my old plates switched to the new car and pay the laundry list of fees and taxes associated with doing that.

    Yes, an appointment, because for government offices zombies are apparently still a thing and they don’t want anyone inside the building if at all possible. And the first available 15 minute appointment was this afternoon – a mere two weeks after the notice.

    Anyway, I left work a bit early today and wandered over to the local DMV, where I once again arrived early and the robot wouldn’t let me in the building until 15 minutes before the appointment… So I hung out on a nearby bench and ogled all of the cars with temp tags – of which about a dozen were new Teslas of various flavors.

    Everyone is apparently doing as instructed and buying new $70,000 electric cars. This is fine as it means more gas for my planet-destroying hemi. 🙂

    I also noticed that Tesla people, by and large, are the sort who wear a mask, in the car, alone, because apparently zombies are still a thing for them too.

    Eventually the appointed time arrived and the robot let me into the building, gave me a ticket, and I commenced to wait another hour and a half to talk to a human.

    Said human was really very nice, probably because I had my shit together and wasn’t missing paperwork, had an expired license, didn’t have insurance, didn’t speak English, had a sketchy bill of sale, or any of the other things I saw during my 1.5 hour wait.

    And this is where things got weird.

    See, here in Colorado we used to be able to just transfer plates from the old car to the new car for free; we had already paid for the plates, so all we had to do was pay the taxes, fees, and have the state update the database for the new make, model, and VIN.

    But now the county has determined that they weren’t making enough money on this deal, so as of January you must get new plates printed and mailed to you for the low, low fee of $65.

    So, the process is now:

    1. Purchase car
    2. Get a temp tag and title
    3. Wait a month for the paperwork to complete
    4. Wait a couple of weeks for a DMV appointment
    5. Take some time off and go to the DMV because they are only open from 10-4 on weekdays
    6. Get another temp tag and title
    7. Wait 2-3 more weeks for plates
    8. And finally install plates

    I’m sure it makes perfect sense to someone, but for me it’s just another example of procedural B.S. clogging up the system and yet another reason I need to get out of the Denver Metro area; the bureaucracy is getting deep.

    Overall it only took about five minutes to get everything done and pay my nearly $1000 in taxes and fees for having the audacity to buy a nice car; and now I get to wait 2-3 more weeks for actual plates.

    Listening to "A Million Miles Away" by FM Attack

  • Drive

    This morning I decided I would top off the gas tank and go for a drive…

    The route was an old favorite; up Deer Creek Canyon to High Grade Road, and then take the back way into Conifer via Pleasant Park. From there I’d get on US 285 for a bit before getting off the highway onto Turkey Creek, which I would follow to the fire station where Deer Creek meets up and then back home.

    The route looks a bit like this:

    A pleasant mountain drive… Mostly…

    I was hopeful that by leaving the house at 8am that I would miss most of the bicycle people, but no such luck… They love to park a couple hundred cars at the bottom of Deer Creek Canyon Rd, and then ride 3-4 abreast up to Conifer at like 3mph.

    Normally this is just annoying, but on the hundred or so blind corners going up and down they become a menace because there is guaranteed to be an oncoming car any time you try to get past them. And they have zero self-preservation instinct that says “the oncoming two-ton vehicle will kill me”, so they do some truly boneheaded things… Like passing on the inside while you’re trying to not run some other bicyclist over…

    But if you can ignore the cycle-rats, it’s a beautiful drive.

    High Grade Road between Deer Creek Canyon and Pleasant Park… I remember when this was little more than a dirt goat path.

    And one more picture from the fire station at the junction of Turkey Creek and Deer Creek…

    If you know what the significance of the brown boxes are, you probably hung out with me in the 90’s. 🙂

    All in all it was nice to get out of the house for a bit and get up into the hills – even with the slow moving herds of bicycle-people all over the place.

    Listening to "Breeze" by Mitch Murder

  • There and Back

    So after some discussion yesterday morning, I sent my roommate and his relatives off to Rampart Range Road in his jeep while I enjoyed a quiet day at the house – for the most part.

    See, it’s typically not a good idea for both of us to be away from civilization at the same time because something always comes up at work and needs our immediate attention, and yesterday was no exception… At about lunchtime my boss calls and says theres a surprise data collect going on at the office and the wifi isn’t working – so everything is pear-shaped.

    The “problem” is that we don’t run the building wifi on weekends for security, and haven’t for years, but no one thought to mention the data collect to I.T. so we could enable it.

    An easy fix, and as I needed to get a MAC address off of the new HP Z8 for the mac-locked software they need to run on it before Monday morning, I just drove in to take care of both birds.

    As soon as I arrived at the office, my roommate calls and had both managed to get lost in the Pike National Forest and declined to top off the tank in the jeep before hitting the trails; so he had about 20 miles of gas left and no idea where he was.

    This was another easy fix once he enabled “Find My” on his phone so that I could see where he was from here at the office. I used that to guide him back to the proper road and they made it into Woodland Park with about four gallons left in the tank.

    Once I had the office back up and running, I went and washed the car and then decided to go get dinner at Hickory House in Parker…

    As I was leaving the subdivision I was flagged down by this older lady who was in a panic; she was at the community mailboxes and looked to be having an issue with someone in a nearby car.

    I stopped and she very apologetically explained that she had a terrible fear of spiders and there was one on her car door… I chuckled, pulled over, and got out to face down the pencil eraser sized wolf spider on the glass of her driver’s side door.

    With a suitably super-hero flick I sent the monster flying off into a nearby bush – and bid the relieved citizen a nice evening.

    The rest of the day came and went, and ended with the roommate’s relatives gushing over how amazing their day was and showing me all the pictures they took.

    Colorado is really quite photogenic. 🙂

    Listening to "Don't Want to Change Your Mind" by FM-84

  • Out and About

    Today my roommate’s sister and her husband arrive from out of state for a short visit. I’ve been volunteered to take the lot for a tour up in the mountains tomorrow (Sunday), so I’m sure I’ll have something to post about (and a photo or two) that evening.

    We’ll be taking my rocket-barge I guess, as it’s a bit more comfy than the roommate’s Jeep and actually gets slightly better gas milage – as long as I drive it like I’m retired.

    Other than that, not a lot to report. Over the last week or two I’ve pretty much just hunkered down and tried to save money wherever possible in expectation of a $1000+ tags and title fee for the 300.

    I’ve re-textured a friends avatar in Second Life, which took several days… The avatar is a zebra sort of thing, and 3D stripes suck – but I got it done and said friend is happy, so yay me.

    Today I unboxed, configured, and loaded a new computer for the biometrics department at work… I wanted to get it done yesterday, but FedAxe was running late and didn’t drop the machine off at the office until 5pm.

    It’s a new(er) HP Z8 G4 workstation, meaning it’s somewhat on-par with my old gaming rig that my roommate eventually sold to work to pay off his new Mac Studio. It’s a dual 6136 Xeon machine with 512 gigs of ECC DDR4, and a Quadro P6000 in it… Not too shabby for a bit over $4000.

    It’s a ‘refurb’, and being as we need it for science-y stuff I had to do a full hardware certification on it once I got it configured and loaded, which took about four hours this morning. But it passed and I’m back home for the remainder of the day.

    Listening to "Escaping the Void" by Timecop1983