RIHAHN.COM

Month: April 2023

  • This

    Listening to "Pool Lights" by Phaserland

  • Top Fuel

    I just got back from the gas station, which oddly ties into my last post about the cost of food and the financial gymnastics that goes on to afford things in 2023…

    My grocer has a loyalty card thing that gives me points for every dollar I spend on food, and said points can be used for a $0.10 / gallon of gas discount per 100 points – which can only be used at their station and expire monthly.

    I currently spend $400-$500 a month on food, which is 400-500 points per month – or $0.40 or $0.50 off per gallon – and I use a bit less than a quarter tank a week so I need about a tank of gas per month…

    So today I fed my planet destroying hemi a bit over 16 gallons of 91 octane for $3.39 a gallon after the $0.50 a gallon discount.

    That means it was still over $50 to fill the tank, which sucks, but it could have been closer to $70… And every dollar counts right now.

    Listening to "Neon Daydreams" by Dana Jean Phoenix

  • Disgruntled

    In my continuing analysis of life in the idiocracy timeline, today I present another grocery run…

    A few variables:

    • I do my grocery shopping at around 0630 on Saturdays, because that’s when my local grocer marks down all of the fresh food that’s close to expiry.
    • I clip coupons and use them whenever possible.
    • I buy myself one (1) snack thing per trip – usually popcorn.
    These days we have to bag our own groceries and supply the bags, so I got myself a nice thermally insulated and compartmentalized bag.

    The above is

    • a half loaf of discount wheat bread and enough lunchmeat / cheese to make sandwiches out of it
    • a discount box of chicken tenders for three meals this weekend
    • four breakfast bowls for work next week (coupon – buy 3 get 1 free)
    • three potpies for dinners next week (coupon – $0.30 off each, making them $3.49 for the big ones)
    • three cup-noodles and two frozen burritos for work lunches next week
    • two pints of store-brand milk, a small box of store-brand stick butter, and two Knorr pasta sides
    • and a bag of pepperjack popcorn (coupon – $0.50 off).

    Total? $82.52 ($77.63 after coupons)

    When the tech bubble burst the early 2000’s I ate a lot of Knorr pasta sides because they were $0.49 each and made two meals. Three years ago they were $0.79 each. Today they are slightly smaller and $1.49…

    Back in the 70’s / 80’s my mom would make an olympic-class event out of coupon clipping, which is something I’ve taken to as well – when possible. Coupons really only work if you’re meal-planning for a family where the economy of scale kicks in though – and I make meals for just me. And while I do tend to eat a lot of leftovers, I can’t get through family-of-four portions before they go bad in the fridge – so I avoid ‘family size’ discounts.

    Anyway, that’s today’s window into life in 2023… I really hope I can look back on this in a decade and chuckle.

    Listening to "Mixtapes" by Moonrunner83

  • Audit ALL the things!

    You can tell things are getting tight economically by the number of organizations shaking down my company for loose change right now.

    This month started with a tax audit by the city we reside in, then being as we’re a NIST certified laboratory NIST wanted to do an audit (which runs about ten grand), and this morning I have a call with Microsoft to audit our licensing so they can determine how much more money I need to give them.

    The correct answer is “none”; I run mostly linux internally and the two Windows servers are running 2008r2 with cals that were both paid for ages ago – and all of my employee Microsoft needs are managed via Office 365 – so at least it’ll be a short meeting.

    Anyway, I need to run and get on this 7am call with Microsoft. Have a great day out there!

    Listening to "Severed" by New Arcades and Droid Bishop

  • DARWARS

    I was digging around in an old box of stuff here at work and came across a DVD for one of the first things I worked on when I started here in 2004…

    DARWARS Ambush! V1.0

    This is the ‘tactical simulation’ I mentioned back in August of ’04 – I figure it’s been pretty close to 20 years since this was a thing, so I can probably talk about it now. 🙂

    Listening to "Control" by Michael Oakley

  • The Golden Age of Wireless

    A package arrived today…

    A new old-stock Apple Airport card, still sealed in its 2002 cardboard tomb

    I’ve been searching for the Apple branded wifi card for my circa 2000 PowerBook G3 “Pismo” on and off for quite some time, and while they tend to be readily available, the ones that are readily available tend to be in pretty sketchy shape.

    Anyway, last week I found someone selling one still in the box for $20 – so I jumped on it.

    What $99 purchased back in 2000

    Once I’d deflowered the virgin seal on the box and extricated the card, manual, and CD, it was time to install it in the laptop…

    The PowerBook “Pismo” was the last truly user upgradable laptop Apple ever made, so it’s a simple matter of pulling the two keyboard release clips with a fingernail, flipping the keyboard back, and exposing the guts of the machine.

    In the above picture you can get a glimpse of an alternate timeline Apple Computer where the customer wasn’t assumed to be an idiot and was allowed to do things with the hardware they purchased.

    The upper left is the new airport card in its new home above the PCMCIA card slot and the CPU heat pipe and heat sink is right under it. The cover in the middle that is held down with two plain old Phillips screws is the CPU daughter card which also has the two ram slots on it – and has a pull-tab because it just clips into place, and on the right is the 2.5″ drive bay with another pull tab to make it easy to remove.

    The battery and DVD-rom are under the palm rest and are removable by simply moving a lever on either side of the palm rest to eject them from the body of the laptop – this was so that you could decide what peripherals you needed… Want a second battery for ten hours of portable runtime? Go for it! Want a zip dive instead of a DVD? No problem!

    There’s a reason this laptop is viewed by many as peak Apple hardware design…

    Back in 2000, when this laptop came out, it was the undisputed king of portable power; it could computationally annihilate every other laptop on the market and sported two 400Mbit Firewire ports that were insanely fast for an era where bleeding edge USB was a whopping 12Mbit.

    The machine above has the top of the line 500Mhz PowerPC G3 CPU on a 100Mhz bus and a gig of PC-100 ram – the most it will address. And the old mechanical ultra-ATA HD has been replaced with a 128G SSD – also the most it will address.

    All told, this is probably my favorite bit of Apple hardware I’ve owned over the years just because it’s so different from modern Apple ideals.

    Anyway, card installed and the antenna connected it was time to fire up the laptop and make sure it all worked…

    Looks like everything is working just fine.

    It took a bit more work to pull this off though. See, retail wifi in general was only about six months old when the Pismo was introduced, so it’s a really primitive implementation of 802.11b and simply won’t talk to modern security-conscious wifi…

    Luckily I have an old “Airport Express” that can talk to the Airport card in the laptop, but I can’t run any security on the connection – so the Airport Express is MAC locked to the card in the laptop. But it does work!

    After all of this I spent the remainder of the afternoon cruising old websites on my old laptop and pretending I was back in the early 2000’s when the Internet was still cool…

    Listening to "Beta Girl Lost in Forever" by SelloRekt LA Dreams

  • Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get

    A little return to winter here today, so here’s a picture for the snow deprived out there:

    I’m also testing the post template I whipped up to make posting more about content and less about code.

    Listening to "Who You Run To" by The Bad Dreamers

  • Update

    Took the 300 over to the dealership to take care of a TSB… Apparently a few 2022 cars have flakey tire pressure sensors and people are too stupid these days to manually check tire pressure occasionally – so the Feds had to step in and have Chrysler check the TPMS system in every 2022 car.

    While I had the car there I had them change the oil and rotate the tires. I’ve only put about 2500 miles on the car, but it’s entirely possible I’ll be moving across the country ‘soon’ and I figured it was best to be prepared for that.

    Things at work aren’t going well with the economic situation and all, so we’ve been laying a few people off and tightening the belt where possible… But between the crap economy, our sales team being pretty bad even in the best of times, and the city of Aurora deciding to do an egregious tax audit in the middle of an economic down-turn, my boss / CFO looks to be just about done with it all.

    The random tax audit is really the icing on the cake… They are auditing everything over $1 for the last bunch of years – across all of our various business interests (including my boss’ real estate endeavors) – which has the entire company scrambling for receipts while we’re also scrambling to keep the doors open. But someone has to pay for all of that free stuff the current regime promised, and I guess that’s us.

    I don’t really fault my boss for being done with it all; he started the company in ’99 and while things were really good for a long time, since 2020 it’s just been one body blow after another… Whacky regulations, stupid lockdowns, tax insanity, economic shitstorm, industry brain drain, etc, etc.

    I’ve been with the company since August of ’04, so I’ve been around for both the good and bad – and right now it’s the worst I’ve seen.

    My current “SHTF” plan involves heading to South Carolina where my roommate has a little land and a trailer we can hole up in until things improve or fall off a cliff. I have my property in south Colorado, but I wasn’t able to get anything built on it before the economy caved in… I should probably convert it into liquid assets while I still can.

    If my boss decided to end things today, I’ve probably got another six months or so to spin everything down so it won’t be “Surprise! You’re unemployed!”. But as a precaution I’ve been turning off the non essentials and reducing my monthly outlay as much as possible to bank as much as possible.

    I’m still a bit over a decade away from retirement, so I’ll have to land on my feet and keep running for a while. And I’ve never been on unemployment, ever, so I hope that counts for something if I have to call on it for a bit between jobs.

    Basically everything sucks.

    Listening to "The Ride (Into the Midnight)" by Kalax

  • Space

    I’ve always been into ‘space stuff’, so I tend to always have an eye on whatever the new space-thing is… And today the new space-thing was SpaceX’s test of the super-heavy booster and ‘Starship’ stack.

    It looked a bit like this when they lit it off:

    This really shows off the scale of the rocket

    I kinda grew up in the space program – from sitting on my great grandmother’s couch in Ohio watching Saturn-Vs fling people to the moon as a toddler in the late 60’s and early 70’s, to my father working at Beech Aircraft / Raytheon on the Shuttle program in my teens. Even my aunt worked at Ball Aerospace on the Star Tracker for the Shuttle program.

    I guess the Space Shuttle was kind of a family thing for us and the house was always chock full of odd bits of memorabilia… I even went into the US Submarine Force because it was as close to space travel as I could get without being an astronaut.

    Anyway, today’s launch kinda gave me the same vibe as those early Saturn V launches – which was cool. I mean, sure, things ultimately went pear-shaped and the big-ass SpaceX rocket blew up shortly after non-separation, but that was mostly expected with something as ground breaking as this.

    It looks like they lost several engines after clearing the tower, and while they still made it through MaxQ with only 27 of the 33 engines running, I’m guessing the loss of thrust stability on the ‘backflip’ probably prevented stage separation…

    Here’s what the rocket looked like while going uphill:

    Not something you see every day

    I’ve been asked why I wasn’t this jazzed about the recent NASA Artemis flight back in November, and truth be told it’s because Artemis isn’t anything new.

    And I mean that literally…

    Artemis is 100 billion dollars spent on pulling Apollo and Shuttle era stuff out of mothballs and blending it all together in some single-use Frankenrocket that is so single-use that they can’t even reuse the launch pad.

    The booster SRBs, orange fuel tank, and RS-25 engines were swiped from the Shuttle program, the second stage engine is an Apollo era Pratt & Whitney RL10, and the crew module was lifted pretty much intact from Apollo – and only really updated with computers that don’t use core memory and some touch screens because that’s what SpaceX did with Dragon…

    Like I said; Frankenrocket.

    Contrast this with SpaceX’s super-heavy which is all new tech aiming to be mostly reusable while sending even more payload uphill on cheaper gas…

    And it cost less – a lot less – than refurbing 70’s / 80’s era rocket parts.

    Listening to "One Night" by LeBrock

  • Wild Life

    Some new residents out in the forest in front of my place… Wild turkeys.

    Potato pictures because I was zoomed in quite a bit on my phone as to not pester them. These things eat their weight in bugs – which is a good thing – so I’m happy to see them. 🙂

    Listening to "Running Wild" by LeBrock

  • April showers

    Yesterday it was 81 degrees.

    Today it is:

    Springtime in the Rockies.

    Listening to "Love Game" by Timecop1983

  • Sun-Shine

    I rarely talk about work because almost everything I do is NDA, trade secret, classified, or otherwise controlled information – so it’s easier to just avoid the topic entirely.

    But, I’ve also been doing what I do for a really long time – and there are companies I’ve done things for that have literally ceased to exist over the last few decades, so I figure I can talk about some general things now.

    Ages ago, in the mid-90’s, I ran administration on SPARC-based Solaris 2 systems for Intelligent Electronics / Ingram Micro. This was in addition to more mundane things like X86 Novell systems and more obtuse things like IBM AS/400 systems, so I had some deep exposure to high-end (for the time) business systems.

    And this eventually led to working with Sun Microsystems for a while… I was involved in testing for the SWUP (Software Update Platform) portion of Solaris 10 – back when Solaris 10 became a thing in January of 2005.

    Solaris 10 was both interesting and rather cursed from the get-go; Sun was really proud of Solaris because they made it and it ran really well on their own SPARC hardware, so it was their baby – but they were also getting heavily beat up by commodity X86 systems running Linux…

    So, to maintain relevance, they went open source. And with that Solaris 10 was created.

    The problem was Sun, as a company, was mired in their extravagant past and wasn’t lean or nimble enough for the post-tech bubble world they found themselves in.

    I worked at the Broomfield campus during my time there in 2005, and even then several of the buildings were vacant. But in the engineering building the extravagance was still in effect; there were employee kitchens everywhere, lots of free food, and everyone worked in ‘cubes’ that were about 15 feet square with floor to ceiling walls – one of which was all glass and had a sliding door. The more prima-donna personalities were allowed to outfit their office however they wanted, so a few were pretty eclectic.

    But organizationally the place had problems… Engineering was a cost center model, so it was countless small teams fighting for their very existence against other small teams, everyone ‘worked from home’ several days a week and relied on internal communications tools that were sketchy at best to maintain project timelines, and the project I was on wasn’t even sure who was in charge until about two weeks before the project’s end…

    And all of the project documentation was basic at best because in those days at Sun, if it was hard to create it should be hard to understand! And if there was documentation, it was squirreled away on partitions you probably didn’t have access to for a week or two after you discovered it…

    Then there were the more mechanical aspects that were problematic, like the weeks it took to provision test hardware and get credentials for them – even though the servers were on the other side of the wall from my office.

    It wasn’t all bad though. I really enjoyed the remote desktop systems they had where any machine, anywhere, could be used as “your” machine with all of “your” stuff just by sticking your badge in the reader. I applied a lot of this to the systems I run at work, which worked amazingly well when the mysterious virus of unknown origin made the entire company ‘work from home’ for the last few years.

    All in all, my time at Sun Microsystems was an interesting view into how ‘Silicon Valley Big Tech’ operates, and kinda dissuaded me from accepting the various headhunter interviews over the years.

    Sure, I make less than industry average for someone with my experience and resume – but I also don’t have to deal with a lot of the B.S. that plagues my position. So it works for me. 🙂

    Listening to "Tech Noir" by Gunship

  • That one time…

    Story time!

    Back when I was in the Navy I did a lot of scuba training – for obvious reasons… That whole submarine, underwater, living near the ocean thing.

    Anyway, once I got out I didn’t have much call for all of that dive training. Not a lot of ocean front property in Colorado after all. But once I moved to Virginia seven years later there was a bit more opportunity, and once the Yacht was acquired and things like props and hull fittings needed to be inspected, it was once again a valuable skill.

    My roommates at the time got into it a lot more seriously than I did, eventually spending thousands on drysuits, fancy full-face masks, and high-tech air systems. I suggested they get their nitrox certification if they were going to go all-in – and so they did. So there were three of us with mixed-gas training and the ability to stay under the boat for as long as we had air.

    In the late 90’s I lived on a 40-acre farm, and on the farm we had a six-stall barn for the horses. Above that was a one bedroom apartment that Pegasus lived in… And this meant that to get to Peg’s place one had to go up about twenty feet along about forty feet of steps with no landing.

    So one evening Zeze, Peg, and myself are hanging out in Peg’s apartment and Zeze’s ex decides she wants to visit as well. She wasn’t the world’s healthiest person, and getting up to the apartment winded her.

    Well, about ten minutes pass and she starts to complain about being light headed, and then passes out in the middle of the living room…

    I check, get an erratic elevated heart rate, and judging by her lips her oxygen levels have plummeted.

    Thinking quickly I sent Zeze to get blankets, Peg to call an ambulance, and then grabbed his nitrox setup, checked the mix (32% oxygen, which while above the 21% for regular air, wasn’t so high as to burn the lungs), and then manually breathed for Zeze’s ex using the purge valve on Peg’s regulator… For the 15 minutes it took for the paramedics to arrive.

    Ultimately they arrived, put her on medical oxygen, and hauled her off to the hospital, where she made a full recovery and is still around to this day.

    I’m told that, at a minimum, I prevented brain issues from oxygen starvation and probably saved her life.

    And so that was that one time I saved someone’s life.

    Listening to "Galaxy Train" by Jordan F

  • Part and parcel…

    Three posts in one day!?

    Right after posting the last ramble about an old server, my roommate IM’d me to ask if I left the garage door open when I left; I didn’t. In fact, I wait for the door to fully close before I pull away because the door from the house into the garage is usually unlocked – so, no, I didn’t leave it open.

    A few minutes later he IMs to tell me someone broke into his truck, which he has to park on the street because it won’t fit in the garage, and cleaned it out – including the garage remote – which explains the door being open…

    Fortunately we have this insanely bright LED workshop light in the garage that also happens to be on a motion sensor. I’m guessing as soon as the thieves tripped the motion detector and were blinded by the shop lights they decided to not clean out the thousands of dollars in tools.

    So, police report done, insurance claim made, and garage opener reset we continue on.

    Unfortunately this is the third “you live in the third world now” incident in almost as many days:

    Thursday the HOA mass-mailed the community to remind everyone to keep their garage doors closed because some homeless guy was sleeping in someone’s open garage.

    Friday we had the nearby fire, which I’m told was caused by a homeless camp out in the woods and their cook fire.

    And last night the truck was broken into and cleaned out. The contents are probably in a pawnshop by now…

    Now, I live in a pretty nice area full of half-million dollar or more homes, and for the last few years the place has been really nice – but apparently things have changed. I wonder what that could be in response to?

    Rhetorical question, don’t bother answering.

    Might be getting on to a time where I need something other than hunting rifles…

    Listening to "Everything" by FM-84

  • High-end server

    Back in 1999, when we started the company, we bought some really high-end servers for performance testing – and I still have a few for ‘old times sake’.

    Here, for your viewing pleasure, the HP Netserver LP 1000r:

    These were really potent machines back when they were purchased: dual Pentium III processors (1Ghz @ 133Mhz), 2 gigs of ram (512M ECC PC-133), and three 9.1G 10K RPM Ultra3 SCSI drives – which made them about $4000 each.

    I clearly need to repaste the solid copper heatsinks, but everything in these machines is “HP Original” – and they still work…

    Old-school performance HDs have weird (by modern standards) connectors… But this drive could do 160Mbit and has a 6.9ms seek time – which for the day was pretty impressive.

    But, 20 years on, this server can pretty much be replaced with a Raspberry Pi…

    Listening to "Early Summer" by Miami Nights 1984

  • Dystopia

    The 80’s were a pretty wild time, and despite the rainbows and day-glow the decade had a bit of a dystopian undercurrent that showed up in the pop culture of the time… The cartoons we watched, comics we read, and lots of movies of the time were typically based on a failed future premise – and many of the table top RPGs we played often had a decidedly dystopian flair as well.

    Probably had something to do with the whole Cold War thing and the ever-present threat of getting nuked…

    Anyway, I like to think living through the 80’s prepared me for the modern day – because the modern day more resembles Cyberpunk than Star Trek.

    On the way into work this morning I got another heavy Cyberpunk vibe from it all… See, Denver – being a suburb of L.A. at this point – has a bit of a homeless problem… And one of my various routes to the office goes past a couple of camps that move around as the politicians take notice and evict them to some other space.

    So, like a page from a Cyberpunk story, I leave my burbclave and drive my high-powered high-tech executive sedan past the favelas to get to my corpo tech job on the top floor of some glass and steel high-rise. Once I arrive, cutting edge biometrics let me into the building so that I can spend the day working on the company’s Gibson that I built over the last two decades…

    It makes for interesting stories, but I’m not sure I’m happy living it…

    Listening to "Kids" by The Midnight