Back on July 4th, 2022, I put in a request for my OMPF (Official Military Personnel File), and today it showed up in my email from the National Archives. So it only took about 16 months… Not bad really!
But, now I have specific dates for all of the various things I did while I was enlisted – so now I get to go and update some entries to be a bit more specific.
The levels of security involved to get this PDF was pretty impressive. I guess I should squirrel it away somewhere when I get home from the office.
My CFO came in this morning stating the big sliding front doors to the building wouldn’t close.
I just had them serviced, so I doubted it was anything major and told him I’d take a look before he called the door company and spent money on a service call… And upon taking a look I noticed something funny with the beam break sensors…
So a quick trip back upstairs to get a screwdriver led to an even quicker debugging session…
And after dumping out the mummified moths and reassembling – everything is good as new.
It’s the little things.
And here’s a bonus picture of a snowy Colorado morning from the roof of my office building looking towards downtown Denver.
Listening to "Blinded By The Light" by Manfred Mann's Earth Band
I spent several hours at “Urgent Care” last evening for a bad bout of food poisoning, probably caused by a King Soopers salad… I try to eat healthy, but apparently the healthy food these days will try to kill you as well.
Kaiser’s Urgent Care is anything but urgent, as I spent two and a half hours sitting in a waiting room with a 104-degree temperature and feeling like I was freezing to death. The shakes were the worst part, and I’m still sore.
By the time they actually got around to me my temperature was down to 100.4, so they did a cursory check and sent me on my way. And the fee for this was a mere $50.
Fortunately, my roommate has a somewhat open prescription for amoxicillin being a kidney transplant recipient and therefore living on immunosuppressants. So, I’m self-medicating with Gatorade, the BRAT (bananas, rice, applesauce, toast) regimen to get my insides straightened out, taking 500mg of amoxicillin every 12 hours, and trying to get some rest.
My HR director at work has been using the same HP Envy 700-527c desktop since the company purchased them ten years ago, and earlier this week the drive started showing symptoms of failure… So, I had him back up his data – just in case – and started the process of replacing his machine.
The Envy 700-527c uses a 4th gen Haswell i5, so pretty much anything would be an upgrade. But, just to show how fast technology has evolved, I found a refurbished Dell Optiplex 7060 over at Microcenter for $230…
Said Optiplex has an 8th gen i7-8700 in it, 32 gigs of ram, 4TB of storage (1TB SSD + 3TB 3.5″ HD) and Win10 Pro. Win10 Pro is probably a hundred bucks of the $230 all by itself…
Anyway, I send my CFO (who has returned from abroad) over to Microcenter to get the Dell, and when he gets back, I collect the HR director’s machine, pull the HD, and install it in place of the 3TB 3.5″ in order to clone it to the SSD.
So far so good – with one exception – the new Dell only supports display port for monitors, and everything at work is older than that. In fact, my HR director is still using an old DVI-based 27″ LCD I sold to the company back in 2010 or so… But I can fix this being as I have a huge collection of old video cards and most of them do DVI.
So, I stick an old Nvidia GT-430 into the Dell because it can’t support additional PCIe power, hook up a test monitor, and power it on…
Nada. The machine powers up, but no display.
I figure this is caused by a UEFI configuration where it’s been told to use the integrated GPU in the CPU and ignore an external GPU, so I scour the building looking for a monitor that will do display port – finding one in our spinoff’s disused office space. (They get all of the cool new stuff while I build complex systems out of popsicle sticks and paper clips – such is life)
Okay, new(er) monitor hooked up and I get into the UEFI – and the GPU selection is set for “automatic”: so that’s not it.
Then I remember that if a UEFI machine is set for “Secure Boot” it will generally refuse to see any cards that aren’t also UEFI-based. The GT-340, being from 2010, has no concept of UEFI and uses older VBIOS mechanism to instantiate itself on boot…
Easy fix. Turn off secure boot, turn on legacy card support, and presto – DVI video. And a half an hour later I have the old drive cloned to the new SSD, the system booting off the cloned image, and all of the Win10 drivers installed for the new chipset and other new hardware.
Even with the 2010 video card in it, the new Coffee Lake-based Dell runs circles around the Haswell-based HP, as one would expect.
Now to replace the other 4-5 Haswell-based HPs still hanging out in the office with much more performative $230 Dells.
Apple has apparently caught wind that I’m using other systems and decided that I’m a heretic, because starting this morning nothing has worked right.
My roommate likes to use iMessage to send me his part of the utilities and to pay off the loans I’ve given him, and as of this morning iMessage says my account isn’t eligible for Apple Cash payments. Following this Apple Music, which I have a year’s worth of subscription in the queue, stopped working in Windows and Android – insisting that I need to log back in, but then refuses to let me log back in.
And being as these are the last things I was actually using Apple for, I’ve decided to completely move on.
I’ll keep the account, just because I’ve had an Apple account since Apple accounts were a thing, even though all I get at my “.mac” address is spam. And I’ll keep the credit card open as it doesn’t cost anything to do so, but without an iPhone the card is pretty much useless.
For payments we used Zelle this morning, which seems to work just as well and has the added advantage of going straight into my bank accounts versus the Apple debit card. And for Apple Music I’ve decided to give Spotify a whirl and paid for a year of that. It was cheaper than Apple Music, but hopefully just as good.
So, it’s been a few days with Windows now, and I’m adjusting well, I think.
I know I make it sound worse than it really is. I mean, I manage Windows-based servers and Windows-based users pretty much every day, so it’s not like I’m coming into this blind. And I’ve been using Windows on and off since Windows was a thing, so – yeah.
Sure, Windows 11 is kind of a hot mess when it comes to anything approaching a cohesive operating system; the backup facility for example is located in the still very Windows 7 control panel that no one is supposed to see anymore, and even says “Windows 7” right in the title…
And it still takes Windows Backup a month of Sundays to do a backup, but at least it’s still there I guess, so that’s a win of sorts.
Apparently, there is a new backup utility in the works where Microsoft is attempting to ape the functionality of Apple’s Time Machine – but in typical Microsoft fashion it’s half-assed and only supports OneDrive and only works with Microsoft Store applications that have been installed on the machine.
And that pretty much sums up the whole “Windows 11 Experience”: half-assed. Which is still better than Windows 8, which was whole-assed – but I digress.
Really what Window’s problem is, is it’s written by a thousand different teams of blind people all trying to describe an elephant. Every single aspect of Windows feels incoherent and tacked on, because it is.
But, even with that, I think I’ll stick with Windows for a bit – mostly because of the functionality of DirectX 11/12 for the various games I like to play. Which makes me wonder how much of Window’s install-base can be attributed to that line of thinking; “Windows sucks, but I want to play [insert game here] so – whatever.”
With the move to Windows, I’ve also had to exfiltrate all of my data from Apple’s walled garden, which was more complicated that it needed to be because he who controls the data controls the subscriptions, and no one wants to lose that subscription money.
Initially I was just going to run the Windows iCloud agent much like I do on the Mac, because iCloud contains a copy of damn near every aspect of my life – but it was somewhat buggy and more than a bit clunky. So, I started looking into what it would take to just move everything to some Windows equivalent.
Apple Notes required a third-party utility and some patience. And I needed another one to export all of my photos. For all of the general data I had squirreled away in iCloud Drive it was a simple matter of telling the iCloud agent to keep a copy of everything local, and once it was done just turning off the agent and moving everything into the correct folders.
Once this was done, I attempted to sync my iPhone with Windows, which hasn’t been possible until recently. But the new phone-to-windows utility with the ability to do iPhones is yet another beta-at-best mess, and while it did connect, the functionality is extremely basic.
And this got me thinking…
My cellphone is an iPhone “SE”, the cheap iPhone, and I’ve had it for a while now. It’s okay and does what I need it to do, but the main reason I have it is because I use a lot of Macs and I have an Apple Watch, and the phone works seamlessly with those as you would imagine.
But now I’m using a Windows gaming PC… So maybe I should switch over to some cheap Android phone as that works better with Windows.
Fortunately, at work we do a lot of “Mobile Testing”, which is software QA for smartphones. And the best way to do this is to sit a trained software QA tester down with the selection of physical phones and the software, and have at it… So, I dug around in inventory and found a somewhat recent Android phone that had never been used in testing and borrowed it for a while to see if I can coexist with it.
The phone itself is an LG V60 from back in 2020 that was purchased used and was locked to T-Mobile. But without a T-Mobile sim / account the phone was essentially useless as it constantly stopped whatever it was doing to attempt to activate – so no one ever used it.
For me this was an easy fix; just put the phone into developer mode, load up the Android tools on my Mac at work, and do a little brain surgery… Which they can’t do for testing as it invalidates the device – but I’m testing for me and not a client…
And about 30 minutes later the phone was working with the Ting sim out of my SE… And this started the day of Android OS updates. I guess Android OS updates need to be done patch by patch, in order, and the phone was on an early Android 10 version, and I was taking it to Android 13. And once the phone was on Android 13, I went in and removed / disabled all of the Google / LG / T-Mobile spyware.
Once I got past the “What were they thinking!?” of Android, I kinda like it. Granted I’ve totally removed the creature comforts of the phone like the various app stores and whatnot – so when I want to install something it requires an effort similar to command line Linux. But I can live with that.
After this, I got the phone syncing with Windows, which is pretty slick. And then I got Android Auto working in the car, which is also pretty slick. But this left my Apple Watch out in the cold because the watch really can’t function without an iPhone…
So, I dug though my storage bins and pulled out my old circa 2016 Samsung Gear S3 watch, charged it overnight, and am currently going through the update cycle on it as well.
And with that my Apple watch has been set aside for the time being, and my iPhone SE is just being used to manage my Apple credit card and handle my roommate paying his half of the rent over iMessage.
All in all, it’s been entertaining to switch platforms again, and everything is going pretty well on that front. 🙂
I got a bit fed up with the complexities of my Hackintosh this morning, specifically the flaky network kexts I’m using to make an unsupported NIC and WIFI work – and after a quick trip to Microcenter for a few parts I set about installing Windows 11.
My rig as it appears now:
Windows 11 is, well … Windows 11. Everything you’ve heard is true – both good and bad.
I spent a good portion of the day disabling the operating system’s incredible desire to send everything you click on, look at, open, install, or type to Microsoft. Then another couple of hours were spent turning Edge back into a web-browser versus an advertising engine with rudimentary search functionality, and Outlook into a usable email application versus EmailOS.
Seriously. Everything in Windows is massively bloated, overcomplicated, and stuffed with features and pop-up tie-ins that I seriously doubt anyone asked for or needs.
But, after a solid five or six hours, I got the OS and assorted useful applications into a state where they are worth my time.
I even got all of my Apple specific things running, like iCloud cloud storage synchronization, my keychain linked up with Edge, Apple Music, and even my iPhone is connected to Windows and offers iMessage and calling from the desktop.
The final bit was getting the mouse wheel in Windows 11 to scroll the other way – like a Mac… I’ve been using Macs for so long that the default scroll direction in Windows irks me. And while there is no real facility in Windows to invert the mouse wheel scroll, this is only a minor setback.
By firing up PowerShell in admin mode, the following is possible:
$mode = Read-host "How do you like your mouse scroll (0 or 1)?"; Get-PnpDevice -Class Mouse -PresentOnly -Status OK | ForEach-Object { "$($_.Name): $($_.DeviceID)"; Set-ItemProperty -Path "HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\$($_.DeviceID)\Device Parameters" -Name FlipFlopWheel -Value $mode; "+--- Value of FlipFlopWheel is set to " + (Get-ItemProperty -Path "HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\$($_.DeviceID)\Device Parameters").FlipFlopWheel + "`n" }
0 is Windows default, 1 is Mac default.
This changes the registry to invert the mouse wheel, so now I’m less irked. 🙂
There are a few things I’m having to change though, like I’m dropping iMessage in favor of Discord. But in exchange I’m getting to play games like “Starfield” as soon as I finish Baldur’s Gate 3.
Speaking of which, things like Second Life and BG3 run 3-4x faster under Windows than macOS on the same hardware, just because Windows supports things other than Metal.
Now to enjoy a nice quiet weekend of video games. 😀
Last week my boss / CFO / landlord had to take off to Taiwan for a while to deal with family issues, and since then things have been pretty complicated at work and I’ve been running around putting out fires.
I’ve already written about the Microsoft debacle – and I got that worked out in a couple of days.
But while I was working on that the hosting company we use for the company website decided that now is a good time to phase out PHP 7 in favor of PHP 8 – which is totally legit, I just wish it wasn’t ‘right now’…
Anyway, this shouldn’t be a problem but our website is … contentious. See, when my sales team contracted out the design for the company website, the provider of said design took a $60 ThemeForest template, slapped in some stock photos, charged the marketing department $6000, and ran off giggling. And due to this I don’t have any of the ‘source’ for the website and have to reverse-engineer whatever needs to be fixed or adjusted every time it comes up.
The site’s template was developed on PHP 5.4 back in 2015, and I updated it all in 2018 for PHP 7.2 – which was a week of hell. And now we’re in 2023 and it was time to drag the thing kicking and screaming into PHP 8.
It took another week, but I was successful.
The roadblock currently is the COO wanting to have some testers test my work before I move the thing from staging to production, but continually spacing out that he wants this – so I’m on hot-standby to move the codebase around and the clock is ticking on the forced PHP upgrade…
Then on Saturday I get a voicemail from the alarm company regarding the alarm going off at the building… So off I go to get there and figure out what the hell is going on – which is perfect timing for the daily multi-car accident on Parker Road, so it takes me 45 minutes to drive 4 miles…
I get to the office and discover that it was a maintenance guy setting off the alarm because new tenants were moving into an office space on the second floor and no one got them keys. So I reset the alarm system and the new tenants catch me to ask if I can lock out the elevator for their movers a 2pm on Sunday.
I say “Sure” and make plans to be back at the office to use the elevator keys I’m not supposed to have.
Sunday rolls around, and then 2pm rolls around, and no tenant and no movers… She texts me to say the movers aren’t there yet and they don’t know when they will arrive. So I put the elevator into lockout and put a post-it above the buttons with instructions on how to get it to move, and bail.
Monday I get to the office early to fix the elevator so that the nurses on the second floor don’t panic when the elevator doesn’t arrive on the ground floor when they press the button. Monday is also when I’ve scheduled the door company to come out and to the maintenance on the big sliding glass door on the front of the building.
The maintenance guy arrives, does “stuff”, and leaves. Then at 17:30 when the building locks down it’s discovered that the front door will no longer open without an arcane sequence of events involving the door open switch that never worked and the motion sensor / mag-lock unit timing out after it sees you.
No one tells me this until Tuesday evening though, so I drive back to the office and try to figure out what the hell is wrong with the doors… And leave another post-it, on the door this time, explaining the timing required to get the doors open after 5pm.
And on top of this it’s fall in Colorado, so we went from weeks of high-80’s to high-60’s in one day – which was Saturday – and the building HVAC has never worked quite right and needs a lot of manual intervention… So since Monday I’ve been babysitting the Trane controls to try and keep the building comfortable.
Tomorrow I need to manually relight the boiler and get the heating system running as it took the building 5 hours to go from 68 to 72 today, and anything under 68 makes the aforementioned nurses cranky.
