Month: February 2023

Friday, February 24th 2023… Everything is always a project…

So, I grabbed the NAD M50 streamer from my buddy for a song (bad pun) and am trying to get it connected to my network. I got it connected and it seems to be working well, except that I cant see any way of ripping CDs since it only seems to play them. In the meantime, I think my old “MyCloud” NAS died. I was planning on using it on the M50 as an external storage device. Now I have to troubleshoot it and see if it’s worth saving, or just buy another replacement NAS drive. Everything’s a flipping project.

Update: So, I get home from work Friday night only to find my small NAS drive dead – I had a sneaking suspicion. I saw that it has a USB 3.0 male plug so I went on Amazon, just for kicks and ordered a male-male USB 3.0 cable. Got it today (Saturday) and got my NAS drive working. My concern is for how long? I am currently copying all of the files off onto a backup drive and ordered a new NAS.

I did get a painter’s diary though from “Jerry’s Art Supplies” for my watercolor paints. I also got some extra paints that I was running out of – cerulean blue, cadmium red, and alizarin crimson. I still need to order burnt umber. I’m fixing 3 of my last 4 pictures. Little changes – fixing things that bugged me. I’m also working on a picture from about 2 years ago that I never finished. As a matter of fact, it was only about 40% done with it. I’m interested to see how it finishes. Looking at it with my current eye, I think I was very timid with my tones and colors when I walked away from it.

-Rat

Wednesday, February 22nd 2023…If it’s not one thing, it’s another…

WordPress, ISP’s (Internet Service Providers), ICANN, 3rd Party software providers. Damn. Why can’t we all just get along. It’s tough running a simple blog. WordPress upgrades its code, PHP is out of date, update PHP and the site breaks, the new WordPress doesn’t play well with the 3rd party apps that are supposed to support it. Your domain is expiring, if you want to own the domain from a technical standpoint, you need to register with ICANN, but the ISP who supports your site, for some reason can’t send emails to ICANN with your domain emails. Do that and your information can’t be private, don’t do that and you get all kinds of spam calls (calls from numbers that don’t really exist). Lie about it and ICANN finds out and your domain is shut down. That’s the dark side of ICANN. All this to keep things “free”. Get the government involved and nothing works right because business’ keep it that way, get business involved and nothing works in your favor (meaning you’ll have to pay for everything and if they can’t monetize it, they won’t develop it – so you’re stuck with what they give you until someone figures out a way around it. And then there are the hackers who exploit your stuff just because they want to experiment on stuff that is meaningless.

Ugh, to have a blog. How do all these people stay fat, dumb, and happy? I don’t get it. Maybe because they stick to monetized sites with tons of crappy ads that charge little to nothing. I dunno. Fuck em’.

-Rat

Sunday, February 12 2023… Happy flipping’ New Year…

I can’t believe it’s February and I haven’t posted since September of last year! Holy Crap! Today is supposed to be sunny and nice (50F for a high). There is a grove of interesting trees that I wanted to photograph. I’m going to bust out the hybrid and go for a short ride. There have been some interesting changes and some interesting things going on.

The basement is slowly getting cleaned (-1.0 bummer:very cool). I haven’t done anything with photography (bummer). No Tai Chi (bummerx2), but I have been researching while I’m getting my area cleaned (-0.5 bummers). I hooked up the Ohm’s to the Carver amp (TFM-25) and nixed the old receiver (CT-3) for a “new” Pioneer Elite (SC-72). My bro gave me all his old CD’s so I’m going to throw them in the carousel. That said, I am starting to seriously consider the BlueSound Vault 2i Network Streamer. I’d really like to rip all my CD’s and store them on a NAS and put away all my CD’s for good. Once upon a time back in 2007, I ripped them all up to iTunes. I’d like to get away from that since Microsoft is not developing it anymore and its “iffy” sometimes. It’s all a project. A buddy of mine has a NAD M50 streamer player and is willing to sell it to me for a good price. I’m also considering that direction. I don’t want to be stuck with CD’s with no way to play them or degrading disks. I’ve been keeping up with painting watercolor (fun). Since I’ve posted last, I’ve done 3 watercolor paintings that I can remember – 2 koi (16×20), the Niagra river (16×20), and a sunflower (10×12). I’m also working on fixing/finishing a painting from last year (32×40). I’ve started prepping/training for the upcoming riding season. Losing some weight (a priority) and working on my cardio and strength. Ill post pix’s next time because I’m working this morning, and on my work laptop, so I don’t have my graphics and web tools.

Speaking on working, I’ve been working like a dog. That said… I finally got some help. It’s been a blessing. We moved offices to a new location – closer to my house so my commute is now 15 minutes tops.

-Rat