Author: Ratpuke7

Husband, father, IT Professional, artist, techno-geek, music freak, martial art lover, advocate of work-life balance and all things odd.

Friday, September 25th 2020… Will I? Or won’t I?…

I’m posting today to see if my post hits my blog. I’m not quite sure at this point. It looks like there is another bad plugin that does not want to play well with WordPress. I am learning a new language, albeit it slowly via Duo Lingo. Kind of interesting and it almost slides it in under your nose. It doesn’t even feel like I’m learning. A couple of things though… one is that its relentless in reminding you that you need to put in the time which I totally get but don’t really want to hear. Second, there is not a lot of explanation that I think I would benefit from.

Watercolor class is going well this term. I am posting my latest creation. A monochrome purple painting.

-Rat

Thursday, August 27th 2020… Nothing to say… lately…

Work sucks, been riding when I can in the mornings on my bike with Vikash. Been watercolor painting when time permits. No martial arts, no lifting, no life drawing – here in the desert. My only real entertainment is the birds and learning Dutch.

I have 2 bikes, a hybrid which is a cross between a gravel bike and a mountain bike. Basic front, lockable suspension, thin-ish knobby tires with a road stripe, and disk breaks. It can be taken off road, rode on gravel or street. Its a workout on the trail around my house. I’ve rode it on the “Bike the Drive” ride and it have me awful chaffing. It wasn’t made for a 30 mile ride. I learned the hard way. I also have a road bike with 700×25 tires which I purchased used in March this year. It was made to roll. Carbon frame, awesome gearing, skinny tires. While I haven’t ridden it 30 miles yet, I’m sure it would handle it with aplomb. I’ve ridden it for over 500 miles this year so far. Only 2 flats. I decided I’m getting some gator skin tires. They should be delivered tomorrow. I will have them on for a 30 mile ride on Saturday.

So, I have been taking a watercolor class with John Howard. He’s an AA Art Grad and all around good guy who teaches watercolor and drawing at McCord. He’s got some mad watercolor skills. Pretty funny, a guy I went to school with from AA back in the day, had a art show at McCord – Dale Popovich. He was a hell raiser when we were in school, or that is what I remember :). Anyway, my watercolor skills have a ways to go. I’m better than most, but I know what I’m capable of and what I think I can aspire to.

Lee’s has been out of the question with COVID and stuff, same with the gym – off limits. Cant wait until there is a vaccine. No life drawing here in the South Side Desert. I’d have to go to Elmhurst but with working from home so much, ill wait until the winter time if we get a vaccine. We bought a recumbent elliptical machine for the house so we can exercise when the weather gets shitty.

I’m an avid bird watcher. I try and make sure their feeders are stocked and the birdbaths are filled. I have 5 feeders. A hummingbird feeder, a thistle feeder, a cylindrical songbird feeder, a suet feeder, and a black oil sunflower feeder. They (sparrows, finches, cardinals, doves, chickadees) are like a bunch of toddlers, its fun to watch them. I can be entertained for hours. Then there is the occasional hawk, which is always interesting. I just wish he’d get a chipmunk or 2.

I’m learning Dutch via Duo Lingo. Which albeit is fun, is really a labor of love and is a bit of a grind. I am following a few people who I would like to think I know! Hope springs eternal. I am truly an optimist.

-Rat

Thursday, June 25th 2020 … arrgh! Flipping website!…

So I need to vent! My site has been working sort of for about a month now. Now there was no hacking involved here (unlike before). Its a battle for services and sites. All my photos and some of my apps did not work for a month. The reason? A firewall via a DNS service provider. Change my host DNS servers, voila, no hacking. Pictures don’t work. Posts sometimes don’t work. My backups don’t work. Some of my apps break. No email. Restore DNS and voila! Everything back to normal. Except my site is open to hacking (maybe). We shall see. I have to get this figured out. At least I know what the problem is now.

-Rat

Monday, June 8th 2020… I don’t know what to think….

I kind of like this stay at home thing however, I don’t like this working nonstop thing. It was nice to have an actual weekend off. I didn’t have to do anything…except what my social coordinator tells me. So, I dug up rose bushes, planted new plants, put out the garden trinkets, and watered the plants. I got the new belt for the dryer (the old one snapped last week). I put out the low voltage lights, set up the hummingbird feeder, set up the mosquito dynaTrap, put out the big wind chimes, and made a batch of sun tea. Oh and washed the kitchen floor and did the taxes. Ah, the honey do list.

Bizarre, sometimes the header pictures work, sometimes they don’t in Firefox. I downloaded Edge today to see if i can see any difference. Maybe it will give me some clues. Its easier to flush cache though.

-Rat

Monday, May 25th 2020… Happy Memorial Day…

Thank you to all the veterans who gave their lives for our freedom and those currently serving in the military. An extra big shout out to the Army! 40-Rounds.

Worked on a deck yesterday and am just taking it easy today. Worked on taxes for most of the day today. Went to Home Depot this afternoon to get a replacement drainage hose for the dehumidifier. My neighbor helped me put on my pedals on my bike Saturday, so now I’m ready again to hit the trail. Had to work this morning so no trail today. Also, have to work tomorrow morning too. Maybe Wednesday morning – look out world. I went and picked up a used weight bench for the basement on Friday. I have to get some replacement parts to get it in usable shape. About another week ought to do it. It was cheap (the price was right). I’m glad I took an extra day off, my back was sore. Anyhoo, back to taxes….

-Rat

Wednesday, May 20th 2020… Boy, am I an idiot….

Sometimes, I just get an idea in my head and my imagination runs with it. The downside to this is that that idea is sometimes waaaaay off base. I need to start applying Occam’s Razor to the problems I run across, and not apply some conspiratorial logic. I apologize to all involved because yesterday’s initial middle-page rant was wrong. I was wrong. I apologize to my neighbors even though I’m sure they have no idea that I needed to apologize. Yeah, I’m human and imperfect. They are good peoples, and I needed to give them “the benefit of the doubt”. There is/was no real reason or justification for me thinking what I thought. Nuff said, I’m done brow-beating myself over my own stupidity – mission accomplished.

I got a bit of a scare this morning. I couldn’t find my admin page. Whaaat? Finally, I reviewed all my settings and voila! Admin page. I can breathe now.

-Rat

Tuesday, May 19th 2020… “It’s always something…”

The subject line… that’s what SNL’s Rosanne Roseanna Danna would say. I am trying desperately to secure my network at home and my website. I don’t want to have to spend so much time learning crap that helps me do these things. It’s a waste of my time, money, and effort. I’d rather be doing something else besides keeping assholes out – who have nothing better to do than steal from me. What is it these days? My website – has nothing of value to anyone but me at this point. A blog that allows no one to comment or post, that is away from search engines, that uses no advertising – a fucking anomaly. But yet, like clockwork, some asshole’s bot is trying to guess my password 5 times per day via a some proxy. I only have 1 user. That’s the funny part, if it wasn’t so sad. WTF, asshole? I needed to whitelist my WAN IP address, which brings me to my next problem.

My home wifi. I also have that buttoned down, except for some crappy modem/router that I get to use from my cable provider. It’s like swiss-fucking-cheese. First, I had better slow my roll… I’ll post about this again tomorrow.

On a different note (like the transition?), I just put the new guitar strap on with the locks. Started practicing – from the beginning (again). Hopefully, I can keep up the momentum. That’s one thing that my language app “Duolingo” taught me. That slow and steady wins the race. I’m learning Dutch! I will see if i can get my new inexpensive, plastic pedals on today. Did I mention that these pedals only cost me $14 dollars? The first pedals that I picked up were very sexy but were $119 – Yikes! They were metallic black and very industrial looking – machined to the hilt. They used words like “Black-Ops” and “Chromoly” (whatever the fuck that is). I think it’s a made up word actually, because chrome is one thing (shiny plating) and “moly”, short for molybdenum (a whitish-silvery metal that is an element and highly ductile, corrosion resistant and has a really high melting point) is another. I digress… that’s the problem with having a science background (I find everything interesting). Also, the problem with ADD is I get easily sidetracked. What I was going to say was, that I want to get my bike – trail ready for tomorrow morning. Also, i started looking for a used bench for working out in the mornings. I need something sturdy, not cheesy. I think “Letgo” will fill the bill.

-Rat

Thursday, May 14th 2020… Yeah, still working like a dog…

I think we should change “OK Boomer…” to “OK Mule…” Because, if you are one of the multitude of tele-workers of this economy, you are being overworked and burnt out. Companies have figured out or are figuring out that they don’t need their offices. You can work from home just fine now, they can save money, you can have no life, they can utilize no boundaries, and guess what? You don’t like it? Quit. Hahahahahaha…… Piss off!

Ok, I’m done with my rant. BTW, I also hate audit. Everything that makes sense, gets the microscope. Stuff that makes no sense. Who cares? Well I thought I was done. Ok, now I’m done.

It was raining all morning today and I still have 1 meeting left and need to go to Costco by 5pm. Ugh. A place I would like to avoid.

No light on my bike yet, no new pedals, no clean basement, my life is a mess. At least I have my work ethic. I did however order a new guitar strap and some Schaller straplocks for my Epiphone ES-335. Ive been scared to play it because it wont sit nicely on my lap like my Strat without guitar straps. It’s been “sitting” on the wall collecting dust for several years now. I don’t need a broken neck. I am motivated to practice and learn from listening to Billie Eilish this afternoon.

It’s also been interesting learning security stuff about my site and associated applications. I would have done it earlier but i just never made time to. It always worked – until it didn’t.

-Rat

Monday, May 11th 2020 … Hmmm, the recent stability thing scares me…

It’s been a month >crickets< - Nice! Anyhoo, my site still works. So, I got a pre-driven Trek Madone 5.1 road bike. I used https://www.bicyclebluebook.com and bought it from a gent in South Bend, Indiana. Sweet! It’s light as hell (carbon fiber). Did the trail last weekend with my neighbor, Chris. Was my first time out on a path this year. The cardio part kicked my butt. Did it again Friday and wasn’t too bad. Still a butt kicker but not as bad. I think I am going to put my light on the bike this week and see how 5:30am feels on the trail. Been working like a dog still. Got some more vintage stereo stuff and bought a Topping DAC D50s (see https://drop.com/buy/topping-d50s-dac) with a linear power source. The thing is built like a brick shit house. You could beat someone to death with it. It’s that solid. I’m going to pair it with my DVD changer. My mini-disk players have built in 192kHz 24bit DACs and they sound killer. So, this should work just as good since it has a Toslink optical up-link. Need to get some new cable with banana connectors for my speakers and run them to different places in the basement. I like sonics. So, I have 6 speakers, 3 pairs in different parts of the basement. I’ve been listening to vinyl lately and occasionally, flip to CD/DVD however, I don’t typically like the sound due to the low bit rates and crappy channel separation. The streaming sounds really good if I can find the right album version. I’m a bit of an audiophile.

The sense thing has been fairly interesting and enlightening. Had to hire an electrician to install, which was good because to get it on, he did have to take the central neutral off to get the induction clips on and that sucker is a huge wire. My circuit box is an upgraded 200amp. I bought this gizmo almost 2 years ago when it was in the prototype phase. You can check it out at https://sense.com I was using an electric space heater for the laundry room which is part of the currently unheated garage. It turned out to cost us an arm and a leg. I think this year I will re-pipe the existing garage heater. Last year at the beginning of the fall, I was hell-bent on getting it to run. I almost blew up the house in the process. Luckily I have a gas shut off valve for that line in the basement. In any event, I found out that my average vampire power is around 213v per second. Which as it also turns out, is pretty good. I was able to identify almost all electrical appliances in the house. Its kind of nifty with it’s own app and up to the second power consumption/real time information via my iPhone. Vampire power is the power that your “turned off” electronics use to keep their IC’s up to date with your last channel, channel line up, clock, configurations and settings, time, etc..

On a sad note, my friend Father Peter Jarosz passed away on April 26th, 2020 – I think from COVID. Nowhere is it really stated, nor disproved and frankly, I wouldn’t trust the data anyway. Using common sense and looking/thinking concerning the things that happened and length in the ICU on a vent, COVID-19 makes sense. Anyway, he was just a good guy to spend some time with or just sit and talk to. Rest in peace Father Peter.

I am praying for our first responders including my paramedic nephew Mike, my niece Megan who is an addiction counselor, and my friend who is a nurse at Rush.

-Rat