Author: Ratpuke7

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

Thursday, May 11th 2023… Back in the saddle again…

Back from vacation and back to work – ugh. It was nice getting away, but it was also nice coming home – to mount laundry! Na, it was good to get back to familiar surroundings (my own bed and shower). We flew into Tampa to visit my daughter and son-in-law who were married last April in Vegas and had since moved to Tampa during last September’s hurricane. My son also came in from Baltimore for a couple of days while we were there. It was great to see them since we missed seeing them last Christmas holiday, due to the snowstorm! Although we didn’t stay with them, we stayed fairly close in downtown Tampa. I found out that I will be a grandfather – god willing. We visited the river walk, the armature works, aquarium, and lettuce lake, and I also got to ride an electric scooter! It was nice going out to dinner and catching up, watch a sunset, and just hang out.

We then travelled to Key West. The vibe reminded me a lot of New Orleans – a slushie bar on every corner (or so it seemed). I got to see the Hemmingway house, the lighthouse, the Southernmost point in the continental US, where US 1 starts (mile marker 0), a butterfly conservatory, roosters, some kitschy houses, Key-lime pie, and walked ragged. It’s tough keeping up with a determined woman on a scooter 🙂

After Key West, we traveled up the Key’s to Islamorada to check out “Robbies”. An interesting little place that had awesome milkshakes and where you got to feed the Tarpon and “fence” with a pelican. From there it was off to Miami!

Miami was interesting and really made me appreciate Spanish. Everyone spoke the language and for the first time in my life, I appreciated it and wished that I had learned it. We rubbed elbows with the famous at Fontainebleu on Miami Beach. Wow, is all I can say – a fish out of water 🙂 We went and saw Wynwood Walls (a very cool graffiti museum) and visited the art deco district of South Beach.

-Rat

Thursday, April 13th 2023… All good things must come to an end…

Just sayin’… CityBBQ has left Orland Park. I’m bummed. I feel like I tried, but it just wasn’t good enough. CityBBQ came to Orland somewhere around April 2018 and was frequented by me as often as I could. As an older guy though, I figured I have to start putting my health and waistline above my love for BBQ. So, as I would drive by to and from art class, I would gaze lovingly on the building and think of plates of BBQ past. My personal favorite was the ribs. The quality never disappointed. I’ve been to a lot of BBQ places where quality was suspect, and the amount of fat was disappointing. A place or 2 in Lemont comes to mind. That aside, I felt that a BBQ place on that side of town was a bad location. If you would have put it over by the Patio on the Tiney side of East Orland or where Fry the Coop is, it would have rocked! I think the Orland/Tinley population just didn’t want to drive to the other side of Orland for BBQ.

-Rat

Tuesday, April 11th 2023… I finally got out!…

I finally got out on a bike last Friday, it was about 70F outside and it was lovely!

Tinley Creek North

I picked my bike up from Richards and they did a really nice job on it! New wheels – yay! Saturday, we went to the outlet mall and walked most of the day and I was beat Saturday night. Sunday, (Easter) was a day of recuperation. I still have to put a new battery in my cadence meter and take my little speedometer magnet from my old wheel. But other than that, I am ready for this season.

-Rat

Tuesday, March 21st 2023… Happy Spring/Vernal Equinox D+1…

I’m excited that it’s the second day of spring. I like the time change! I’m going to have to bring the bike in to Richards this weekend with the new wheels, tubes, tires, and have everything tuned up.

I finally have ripping working on the M50, the procedures are understood, and the external drive is set up. It seems so slow… I’m used to speed ripping, and this is single speed. 20min per disk. However, it’s better than nothing. I don’t think the Vault 2i is any better. The nice thing is that it’s using a 8Tb HDD. The problem will be when I am approaching 6Tb. This is going to take a while. I may have to take it off and back it up soon, since I am starting to get into “I wouldn’t want to lose this…” territory.

-Rat

Thursday, March 16th 2023… If at first you don’t succeed… keep on suckin’ till you do succeed…

Gotta love a good “Three Stooges” quote. Well, I finally got the M50 to both have an external device and rip a CD. I just need to figure out a bunch of odds and ends now from a procedure perspective. I feel like dancing. The exFAT format worked in lieu of the FAT32 format. They are supposed to be similar, but I wasn’t confident. It’s not ideally what I would want, but at least I now have external storage. I am still going to try and work out how to get my external storage addressable via the network. Currently, it can only be seen via the M50. I now have to get my Carver and speaker fixed. Hopefully, it won’t cost too much.

-Rat

Monday, March 13th 2023 … I had a brainstorm.. or was it drizzle?

If it’s not one thing, it’s another. I was running out of outlets, so I just left a couple of components on instead of turning them off – this is because, once upon a time I decided that switched plugs were the way to go. The long and the short of it is – I am short on non-switched outlets. Have to fix that. So, I think my amp had some thermal issues, since I cranked up the MTBF numbers. I don’t see anything fried. But one of the sides of the amp seems like its dying. I pulled the amp out to let it cool off. Hopefully it will return to operation. If not, I’ll have to troubleshoot it.

I think I am going to try a couple of different tactics on the storage side. I investigated FAT32 and found that it’s a “USB” format and really has a 32GB file size limitation, but on the partition size, a 3TB upper limit. I am going to look at my buddies NAS and see how it’s set up and mimic that setup. Also, I’m going to try and use a single drive, formatted to FAT32 and hook it directly to the M50 to see what it does.

-Rat

Monday, March 6th 2023… Nope, not surprised…

Nothing works like it’s supposed to. I was supposed to be able to rip a CD from my NAD M50 streamer to my NAS drive which I configured last week. First of all, my iTunes server that was installed, works like advertised. I never knew that there was such a thing – nice. The Twonky media server looks into the iTunes and indexes it in Twonky as a DLNA compatible file. Both work. What I still have to figure out is how to keep iTunes from changing it’s .ini directory hierarchy on the C drive on the laptop, or my backup device on a separate drive. I need it to cement it to the NAS drive. Also, I need to figure out how to rip CD’s to my NAS attached to the M50. One thing at a time 🙂

-Rat

Thursday, March 2nd 2023…Sometimes, even I am surprised…

So, I got the new NAS drive and set it up on the network yesterday. I added Twonky and iTunes server. Twonky is a DLNA-compliant media server that runs on the Western Digital platform. It will, if directed also reach into iTunes and index all your iTunes stuff and allows you to play music and whatever on your DLNA receiver. In my case, on my Pioneer Elite SC-72 Receiver (glorified pre-amp). I can actually send music there and it automatically plays. I can also push it to my NAD M-50 streamer. It works “just like downtown”. Amazing. I am hoping that I can figure out how to rip CD’s to the NAD and consequently to the NAS drive. That’s my next hurdle. iTunes server is supposed to allow you to share or play your iTunes content on other devices without the need for a MAC. We shall see…

-Rat

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