1 2023 0 comments |
The past week was in Wisconsin, visiting D's family -- and as we have done for a while now, we brought our dog Maggie along and stayed in a pet friendly hotel.
Maggie is a complicated girl: she was an abused puppy mill mom who has blossomed in the past four years that we've been taking care of her, but one consistent thing is her abject terror riding in a car. She pants and shakes the whole way. We tried giving her trazodone, which seems to have only made things worse. However, we're fairly certain that leaving her in a kennel, full of barking dogs and strangers, would break her spirit.
Her car ride response has improved though; she will jump up into the car herself about half the time, and the other half just stands by the door to be lifted in -- versus straining at the end of her leash to avoid the car. She seems to get that we're not leaving her someplace or taking her off to a horrible fate, but she still is not happy with the riding in the car part.
Interestingly, she is an expert at remembering places she had been before: the second time we stayed at the same hotel she went straight from the car to the door of the room we had stayed in before and it took some time to get her over to the correct room. She remembers where D's family's patio door is and heads there when we arrive for the visits. As we often say, Maggie contains multitudes.
The trip was otherwise uneventful: boardgames, eating out, antique malls, etc., etc. However, on the third day of the trip I noticed my phone case wasn't fitting right, which I wrote off as "cheap amazon junk" but on the last day of the trip I discovered that the reason it wasn't fitting was due to the battery inside puffing up like a balloon, pushing the (normally sealed) back of the phone off.
As we live in The Future, using what little voltage I had left without aggravating the dying battery, connected to Verizon, picked a very nice replacement, clicked OK a bunch of times, and had a new phone waiting for me at the Fargo Verizon store as soon as we were back in town the next day.
I get the security issues, but when you use a "copy my phone" feature which the phone manufacturers helpfully offer, it copies pretty much everything except security data. As part of my work I have a bunch of 2FA apps and other programs which meant this morning was a lot of figuring how I got them set up in the first place. Then, other settings like "what does a swipe mean in my email app" need to be fixed, the keyboard I like wasn't enabled, etc., etc. Nothing's easy when you need a pocket computer to get through life.
In I'm a TV Professional news: applied for two upcoming gigs in the area, and my latest episode of House Hunters airs next week on the 8th.
And, finally in Esmerelda news: I have no idea; all the security cameras are off-line, which usually means I need to reset the wifi router. I should have time to get down there this weekend, but I also have that project to finish. Such a busy life I lead.

15 2023 0 comments |
Sunday I went to help the owner of the antique mall sort through her inventory, but then back to work on Monday. It was quite a busy week with more problems than usual, but for the most part everything went well. Then Saturday I worked at the antique mall, which was very, very slow unfortunately.
But then I woke up on Sunday, excited - I was going down to Esmerelda! If you don't follow me on social media, Esmerelda is a house we bought in Elbow Lake, Minnesota: built sometime around the 1890s, it was neglected for probably the past thirty years, until we bought it as a foreclosure for almost nothing, with the intention of remodeling it to live in. For the most part it's a fun hobby for me to go do physical work for a few hours.
I was excited because it was the first time I'd been down since there was snow on the ground, and also I was able to get the powder room sink installed. That part had more practical benefits, but getting to work in the yard is my guilty pleasure down there.
The lot is a large triangle, with the narrow point to the west; that point is covered with a large flower garden, which is pretty much just tigerlilies. I'd been working on getting it cleaned out of sticks and garbage and leaves, so this time I went nuclear on it - I took the lawnmower to it, and then used the thatching rake to scrape it down to dirt.
Don't worry about the tigerlilies - if there's one thing I've learned is that killing tigerlilies is difficult. They were growing around a couple trees that I had to cut down, and the stump grinder took out most of them, and then I dug down around them and took out all the bulbs I could find and replaced the top six inches of dirt, but, boom, this spring it's all tigerlilies again. The big tigerlily garden has probably been there since before I was born and it'll probably be there long after I'm gone.
Once it was cleared of leaf litter and garbage, I took the metal detector through it to see if there was interesting under the dirt, and the metal detector beeped everywhere. After a little digging I found it was because it was detecting the tigerlily bulbs. Sad trumpet noises. I did find a 1919 penny, though, and the lack of real metal garbage was nice.
I lost track of time and had to rush the last few tasks I needed to do, because I had to be back in town by 6 for Mother's Day dinner with D and Allie. Which was nice and uneventful - steaks, french bread, green beans, and blueberry pie.
Next week:
The first day of school! That is, if I survive the big project that wraps up tonight. And then - what - I have both a Saturday and a Sunday off? Snow was on the ground last time that happened.

7 2023 0 comments |
Back to the real job again; the first two days of the week we tried to get more done with the storage units and the pile at the curb, but then the day job needed me back and I had to get to programming, managing, and otherwise being a normal office guy.
Friday night I went to the Juried Film & Animation Exhibition at MSUM - this is somewhat related to the Capstone screening I saw the previous Friday, but the content was a bit different. The Capstone consisted of all the senior projects, and there were some weaker than others. The Juried show, however, as you might expect consisted of the best they had from all classes, not just the seniors. The high level of quality was very noticeable; still of the "zero-budget" level limitations, but now I was a little anxious over whether or not I'll do a good job with such strong competition from other students when I get in these classes...but, of course, my family said I've got nothing to worry about, so I'll take their word for it for now.
Saturday was Free Comic Book Day, so Allie and I went, not so much for the free comics (although Allie loaded up on those), but to meet Chris Claremont. His biggest claim to fame was his work on the X-Men comic lines, which were largely the basis for the X-Men movies in some form, but he was co-creator of my most favorite comic during my teen years, The New Mutants. Teenagers coming of age but with superpowers? Of course that appealed to a 16-year-old nerdy kid. When I moved out to go to college I left my comic collection behind, which my brother took possession of and then added to, so when he passed the comics came to me. I found that he also liked New Mutants, and had added to what I had originally owned, including two copies of the first issue. So, I bagged the better of the two copies up and went to get it signed.
The autograph line moved very slow, out in the cold wind and with rain threatening to come down on us, and we found out that the slowness was because Claremont wanted a chance to have a conversation with everyone who came in for a signature. When we did get up to the table, I had a nice conversation about what works for storytelling; Claremont said what works is to start with a normal story - going out to eat, staying in school while everyone else leaves for Christmas, etc., but adding a little twist, something out of the ordinary, something different from normal, to put the story in motion and see where it goes; when you get to the next milestone in the story, another twist to keep things moving. I'm mostly writing it here so I'll remember it down the road, as part of my overcoming writer's block path I'm on.
Allie talked about a story she's been working on, a postapocalyptic story of werewolves, which they riffed together on a bit and ended up on a path where the werewolves are defending the Earth from zombie apes from around the world -- which was fun but also demonstrative of another technique: every idea is worth considering, don't discount things until they've been really thought over. I don't know that anyone really wants to hear about zombie apes from Russia, but you never know, and it might trigger an even better idea to discuss it.
Next Week:
Back on the normal schedule for the most part, but because I had to switch days with D at the antique mall, I get to work the 2nd weekend, this Saturday. Maybe I'll get an actual day off at some point; today I'm helping at the antique mall owner's warehouse to clear things out in anticipation of new inventory coming in. by next Saturday that will make it almost three weeks of days with scheduled tasks, and it is getting a bit tiring. But, I'll get through. At the end of the month we're planning a trip to visit D's family in Wisconsin, by that time I should get to rest.

30 2023 0 comments |
Monday and Tuesday were a race to get things done before my scheduled time off. The first two weeks of May are "Cleanup Week" in the area, so actually "Cleanup Fortnight" I guess, and as we've done for years I take time off so we can participate. It used to be for driving around and picking up other people's garbage to clean and fix it and either resell or use ourselves, but starting last year we began throwing out more than we picked up, trying to gain space in the garage and storage units. Each day so far we've made a couple trips to the storage unit, filled up one or more vehicles and left it on our curb, where the pile then slowly disappears like snow in spring, as strangers drive by and take our garbage to clean and fix, and then use or resell, and so goes the Circle Of Life.
Aside from this, the past week was also Participation Week. In deciding to go back to school, I've been forced to reflect on what I did wrong the first time I was in higher education. One of the things I failed to do was Participate. In theatre, someone was always performing somewhere, or there was an extracurricular event of some sort, and I never went, never supported my fellow students unless I was part of the event itself.
So, at MSUM, there were two things on the calendar: One, the film-watching club had a screening of The Shining, which I went to as my inaugural attendance, which was just watching a movie, but I hadn't seen The Shining before so that was good. The screening was poorly attended presumably because of the second event of the week: Friday was the "Capstone" screening of all the film production seniors' final projects. This was fun, technical problems aside - although a pretentious film critic might say that you should be able to watch a film without sound and still hit the emotional beats, but I don't think that's the goal here. On arriving your were confronted with a sign next to a table of cupcakes and cookies saying "DON'T TOUCH, WATCH THE MOVIES FIRST" but while the sound playback problems were resolved the faculty graciously let the attendees eat cookies early. There were five projects, three live action and two animated, with a Q&A with the creators after each; the energy of people showing off something they created doing something they love is infectious and I'm looking forward to my own Capstone in about three years.
Next Week:
I'll still be off Monday and Tuesday for Cleanup Fortnight, and then back to work Wednesday to do a week's worth of work in three days, but then Saturday could be fun: a local comic shop is having an anniversary event, which coincides with Free Comic Book Day, and this confluence will also include an appearance by comic book writer Chris Claremont. Back in the eighties, I was a big fan of the comic The New Mutants: me, a geeky teenager, reading a comic about teenagers discovering their superpowers, what was appealing about that? Claremont is one of the creators of this comic, and by acquiring my brother's comic book collection when he passed and combining it with my own I believe I have a complete set of New Mutants, including two copies of issue #1, one of which I plan on getting autographed during the event. I believe I'll be going with my daughter Allie, a rare event for just the both of us, in one of our common hobbies. Aside from that, our house's actual Cleanup Week is the 2nd week, so we get an extra weekend of piling things on our curb, if D and my bodies can handle that much lifting, carrying, and moving.

24 2023 0 comments |
And, really, my writing outlets had been drying up - I did have a sweet gig with Prairie Public but ran out of stories; other places had dried up, and that's mostly due to how the internet works. I like to blame social media, my writing began to shrink around 2010 when that began to grow, and I've tried sharing things on social media, but the reach isn't very far, it hits maybe friends and family and a few fans, but that's about it. I'm not really a clickbait or listicle writer, so stringing words together for nobody to see in the shortest, easiest to ingest way, hasn't been feeding that creative furnace in me.
I feel that pilot light glowing, and it's been pointed out that when I'm doing creative things it shows up in my demeanor. I need creative outlets to feel good, just succeeding at my job - which doesn't really feed my creative bug even though it's programming, which should in theory meet the need - doesn't light that fire. I need the job to pay the bills, but I need to look around for ways to keep the pilot light burning.
A few months ago I enrolled in college: after dropping out once, and being unable to afford it the first time I returned to school, this time it should work out better. Today, I bring some maturity to the endeavor, plus stability, plus money, and I think I can make it happen, reassembling the courses I took for a BfA in Theatre Production in the 90s into a Film Production BfA in the 2020s.
Even my employer has dropped hinted at wondering if this means a career change; it's not so much to change careers, which I'll do without much thought if it continues the stability and money I currently enjoy, but mostly it's about a change in creativity.
Looking at a couple years of schooling in a creative field has really gotten the pilot light glowing, but nothing's burning yet.
So, leveraging what I've got, I'm restarting my old blog - now...24 years old? After a 11 year gap in posting. Hopefully this isn't hubris, resulting in this post sitting at the top of the page for another 11 years, but it's a start. I intend to return to the personal-diary format that it started out as waaaayyyy back when this site got my first media mention for my internet activities (boy, I was really hard on the Fargo Forum back then), without concern for who might be reading this still. In fact, I'm not even sure if this blogging software - which I wrote myself, decades ago - still even works. Well, let's see, here we go, light that pilot light and turn on the gas...










22 2011 1 comment |
root@sql:/tmp# uptime
14:37:53 up 927 days, 5:45
Yes, when I installed that SQL server two and a half years ago, I booted him up and didn't look back. Over 900 days is a long time for a server to be online; older versions of Linux would even fail after a point, automatically resetting to zero once they hit their limit. This server might be my personal longest uptime, but it's not the longest uptime ever, however. There's computers on the internet that haven't been rebooted in over four years. Still, 927 days is nothing to sneeze at. It's sorta nice to have machines that simply work, without complaint or errors.
Oh, the 'sad' part. The server is keeping up fine, but it's beginning to run out of memory. Right now it has an anemic 512mb of RAM -- that's half a gigabyte -- which was OK when it started, but the number of Wordpress blogs we're hosting has grown and the memory usage is getting up there. Two gigs of memory are on their way...but you can't replace RAM without shutting down the computer. So, those 900+ days will be erased, and I'll have to start counting all over again. I had been hoping to hit 1000 days of uptime, but I can't hold out for another two months. Sorry, Little SQL Engine Who Could: to help you get up that hill, I have to push you all the way back down.
The two new (used) servers that will replace the email and webserver have an interesting past, though. Each arrived with a "Property of Shopping.com" asset ID sticker on the side. Per our usual hardware rotation, I consistently buy 5-year-old used servers, so thank you, Shopping.com (an eBay company), for upgrading your servers and passing the old ones on to an electronics liquidator -- who then sold them on eBay to little old me. These servers are a magnitude of power faster than any other computer I've had; hopefully that means I'll be able to leave them on, chugging away, until they hit their own 900+ days of uptime.




