January 2024 – Stay With Me, Go Places

Little Distractions

Posted on 27 January, 2024 by Ridley

This is a photo of Ramza and Aymeric on my MG-1 flying through space. Check the alt text to read about why I need distractions. It’s pretty depressing, so feel free to skip it. OK, now, let’s talk about pointless stuff, shall we? One thing I keep meaning to mention because I find it both fascinating and baffling is proliferation of “guess which number is bigger than the other” games on mobile devices. Games where, for example, something with a name like “Hero Quest” or something. You have four soldiers and you have to choose a path where you fight either three soldiers or six soldiers. The larger number always wins. That seems like a really dumb concept for a game and maybe there’s more to it (or maybe the game is nothing like the ad, which is a common occurrence). But, there’s a part of me that lights up and tells me “Ridley, you would be really good at this!” I’m annoyed by this part of me because that’s obviously what the advertisement is designed to trigger. Would it really be that easy? So far, I’ve resisted the urge to download one of ’em, but their existence and the number of them available are such an interesting phenomenon. Why? Why are there so many of them? Are they that popular? I’ll never know because I don’t care that much, and having shared this, I’m hoping I’ll stop thinking about them altogether. Speaking of cats (I know, I know, we weren’t “speaking” of them, but I put a big picture of them at the top of this post, so please just give me this one), I hasn’t updated y’all on the Cat Situation lately. Do we have a situation? Oh, you know we do! That’s Red Velvet, the senior member of the crew. She turns 14 this year and it’s a hard 14. One of her kidneys has stopped kidney-ing, so we’re giving her fluids every evening. She doesn’t much mind on account of the fact we give her a Churru at the same time. She’s lost a good deal of weight from her peak, but she’s pretty stable and spry right now. She went in for a checkup last week and the vet was impressed with her condition. She remains as standoffish as always, and she does not like being photographed, so this is what you get. And here are the boys. Top to bottom, we have Aymeric (age 2), Ramza (age 3), and Calvin (age 1). If it looks like they’re all sleeping on my legs, well, you have good eyes because that’s exactly the case. They are all snuggly AF (please read “AF” as “As foretold” instead of any other possible option. AF = “As foretold”) and they all love crunchy food, which is too bad, because they mostly get wet food. We use the crunchy stuff to lure them away when it’s time to give Red Velvet her fluids. Beware of Ramza: He likes to jump on your back or shoulder when you’re not looking. He is heavy. He is also sharp. We have fewer outdoor cats come by these days. Milly still wanders over from across the street. We had a weird political situation where we had three void bois who did not get along at all. As a result, Ardyn and Panthro left the field and Fuzzy became the undisputed king of the porch. He’s kind of an ass, but he tries to be nice. We have seen Panthro wander by again lately so hopefully things are cooling down a little. I took this photo a long time ago. It still gives me the jibblies. Saw my mum a couple of weeks ago. She’s just up the road in Texas, but the drive is the equivalent of Boston to Philadelphia. It was a one-day there-and-back, so that’s closer to NYC to Detroit or a bit longer than London, UK to Inverness at the north end of Scotland. It’s a hike. Texas is ridiculous. I mean, it’s ridiculous in a lot of ways, but it’s ridiculously big considering neither terminus of this trip brought me anywhere near a border. Anyway, mom is…she’s very much herself, but the years are definitely present in her. Some of her infirmities are self-inflicted, which makes me wonder which activities of mine will come back to haunt me. I’m sure it’s a matter of “when” and not “if.” Nicole got a PS5 today which is an absolutely cracking piece of kit. We’re reasonably sure that the new FFXIV expansion will requires the PS5, so, well, you gotta have your priorities. The graphical capabilities of the 5 are well beyond what our TV is capable of displaying, which means that the game still looks better than anything I’ve seen on that screen. It’s hardly a “need” but it really is a game changer for her and, c’mon, you know we’re gonna be putting in way too many hours on that game. More on that later. That’s it for now I guess. I feel suitably distracted. Some posts don’t get linked on social media and this is definitely going to be One Of Those Posts. Sometimes, it’s just writing for the sake of writing as opposed to having much to share. I will close by noting that my creative sense remains strong. I’ve written three songs the last two weeks. It may be that none of them will ever be completed/produced/posted, but they’re all good exercises if nothing else. Night all, and take care, -RK

All’s Well That Ends

Posted on 16 January, 2024 by Ridley

The TL/DR update to yesterday’s post: The house is warm again. Unlike, say, this. This is what I woke up to. Those are Fahrenheit degrees in case you were wondering. That’s 4 degrees in Celsius. The heating fellow came back out and, after no small amount of time in the attic, was able to definitively diagnose the problem. Diagnose, but not fix. The controller board of the furnace has an issue that prevents it from sending the on/off signal to the fan. The way the things works is that, when the temperature is lower than what the thermostat specifies, it’ll light a flame and start burning gas in a combustion chamber. Once that gets up to a certain temperature, it kicks the fan on and the house heats up. Since it wasn’t sending the message to the fan, the heat just stayed in the combustion chamber until it crossed a certain heat threshold. At that point, the whole thing shut down. So, we need a new board. Boo. Those ain’t cheap. On the plus side, he’s wired it so that the fan stays on constantly. That’s wasteful under most circumstances, but not damaging. This ensures that the fan will be on when the heat kicks in and we won’t have the overheating problem. Given that the temperatures are going to be in the mid-teens tonight, I don’t imagine the fan would spend much time in the “off” position anyway. So, the problem isn’t sorted, but it will be shortly and we have an acceptable workaround in the meantime. Phew. Thus ends a thoroughly unpleasant long weekend. To add insult to injury, once the house warmed up, I sat down to play FFXIV only to discover that the game is undergoing maintenance and will not be up until 4:00 AM. That’s not too bad, or it wouldn’t be if this weren’t a school (work) night. Speaking of work, it’s going to be odd next week. I do have the most passive-aggressive script for the meeting with the vendor I described yesterday. I’m looking forward to it. It’s going to be fun. On the plus sides, the cats handled the whole ordeal like troopers and are now zooming around the house as though nothing happened. The cats have the right of it. Don’t let a bad yesterday spoil a lovely today. It’s awfully hard to argue with them when they look so happy. On an unrelated note, remember when I was so proud of my synthesizer repair skills? It turns out there’s a difference between “testing” and “thoroughly testing.” Which is to say, when I put it back together, the keys worked…except for the lowest octave. I had to put it back on the bench, take it apart again, and then reseat one of the ribbon cables. This time, I tested all 61 keys instead of just the middle ones, and we were good. The reason I’ve been working so hard to get this keyboard in tip-top shape is my little Christmas present to myself: A Retroaktiv DW-8P controller for the DW-8000. “What the heck is that?” you say? OK, so, you may have seen synthesizers that look like this: Let’s get very slightly technical here: Everything the synthesizer can do can be controlled with one of those knobs or switches. This makes changing the sound very intuitive. You want to change something, you move the knob and can hear the effect it has on the sound immediately. There’s one drawback, though: It’s very expensive to make a synthesizer this way. So, Yamaha made on this way (yes, I know this wasn’t the first of its type, but it’s the one that made this kind of interface popular): It’s very sleek and modern looking, but where are the knobs? There aren’t any! Most of the programming is done by picking a setting you want to change from a menu on that tiny screen and then using the sliders on the left to change the values. This is a pain in the buttocks, especially for the DX7, but it makes the whole thing cheaper and lighter (lighter is a big deal for folks who have to lug them around). But..what if you could have your cake and eat it too? The folks at Roland thought “what if we make synthesizers with the menu interface, but we also offer a programmer that you can attach to it that will give you the ability to have one slider per function like the old synths?” So, that’s what they made: See that little unit on top of the right side of the synthesizer? That’s the Roland PG-800, a dedicated programmer for the JX10 (AKA the Super JX, which is really two JX-8P synths in one box along with a 76 key keyboard and I’ve had two of them and sold them and I am so dumb..but I digress). These days, the Roland programmers go for almost as much as the synths themselves. It makes sense, too-these are dedicated pieces of hardware. What works on one synthesizer probably won’t work on another because they have different functions, different allowable values, and these vintage keyboards didn’t really have standardized ways to address otherwise similar functions. Still with me? We’re almost there. The missing use case here are the synthesizers that are still considered useful, plentiful enough that a lot of people have them, are crippled by the awful menu interface, and there are no manufacturer programmers available. It’s a niche market, but it’s a market that has encouraged companies like Retroaktiv to create dedicated programmers for these old synths. Being much more modern, these marvelous devices can do a lot more than just provide a slider for each function. Memory is much cheaper now, so the DW-8P has a memory card that can store 40 banks of 64 sounds on it. Korg actually made a memory device for the DW-8000. It could hold 4 banks of sounds and cost more than the DW-8P. The new toy can also semi-randomly create sounds (you can tell it what sort of sound you want as a starting point). Oh, and it can control two Korg DWs at the same time. So, progress, am I right? None of this helps me play it, but it does give me all my favorite sounds at my fingertips without having…

A snowdrift between Coal Bank Pass and Durango in Colorado. It has a nice, pleasing S shaped curve to its ridge.

Ridley Kemp’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day(s)

Posted on 15 January, 2024 by Ridley

Dear Reader, On most occasions, I make an effort not to complain too much. My rate of success is well south of 100%, but I don’t want this to be a blog of “things that get my goat” or whatever the kids say these days. This weekend, however, has been One Of Those Weekends and I’m going to blow off a little steam. I reckon the title may have given that away, so consider yourself doubly warned. Let’s start with Saturday morning. Early Saturday morning. Pre-sunrise Saturday morning. I am a long-time supporter of Leicester City football club and their match this weekend was at 12:30 PM in the UK. That translates to 6:30 AM in my neck of the woods, so I got up early, put some water on to make tea, and settled in to watch the match. Just before halftime, we scored a goal to take the lead. Somehow, between that goal and halftime, one of our players did something very bad and was sent off. That meant we had to defend a narrow lead for the entire second half short one player. We did a marvelous job for half an hour and then we…didn’t. We gave up three goals in the last fifteen minutes for a very demoralizing defeat. Reader, I am not kidding when I say that this might have been the highlight of the weekend. It was about the time the match was over I was awake enough to notice that it was unusually chilly in the house. I checked the thermostat and…uh oh. The current temperature was 58 degrees while the thermostat was set to 68. Nothing on the thermostat looked out of the ordinary, so the next step was to ensure there were no outages with our gas provider. There were none. Nonetheless, I put in a call to the gas company to send someone out and started a ticket with the home warranty company to get someone out to look at the furnace because it makes sense to get the ball rolling ASAP. I tried to look at the furnace myself, but it’s in the attic and the attic is only accessible by climbing a ladder to get on the roof and going in through an access hatch. I might as well have been looking at hieroglyphs for all I understood. Fortunately, the gas company was very responsive and had a fellow out there in an hour. He was super helpful, confirmed that the gas pressure was good, climbed into the attic, checked the furnace, fiddled with some simple stuff and then we did some testing. It would come on briefly and then stop. Nothing he could do about that. He turned off the gas at the furnace and unplugged the unit to ensure nothing caught fire, which I appreciated. Anyway, good thing I started the other service call. In the meantime, there was some work-related goodness going on as well. One of our vendors finished a server replacement at one of our sites. It was critical to do this quickly because we had to be able to get the date to that vendor’s above-store reporting tool so we could run payroll for the site. With this being a holiday weekend, this was critical enough to have the payroll team standing by. We’d arranged for the vendor to have their team that installs the data movement software ready to go as soon as the server came up. The server came up at 11:30 AM, so I let the payroll team know that we should have their files shortly. This was a mistake. I saw the ticket go to the vendor’s team at 11:30 AM. I heard nothing from them, so I followed up. I followed up seven times. I asked for ETAs, or at least when I would receive an update. I never heard back, so I kept bugging them. Pro tip: When dealing with work stuff, never hang up the phone without both parties understanding when whatever task is being discussed is due and/or the update cadence. At 11:30 PM, I gave up. I had also not heard anything from the furnace service company. That was extremely worrying as, while Saturday was quite pleasant, Sunday was going to be cold. Monday and Tuesday were going to very cold. So, this morning, I followed up with the home warranty company and they seemed shocked that I would expect emergency service from one of their subcontractors. I pointed out that the types of service that one would have a home warranty for tend to be emergencies, but their ears were a rocky place where my words could find no purchase. They suggested instead that I could expect a call to schedule service on Tuesday. This represented A Problem. So, Nicole found a local vendor who did weekend work and we called them. Fingers? Crossed. In the meantime, the vendor had finally completed installing their data movement software at 8:30 AM. This should have marked the end of the issue, but alas, while they installed the software, they did not retrieve the missed data. And, thanks to a recent update to the process, I no longer have the capability to initiate this retrieval. So, I called them again. I should point out that calling them is a special sort of ordeal. We have a local phone number for them, but this number does not work anymore. So, we have to call the corporate office and navigate a phone tree rife with unskippable instructions that require 9 button presses to get to the support team. I bring that last bit up because, while I was dialing, I was installing another vendor’s software on the new server. I needed a code to complete the installation, so I opened a ticket with them. I received a response that they were working on the ticket. Then I received the code I needed. I did this all in the time it took for me to navigate the other vendor’s phone tree. It took another three hours for the original vendor to pull the data into their system so I could run a report for our payroll team. At least that much was now right with the world. It was about this time the gent from the heating company showed up. He was a…

Last Night I Dreamed I Returned To Azeroth

Posted on 4 January, 2024 by Ridley

I like lists. I’m a sucker for lists. So…we’re gonna do more lists. Last night, for some reason, I fell asleep thinking of World of Warcraft. Specifically, I was thinking of my favorite raid fights. WoW isn’t like Final Fantasy XIV, which is about story and characters. WoW is all about game play and it’s something that they did very well. They may still do it well, but it’s been a decade or so since I’ve played, so keep that in mind. I played the original game through the first four expansions (up through Mists of Pandaria), so there may be better fights in the more recent expansions, but I can only go with what I know. First, a few honorable mentions:Opera Hall (Karazhan) A very silly, chaotic fight in one of the best raids in the game. Be sure to pay attention to the dialog between the NPCs. Onyxia (Onyxia’s Lair) Like most fights, this was impossible until suddenly it wasn’t. Onyxia was a one-boss raid, but it was very well balanced and a lot of fun when you did it right. Or when you failed spectacularly. Valithria Dreamwalker (Icecrown Citadel) An unusual healer-focused fight where you don’t kill the boss, you heal the captive dragon. Way better than the final fight against Arthas IMO. Thorim (Ulduar) Another candidate for best raid in the game, Thorim was the most interesting fight in the raid. It was a split-the-party fight and I am a sucker for those. C’Thun (Ahn Qhiraj) The first of the Lovecraftian final bosses, this was a deeply unfair fight but I had to admit it was different an interesting.Here are the five that I remember most fondly from my time playing. Gothick The Harvester (Naxxramas, Vanilla/Wrath of the Lich King) Naxxramas was a weird one. It was originally released as part of the original game but then withdrawn when the first expansion came out, and then re-released in the second expansion. I know this post is about individual fights and not entire raids, but Naxx was probably my favourite raid. It had 15 boss fights, and they were all good. Each one of them was memorable and they all felt like challenging but fair fights. The Gothick fight probably had the most interesting mechanics. The raid was split into two separate rooms. The first group had to fight wave after wave of opponents and then Gothick, being a necomancer, would turn the corpses into undead in the other room. They monsters were slightly easier as living creatures, which mean you could kill them faster, which in turn meant you could wind up overwhelming the second group. Once the minions had been dispatched, Gothick himself would join the fray and zip between the two sides and make life miserable until the barrier between the two rooms fell and you could clobber him. It was in some ways the most typical of Naxxramas fights in that, if you just beat on the boss without considering other things, you were doomed. You had to coordinate 40 (vanilla)/25 (WotLK) people in a fairly delicate dance to keep either side from getting buried, and it was immensely satisfying to finally beat. Garrosh Hellscream (Siege of Orgrimmar, Mists of Pandaria) OK, I’ll be honest, it’s not that great a fight. It’s incredibly busy and very punishing, but it’s not really fun. I suppose it’s an appropriate end to an expansion, but it’s not really as interesting as, say, Illidan Stormrage in the Black Temple. However, it was a personal grudge match for me. The writers did a fantastic job of really pissing me off and wanting to kill Garrosh. You see, I played a Tauran shaman (Taurans being huge bull-people, like minotaurs but goofier). Garrosh killed the Tauren lead, Cairne Bloodhoof,, in a duel. It was probably an accident as someone poisoned his blade, but the thing about Garrosh was the he was exactly the kind of guy who never should have been made warchief of the horde. It was in-character for him to kill allied leaders because that’s just the kind of guy he was. Plus, he created an order of “dark shaman” which, speaking as a shaman…”dark shaman” is not a thing. It’s like being an “anti-druid” and going around killing every plant you find because you’re just that evil. His “dark shaman” were abominations and their existence got under my skin more than it should have. So, for the raid, I transmogrified my gear into the traditional shaman starter kit look and when we finally took Garrosh down, I had a four-macro speech I recited over his body decrying everything he’d done. My guild thought there was something wrong with me, which was very perceptive on their part. Anyway, it felt good to kill him even if it wasn’t the greatest fight. Spine of Deathwing (Cataclysm, Dragon Soul) To be fair, this one may not have been the greatest fight, but it was a good one. The raid takes place on the back of a dragon. The dragon is too heavily armored to harm, so your job is to remove some scales from its back to allow a giant weapon to fire on it and presumably kill it (“presumably” because it doesn’t quite work). There are several damage gates where you have to do X amount of damage in Y time or you’re boned. It’s also a movement fight. The trick is that you don’t want too many people on one side or the other of the dragon’s back, or it will roll in that direction and throw you off. You are ALWAYS moving. Which is great fun for everyone except shaman. We had no instant cast heals at the time, so my ability to do anything useful was very, very limited. We tried over and over and over and kept failing and, to be honest, it was my fault. Sean’s druid and Jenn’s paladin (I think Sol was gone by this point) could heal just fine, but I was useless. Finally, we tried something a little weird. Instead of focusing on healing, I would be their battery. I would keep their mana topped off so they could cast more and heavier heals. Weirdly enough, this wound up working. I always built my character for mana regen anyway and that included maximizing the regen…

Is This Thing On?

Posted on 2 January, 2024 by Ridley

Hi there. Welcome back. It’s been a good while since I’ve posted an update. I haven’t been in a good place for a while now. Last year was difficult, and while there’s no guarantee the next will be any better, I feel better equipped to deal with it. The financial issues are easing a little bit, the medical ones are no worse, and I’m going to try something new to reduce the anxiety I generate: No more arguing on social media. I’ve always known online arguments were unhealthy, but I am an absolute sucker for them. It’s worse now, at least for me. There’s a lot of tactical speech out there of the “this is hyperbole or it isn’t true, but it will provoke a reaction and get noticed” sort. I don’t do well with that, especially from people I largely agree with. So, I engage, which does nothing but raise my blood pressure and make me impotently angry. It came to a head the other day when I was involved with a discussion and the original poster wildly disagreed with my point of view. They made some good points and I was starting to come around to their way of thinking when they blocked me. I won’t go into the details, but it clarified for me just how dumb the whole exercise is. I’m not going to convince anyone and they’re unlikely to convince me. Even if they do so, I’ll get blocked anyway. A good number of my more reasonable friends already practice this and I imagine they’re metaphorically shaking their heads at me right now. That’s fair. It’s not like I didn’t already know and hadn’t been reminded multiple times that this wasn’t a great use of my energy. From a practical standpoint, it means I’ll be using the mute and block buttons a lot more. If something raises my hackles and makes me want to engage, then I need to ignore it and if I keep seeing it, I need to make sure I don’t. I was about to say “In the past, I’ve only blocked for egregious behavior,” but that’s not true. I’ve blocked a lot of well-known accounts for exactly this reason. I’m just doing the same thing, only more so. That all sounds negative, but it isn’t negative at all. Just thinking about doing it is liberating. I’ve blocked more accounts today than I have in the previous ten years combined. I guess this is “self-care.” I’ve been so withdrawn trying to get through the end of the year that I haven’t been paying that bill, and that bill is long overdue. Fortunately, the company I work for offers sabbaticals after working X number of years. My span of employment is X+several, so it’s time. I’ve booked time off this spring. I’m not certain what we’ll be doing as we have a cat that requires regular treatment, but I have some ideas. What I don’t want to do is get caught in the “I’ll do this thing I want to do as soon as I have time” trap. I have a lot of things I want to do and I’d rather start them now rather than wait for my extended break. Yes, I realize I’m being vague about a lot of things here. I’m a proud LiveJournal alumnus. On that note, I did something that brought me joy on Saturday and I want to brag a little bit. I am a synthesizer nerd and my favorite piece of hardware has always been the Korg DW-8000. I’ve owned several, having had to sell them for rent or bills. I noticed that the one I have now had a problem: The digital delay wasn’t working. I had no idea what might cause that and was planning on taking it to Switched On to get it fixed. Being the nerd that I am, I’m also in a Facebook group dedicated to this synth. Last week, someone mentioned having the same issue and several folks popped up to say that it was probably a bad delay board. I had assumed that this functionality was just built into the main circuitry; it never occurred to me that it might be a separate circuit board. As luck would have it, I live down the road from one of the premier parts suppliers for vintage synthesizers. Syntaur happened to have the delay card in stock, so I snapped it up. I wasn’t planning to perform the replacement myself. I was still going to take it up to Austin, but we didn’t feel like making the drive on Saturday. Instead, we came home and I opened the DW-8000 up to see what the replacement would entail. I said “I opened the DW-8000” up like it was no big deal. I had to remove 19 screws to get the top off, and that’s only because some were missing. Once I had it open, I recognized the location of the delay card and my heart sank a bit. It was attached between the top of the synth and the keys. I wouldn’t be able to replace it without removing the keys, something I hadn’t planned on doing. But…it looked like it might just be within my ability, so why not? It wasn’t the easiest task I’ve ever had to do, but I did manage it. Once I removed the four screws holding the delay board to the lid, there were three ribbon cables to be carefully disconnected. I was halfway there, but it was the easy half. Connecting the cables to the board and screwing it back to the lid wasn’t difficult. Getting the keys back in place was. That took a good half hour of getting everything aligned just right so I could screw everything back together, get the grounds reconnected, and so forth. At this point, I placed the lid back on and was about to reattach it when I came to my senses. Instead, I attached headphones and a power cable and fired it up. It came up without error, and all the buttons worked, but when I played it, no sound was produced. Just to make sure the problem wasn’t with the headphone jack, I attached it to an amplifier and got the same result. Uh oh. I opened it back up and saw…