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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Category: Life

  • Backups & Archives

    It’s 7pm on a Monday night. Do you know where your data is?

    OK, good. Where else is it? Which is to say, if “where your data is right now” goes kaput for some reason, is your data somewhere else as well?

    Are you sure about that?

    I spent the afternoon of the first “real” day (not a weekend day, which I’d normally be “off” for anyway) of my vacation making sure my backups are pointed at the right folders and are working, complete with testing file restoration.

    (Rule One of Backups: Assume that if you haven’t tested them lately, they’re broken somehow.)

    Then I updated my archive drives.

    My what, you ask?

    I have a pair of high-capacity solid-state external drives that I use for media files archiving. Two of them, so in case one goes kaput for some reason I still have another to copy from. These don’t get used regularly for enjoying media (I have other devices for that), they’re just archives to backup (& potentially restore) music and videos. While the process of keeping them updated is a bit cumbersome, it beats paying for the kind of online backup storage I’d need to keep all those gigabytes of shows and songs “professionally” safe.

    My music library also gets a couple other copies made, including an upload to a virtual private server I control, because it’s kind of important to me. Okay, a lot of important.

    Anyway… backups are good. If nothing else, a tiny bit of peace of mind can’t hurt in these chaotic times, now can they?

  • One Foot In The Mailing List

    There’s nothing quite like getting a letter with “Happy Birthday, [your name]!” stamped on the envelope…

    …from the AARP.

  • Last Gasp of Winter

    Sure, we had those days of bitter (and bone-dry) cold and wind, and I think we had a brief icy-rain storm at some point, but proper piled-up snowfall? In Winter of 2022/2023? That’s a thing of the past, at least in westside Portland Oregon metro.

    Except, no, apparently not entirely, not yet.

    Last Thursday we got snow. Serious amounts of snow.

    Picture taken shortly before 5 o’clock in the morning, prompted by some jerk’s car alarm going off for 90 solid minutes. At least I got this pretty winter wonderland snapshot out of it.

    Of course, it didn’t really last long. By midday Saturday the roads were mostly clear, and here on Monday afternoon there’s barely anything left hidden in various nooks & crannies.

    But, hey, for a couple of days it actually looked like winter around here. Inconvenient as heck, sure, but some part of me loved to see it nonetheless.

  • Quick End-Of-Month Check-In

    Let’s see… here are a few things I don’t yet have time + energy to flesh out, though some will get further attention at some point:

    • The GameBall trackball is holding up pretty well so far. At least, it hasn’t infuriated me and does its job reliably. So far. The third in the ongoing “in search of” post series will bubble up here probably in early February.
    • There’s a new Mono Inc record out, I have it, I’ve heard it. I need to sit with it and give it another solid listen-through before I feel like I’ll be ready to give it a proper review. It’s coming, though.
    • Fire Emblem Engage has taken over a lot of my free time, and that’s a good thing. If you have any interest in the game series at all and have read some reviews and seen first-impressions videos, my opinion probably won’t surprise you by diverging from a lot of those… but I want to get a bit further into the main storyline before putting my own complete thoughts in order here. I’ll absolutely be ranting and raving about it before much longer, don’t you worry.
    • I don’t think I’m writing an entire post about how angry I am about the state of housing. Nobody needs to read that, and I don’t need to be writing it. Suffice to say that I feel intensely frustrated by the fact that at almost exactly the time that I paid off the big big loan and started stashing money away for a potential move, the costs of everything jumped skyward and now I just… can’t. I’ve nearly been priced out of existing.
    • Another brief grumble unworthy of an entire post? The folks who make the good version of my primary diabetes-treatment medicine could resolve their supply-chain issues any day now, please and thank you. Taking the other folks’ version is a fuss and a bother and I hate it. (A pill-crusher is involved. Feh.)
    • And to end on a positive note, I need to write up my experiences with trains in Satisfactory now that they’ve been the central concept of my latest solo savegame and an integral part of the co-op game I’m playing with the kids. It’s been fun! But… there are definitely drawbacks to going All Trains All The Time. I’ll get into that at some point in the next few weeks.

    That’s all for now, folks. I hope you’re staying healthy and safe.

  • In Good-ish Health

    Today I went to the doctor’s office for my first general check-up of the new year. My weight is down a bit (under 170 lbs for the first time in… a while), my blood pressure’s fine (I don’t remember the numbers nor do you need them), the sound of my breathing and heartbeat were nominal, etc. The doc and I talked about my medications as well as revisiting the physical therapy regimen for the range-of-motion issues in my shoulders, and I answered a battery of mental-health questions (how do you think I’m doing in this ongoing pandemic late-stage-capitalism hellscape?) so that’s done for a while. I’m current on my shots, my blood work looks good, in a few months we’ll check again (there will always be more blood work to be done), and all I need to do is keep on keeping on.

    As the Internet meme goes, I got a passing grade in being medically examined, which is totally a thing one can achieve and is normal to want.

    I even found that I can have the dosage of one of my meds halved officially, so I can just get the smaller-dose pills instead of having to use the pill cutter every other night. Sweet deal!

    So, you know. Provided there are no catastrophic events, wild accidents, or pandemic-related shenanigans… I should remain above ground a while longer yet. I hope.

  • dBpoweramp: Big Thumbs Up

    This afternoon I pulled up an album in MusicBee that I hadn’t listened all the way through in years, Depeche Mode’s Music for the Masses. Partway into it I noticed one song (Little 15) had a bit of a skip. I scrubbed back, listened to that part again, and sure enough… skip confirmed.

    Well, great. How long ago did I rip this CD anyway?

    Checking the codec properties for that song’s data file revealed that while it wasn’t made with the beta versions of the Ogg Vorbis codec (thank goodness), it certainly dated back to roughly 2002, thus a very early release version. This means the skip glitch could be on account of a newer playback decoder disliking something about early Ogg Vorbis encoding, but is more likely just a result of the cheap fast CD ripper software I used back then.

    No time like the present to freshen the library up a bit, then, is there?

    (more…)

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