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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Author: Karel Kerezman

  • Just Plain Getting Older

    I went on a long, long train ride to SE Portland and back last week to visit Dad, who’s in the hospital on account of… well, I’m not entirely sure what got him there but “just plain getting old” is what it boils down to. He may or may not remember that I was there, that’s how out-of-it he was, but I made the trip and did my best. And yes, I kept my Flo Mask on the entire time.

    We’re not a close-knit family, but that doesn’t make it any less gut-wrenching to realize that we’re also all just plain getting older. It’s the way of things, I suppose.

  • Satisfactory: FICSMAS Takes Its Toll

    Well, this is moderately embarrassing.

    Satisfactory video game screenshot: A player character lays sprawled in desert sands, with an instructional message overlaid which reads, "Press RMB to Respawn."
    Insert “record scratch” meme, here.

    There I was, minding my own business, preparing a new site for a couple of electronics products (Remote Control Units and High Speed Connectors) when I saw something shiny.

    We all like shiny things, right?

    (more…)

  • Satisfactory: FICSMAS 2024

    With the 1.0 release of Satisfactory comes the first “true” version of the annual FICSMAS event. The inaugural rendition came in December of 2020, right at the time I’d just bought the game… which made for a slightly odd first impression, indeed. The developers tinkered with it a bit once or twice since then but mostly it was just a low-priority side-project amusement for the team.

    This “northern lights” effect is a new addition for 1.0, and I love it. I want it all year ’round, now.

    Now, though, it’s fully fleshed out and polished to a higher sheen. Let’s get into it.

    (more…)

  • Halfway Ninja

    There comes a point in every major product migration (and let’s not talk about the fact that this is the second of this exact kind of migration we’ve done in six years) when you’re fully in the thick of it and you realize that you’re at that magical, meaningful turning point: There are more of [thing] in the new system than remain in the old system.

    We hit that point today in our migration from ConnectWise Automate to NinjaOne. 1200+ agents in the latter, fewer than 1200 remain in the former. (And it’s a safe bet that some of those 1100-or-so are zombie agents which haven’t checked in for a while, and many of those probably won’t before this is all over. Oh well!)

    Considering that I’ve been the one doing 99% of the work, I’m glad to see that this project is finally on the downslope. Hopefully by the end of January it’ll be finished. Mind you… we have our several largest and most finicky clients remaining to move. Starting with any of them simply wasn’t an option. So, here comes some real fun.

    Still. It feels good to hit this milestone.

  • Satisfactory: Water Reclamation

    Satisfactory: Water Reclamation

    When you break past the point of sending the Phase 3 shipment up the Space Elevator in 2024’s Golden Joystick Award Game-of-the-Year-winning Satisfactory, what you’ve mainly done is unlocked the twin titans of the mid-to-late game: Aluminum and Uranium. I have a couple of posts about nuclear power in the archives, and yes I’ll need to revisit that topic at some point because things have changed with the advent of Version One Point Oh. Today, however, I want to talk about waste water reclamation, a key part of the Aluminum production process.

    Let’s get into it.

    (more…)

  • Another New Look: 2025

    Things look a bit odd over here, don’t they? No two-column layout, no randomized header image (yet, maybe).

    Here’s the thing: Hemingway was a very good website theme, I liked most everything about it, but it’s long in the tooth and was eventually going to become fully obsolete. The inevitable march of technology, or something. So upon the advice of professional website designers, I’m… using the new Twenty Twenty Five default WordPress theme.

    (And yes, using WordPress is a fraught choice in and of itself nowadays, for certain reasons we’re not going into at the moment. At least I’m self-hosted.)

    I have a lot of fiddling and fussing to do, so expect things to look a bit odd for a while. Or, like, forever, depending.

    Wish me luck making sense of this bold new scheme.

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