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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Month: October 2022 (Page 1 of 2)

Out With The Old, In With The Somewhat Less Old

30 October, 2022 /

If we know each other in person, and maybe even if not, you’ve probably heard me joke about the “Thousand Dollar Alarm Clock.” Heck, I even wrote about it some years ago, as evidenced by the link there. The poor thing’s not quite as old as my kids… but it dates from before the turn of the millennium, so there’s that. I have used it as my alarm clock almost exclusively since the turn of the millennium, come to think on it.

And then this morning I found the hard way that I’d forgotten to account for the fact that its ancient Windows CE 2.1 operating system couldn’t adjust for a Daylight Savings Time regression (“fall back!”) that had changed dates over a decade ago. Usually I remember that it has the wrong date and adjust it the night before so my alarm goes off on time. (And then re-adjust on the “correct” date. Sigh.) Not last night, though.

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Satisfactory: Rocky Start, 2.5 Updates Later

28 October, 2022 /

I got this done, start to finish, in the span of about a week. This included taking yesterday off from work (as an ostensible mental health day, which I definitely needed) to hunker down & finish adding clips, editing footage down to a somewhat-reasonable 39 minutes, and recording my voice-over.

This meant listening to my recorded voice bits repeatedly until everything was trimmed down and slotted into place. It was every bit as cringe-inducing as you suspect.

At any rate, here you go:

All things being equal? I’m actually proud of this one. I took the fact that the game loaded in with a reset/default player avatar and used that to create a kind of narrative path for the video to follow. During the edit, I discovered a couple of other fun things to do along the way.

It could be better, but I could’ve done much worse, too. Go, me.

A Diligent Worker I Am

27 October, 2022 /

I took today off as a mental-health and personal-projects day, in advance of starting my on-call rotation tomorrow. I needed the break. Technically I need a longer break but I was so busy and stressed out and off-balance this month that I didn’t think to actually apply for time off until… yesterday.

Oh well.

I still got up with the alarm, though. Being on a pill-taking regimen sort of requires sticking to the daily routine; if I sleep through the alarm, my phone’s pill-taking reminder goes off a while later anyway. So I went through the regular start-of-day shuffle: shave, shower, etc.

While in the shower, the solution to a nagging work problem came to me. Because I am who I am, as soon as I got to my computer I confirmed the validity of the idea, then loaded up my work email and sent a message to my boss about the solution.

I get brownie points for that, right? Good. Thanks.

So Long, Augtober

21 October, 2022 /

We were getting 80F+ temperatures in the middle of October. Not just once, but repeatedly. Today, however, the rains finally arrived and “Augtober” can be nailed into its coffin and buried in the deepest pit we can find.

If “endless summer” is what we have to look forward to in the Pacific Northwest going forward, I want to know where I can go to escape from it.

Satisfactory: Turbopower!

8 October, 2022 /

I picked Satisfactory back up a couple of months ago in anticipation of the Update 6 patch landing on the Early Access branch. Instead of starting yet another new save, however, I decided to keep going on the save I started back before Update 4 landed. This neatly avoided having to climb the tech tree all over again, not to mention it takes advantage of the fact that I deliberately left the Spire Coast region alone the entire time so far. (The developers warned everyone that major map changes were coming to that area.)

Update 6 and its quality-of-life improvements arrived at the same time that I unlocked my very first ever “Turbofuel” recipe. I needed more electrical supply anyway (the lines on my power graphs criss-crossed a lot more than I was really comfortable with) so I decided to try out the more potent variety of fuel generation.

Gus? Buddy? You know that the Blender is not your friend, right? No, no you don’t.

Here’s how that turned out.

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