Month: June 2024

  • New Pantry Shelving Get

    We knew going into this that the moving expenses wouldn’t end with the moving company and the setup of utilities. There’s also replacing outdated cooking gear, like the should-have-replaced-it-years-ago griddle, and adding shelving which would never have fit into the apartment, hence living partly out of boxes for most of the 8 years of that residency.

    This week I ordered in new shelves for the erstwhile pantry space. (Basically, the “pantry space” is the walkway from the garage door & back door, past the kitchen, into the house proper.) This will allow us to, you guessed it, unbox more stuff.

    Today we assembled the shelves. Okay, Vyx helped with the first one. I did the second unit solo.

    On the upper right you can see the new Zojirushi griddle which arrived earlier this month, because yes we really did throw out the old busted griddle during the move.

    I’m not wild about this construction style, but it beats the wireframe style, even though they both essentially come down to “beat this shelving mount into place with a rubber mallet until it stays put,” which is… certainly a thing, isn’t it. At any rate, soon these shelves will be covered in foodstuffs, cookware, and the board game library. (It’s well away from the cooking area, don’t worry.)

    More and more, we’re making this our home. And I’m still loving it.

  • Hello, Summertime

    It’s been a slow posting month, probably not helped by the fact that I’m essentially on a Satisfactory hiatus. (I’m expecting 1.0 to drop early in autumn but we don’t know for sure yet. Whenever it does, it’ll break all existing saves, so… why bother?) Is it time to find another game to post about? Maybe. Or perhaps I should post about a variety of games, since that’s actually what I’m playing now. Honkai Star Rail, Gems of War, Titan Quest (yes, the precursor to Grim Dawn which I like far better), FFXIV (some day I’ll reach level 50)… I’m sure there are others I’m forgetting.

    Oh right, Unicorn Overlord, which I keep trying to gel with and just can’t for whatever reason. That reason is probably something to do with the fact that most of the actual strategy is in setting up “unit” compositions because once you’re in a battle scenario the outcome of any given clash is predetermined. How exciting. How fun. Let’s play 12-directional rock-paper-scissors without even the fun of directly controlling the output of a combat clash.

    Anyway. Living in the new house is still going great aside from the screeching dishwasher, and while it’s a bit annoying to need to don two layers every time the AC comes on… I’ll take that over the AC simply having almost no effect (and being too loud to hear yourself think, on top of that).

    Work is progressing along. The odds are good that I won’t be getting any time off for the next few months as we have a big migration looming. Yay? We’ll see.

    Anyway. I hope your summertime is cool and cozy.

  • What’s starting, when, exactly?

    If I had to see this, then so do you.

    Arrows added via screenshot utility for emphasis. Names NOT changed to protect the guilty.

    A few minutes ago I received a marketing email in my work account from SkyKick, an outfit that does some cloud-related stuff related to Microsoft’s cloud offerings, like migrating email from local Exchange to Microsoft 365. We do business with them so actually blocking them would be counterproductive (supposedly), fine, whatever.

    But. At 4-something in the afternoon (the day before, and a federal holiday no less) I have a very, very hard time believing that they have a webinar starting 2 hours from right now. Especially since the start time is also clearly stated as 11 o’clock (Eastern, because the entire business world operates on US Eastern Time, right?) tomorrow.

    All I can figure is that somehow it being 6pm Eastern right now is translating to… two business hours before 11am Eastern tomorrow? I guess? Dunno, seems wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey to me.

    Not that I care. They’d have to pay me serious money to get me in attendance for a Microsoft Copilot (hawk, spit) presentation. Yuck.

  • Re-Foundry

    Given that we’re never, ever, going to use the Starfinder stuff I set up in the Foundry VTT rig, I figured I’d get all that cleaned out. So I did. All of the systems, all of the modules, everything. In addition, I performed an upgrade to version 12.

    It’s clean, it’s tidy, it’s ready for… somebody to make use of for running some kind of tabletop-RPG-type game. Dunno who, when, or what, but hey… if you need a Foundry rig and don’t want to shell out for it, I already did so maybe you won’t have to?

    Wheeeee.

  • Duo Universal

    Just a quick heads-up for other WordPress admin types who installed the Duo plugin years ago and kind of forgot about it… apparently it’s been deprecated in favor of a new plugin which supports the new “universal prompt” system. It’s not hard to upgrade (deactivate old, install new, activate new, enter the same token/passkey/hostname as you did before into new, authenticate, delete the old once you’ve confirmed new works) but I wish there’d been a bit more communication about this.

    Also be aware that Universal Prompt defaults to an immediate push notification rather than giving you a button to click to initiate a push. Other than that, it’s basically the same, and works just fine. Hooray for security.