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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

  • So long, Wonderduck

    On March 8th, Eric T Carra lost his final battle against the ravages of ill health.

    I found out about this over the weekend, when I decided to check his website in case there’d been any updates on his condition. (The news is in the comments thread of the final post.) If you read the slate of posts during the calendar year 2022, entered as he had the time, opportunity, and energy, you’ll see a litany of indignities (including COVID, but that was well after the initial problems had commenced). Through it all, when he could, he tried to inform and entertain in his clever, self-deprecating style.

    It must’ve been hell. I can dimly imagine all the posts he didn’t complete, drafted then scrapped, about the ongoing interminable misery his life had apparently become.

    To me, he’ll always be the one of the biggest fans of my silly webcomic project, Quacked Panes. Heck, early on I sent him the twin to my cast-iron duck, Rusty. I always looked forward to his reactions to my latest bad joke, and enjoyed following his interests on his blog (even if I’ll never understand the appeal of Formula 1). It’s no exaggeration to say that without Eric and a few other dedicated fans, I’d not have lasted four months at the webcomic project let alone four full years.

    We shared similar-enough tastes in music, anime, and other odd bits of common culture to sustain a kind of distant friendship. Never close pals, but always cordial and supportive. Now I wish I’d been a better friend overall. Regrets, eh?

    A font of knowledge and humor has left this world, and I’ll miss him always.

    “Next episode: More zombies?”

  • Satisfactory – In And Around The Lake

    Post tagged:

    “… mountains come out of the sky and they stand there!”

    Yes, ha ha, the song “Roundabout” by Yes (ha ha) earworms me every time I think about building roundabouts in Satisfactory. Maybe you, dear reader, are young enough not to have this problem. I envy you your youth and your lack of Jon Anderson’s voice in your head.

    Anyway.

    (more…)

  • Workflow Redux

    As a quick follow-up to yesterday’s adventure, ConnectWise Support called me yesterday just before close of business to explain what went awry. In short: The third condition failed on thousands of tickets because prior to 2016, status changes were stored differently in the database. So the condition for “last ticket status update not more than 1 hour ago” was checking for the new kind of status change flag, not the old kind.

    We had almost no way of knowing this would happen, short of memorizing every feature and function change over the course of a decade’s worth of software updates to this platform.

    By the by, at one point we hit 3000 open tickets. Fun.

    Two upsides: One, this should never happen again (on this particular service board) because, well, we’ve now re-closed all those tickets with the new status change flag. Two, my performance metrics for the month are through the roof:

    The other four-digit bar is the Operations Manager who decided to pitch in on the ticket-closing efforts.

    Do I get a raise for this, boss?

  • Workflow Overflow

    It seemed like a simple request.

    “If a technician closes a ticket without attaching a Configuration (device), reopen it, send them an email, and change the ticket’s status so they know they need to remedy the lack of Configuration before closing it again.”

    Cool. I can do that.

    (more…)

  • Depeche Mode – Memento Mori

    I can imagine few situations more challenging than trying to craft an ostensibly commercial creative project almost immediately after the death of one of your longtime collaborators. How do you balance the push and pull of “the record has to sell or the label will be cranky with us” versus “this needs to be meaningful on some level”? I’m not sure I could do it, and I wholly understand why a band might just “nope” out of existence when one of its members passes on.

    With all of that said, yesterday’s release of Memento Mori, Depeche Mode’s follow-up to 2017’s Spirit album and their first project since the death of Andy Fletcher last year, didn’t connect with me. Is it well crafted? Definitely, absolutely. Are the lyrics laden with meaning? I suppose so, but my brain doesn’t process lyrics very well so I’m only guessing here. And the problem is, I suspect that if lyrics were what I connected to in a song then I’d be faring much better with this record. They’re not, and I’m not.

    Will I listen to most of it again? Probably not. It’s not bad, for the most part, barring a couple of tracks that actively repelled me. The album’s just not working for me. It might for you, though! And that’s cool.

  • Fire Emblem Engage – Story Thoughts

    Over the weekend I finished off my first playthrough of Fire Emblem Engage, and I’ve been sitting with it for a little bit to percolate my impressions. Overall, in general? It’s a perfectly serviceable tale. There’s nothing groundbreaking in it, nor is there anything absolutely awful.

    I don’t want to spoil specific details, but I can’t really talk about my reactions without giving some general things away, so… bail now if you aren’t done with the game and want to avoid anything spoiler-ish. For that matter, I’m also going to talk about some comparisons with Three Houses, so… again: Beyond this point there shall be spoilers-of-sorts.

    (more…)

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