Greasy ground, juggling, resourceful, vlog, Overwatch
So even though we had some torrential rain during the afternoon yesterday I wanted to take advantage of a small break in the precipitation to look at the ground on the old Tacoma. The driveway was still wet so I already accepted my back was going to get wet. When it started to rain rather heavily 10 minutes into the work the rest of me got equally wet.
So in order to find the ground I had to remove the two piece skid plate from beneath the engine compartment. Of course these parts were quite dirty/oily and that dirt quickly spread to various parts of my upper body. Once the plates were off it was easy to locate the negative ground, it was right next to the oil filter. This seemed like a less than ideal place for it since filter changes always resulted in oil sort of coating that area. As you would imagine there was a lot of sludge and grime on the grounding bolt.
I unbolted the ground and cleaned the bolt, the wire terminal, and the grounding point on the engine block with degreaser and wiped them off with shop towels. Putting everything back together was a bit of a pain in the ass and made more annoying by the rain pelting the portion of my body hanging out from under the truck. A quick turn of the key verified the truck still started. I now feel I fulfilled my self put responsibility to make sure the issue is taken care of as much as I could.
I hopped in for an early shower to get the grime off. After dinner I had a bunch of things going on simultaneously. I received two new computers that are for my accountants that live in Fort Myers. I am going to be installing the systems for them but wanted to do some prep work at home before I go to their home to do the migration. They have been having big problems with one of their systems for the last few months which is terrible timing since it has been the heart of their busy tax season. Somehow I need to find the time to get up there to swap out the systems soon.
Warning, tech talk to follow. In addition I was doing remote work at the office, upgrading our internal instant message platform and upgrading the operating system on our main domain controller from Windows Server 2008R2 to Windows Server 2012R2. I initiated the upgrade via a Teamviewer session to my workstation at work that in turn was connected to the server initially by a remote desktop session. When I tried to start the upgrade it would not continue via RDP since it saw the console session as being active. I had to disconnect and connect to the console via VNC and restarted the upgrade.
So during the upgrade I lost connectivity to the server since the upgrade requires a couple reboots. I also was unable to connect via RDP. I was worried that the upgrade was stuck on a screen that required some sort of question to be answered. I had one other way to connect, our multi-system keyboard monitor switch that is connected to the network. I first tried using the APC application to view the screen but it would not connect. I then tried to connect via browser. It began to start to launch the Java viewing app but would not complete when Java security settings killed it. The switch is probably at least 10 years old at this point so the java applet does not meet the minimum requirements modern day browsers require. Even if I added the site to the security exception list in Java it would not allow it to run. Mother F…
I am certainly far from a technical genius. I don’t have an encyclopedic memory or a comprehensive understanding of all things IT. What I do possess are good trouble shooting skills and resourcefulness. So when I hit what at first seemed like a java dead end I came up with one more path to get to my goal. I remembered I had Virtual PC with an XP mode virtual machine set up. I found it and started it up. It had not been fired up literally in years. Once I got it up and running I opened the IE8 browser and tried to connect to the KVM switch. It complained no version of Java was installed.
I then had to find an old version of java to install that did not have the same stringent security requirements modern java does. After some searching, being careful to avoid the various trap web sites, I found a 3 year old version of java which I downloaded and installed onto my virtual XP machine. After doing so I finally was able to successfully connect to my KVM switch over the network and gain access to the domain controller. It took a long and twisting route to get there but I finally navigated the way.
For the first time this week I brought my new Tacoma to work. I had the GoPro along which I used to shoot another vlog entry which I’ll post later tonight. In the vlog’s I try to speak about subjects not necessarily in step with whatever my blog topic of the day is. I don’t know how good/bad these videos are and to be honest it isn’t a big concern of mine. It helps me work on my off the cuff speaking which without a doubt is a big weakness of mine so I will keep throwing them out there.
I downloaded the latest game from Blizzard, the company that has entertained me for over two decades with games like Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo, World of Warcraft, and Hearthstone. The latest title is called Overwatch and is a first person shooter, something new for Blizzard. I used to be a HUGE FPS guy. I cut my adult gaming teeth on games like Doom, Quake, Unreal Tournament, and Call of Duty on the PC. I was never great at the games, my twitch reaction just was never quick enough to compete against high level players but I enjoyed the genre nonetheless.
Eventually that type of game faded from the forefront of my gaming tastes with World of Warcraft dominating most of my allocated gaming time the last 10 years or so. Well Overwatch might be a reason for me to jump back into the FPS world. Up until yesterday the game was in closed beta with access only being given to a limited pool of players. They now have a brief open beta period where anyone can play for free till the retail game is released later this month.
A couple of the podcasts I listen to have hosts that have played extensively in the beta and they have been saying how fantastic the game was. So although I was quite busy last night I took the time to download the game and play briefly through the tutorial. The visuals and fluidity of the game are impressive as hell. I didn’t have time to do more than scratch the surface otherwise, only playing through a brief tutorial. I hope to get a chance to dig in deeper before the open beta expires so I can decide if I want to lay out 60 bucks for the final game.