Yesterday I heard a good portion of the Michael Cohen testimony. There wasn’t a lot of new things revealed although I did think it was funny that Trump threatened the schools he attended to not release his grades or SAT scores. Despite obviously being a flawed individual, I think Cohen came off as pretty sincere in his intent to “repent”. Backing up some of his statements with documentation was just another log on the fire of Trump’s credibility. If anyone has any doubt that Trump is a habitual liar, so much so that he believes his own fabrications, it is incredulous to me.
I ironically got some additional context and history on why Donald is the way he is last night. A buddy of mine from work that shares my general political feelings said he watched the first episode of a documentary on Netflix on our president, called Trump, An American Dream, a very tongue in cheek title. It starts back in the the mid-70’s and documents his history which is honestly very interesting. I never saw Trump’s father before, wow he seemed like a cartoon character. He used similar repetitive use of words like tremendous, amazing, and spectacular, a speaking pattern his son obviously picked up on. Roy Cohn, one of Trump’s early all star lawyers looked like he was straight out of the Godfather, what a creepy dude.
Even way back then you could see all of the same traits that were sort of funny and entertaining when he was just an ambitious real estate tycoon that worked NYC for hundreds of millions of dollars in tax abatements. Those traits unfortunately don’t make for a competent president. If you have a Netflix account you should give it a watch.
It’s an odd thing that as you get older you find yourself getting angry or frustrated over things that you have no direct control over and/or things that have no significant impact on yourself. Even though you can logically identify the behavior and why it is pointless, I still find myself feeling these emotions all of the time. People will disappoint you all the time if you give them an opportunity to do so. I assume that is part of the reason that my circle of personal interactions has consistently shrunk as time has passed. If you don’t deal with people beyond a surface level, they don’t have an opportunity to disappoint you. When I was young I didn’t think about any of these things. All I saw was the moment I was in with very little focus on anything outside of that. Ignorance can indeed be bliss in some situations.
Speaking of disappointing, I just got another email from HP, the replacement video card for my brand new system has now been pushed back to almost two months away. Thank goodness I had a contingency plan in place.
During my live stream on Sunday night someone mentioned how they have problems finding my channel, Dufisthenics, on YouTube. While I was broadcasting I tested out what he was claiming, that typing Dufisthenics into the search area does not show my channel. He was right. What happens is YouTube assumes that you MEANT to type calisthenics and instead shows you results for that. There is a single line up top that allows you to actually search for dufisthenics but it isn’t obvious. Well that is kind of dumb.
So yesterday I decided to change the channel name to just Duf. When I created Dufisthenics years ago 95% of my content was all calisthenics based videos. Well nowadays 1% of my content is that yet the name remained the same. Changing it to just my nickname of the last 40 years makes sense to me. It also makes the channel URL consistent with my Instagram and Twitter accounts, duf67. So if you found me under the old name that should continue to work but from here on out it’s just Duf.
Imagine being a billionaire that owns one of the most successful teams in the NFL, yet you decided a strip mall rub n tug is your best option for paid sexual services. And, it’s all on tape, brilliant.
So I decided to skip running Friday night. My lower right side/back had been sore all week, I figured trying to pile 13 laps on top would only worsen/lengthen the pain. We did wind up getting our exercise in a different way, we rearranged the office. This idea came about simply from a few cool lights, specifically the lights on my new PC.
The RGB lights on the front and inside the case change color based on GPU/CPU activity levels. In the normal spot where I have kept my PC’s for the last 10+ years, that activity is basically hidden since the unit is in a “cubby” in the desk down at floor level. I got the idea in my head that I would like to be able to see the guts of my new PC at work. That idea lead to a couple hours of chain reaction reorganizing after dinner Friday night.
So the base of my plan was to take my shelf/stand that I made in woodshop class 30+ years ago and stick on the right side of my desk. It would serve as my new CPU stand plus the shelving underneath would be useful to store items that were just piled up elsewhere. For the stand to fit we had to move my big but shitty desk over six or seven inches. The process damaged the already damaged desk a little bit more but it survived.
As I said, this seemingly minor change lead to a lot more changing. We moved things around on Cindy’s side as well, allowing her more practical use of the space around her. The process also had some casualties, like my old color laser printer that was not really used. That got curbed and was picked up by somebody within an hour. A lot of things were tossed as well. It was tedious work that kicked up a lot of dust. Cindy and I are both very pleased with the results. I had not significantly changed my desk configuration for many years. It felt good to switch things up. What was funny was Cindy had already spent a good portion of the day switching up other areas in the house. I came home to different layouts in both the master and guest bedroom.
On Saturday I kept myself pretty busy with a number of small projects. I found myself being quite annoyed that I found myself sweating while tending to them in the morning. It’s been stupid hot lately considering the time of year. When I woke up on Saturday the thermometer already read 72 degrees, which is what you would expect in June, not February. The highs both days reached into the upper 80’s with high humidity.
I did shoot a video showing off some of the convenience features of the Ultron Ultra Saturday afternoon. Despite it’s lower cost, it has some quality of life things that the much pricier Dualtron scooter does not.
Saturday night we watched Hostiles, a western with Christian Bale. Cindy and I rarely watch Westerns so it was a change of pace. It was a very well done film but damn it was depressing. Don’t expect to come away from it with pep in your step. It was B+ stuff for me.
On Sunday I got out on a pretty long solo ride at the Greenway. I took what I consider my two most fun PEVs, the Mten 3 and the One Wheel. Outside of the once again stupid hot temperatures, I had a great ride.
Sunday afternoon with some trepidation I decided to tackle replacing the back two tires on my Backfire Ranger. My hesitancy was due to the massive struggle I had replacing the front two tires last weekend. However the prospect of silencing the maddening flat spot tire noise was too tempting, so I dug into it. Although I still struggled, the duration and intensity of the struggle was definitely less thanks to using some different tactics suggested to me by others. In total I may have spent 30-45 minutes on the swap. After completing the work I headed outside to test the results. It did not take me long to realize the noise was gone. It no longer sounded like I had a flat tire, instead I just heard rubber on the road, like a normal tire. I was happy my struggle eventually resulted in success.
Sunday night I had my 18th PEV livestream. Cindy helped me set up the green screen to enable the Chromakey effect. The stream went fine although I didn’t have tons to talk about on my agenda. I still managed to fill almost an hour and 45 minutes of time from interacting with the livestream chat audience. The real time viewership has been lower the last couple shows. I don’t think we crossed 20 simultaneous viewers last night which is a bit disappointing. I do more or less enjoy doing the streams but it would certainly be nice to steadily increase viewership instead of having it flat line or slightly decline over time.
I had another all weekend print going. It’s another island/tower design that I am sure Cindy will do an amazing job with finishing it up.
I have not been getting enough quality sleep lately, it wears me down…
So I got an updated status on my warranty replacement of the video card in my new computer. When I talked to the guy on the phone he mentioned that he did see a note about replacement cards being held up in customs which could result in the replacement not shipping out until the first week of March. Well the latest email now has moved that time frame to the end of March. Now luckily I have the GTX 1060 card that I was able to substitute into the machine to keep me rolling but if I didn’t I would be pretty damn annoyed right about now. Last night I finally was able to get WoW up and running on the new system. The 1060 worked great, holding 100FPS most of the time.
So I am skipping my 13 lap run tonight. Most of the week I have had this bad soreness in my lower right back which will only be aggravated further by running. For a couple days mid-week I had left knee pain that had me limping. What is so aggravating is these aches and pains come and go without clear cause. I just accept it as the new norm, grit my teeth and just keep limping through the daily grind.
This weekend I have some small to do’s planned but nothing of major consequence. Well one could be a little involved. I want to shift around some stuff in the office which will allow me to put my new PC up at desk level so I get to enjoy the cool visuals it provides. Right now it sits in a cubby hole that is built into the desk which hides most of it’s RGB coolness.
Bernie sure got a good kick off to his election funding, raising something like 6 mil in the first 24 hours. I can only hope that means good things down the road.
Yesterday I was doing research into why my brand new, lightning fast computer was running WoW, a game with low horsepower requirements by today’s standards, poorly. To get the game to run at all I had to set the graphical settings very low and even then I was still getting some glitching and lock ups. When I got home I loaded up a couple GPU benchmark/stress testing apps. The card locked hard on these which now told me this wasn’t a driver/WoW settings issue, something is up with the RTX 2080.
A quick Google search reveals a ton of people having issues with the card that was only released late last year. The most common issues reported were overheating and lock ups. In my case the card never ran long/hard enough to overheat, it just locks up. So I unexcitedly called the number for HP support, fully expecting to be greeted by someone with a strong Indian accent which would make the interaction extremely tedious. I was pleasantly surprised when Jason, who was located in California answered instead. During the call I let him know how surprised/happy I was to get support whose native language was English.
So I expected to have a lot of hassle convincing support to send me a new card but it wasn’t tough at all. As I was going through the troubleshooting steps with him, Jason asked how familiar I was with computers. I told him I was pretty familiar since I have been working on them since 1992. Once he had that information he was very quick to believe my theory that the card was bad, based on the testing I did. So he arranged for a new card to be sent out to me which I will swap myself.
So to get by I installed the GTX 1060 card that was in my dead HP. Although not nearly as powerful as the 2080 it will be 100% fine until I get a replacement. It’s a bit disconcerting to have this sort of problem out of the box. I can only hope the new card they send me is absent the issues that have hammered so many of the RTX initial releases.
Yesterday my additional parts for the new computer arrived,a NAND stick style SSD drive and an additional 16GM memory stick. The SSD is a Samsung which is Bthe ONLY brand of SSD I use. I have had great reliability with them but the biggest reason is their migration software is fantastic and works perfectly everytime, making migration a piece of cake. To make it all work I had to buy a cheap USB enclosure for the new stick and then transfer the data to it using one of the high speed USB ports. The process took a little over an hour which wasn’t bad. When I was finished I was up and running with 3X the space on my C drive than I started with. Doubling up the RAM to 32GB was probably less necessary but can be useful for things like video editing/processing.
Later I got back into WoW to see if I could get it running smoothly. The video card in this system is top tier so running an older game like WoW should be a piece of cake. Well I fought on and off with it for about an hour trying various settings. The only way I could keep the game running decently is by turning certain graphic features off or way down which is definitely not how it is supposed to be. I should be able to max out everything without issue. I need to load up another game to see how it responds graphically. If it runs without issue at high settings then I at least know my issue is WOW specific and not a hardware problem.
I saw Bernie officially declared for the 2020 presidential race yesterday. I love Bernie and I am pulling for him but I have to be honest, there is part of me that thinks he is just too old for the job. He is currently 77 years old and would be scraping 80 by the time the election comes around. Yes Bernie still has good energy and seems to have solid health but still, the demands of that job just do not seem appropriate for an octogenarian. If Bernie was the only progressive candidate that has declared I may feel differently but there are several younger candidates with similar platforms that may be equally good options.
It is a bit disconcerting to see so many declaring so early. The end result must be strong support from the party behind a unifying candidate. God knows Hilary better steer clear of 2020. Her love/hate relationship with the country was responsible for letting Donald in the door, which will be looked back on as the most embarrassing presidency in the history of the United States. I know tons of staunch Bernie supporters were so pissed about how the DNC rigged the system in Hilary’s favor that they refused to vote for her, throwing their vote into the wind for the independent candidates or GASP, maybe even Trump as the ultimate FU. Sanity must prevail this time around.
So yesterday I spent a good portion of time continuing working on my new PC. Part of that was cleaning up the carnage from my old pc as a result of my trying to revive it. At this point I would say I have the new PC 85% there. Last night I ran into an annoying issue where the PC was performing very poorly in WoW. It would be lightning fast as it should be for brief periods of time but then it would choke and hang inexplicably. I am sure it is a driver/setting issue that I will have to sort out but it is annoying none the less.
Yesterday I returned the power supply I bought from Best Buy since it did not fix my issue. I was somewhat surprised how easy the return was. The girl at the counter didn’t even open the box to see if the parts were inside. I could have thrown a dirty brick in the box and they would not have known the difference. Getting the money back for the power supply helps offset some of the additional stuff I bought for the HP Omen. The 1 GIG stick style SSD drive and additional 16GB of RAM are suppose to show up today. I hope to throw that stuff in tonight which should set the system up to suit my needs for the next five years or so.
I decided to take on another PEV project yesterday, swapping the front tires on the Backfire Ranger X1. The all terrain board has been a great device except for one annoying thing, tire noise. On smooth surfaces the solid rubber tires make a loud and incessant scrubbing noise like they are out of round. In an attempt to address the issue Backfire came out with a new tire design. I was able to get two of these tires sent to me by support.
So I have a long and shitty history of doing work with tires. To put it simply I am not good at it and have had a lot of frustration changing tubes/tires over the years on a number of vehicles. The tire change on the X1 was no exception, I struggled mightily to get the new tires on but eventually got there after a lot of prying and pushing. During my testing afterward the noise I was hearing from the front tires seemed to be gone. Unfortunately the two original rear tires still make the noise. I guess next I will try to get those replaced for free as well.
The chicken integration has continued to go well. At this point we now have the young birds going into the coop at night without us having to physically place them there. They also now realize they can come out in the morning on their own once the automatic chicken coop door opens. They are still hesitant to go in the chicken run when the adult birds are there but it’s slowly getting better. The chicks seem quite happy to have so much space to roam. So far Daelin the rooster has been doing fine and seems to to realize that I am the true rooster on the top of the ladder. He eats out of Cindy and my hands just fine.
Saturday I got out on the skateboards a bit for a ride. It has been awhile.
I dug into my desk area on Saturday, using a hole drilling bit to cut a couple extra holes into my desk to make it easier to route wires. It made a huge mess, producing more saw dust than I expected. Saturday night I did a test stream using the new hardware Cindy got for me, a proper frame and two bright LED lights. It made a big difference in the effectiveness of the Chromakey effect.
Saturday night we also watched our latest rental, Tully. It was one of those f with your head sort of movies that pulls the rug out from under what you think is the plot. It was still entertaining enough for a B+.
I woke up Sunday morning and noticed my computer was off. That’s odd, I don’t recall shutting it down. When I hit the power button there was no response whatsoever. After doing the normal checks it seemed like the system had died. It is over four years old at this point and sees heavy use so I figured the power supply gave out. A pain in the ass but I figured I could pick up a replacement at Best Buy later.
So I came up with a plan where I would ride to DD on an EUC, have Cindy pick me up and then we could run errands, including getting the power supply. That plan had a detour as well when my Msuper started giving me low battery beeps less than three miles into the ride. I had to swing a U-turn back to the house where I picked up the big Monster instead.
So I got a power supply as planned, a more robust model to be safe. When I got home I dug into my PC, ripping out the old supply and installing the other which was a bit tedious and patience testing at times. After some sweating and swearing I got it in there. I wanted to do a quick test before I closed everything back up so I hit the power button and was not thrilled to see everything remained dark. After double and triple checking my connections and repeated tries the shitty revelation came to me that it was the system board that died, not the supply….. damn it.
Well that is a much more serious problem. Trying to secure the correct system board and the process to replace it is anything but a quick process. I needed to have the system up and running. I decided that although it is going to be costly and a huge pain in the ass, a new pc was going to be my answer. I told Cindy of my plan as I shoved off for Costco, hoping they would have suitable replacement.
My hopes were not realized, all Costco had were entry to mid-level boring systems that I was not interested in. Luckily Best Buy was in the same shopping center so I rolled over there next. I saw HP Omen towers. These are high end systems designed for serious gamers. Although I am not a serious gamer, I still benefit from a high horsepower system for my video processing.
I saw the price tag and noticed it said they had an open box version for a couple hundred less. I flagged down an employee and asked about it. He said they did have it in the back and he would bring it out, sweet.
So when he tried to ring it up he was blocked from doing so. The inventory system said it was not able to be sold. The short version of the story is HP sent out a bunch of these systems with incorrect labels. For liability reasons they were pulled off the shelves until they could be relabeled. That relabeling had been done but whatever back end work that had to be done to put them back in inventory had not been done. So basically, even though I was standing there with a box at my feet and my credit card in hand, Best Buy could not sell me the system.
I told the guy it seemed rather crazy that I am willing to buy something that was right in front of me and they weren’t able to sell it. He even jumped on the Best Buy website to see if he could release the inventory by buying it online and selecting store pickup, nope that didn’t work either. I asked one more time if there was anything else they could do and he apologetically said no.
So as I walked out to the truck I was very frustrated but not defeated. I fired up the Best Buy website on my phone and did a HP Omen search. It popped up that the Gulf Town Center location had another open box unit in stock, the higher end model with a better video card and larger hard drive. The price was higher than the model I looked at but it was discounted more, $500 off normal price. I was able to complete the purchase online and drove the 17 miles further to get it.
I felt a small sense of triumph as the clerk brought my open box Omen to the counter. I had actually asked the guy at the first store if other Best Buy stores in the area might have them. He said no, they would all have the same restriction. Well I’m glad I didn’t take his word for it.
So the rest of my Sunday was diving full scale into recovery mode. Luckily with the cloud based environment we live in, I had base functionality returned pretty quickly. I was able to throw my 3TB hard drive into the empty slot on the Omen to get access to that data. I was able to use a USB to SATA external rig to connect my old SSD drive to the system to move other data across. Since most of my important stuff is saved on Dropbox that is very easy to recover as well.
At this point I would say I have 80% of my core functionality returned which isn’t bad at all considering how bleak I felt yesterday afternoon. I went ahead and ordered some additional upgrades for the Omen including a larger internal NAND SSD drive and another stick of DDR4 RAM to double it’s capacity to 32GB. Although a new computer was not on my radar, I certainly appreciate the additional muscle it brings to my daily processing needs.
I do have a theory regarding the failure of my old system. One of the holes I drilled was next to the computer itself. The side I punched through on was also the side of the computer case that has ventilation holes. I am wondering if during the process some debris/saw dust got into the case and killed a component. That would be a real kick in the nuts if my carelessness resulted in a $1500 replacement bill.
Today for my last day off I will be trying to put things back in order as the office turned into a crime scene of computer parts Sunday as I scrambled for resolution. Order must be restored.
Cindy enjoyed our Valentine’s Day although the meal at The Warehouse was not up to snuff compared to our previous visits. I theorized that it was much busier than our other visits so perhaps that is why the food seemed a bit rushed/undercooked and our waitress was not very attentive. Cindy was surprised by my oddball gift where I had Ben Higgins, a former Bachelor wish her and Katie a happy valentine’s day via Cameo.
Yesterday was chicken integration day. Before I even opened up the chicken tractor with the young birds I wheeled it over to the gate. Once there I opened the tractor so the babies would exit right into the adult hen area. The adults were still in their run but you could tell they were not thrilled with their space being invaded. Once we let them mingle together Cindy and I stayed in their yard to referee. As expected there was some squabbling but nothing terrible. Daelin, the hen turned rooster got put in his place very quickly by Katie who jumped on his back and gave him a few “don’t f with me pecks”
During the day the two groups mostly stuck together but a few times there was mingling going on which was good. When night time came Cindy and I had to get involved as the baby birds did not know what to do. We picked each one up and placed them on the perch inside, surprisingly they stayed put all night and I didn’t see any more squabbling on the coop cam. It’s going to be funny watching the new chicken social dynamic forming.
I kept myself very busy all day long. I did weeding, weed whacking and mowing which consumed a solid four hours of the day. I also ran out to Costco, Lowe’s and a couple other spots. In addition I did the shooting and editing for my YouTube 5000 subscriber video. Despite busting ass most of the day I got out and did my Friday evening run. I was determined to get back into the 9’s with my pace. I managed a 9:52 average but man it feels like I have to work hard to get there….
I’m looking forward to three more days of getting shit done yet enjoying the time as well.
My hopes were not realized, all Costco had were entry to mid-level boring systems that I was not interested in. Luckily Best Buy was in the same shopping center so I rolled over there next. I saw HP Omen towers. These are high end systems designed for serious gamers. Although I am not a serious gamer, I still benefit from a high horsepower system for my video processing.