Archives 2019

So I have been printing my largest and most detailed model ever all week. It’s a massive castle with incredible amounts of detail that has already consumed one complete 1KG roll of filament and is chewing through another.  Last night I had to do the filament swap which I was nervous about.  I tried printing this model the first time last weekend.  When I tried to swap filament that time I messed up the print head position which made it impossible for me to resume.  Luckily this time I got it changed without incident. Cindy is very much looking forward to getting the opportunity to paint this massive model which will be a huge project in itself.  Depending on how much detail she does, this thing could be a genuine piece of art by the time it is complete.

Cindy and I have been watching Leaving Neverland, the HBO documentary about Michael Jackson and his pedophile tendencies.  If you ever had any doubt that Jackson was a habitual child molester, those doubts will vanish after watching this two part series.  It’s just another example of how these famous people are propped up and insulated by money, buying silence and cooperation to keep the curtain of deception intact.  Our president is another unfortunate example of the same practices, thankfully I don’t think he has any pedophilia hiding in his massive, gold plated closet of secrets.

So I believe I made mention of Luke Perry’s death a couple weeks ago.  The former 90210 actor died after complications of a massive stroke.  He was only 52 years old, less than a year ahead of me.  Anyone that has read this blog for a long time knows my hang ups about aging and death, I just don’t want to deal or think about either.  When my mom died at the relatively early age of 67 we had to work through the process of handling her estate which was tough since mom never gave me power of attorney, something she talked about doing for a few years but never happened.

Mom’s death gave me the push to do some estate planning, sort of.  I bought Quicken Will Maker maybe a year after she died.  I then waited another year or more until I actually installed the software and generated a will, power of attorney, living will, and health care advocate documents.  Then another year has passed but yesterday, partially thanks to Luke Perry, I actually signed and got these documents notarized so they are official.  I scanned and sent copies off to all parties mentioned, hopefully never having to be used.

I don’t just have Luke to thank for taking this final step.  My ongoing health issues that started last summer have made me think more about the need for this to get done.  If I join the ranks of the “drop dead out of nowhere” club, I certainly want to make sure that my affairs are in order.  I still don’t feel normal and that concerns me.  It concerns me enough that I am arranging to revisit the med clinic after my second chest CT next week to look more into the calcification on a coronary artery that was mentioned during the first scan. For some reason this was viewed as a minor finding, which I don’t get.  The way I feel when doing higher exertion activities, where my energy level seems to plummet feels like a symptom of a possible partial blockage somewhere.  I am going to push for whatever testing there is to try to figure it out.

This weekend I have plenty to keep me busy.  It will be the calm before the storm of next weekend which is Katie’s baby shower.  The amount of planning and prep Cindy has put into this is nothing short of staggering.

I got done printing a small version of the big castle that I am trying to print at home for the second time.  Even with the diminutive scale, the detail on the model was pretty incredible.  I took it home for Cindy to paint which will surely be a delicate process, requiring more patience than I possess.  I printed the miniature version on my Ender 2 printer that resides in my office.

I have been busy at work doing a lot of updates on our servers that have been in service for awhile.  My main focus has been upgrading server OS versions.  We had a number of servers still running Windows Server 2008R2.  I have been trying to bring them all up to a minimum of Server 2012R2 and Server 2016 if possible.  I have been doing in place upgrades which is not officially endorsed as the best way by Microsoft.  They would prefer you set up a new server and then migrate.

Most of our server hardware is several years old but is still more than robust enough to fulfill their roles in the network.  We actually have been reducing our physical server footprint for quite awhile.  Between outsourcing applications to the cloud and virtualization, we probably have close to half of the amount of boxes that we once did.

Anyway, for the most part, the in place upgrades have gone smoothly.  I have had a few head scratcher issues that I am still sorting out but nothing that I can’t work around.  These are changes that I probably could have done awhile ago but the “if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality definitely applies for me.  I am not a big fan of upgrading for no reason other than incrementing a set of numbers.

For quite a few weeks I have been not getting great amounts of sleep.  It seems like my bed time has been consistently slipping back to 11:30 or later.  With a 6AM alarm during the week that seems to be adding up to a lot of drowsiness.  I never have gotten a consistent 8 hours of sleep but I sure would like to shoot for it.  As you reach your elderly years as I have, rest is important.

So Nick Foles is officially going to be a Jacksonville Jaguar which makes me sad.  Of course I wish him the best of luck but I am curious how this will all pan out.  Nick’s best time in the league has been with the Eagles by far.  When he was traded years back he struggled mightily.  I am curious if he will be able to have the same secret success sauce with the Jaguars.  I already have read a couple stories mocking Jacksonville for paying big money for a QB that statistically was at best marginally better than Blake Bortles their current QB, who is due to be cut.  Plus it seems like there weren’t any other teams that were in red hot pursuit of Nick, making Jackonsville’s big contract more questionable.

The other Eagles news was they have traded to bring Desean Jackson back to the team.  I have mixed feelings about it.  When he was released years ago I remember feeling relieved.  I hated his cocky attitude, although his athletic ability was top notch.  Ironically it seems Jackson’s best games since leaving the Birds were when he played against them. He has put up some big numbers against the Eagles but overall he has never reached the superstar status he thought he already had attained as a young player.

My hope is now at 31 years of age, Desean has matured at least a little bit and isn’t quite as much of an asshole as he was 10 years ago.  By all accounts he still has great speed which is something the Eagles receiving group did not have a lot of last year.  It will be cool to have a legitimate downfield threat to help keep defenses honest.  Hopefully Carson can stay healthy enough next year to throw some balls to him.

My ride back home on the scooter Friday night went well although I was pretty beat up by the end of it.  I did a lot of seated riding the last 10 miles of the trip.  Despite not having a 100% full charge before leaving the office I still got home with right around two (of five) battery bars remaining.  As I said in the video, I doubt I will ever do the commute again on a scooter.  The large amount of sidewalk riding I have to do makes a scooter a real pain in the ass to control since the speed control is done with your finger, which is constantly getting bumped around on sidewalks.

On Saturday I had targeted yard maintenance as the TO DO item of the weekend.  I hit it hard with weed whacking and mowing (assisted by Cindy) on Saturday and then I mowed the back yard on Sunday.  We also moved the RV so we could mow down everything under/around it in anticipation for the massive baby shower that is being held at the house in a couple weeks.  While I was doing this yard work I once again looked at the overgrown mound by the culvert that leads to the neighbors property.  That spot is always overgrown because a big rock resides there.  For almost as long as I can remember living at the house I remember having the thought that “yea, I should pull that thing out”.  Well for whatever reason, Saturday was the day where I finally made that happen.

I did this late in the afternoon Saturday, when I was already hurting from nearly a full day of yard work. I knew the rock was big but I wasn’t sure exactly how big.  Like an iceberg, only the top portion of it was exposed, I had no idea what remained underground.  My implements of removal included a shovel, a sledge hammer and my iron post/pry bar.  I only actually needed the pry bar.  I jammed it into the ground around the stone to determine what was hard and what wasn’t.  Once a rough perimeter was established I was able to drive the bar deep into the ground to get under the rock.

Once I had dislodged the big stone, I was able to flip it end over end to the back of the truck.  All that remained was hoisting it onto the tailgate, which I thought would be mildly entertaining.  It reminded me of my day at Stone Park with my buddy Lou during our last NYC trip. During that strongman style workout we lifted heavy things for hours.

Saturday night Cindy and I went to see Captain Marvel, a movie that has been hyped ever since the last Avengers movie.  I had heard a few reviews of the movie and they were all pretty much middle of the road on the Marvel scale, which is already elevated above other comic book movies by a large margin.  I know there was some buzz about the movie being too feminist, which I really didn’t understand.  I knew next to nothing about Captain Marvel prior to the film being announced.  I think they did a good job establishing her origin story, setting her up for whatever her role is in Avengers Endgame.

The CGI tech they can do do nowadays to change the age of an actor almost seamlessly is incredible.  They took 30 or 40 years off Samuel Jackson and you hardly noticed.  They did the same thing with Coulson, amazing stuff.  Overall I would agree that from a Marvel standard, the movie was middle of the road, not approaching Winter Soldier, or any of the Avenger movies, but it was still a entertaining film that got both of us pumped for Endgame, which releases next month. I’d give Captain Marvel a B+ or A-.

Daylight savings was Saturday night so all of Sunday felt like I was behind schedule.  I didn’t even get a chance to go out for a ride.  Like I mentioned I mowed the back yard in the afternoon.  Earlier in the day we ran to Home Depot where we got some garden soil and some more plants to replenish the garden which I planted in 87 degree heat.  I also had to replace a sprinkler head by the garden which stopped oscillating.  No wonder certain plants in there were looking stressed.

I was pissed when during the day I had to change filament on what would be my longest print ever.  My slicing software estimated the completion time at FOUR DAYS, which was probably conservative.  It’s a huge and incredibly complex fantasy castle.  When I did the filament change I was more than two days into the print.  Well when I performed the change I was not being as careful as I should be.  Evidently I put weight on the X gantry during the change which pushed it down a few millimeters.  The end result was when I tried to resume the print it was at the wrong height and I had no way to recover.  So now I have a very cool looking half model that Cindy vows she will do something cool with.

Sunday night I had another live stream.  It was a unique stream for a couple reasons.  As I was interacting with chat all of a sudden I saw a blue “super chat” pop up for $2.  A super chat is basically a donation from a viewer, when they do this their chat is given special visual treatment so it stands out.  I had never had somebody donate before so I was shocked.  I thanked him for his generosity.

L.A Beast Net Worth

Later in the stream I saw the name skippy62able pop in, holy cow, that is LA Beast! LA Beast is one of my favorite YouTubers.  He has a very funny personality and his specialty is stunts, mostly eating stunts.  A few weeks ago I had him do a Cameo video for me for hitting the 5000 subscriber mark.  Beast is a big YouTuber with almost three MILLION subscribers.

So anyway, I reacted to him being there and asked if that was really him, which it was.  Shortly after Beast appeared a bunch of other names started showing up in chat that I had never seen before.  Evidently LA Beast told people to come “raid” my stream to get me some more views and likes which was funny and awesome.  He even did his own $1.99 super chat donation to me which was so nice.  When he did the Cameo for me he referenced a bunch of my videos which he evidently watched.  He also must have subscribed to me and got live streaming notification.  Cindy was excited for me when she heard Beast was on.

Later on during the stream I got two more super chat donations, one of which was for $20.  I couldn’t believe it.  All of the excitement in the stream gave me the energy to keep it going, well past the two hour mark.  It was a cool way to end the weekend.

For the past couple years during the winter I have ridden my EUCs to work just to say I could.  I first did it with my Msuper and barely made it, coasting into the office on fumes.  Last year I did it on my big Gotway Monster which has a much bigger battery, it was able to cover the distance without issue.  This year I decided to give it a go on the newest PEV in the fleet, the Ultron Ultra.

I did one long ride with the Ultron out to Ave Maria and did not have a good end result.  I wound up pushing it for more than three miles of the 30 mile ride.  I overestimated how much battery range I would have and drove very aggressively on the first half of the ride, traveling 30 mph for most of it.  I used that experience to come up with a different plan for today’s ride.

I had the scooter on the charger all night to make sure I had max juice before I shoved off a little before 6:30 AM.  I was fully geared up with wrist guards, full face helmet, elbow, and knee pads, as well as my safety vest.  I also had on a hoodie since it was 58 degrees and the chest mount for the GoPro to capture the ride.  I then threw my backpack on as well so I was loaded up pretty heavily.  Of course Cindy was worried as always.  To be honest I had a bit of an unsettled feeling as well since just this week someone in our area was killed on a bike, in the bike lane, when an idiot driver veered into the lane (surely texting) and hit them.

So my plan for the ride was pretty simple, keep my speed down to extend my battery life.  I was cruising 20-21 mph which actually feels sort of slow on the scooter which is my normal cruising speed on an EUC.  The one thing that is annoying with this scooter, compared to Cindy’s Dualtron is the cruise control does not work.  This means I have to keep constant steady finger pressure on the accelerator hand trigger which can be tough to do.  The bright headlight, tail light, and color cycling side LEDS make the scooter very visible in low light conditions which is helpful.

I was anxiously watching the battery meter as I progressed.  At one point it seemed like it was dropping faster than I expected but it settled down.  I wound up getting to the office with two of the five battery indicators intact so I had juice to spare.  I immediately threw the scooter on the charger so I can once again be topped off for the ride home this evening.  It’s reassuring knowing that I have some wiggle room in battery capacity as long as I don’t keep the pedal to the metal.

This weekend I have a lot of mowing on the mind.  After I change the oil and filters on the tractor I plan to put it to work hard core.  The front and back yards need to be mowed as well as weed whacked.  I expect the combo of the three things to consume the majority of my Saturday.  Saturday night we are going to get out to see Captain Marvel and then Sunday evening I have my bi-weekly live stream.  It’s going to be a very busy weekend for sure but it’s better than being a sedentary, lazy, unmotivated sloth.

This morning I had my follow up appointment with the pulmonologist.  While he and the nurse were outside the exam room I heard him talking as he looked at my chart.  He said there was no high res CT results in there, something they talked about scheduling back in September.  I knew it was supposed to happen but I assumed that maybe it was going to get scheduled after this appointment.  So when he walked in the office I already knew what he was going to say.

I told him I knew about the other CT but it never got scheduled by his staff for whatever reason.  He did at least have the results from the breathing test I took Monday and he said they were totally normal.  However since that nodule in my lung was spotted on the last CT, he needs this follow up CT to verify nothing strange is going on in there.   When he asked how I was feeling overall I said fine, outside of situations where I am trying to exert myself cardio-wise.  I told him I never have returned to normal in that regard.  He didn’t seem too concerned since I don’t have any apparent function problems with normal day to day activities.

Not only is this CT to check on the nodule, it is a high res version of the test that should also shed more light on the possible fibrosis observation I got back in September.  It’s something the pulmonologist dismissed as highly unlikely, but this version of the test should give a very clear picture that can rule that out completely.   So in about two weeks I hope to have the test completed.  That will dictate the next step.

Of course none of this will help with the mysterious right side pain that has continued to be brought on by increasingly lesser forms of exertion during weight training.  I have modified my gym routine quite a bit since this got bad late last year to phase out a lot of the heavy and/or extreme exercises that contributed to the pain.  Even with doing so I still feel it from time to time, it’s frustrating getting old and feeble.

Yesterday Cindy was feeling really wiped out.  She said it was tough for her to breathe and she was feeling weak.  It scared her enough that she had her mom take her to the local ER to get checked out. I got over there about 2:30.  Cindy was tired and was just resting in the bed.  They had taken some blood, did a flu test and did a chest xray, none of which showed anything of significance.  A nurse practitioner came in and said their official recommendation was for them to admit Cindy to the hospital which was not what anyone really wanted to hear.

She mentioned that a steroid injection may help which sounded like they would only do once she was admitted.  However maybe 10-15 minutes later a male nurse came in and gave Cindy the steroid injection.   As we hung out there Cindy started to feel better as her breathing improved.  We told the nurse that we were going to forgo hospital admission.  They said that was fine but Cindy had to sign a waiver that basically said “if you die, it’s not our problem”.   We got out of there a little after five.

I treated Cindy to a Culver’s meal for dinner, one of her favorites.  We took it home to eat there.  I did my best to encourage Cindy to just take it easy all night.  She has a hard time sitting around doing nothing much like I do, so it wasn’t an easy assignment.  She is taking today off from teaching classes and hopefully tomorrow she will be able to resume her schedule if her energy level continues to improve.

These sorts of peaks and valleys are par for the course with her ailment which has been diagnosed as multiple things over the last couple years including mercury poisoning, Lymes, and now MS.  The problem is the symptoms of these conditions all overlap one another so getting an accurate diagnosis is very difficult.  Cindy recently underwent a spinal tap to get some more clarity.  Because of my natural temperament, I keep a level head about the situation, knowing that whatever the circumstance is we will address it and keep moving forward.  It’s the only viable choice to me.

My monster sized AnyCubic Chiron is broken once again.  I had the hot bed cable snap on me a month or so ago.  Now it appears there is a problem with the cable harness that runs to the hot end.  After locking up during a print, the hot end will not longer get to operating temperature.  I have to find the motivation to rip the cable chain apart and inspect the cable thoroughly in the hope I can get a replacement from AnyCubic.  It’s frustrating.

I have targeted a new automotive project, replacing the spark plugs in the Prius.  Although the car is running ok with just under 225k on the odometer it is way past overdue for plugs.  I don’t know if the prior owner ever replaced the plugs but we have had it since 132,000 miles and never did it yet.  I watched a couple videos on the job to get a general idea of what is involved.  It looks mildly challenging but nothing that I can’t trudge through.  I am still crossing my fingers that I am able to squeeze some more miles out of the car as my daily driver until I am in a position to purchase either a Nissan Leaf or Hyundai Kona EV.

I was a bit shocked/saddened to hear that Luke Perry died after suffering a massive stroke last week.  Like a lot of people of my generation, I was a regular 90210 viewer but what really affects me is his age, we are basically the same.  He did not strike me as the type of person physically that would be an early stroke victim, yet he is now gone.  Once you cross the half century mark, the odds overall are still in your favor but clearly you could still drop from a heart attack or stroke with little warning.  Obviously I put consistent effort into my health but even so, there is no assurance I won’t check out tomorrow.  All I can hope for is my work helps make my odds of a healthy existence a little bit better.

Friday on my way home I picked up Sadie.  While I was there I also addressed a long running problem Ali had with her PC.  She has three monitors.  The third monitor was connected via a USB to VGA adapter.  That adapter has been problematic.  It seems whenever a Windows update is applied it stops working, requiring some intervention to get it working again.  I had an old video card that had three ports built into it that I was going to throw into her PC to eliminate the USB device.

So when I got there I pulled out her PC to look at the old video card, it already had three ports.  The DVI port was not being used.  I wasn’t sure why I didn’t use that port originally when I set up the system.  Once I started trying to attach a cable to it I remembered.  The DVI port was keyed in a way that did not work with certain connectors.  Luckily in my bag I had brought a bunch of different cables, just in case.  One of them fit which allowed me to fix the problem without even cracking the case.

I got it fixed so quickly that I had time to also fix a problem with her laptop which had a corrupted profile.  I worked on that as I sat downstairs and caught up with Ali’s boyfriend.  I had not seen him in awhile so it was good to talk.  I always enjoy his company.

This weekend had all of the standard to do’s but not much on the side project front.  The closest thing to that was pulling out a large portion of the stuff in the small shed and throwing out/ reorganizing those items to make it less cluttered.  There are a lot of spots inside and outside of the house that feel like they could use attention when it comes to organization and purging.  I am going to try to keep taking bites out of that task one small chunk at a time.

Late Saturday afternoon I took the Ultron back out to the same dead end side street to do another round of speed testing, this time with my GPS.  When I tested top speed just using the onboard speedometer it showed 94kmh (58mph) as my fastest speed.  That just seemed ridiculous so I wanted to do the same test with another measuring instrument.  I was very surprised at the results.  After three or four all out runs the GPS showed a top speed of 37MPH, which is still crazy fast on a vehicle with 11 inch tires but way less than what the speedometer showed.  I’m not quite sure why there is such a discrepancy when compared to the scooter speedometer.

The weird thing is the Dualtron, according to it’s onboard speedometer, got to 37mph as well, but that speed feels way faster on the Ultron.  My current theory is that is because the Ultron accelerates harder with it’s bigger motors.  Anyway, it was an interesting test that I think translated into an interesting video.

Saturday night we watched our Netflix rental, Downsizing, with Matt Damon. The plot is science discovers how to shrink humans down in size to a half foot tall or less.  The result is grossly less consumption of resources.  The first half hour of the movie was interesting but after that the movie just got real stupid.  The story seemed to have no flow whatsoever and bored me terribly for most of the movie. The film oscillated between being a comedy and serious in a way that was aggravating and non-sensical.  Don’t bother renting it, C-.

Sunday morning Cindy and I headed to the Greenway to ride.  We brought the Dualtron for Cindy to ride as well as the Backfire all terrain skateboard and the KingSong 18L.  With four new tires I wanted to see how the Backfire would feel on the varying terrains the Greenway offers.  The answer was, great.  Cindy wound up riding the skateboard too, a lot.  In fact she took it on the mulch trail and did really well, likely better than I could hope to do myself.  We had a lot of fun on the ride.

Sunday afternoon I found myself feeling lazy.  I even laid in bed and watched the original Iron man movie from start to finish.  I felt sort of like a slug for not accomplishing more throughout the day.  It takes a very short period of inactivity to bring about those feelings of being a bum. I even ate an entire box of Reeses Pieces.

This morning first thing I had a breathing test, a follow up to my mystery ailment that started late summer last year.  I never had a breathing test before, it’s not a great time.  They give you a device to pinch your nose shut while you wrap your mouth around a tube.  The tech then leads you through a bunch of breathing drills.  She has to be part cheerleader as she uses hand movements and “cheering” to guide you to perform the tests properly.  Most of the tests involve you doing prolonged exhales and inhales to the point where you feel like you have nothing left to give, which is sort of uncomfortable.  Luckily it didn’t take more than 15 minutes to complete.

I asked the tech how I did.  She didn’t give me specifics but she said if I would have scored below 70% in any of the tests she would have given me an inhaler to use to retake a test.  Since no inhaler was used I guess I at least scored a C or above.  I have a follow up with the pulmonologist on Thursday where I will see the results and talk about what happens next.

Last night I was doing a little messing around, streaming to Twitch while I played in World of Warcraft.  I utilized the Xsplit Virtual Cam but used it inside of OBS, the other major streaming software.  I did two short sessions that nobody watched live. I only have two followers on Twitch, nobody really knows I am even on there.  Anyway I had some audio issues I didn’t realize until I reviewed the footage later.

During the first session I had game audio but no sound from me, I didn’t realize I had my Yeti mic muted.  The second time I used my headphones so my voice came through but game audio did not which was another setting tweak I missed.  I doubt there will be tons of interest in an old guy who is average at best playing WoW but who knows.  I use the same handle as I do on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, duf67.  If you want to see the incredible experience, go here.

This weekend has standard items on the schedule.  I have started a text file with ideas for various videos I have been wanting to make.  The list is about a half dozen items long, hopefully I can knock some of them out.