My Dad’s obit is live on the Syracuse Post-Standard this morning.
I don’t look at Facebook anymore these days, but my profile is still live so all of my links still exist. I glanced at my profile last night to check on something for my Dad’s service, and another post caught my attention, which led me to the obituary of an old friend who died of cancer last fall. I had no idea. Jason and I were friends from back in the SystemSource days, when he was a programmer and I was a designer/front end builder. We formed a company with our friend Dan and did a bunch of projects, as well as played a lot of pool, drank a lot of beers, and had a good time. I met up with him six or seven years ago in the city for a drink to catch up, and I did know that he was in the hospital for brain surgery a couple of years ago (I sent him a T-shirt of his favorite football club). But I had no idea it had gotten that bad. I don’t know how to reach out to his widow to apologize for missing this, or what to even say. Fuck cancer.
Digging through the family archives this weekend, I found a couple of shots of Chewbacca and I in her prime. This was from about 2001 or so, out in front of my parents’ place in New York State. I guess I’m used to looking at a taller suspension these days, but she’s riding awful low on the springs.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
Mr. Brian stopped by this morning at 7:30 with a truckful of new shower supplies and started tearing out some of the old stuff that had been roughed in nine years ago. By the afternoon he’d cut out the drain and moved the pipes over to be centered in the newer (deeper) shower stall, made a provision for a bench. By the time he kicked off for the day, there was backing board on all of the walls and an inset in the wall. I cannot describe to you how exciting this is.
Jen and I went to a birthday party at a warehouse last night in downtown Baltimore. It was loud and packed, and even though we only knew three people in the whole place, we had fun.
That’s it. What else can I say?
The Passage debuted on Fox this evening, the first reason Jen and I have had to sit in front of the television and watch network programming together in, oh, I don’t know, 5 years? (Football doesn’t count). Verdict: This version is to the original book as the TV miniseries was to It. The writers jammed so much of the setup into one hour, I didn’t stop to give a shit about any of the characters they introduced. Several rather important characters were removed. The actors did the best with what they had, but the direction is stilted and feels like they shot it all in two days. This would have been a prime candidate for a multi-season Game of Thrones style cable series, instead of boring fuckery like Westworld: season two tanked, in retrospect–where they could have opened things up and slowed them down to tell the story. This is network pap.
This is an online security checklist recently published as the result of a podcast discussion. There’s a ton of good information in there, not the least of which is 1.1.1.1: a DNS lookup service that promises not to sell your information to third parties. My switch away from Chrome is long overdue.
All told we got about 5 inches. Finn is off from school today, accompanying me to my oncological checkin this morning. Right now we are sitting on the 10th floor of the Viragh building in downtown Baltimore waiting for my blood draw.
Last night, while I was waiting for my work laptop to clone, I swapped the hard drive out of my late 2010 Macbook Pro into a spare late 2008 MbP I bought as a decommissioned unit from WRI. The 2010 model was suffering from a random shutdown issue, where it would simply blink itself off, and I was getting fed up with it. I’d installed a SSD drive a few years ago so the process was straightforward and easy. The recipient machine only has 4MB of RAM but that should be good enough for the basic stuff I use it for these days. When I stop to think that I bought that machine eight and a half years ago and it’s worked trouble-free for the majority of that time, I have to appreciate the quality and value of Apple gear.
This morning I was on the road by 7:30 to run errands before the storm; I was out of the grocery store by 9 with a completed grocery list. At 10 I had an appointment to meet a lady about a rear cargo cover for the CR-V, which she was selling on Craigslist. This accessory was absent when we bought our car, and I always found them handy to have (my 1982 Subaru GL had one) especially when parking in the city. In 5 minutes the deal was done (they also threw in a set of OEM lug nuts they had laying around) and as we chatted they told me they’d sold their 2005 model with 280,000 miles on the odometer. Our ‘V only has 120K so I think we’re in good shape for another couple of years.
After that were more errands; I sold a couple of lousy XBOX games at the Gamespot so that I could buy a copy of LEGO Star Wars for us, picked up a new metal snow shovel at the Lowe’s, and did some other boring crap.
When I got home we made some lunch and got down to the depressing business of packing up all of the Christmas gear. Within about an hour we had the tree uncovered and out at the curb, and after hunting down and sweeping up all the pine needles we took another hour to straighten up the house.
Then Finn and I took the chainsaw out back to see if I could get it to start. With a little new gas in the tank and the proper choke setting it fired right up and settled into a nice throaty roar. The chain didn’t move at all, which means one of several things: there isn’t enough chain lube, the chain is too tight, on backwards, or misaligned. I’ll try chain lube first and work my way through the other issues afterwards.
Update: It was the chain brake. All I had to do was reset it and the chain spun straight away. Finn and I picked up some chain lube later in the week (the reservoir was dry) and with that I should be able to start breaking down the big stumps in the yard.