Category Archives: General

Hmm, where does this one go…

by srhuston

Not So Quick Thought

Is it any wonder I’m not crazy
Is it any wonder I’m sane at all

–Styx, “Too Much Time on My Hands”

Yep, it’s been a while, and I’ll have to get back into things again. But I’ve had some pretty major issues with my hands; the left was just a standard arthritic flare, while the right, well we’re not entirely sure what’s wrong with it. Symptoms are similar to “trigger finger” though it’s not causing my finger to curl up or anything, more like it felt like the tendon on the right index where it runs past my thumb was injured and if I moved the wrong way, or too much, it would hurt anywhere from a sharp pain (felt like it was tearing) to a dull and heavy ache like it was bruised and battered. So I’ve been doing what I can to alleviate pressures – folded up the right armrest on the chair so I don’t lean my elbow on it, which I often do when I’m reading things or deep in thought; switched to using a mouse with the left hand (and then back to the trackpad) so my right isn’t doing as much repetitive motions, especially on the scrolling; and wear a brace on the right hand to prevent me from moving that finger as much as well as a reminder to not do anything stupid with it.

Of course that all makes typing difficult, so I’ve tried to do as little as I can. Sometimes it’s hunt and peck with a couple fingers, and other times I take the brace off and blaze through something just to get it done, then sit back and do much less for a while. I’ve tried speech to text, but I find that my brain doesn’t filter things making it to the mouth in the same way it does to the fingers, so it doesn’t come out right and I want to edit it “live” which never works. Trying to go back and edit later isn’t going to work for me either, so I’ve just about given up on dictation for now. Maybe I’ll try again a few more times and see if I can get it right, because it could be quite useful – moreso for things like this where it’s really what I’m thinking, as opposed to work where I’d be trying to dictate shell commands, and that’s bound to be a failure.

Still playing AC: Shadows as well, and enjoying it a lot. I’ll talk more about it some other time I think, because it deserves its own space, but that’s been taking up a lot of my time when I’m not working. Feels good to have a game I can sink into again, it’s been a while and the last couple I’ve dove into were replays of things I played before; while they were fun, obviously, it wasn’t quite the same thing since I’d already seen things. Though it was nice when my eldest was playing along as well since we got to share in those moments, Shadows is having that same effect since we’re both playing it (and respecting each other’s pace so neither of us is talking much about story missions or outcomes, especially since while I have a lot more time in it than he does, he has done different missions than I have so we’ve seen different things).

Last thing I want to touch on, which is probably a “buried lede” here, is a thought that keeps coming up. I’ve got all this equipment here, and knowledge of how to do things with it, and part of me keeps wanting to do some kind of podcast. I think I have two problems really, one is that I don’t know what the topic(s) would be because I don’t want to limit myself to one particular thing, and one is that I don’t think I want to do it alone but would have a better time doing it with someone else. I have an idea to solve the first part, which would make the podcast more of an open format, but don’t know what to do about the second part yet. Do I try to pair up with someone specifically? Do I just do a kind of “guest” thing and get various people to join me, either all the time or until I find a rhythm with someone and stick with them? I wasn’t sure about the time commitment to it either, and figured it would end up being a very ad-hoc “released as time permits” kind of thing until Stephanie gave me a really good idea about that too. So now I’ve got even more things to think about.. and talking would certainly be easier than typing right about now.

Speaking of which, I need to get to bed, and rest this hand again. Felt good to put something down though, so thanks for reading this far. Drop a comment somewhere and say hi – I recommend Bluesky anyway since it’s a nice place to be, and you can comment there and have it show up here without even trying so it’s a neat system.

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by srhuston

Silence Is Golden

Even in the quietest moments, I wish I knew what I had to do.

–Supertramp, “Even In The Quietest Moments”

Been quiet here, but less because I fell out of favor for writing things and more because I have nothing to write. Still waiting on the replacement mixer I mentioned previously, but for slightly different reasons – I got the RMA paperwork and sent the bad one off to them, it took a week to get there (I literally could have carried it, by hand, the 16 miles from my house to their warehouse faster than FedEx who sat on it for four days 40 miles away from both of us for… reasons) and then instead of shipping me a replacement I got a gift card for that amount. Wondering why I moused over to their site to see the model listed as “Temporarily Out Of Stock” which is their tag for something that is going to take so long to get more – if they do – that they won’t backorder it. So a couple times a day I hit refresh on that page hoping for something to change, and meanwhile deal with the crunchiness of the old mixer.

Other than that there hasn’t been much going on. Some issues with carpal tunnel flaring up a little (fortunately the same right wrist as before so the old brace went back on today) which appears to be affecting a flexor tendon the most. At the same time, the PsA flare in my left hand subsided a little, so I’m still down to one useful hand but at least it’s not zero. Haven’t done anything radio-related still, and every time I think about it or start to there’s something else, besides I don’t want to get into debugging any possible problems with the setup until the mixer is replaced. And no other projects in the shack to get into at the moment either. On gaming, I’m still working through the postgame items in San Andreas for 100% completion, but after watching my eldest playing Pokemon Sword I got hooked (Pokemon were kinda becoming a thing as I was just a little too old for it, so I never got into it). So I’ve been playing that game and enjoying it. But none of that is really “post worthy” so there’s been nothing to write here. Maybe all of it combined is worthwhile though. Anyway, cat tax below.

Hobbes, my orange and white single-brain-cell creature, trying to make biscuits on a blanket and forgetting what to do with his back feet.

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by srhuston

Moving Right Along

Fozzie: “I don’t know how to thank you guys.”
Kermit: “I don’t know why to thank you guys.”

–“The Muppet Movie”

So…. what’s going on here? Why the sudden desire to put stuff, and pushing it out to other places and whatnot? Well, it’s a long story.

A long time ago I set all this up because I wanted a place to put stuff to share with the world. Writing on websites was pretty new in 2000, and I got on the bandwagon because why not. I posted stuff left and right, and of course didn’t expect people to flock here and interact – why would they, I had nothing really to offer except, well, me – and I was mostly fine with that. Somewhere around 2006 I moved the site from being hosted on my own home computer which meant keeping that online all the time, to an actual hosting company. At the same time I moved it to WordPress instead of Slashcode because the latter was notoriously difficult to maintain while my hosting company (Dreamhost) had a nice single-click installation process. I do systems administration as my day job, I don’t want to do it when I’m not getting paid, so that was a huge bonus to me. I was doing well, even putting up some new stuff, when I discovered Google Analytics. Now I could see what kinds of traffic my site was getting, and while that was never the goal, it was a neat thing to look at. I want to say that was some time after 2009 or so, which would have been some time after joining Facebook and connecting with a lot of people I’d known over the years.

After having GA set up for a while, I went looking and realized something. Nobody went to my website. Nobody intentionally, anyway. Remember how people said sites like Livejournal were just “screaming into the void” and nobody looked at stuff there? Yeah, turns out that was my site too. Now, sure, I wasn’t planning on having a high-traffic bastion of entertainment or instructional data, but still I figured I’d have something a little more active than random people who clicked because a page showed up in the results after searching for “ceiling cat is watching you masturbate.” But the analytics didn’t lie, I was also screaming into the void.

I’ve mentioned before that I like to talk… a bit. Over the years I’ve watched people tune out while I’m talking. A fun trick is to start going off on some outlandish thing and see if they catch on, or see how much you can keep going until they suddenly realize the last few lines were about an alien invasion or crossdimensional rift that flooded your basement with catnip mice. I thought, if I write things here then maybe that’ll scratch that itch – I’ll feel like I’m getting to talk about the things I wanted to, and others won’t have to listen to it. But when you see that nobody’s actually looking, you realize you might as well be talking to a wall. And I can do that just as easily without exercising my fingers – something which some days is a lot more difficult than others (and if you have no idea why that would be, I went over it in another post that nobody read 😛 ). But why wasn’t anyone coming here to read things anyway? Well, I think a big part of it was that everything was corralled into a single place, a book where all of our faces would gather and meet and chat and post. And so the idea of leaving that place to go look at something else.. well, that’s like work for some. Work that they don’t want to do, and I can’t blame them. If I can get 90% of what I want from one place, why go bouncing to other places as well? Just be glad with what I’ve got there. But that means, if you want to put your stories out there for people to see, you have to put them in that space where they’re looking. But for various reasons, that place is falling apart more and more. Ideologies that don’t mesh with my own, rules that oppose what I think are good and just, all kinds of things. And I’m not the only one thinking that, others are as well. In fact, Wil Wheaton posted a thing about it, and while I’d been debating what to do at that point, reading my thoughts coming from someone else whose writing and engagement I respect solidified it for me.

So, that’s the plan. Try to write here the things I want to share with people, and hope that the time is right that people will come read it especially if I put some effort into sharing those links elsewhere. I’m also on other platforms, and I need to set up a sidebar thing linking to them or something, I’ll get around to that too. One other thought that has come up before, especially with the amount of fun I have doing audio work, is to do a podcast. That seems like pissing into the wind just as much as (or even moreso than) a website these days, but it’s something I’m still thinking about. Having enough content to publish is the problem for something like that usually, but maybe if I set the low expectation of “you’ll get something when I have something to give” it would work out. Don’t know, but love to hear your thoughts about it.

Oh, one last thing, since I mentioned hearing your thoughts. You may have noticed comments are off all over here. I got tired of dealing with spam comments long ago, and turned off all comments on all posts. I may try to figure out how to turn that back on in a way that I’m happy with dealing with them, but… not sure. You can reach me in a number of ways, though – including in IRC which is linked right on the sidebar there. Meanwhile, here’s a photo of a cat.

The author and one of his cats (standard issue), Astrid.

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by srhuston

Quick Thought..

For the times, they are a-changin’

–Bob Dylan, “The Times They Are a-Changin'”

With the direction things are going over on that blue F site, and a comment from Wil Wheaton who seems to have done similar to me when it comes to use of a website (though I’ve obviously never had the following here that he has had there, I came to the same conclusion – put the things where the people see them and you get interaction)… I’m giving more thought to resurrecting this a bit more. I do post things on that facey-space for a narrower audience than I do here or on other public forums, and I don’t know if/how I would continue that – not all of my thoughts are meant for everyone, and I think most people are that way, but I don’t think people would sign up for something to see those more reserved moments. Maybe I don’t share them? Maybe I don’t share them here? Don’t know the answer, but something’s blowing in the wind. I think I’ll start by creating a new category, and maybe put some of those “quick thoughts” that I’d share other places there. Maybe I even do something with themes and whatnot so only 1-2 “quick thoughts” will be visible on the front page to keep the noise lower or something? More thinking required.

by srhuston

Everything Zen? I Don’t Think So.

Follow men’s eyes as they look to the skies, the shifting shafts of shining weave the fabric of their dreams.

–Rush, “Jacob’s Ladder”

[Note: Yes, I did think of the Bush quote after already settling on the Rush quote, which is why the title]

Last week I virtually attended the ISC2 Security Congress which was in Las Vegas NV. Three days of cybersecurity talks and other related topics which is always good for increasing the continuing professional education (CPE) credits needed to maintain my CISSP, as well as get insights to new technologies, things I wouldn’t otherwise hear about, new threats, and all sorts of other things. One that comes up now and then is the topic of burnout and fatigue, and they always try to have a few people to talk about how to manage stress. This year was no different, and one of the keynotes in fact was Dan Harris. Dan is a retired news anchor and journalist, and wrote a book called “10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works – A True Story.” While I’ve probably seen him on TV before (I know Stephanie commented that he was one of her favorite journalists when she watched TV news more often in the past), I don’t know that I knew who he was, but I was definitely intrigued as soon as he started talking.

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by srhuston

Do You Remember

Ooh that smell, can’t you smell that smell

–Lynyrd Skynyrd, “That Smell”

Well, I called it. Missed posting something yesterday, and “today” (the 21st night of September) got away from be because of earlier events. Namely, when we got home and the youngest went to close up the chicken coop, he came back in a few minutes later and said “well I just met the skunk.” One whiff later and he was going into the shower, now secure in the knowledge that the smell of a skunk that walks through the yard is much different than the smell of one that was sitting under the patio chair next to the coop and got scared when you came around the corner.

I had intended to do some work on the next project, which is going to be setting up a FoundryVTT server again (I mentioned before that I was running it, and we got mostly through a campaign before other things kept us away from it, which I also mentioned). I plan to do it in a Docker container as I did with the IRC server and its associated systems, I just need to figure out some of the logistics since I also want a Let’s Encrypt certificate for it so I need to think through how I’ll set that up using the existing configuration and whatnot that is working for IRC now. Maybe I’ll have some time to experiment with it all tomorrow. Er, today. After I get some sleep.

by srhuston

Don’t Tell Me ‘Cause It Hurts

Don’t speak, I know just what you’re sayin’

–No Doubt, “Don’t Speak”

While having my hair up in a towel after a shower, and thus unable to use my glasses effectively, I thought, “the Mac has made a lot of advances over the years, I should be able to use speech-to-text to write something!” So I looked up the commands you can use, and gave it a go. I started with the title, clicked where it should go, and said “caps on” so it would put things in Capitalization Mode for Titles.

It filled in the title “Caps on” and waited for the next thing.

Ok, so the commands aren’t perfect, at least if I can get the ideas down I can fix it in post! So I moved down to the body of the article and started talking. I had a vague idea where I wanted to go, and just started going with it. After three sentences, I deleted the whole thing. Turns out, I don’t talk at all the way I think and write apparently, and what comes out feels disjointed and crappy when I’m reading it on a page. Soooo…. I don’t think I’ll be doing that after all. Of course, the idea that I had was kind of a crappy one anyway, so maybe that’s why the words didn’t flow freely and make sense as I was writing it. I think this is a better topic anyway…

by srhuston

The Ruiner

Welcome to the Grand Illusion, come on in and see what’s happening; pay the price, get your tickets for the show.

–Styx, “The Grand Illusion”

I’m going to ruin it. Maybe. I haven’t said it out loud, but I thought one way I could get better about writing things was to put something – anything, no matter how crappy – up once a day. If I could at least put one thing up a day, then at least it’s something. And maybe I could even start to do better things since I’d be doing it anyway, so what’s an extra few minutes writing something else. Or even writing ahead of schedule and having something post so I can get ahead of things. And there’s two reasons this is likely to ruin it. One, I’m mentioning it out loud. And two is that my goal was one week, and it’s only been a couple days. Oh well, we’ll see. I will say I’ve got some other ideas that keep popping up, so if I can keep those low-effort posts going then maybe I can use some “other time” to write the higher quality bits and ready them for publication.

(I came up with the post title at the end, and now wish I’d used Nine Inch Nails, “The Ruiner” as the quote. But The Grand Illusion still works I think. After all this is a grand illusion that I’ll actually be prolific here and put up something people would want to read 😀 )

by srhuston

Come And See The Show

Welcome back my friends, to the show that never ends
We’re so glad you could attend, come inside, come inside.

–Emerson, Lake & Palmer, “Karn Evil 9: 1st Impression – Part 2”

If I’m going to get back into the swing of things, I should just dive in I suppose. So, what’s going on? Well, I last was updating things in 2021, and things back then were pretty okay. The pandemic was winding down and things were “returning to normal”, yet my job was still remote at the time for various reasons. I had started to feel some stiffness in my hands now and then, but hadn’t thought much about it. Around the last post I made I was starting to have some trouble with a bad tooth, but hadn’t made plans for doing anything about it yet because it was only mildly troublesome. If you’ve ever seen Deadpool, there’s a line in the movie that fit quite nicely for me at that time.

Here’s the thing. Life is an endless series of trainwrecks with only brief commercial-like breaks of happiness. This had been the ultimate commercial break. Which meant it was time to return to our regularly scheduled programming.

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by srhuston

How Do I Shot Web?

I want to put more stuff here. Ideas, things that worked, etc. And I keep wanting to do that; even now there’s a handful of drafts that I started to some extent, sometimes just a line or two as the main idea to expand on and sometimes a chunk of a fleshed out post but not the whole thing. But I keep falling short, and I’m not sure why. After some reflection I think part of the problem is that I know how some of my posts were presenting when I was doing my best here, and I keep trying to aim for that. But that’s not who I am right now, so what I think I need to do is just write something to get it on here. And then maybe having the long-form “better” posts building in the background will work OK, because it won’t feel like such a shock. And eventually I’ll be back to that. Meanwhile, there’s at least something popping up more frequently than every two years.

It could happen!