Category Archives: About Me - Page 23

A Little Bit Of Tim Taylor In The Kitchen

Posted by anachostic on November 23, 2016 No comments

Thanksgiving is almost here and that means it’s time for cooking. I believe I probably think like most guys in that in order to do something properly, you have to have the right tools. If you don’t exactly know what the right tools are, it’s best to just have all the tools.

And so, in this year, I’ve been building up my kitchen tool chest. I pitched my ad-hoc cookware and bought a brand new starter set of pots and pans. Then I augmented that set with a couple more small pots, for flexibility of course. And last night, I saw two more pieces from the same model line (in the same color, too!). I hadn’t ever seen them before, and I wasn’t entirely sure I would ever see them again, so I picked them up. Now I own a stock pot and a deep sauté pan. Will I ever use them? Better to have and not need than need and not have. Clearly, a man composed that line.

That’s not the only thing I’ve done in my tool refresh. I pitched my dinnerware and bought all new, matching pieces, including things I shouldn’t need, like a serving bowl, a platter, and a gravy boat. And although my meals are typically for one, I have 4 large plates, 4 small plates, 4 bowls, 2 additional large bowls, and 2 more additional small bowls. I like soup and salad, but still, that might be pushing it. I have the additional plates and such in case I have guests. ha ha ha ha

I also swapped out my flatware. Just because. The old set was over 10 years old, and a change was needed. Also, more knives. I have two carving sets. I have multiple whisks, multiple peelers, multiple strainers, multiple cutting boards, multiple crock pots, and more wooden utensils than I can use in a week. More mixing bowls than I expect to realistically use, but they’re in all different sizes, so I will have the perfect size bowl for whatever it is I plan to do. You need to have the right size tool for the job, right?

Last night, when I picked up the most recent pot and pan, I made the joke that I was a “completist”. But then I looked up the definition, which is: “an obsessive, typically indiscriminate, collector or fan of something.” That doesn’t sound fair. It’s not an obsession, nor is it indiscriminate for me. For one, it’s opportunistic. (This also applies to my CD collecting.) Also, my purchases serve a purpose. I’m not exactly acquiring these things for the sole purpose of having them. I do intend to use them when there is a legitimate need. I just need to create that need.

More Space; Going Vertical

Posted by anachostic on November 22, 2016 No comments

Well, as I last mentioned, it’s time to grow the CD storage. It cost just as much to buy a new storage tower as to build one, so I went the pre-built route.

After the new tower arrived, the first step was to clear out the old tower. Surprisingly for me, I gave some thought as to the stacking of the CDs so I would be able to put them all back into the new tower in order. Unload from Z to A, then reload from A to Z.

The new tower has shelves that are pretty much the same width as the old tower, but there are two additional shelves to work with. Those, times four sides, gives me 8 more shelves worth of space. Compared to the old tower, the new one is quite impressive.

Replacing the CDs, I was able to leave space on every single shelf, and even with that, I had almost two free shelves at the end.

In all, quite a nice upgrade. And if I manage to fill that, I have the old tower I can start using again.

DIY…NAH

Posted by anachostic on November 10, 2016 No comments

Tonight I had a thought. I need a new CD tower. The one I have is totally maxed out. I pulled up an old picture I took during the assembly of my tower and realized, this is nothing. I can build this. All it is is a bunch L shapes joined together into a swastika shape.

I got thinking further, if I’m going to build my own, I can make it HUGE. The measurement of my current tower is about 18” per shelf and about 5’ high. I figure maybe 24” shelves and 6’ high would be amazing.

So I spec’d out what I would need. First, I’d need some tools:

Pocket hole jig: $40
2 Clamps: $40
Shelf pin jig: $35

I have all the power tools I’d need to cut down the wood, so now for the actual parts:

2 sheets of 4’x8’x.75” MDF: $60
1 sheet of 4’x8’x.5” MDF: $24
Swivel base: $15
200 shelf pins: $20
Paint: $20

This comes to a grand total of $254. That’s not bad. But it’s the same price as some reasonably priced shelves. Jeez, I can’t even build this thing myself for less. And, I know me. It won’t be perfect. It’ll probably be passable as far as quality goes.

How Cute.

Posted by anachostic on November 7, 2016 No comments

In my random browsing about CD collecting and storing, I came across a website for “CD collectors”. Some people were posting pictures of their collections and some would post pictures of their finds at stores. It was kind of cute, and I mean that in a patronizing way.

Post titles like “Started 2 weeks ago, full collection so far” and “After 6 months, this is my collection”. And then there’s a picture of a dozen CDs, or maybe two dozen. And when I think about my 800+ collection, I snicker a little inside. And when I see that the CDs are mostly new releases, I snicker a little more.

And boy, isn’t that pompous of me? It is, I admit it, and I accept that. I mean, I could make a post saying, “After 30 years – my collection” and there would be people snickering at me. “30 years and only 800? I bought that much in the last 2 years! My collection of 3,000 laughs at you.”

Despite the holier-than-thou ranking and hierarchy of collectors in which I probably place in the 70th percentile (The curve is exponential. Once you break a certain level, you are in rare company), at the same time, I am encouraged. These are people just discovering the joy of collecting physical media. Judging by their selections, they are young, which means there is still life in physical media. It’s not dead.

There is another reason for encouragement as well. I’m not going to pretend that piracy doesn’t exist, whether software or music or video. I can admit that I used to be a pirate. In the old, old days, we used to have dual cassette decks that would copy tapes. There’s really no legitimate need for a dual-deck unit otherwise. So, I had plenty of copied tapes. Why? Because I was young and poor. I also had lots of pirated software. Why? Exact same reason. I couldn’t afford $500 for Photoshop. As I grew older and started making money in my career, I didn’t need to resort to piracy anymore. I didn’t need to “settle” for a copy. I could get an original. And I started valuing having that original in my collection.

If these budding collectors are anything like I was back then, that means they are beginning to advance in their life, making a living wage, where they can afford the luxury of not stealing. That means the world is getting better. Also, they take pride in their collection. Consider the pride between showing someone 200 gigs of downloaded albums (which may elicit some praise from some people) vs. showing someone a collection of 100 CDs. “They’re all real. They’re permanent.”

You can copy off that 200GB of music to your friend and not feel a ounce of pain. But, giving up a CD from your collection, you’re actually losing something. It’s the same psychological trick pundits use when they encourage you to live a cash lifestyle. By handing over physical cash when you buy things, you feel a loss, more so than when you just swipe a credit card.

So even as these beginners are showing off their tiny collections, it’s still something to encourage and cheer on. They have many years ahead of them and decades and decades of music to discover and collect.

Yay, Someone Did It!

Posted by anachostic on November 3, 2016 No comments

Check out my post from March, 2008. Yes, 2008. Someone finally implemented this.

BackerKit, after filling in your information, allows you generate a post bragging about what you just did. and they offer selectable values for key elements.

This allows someone to be themselves and also capture some data about the experience.

You’re welcome, BackerKit. Believe it or not, I have an entire document somewhere discussing the entire business case for doing this and how the results can be calculated and analyzed. There’s even a prototype website with an entire functional database structure. Ah, if I only had a lot more free time and even more motivation.

Never Let Your Guard Down

Posted by anachostic on October 6, 2016 No comments

Today, I learned I had been “hacked”. I say “hacked” in a figurative sense because there wasn’t really a whole lot of hacking involved. I somewhat left the door open and someone just fiddled around and got in.

I have my own email server that manages a few domains. I have one domain I don’t do anything with, and on that one, I had created a couple of test accounts for, well, testing. The problem is, I never disabled them when I was done. It’s been a while since I did that, so either I didn’t think about the consequences or assumed that since I was working on an inactive domain, no one would try accessing it. You can’t assume that.

Since “hackers” just use a bunch of scripts to automate “hacking”, they can just let the scripts run and go eat some more pizza. And that’s what happened to me, probably. A script found my domain, then immediately went to work trying out different common username/password combos. And although I have security features that will temporarily blacklist an IP address after so many failures, that had no effect. The script will just wait until the ban is lifted then continue on. Time is not a concern.

So, once they got some working credentials, then it was time to deliver the spam. And boy did they ever. I had gigabytes of log files and 22k email messages queued for delivery. How I learned I was hacked was by chance. I happened to try sending an email during one of the spamfests and got the email returned with the message:

DED : You’ve reached your daily relay quota

At the time I got that message, I thought it was being returned by the domain I was sending to. Later, on a whim, I decided to check my own server and was shocked at what I saw. I immediately shut down the email service and started clearing out all the trash. Then I changed all the account passwords and disabled all the unused accounts and restarted the server. The log files showed someone trying to log in using test2@mydomain.com and failing. Bastards.

It’s my own fault, for sure. But it’s terrible that you can’t stop being paranoid for a second on the Internet. They’re always out to get you.

In Memoriam, In Advance

Posted by anachostic on July 26, 2016 No comments

I stopped by my local pool place last weekend for some chlorine. At the checkout they had a sign stating that as of August 1st, they will no long accept credit cards – cash or check only. I asked for more clarification, no debit cards either. So, I give them about 2 months to live. Definitely won’t see 2017.

This business had recently tried implementing a “cash discount” and that didn’t seem to work, because I don’t see those signs anymore. I’m very confused as to what their logic is. Accepting a check is probably more risky than accepting a credit card. No one carries $500 around with them to buy a chlorine generator. It’s unlikely businesses would set up accounts with them unless they can do monthly invoicing and hold out the net 30 terms.

I thought this would make their online sales unworkable, but a quick check shows that their website cart uses PayPal. This raises even more questions. Why not get a PayPal mobile card reader and use the same account for store sales and online sales?

I mean, if they are getting hammered with CC swipe fees and TX charges, they need to renegotiate. Or they need to look at their margins. I’ve always known that the ones paying cash were getting shafted because a store’s prices had to assume that CC fees would be included. I’m puzzled by this in the same way I’m puzzled that gas stations can survive with Cash/Credit pricing.

But in the end, my guess is they won’t be sticking around much longer. Here’s the important thing. They’ve made a decision they can’t easily take back. They may get one more transaction out of each customer (they already got mine). But after that, customers like me aren’t going to return. If they realize their decision has now brought the business into a death spiral and they want to start accepting credit cards again, who’s going to know? All the former customers have written the business off. They could put a banner out front saying “We fucked up and we accept credit cards again!” but that’s some serious crow to eat. Maybe the banner will be “Under New Ownership!” which might invite old customers back to see if the payment options have returned.

It’s sounds like another case of small-business America dying, but sometimes that death is caused by a self-inflicted injury.

Music In The Valley

Posted by anachostic on March 21, 2016 No comments

Last weekend, I had a pretty productive CD run. I think I picked up a dozen new ones. One of the “why not” buys was a disc called “The Best of Starship”. It was a cheap-looking CD. Really cheap. Like one of those compilation CDs that companies make just for some quick bucks. It turned out to be something really different, though.

I don’t own any Starship albums, but I do know the songs pretty well from the radio. When I put the CD in and played it, I didn’t immediately recognize the music. After the song played a little longer, I recognized it, but something was still off. The singer’s voice was familiar and all the notes were right, but the production of the track was different.

I looked at the album cover for clues. In small type at the bottom was “New Recordings by the Original Artist.” How strange. What I was experiencing was the Uncanny Valley effect. That effect is typically associated with robots, how people’s perception of them rises as their realism improves, then suddenly drops off as people get really creeped out by the tiny inconsistencies. I’ve also had the same thing with software, where if the replication of an application isn’t exact, the little differences drive you crazy. You notice all the little things. At that point it’s better to create something entirely different.

And that was the case with this album. It wasn’t a live album. You know you’re getting a different sound when buying a live album. It was a studio album, but it wasn’t like studio outtakes or demos or alternate takes. It was just doing it again. And it wasn’t like redoing it with the intent to improve on it, it was trying to remain faithful to the original. But it wasn’t. The production was much more sparse – less overdubs, less polish. It almost sounded like a MIDI sequence plus guitars, plus the original vocalists. It was good enough to be recognizable.

I have to say, it’s the strangest CD I’ve ever come across. I’m torn between throwing it away because of (to borrow the uncanny valley’s terminology) the revulsion at what I was hearing or keeping it because it’s such an oddball recording.

You Don’t Get What You Don’t Pay For

Posted by anachostic on February 23, 2016 No comments

Applying the concept of the tradeoff triangle – Good/Fast/Cheap; pick two, I recently had the opportunity to choose zero. Or maybe I got them all, just in a crappy way. I’m talking about visiting an urgent care clinic.

As you may have seen in past posts, I’m not a fan of health. Luckily, I don’t get sick. Until I do, that is. And when I do, I usually stick it out until I’m better, or in some future instance, I die. Well, this was a case where I wasn’t getting better, but I wasn’t dying quickly enough to get over the annoyance of being sick. And since I don’t really have a primary care doctor, I went to a clinic.

Since I don’t really have a doctor, I’m not sure what is routine and what isn’t. But I’m pretty sure if they cared, they wouldn’t weigh me with my pockets full of stuff. And they would probably check my temperature to see if I had a fever. Maybe check my heart rate while they are checking my blood pressure. Maybe they would show a little bit of interest in me. But, maybe not. It’s just a walk-in clinic.

Maybe they would actually protect their customers’ personal information. Posted throughout the clinic were signs that stated there were scammers calling their patients and asking questions similar to a satisfaction survey. The problem is that through some phone trickery, the call would cost you $3/min. My question is, how are these scammers getting your patient’s contact info?

To sum up the entire visit, I recited the primary symptoms I had: trouble swallowing, swollen tongue and tonsils as well as secondary symptoms I suspected were relevant. All this was entered in some cloud-based web application. (I initially thought he was searching WebMD for the answer.) Then the doctor came in, looked in my mouth (not even using a tongue depressor) and said, “yup” and entered an antibiotic prescription in the web app that was sent to my Walgreens. That was it – he said the medicine should work in 7 days, but if not, there were 3 more days on the prescription. He walked out and I walked out of the building. But not before forcing him to make physical contact with me by shaking his hand.

I left with a prescription that should fix what ails me, but I didn’t leave with any encouragement that I was going to get better. That is depressing as hell. But, I guess I did expect a bare-bones experience. In my tradeoff, Good was not chosen, Fast was fast in the wrong part of the experience, and Cheap was pretty much the entire experience. This does little to promote any desire for longevity in me.

More Phones!

Posted by anachostic on February 22, 2016 No comments

A while ago, I had the idea to take a cheap Windows phone and turn it into a dedicated portable media player. The prime motivator of that idea was cost. $30 for an electronic device, especially one with a good touchscreen, is pretty unbeatable. That experience has been pretty much ok. There’s a few issues that will hopefully be worked out in the future. But another opportunity came up and I moved on it. More phones!

The media player phone is a Lumia 435. The new deal is a Lumia 640, again for $30. I bought two. And I still would be getting back the $60 Lumia 640 from the GF when she gets her Sony fixed. So that’s three phones of the same make and model. What could I do with them?

The first thing I thought of was home security cameras, but the first idea I could take action on was a car dashcam. I looked in the app store and found a few free candidates and a few paid candidates. So I got the free ones and set out to see what it would do.

I purchased a windshield mount and put the phone up under my mirror. With that and my GPS on the windshield, it looks a little ridiculous. But it’s not too distracting (at least not doing the day because the polarized screen just looks black with my sunglasses on. At night, it’s a little more glance-worthy). The way the dashcam app works is, the camera is constantly recording and discarding video. It keeps a certain time period in memory at all times. When you touch the screen to indicate an incident has occurred, the app saves that piece of video to the phone.

In two days of use, I already captured my first incident. It was a rabbit. Now I can replay the horrible thumping sounds as many times as I want! Viva technology!

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