Diary of a Wolfeman

I have been spoiled.

For a number of years, we have lived in reasonable Sunday-morning driving distance from what I believe to be the Best Breakfast In Town: The Blue Moon Diner over on TV Highway. They serve, in my estimation, the best Eggs Benedict it has been my pleasure to regularly enjoy.

My introduction to Eggs Benny came in Las Vegas in the mid-90’s, when the boss decided to take us all out for breakfast one day at the Rio, a trendy casino well-known for their restaurants. I had been wanting to try it for years, but it’s one of those things that I wasn’t sure enough to spend money on, and ‘Benny ain’t the cheapest of breakfasts. When the Boss is footing the bill, however, is a perfect time to get adventurous. I was immediately hooked.

They just sent me a satisfaction survey, so they asked for it…

Oregon has two small towns that became famous due to the movies that were filmed in them. While Astoria was home to 1985’s The Goonies, over in St. Helens Disney filmed a spooky-themed movie series starting in 1998 with Halloweentown.

Ever hopeful to turn this sort of thing into a recurring tourist event, the town of St. Helens decided to host an annual Halloween-themed street fair every fall with events, vendors, and even a museum tour to commemorate the Disney movies and the later addition of a few scenes from Twilight (Bella’s house). My lovely wife Tolerant has been wanting to go for years and we were both due for some outdoor adventure, so I grabbed us tickets for this year’s event.

The weather broke fair and not-to-warm that weekend, which was about the only saving grace of the entire experience. The drive from Portland was nice with sunshine and light traffic up Highway 30, but once we turned off onto the street heading towards the event parking things backed up quickly. After about 20 minutes of inching forward we discovered that there were basically three lanes of event-goers converging through a single intersection of two-lane roads with only a hanging traffic signal to control it. This lead to a number of people getting fed up with the wait caused by gridlock to actively engage in creating more gridlock.

Once we made it around that corner, we got to creep forward for another ten minutes to the driveway only to find a “Lot Full” sign. This, strangely enough was NOT deterring people from pulling in anyway, but I knew there was a second lot past this one, so we pressed (err, crept) onward. I get the feeling the sign was placed in error, though, as there were indeed some places available in the back half.

Anyway, on we went with, again, no actual traffic control, so it was more creeping. We finally arrived at the second gate to discover there was only a single payment checker, which was why the whole situation was backed up so far. Oh, and of course the payment rig glitched out as we pulled up, then the spare needed a fresh receipt roll… Finally, I was able to purchase parking at the park-way robbery rate of $30/vehicle.

Ok so that took an hour, but on to the event, right?

Wrong.

There were already about 100 people waiting for the shuttle bus at this point, and amazingly they were all lined up pretty straight – out in the sun, because they only thought to provide one shade pavilion. Through some judicious shuffling around, Tolerant and I managed to not get sunburned as we waited for another full HOUR for the shuttles to whittle down the line and get us transported over to the fair. The ‘shuttles’ turned out to be actual school buses, which worked terribly because the parents of small children were smart enough to bring strollers. Modern strollers don’t fit into anything smaller than the back of an SUV, so trying to cram them into a bus with aisles designed for 10-year-olds was oh so much fun.

So now 2 hours into this madness we FINALLY get off the bus and into the fair blocks – only to discover that apparently they have been doing fucking ROAD CONSTRUCTION in the area and couldn’t get it finished before the event started so the event is crammed into a smaller space, some parts of which have Jersey walls and open dirt to trip over.

I had been pretty good about not getting bent out of shape over things I had no control of, but this was starting to push my limits. Seeing the potential for mayhem in my eyes, Tolerant steered me over to a gyro stand and made sure I ate meat while she nabbed herself an ice cream. Best wife ever.

Once I got outside of that and regained some brainpower we wandered through the various vendor stands while seeing how things were going, and the answer was: packed like sardines. Everyone was shoulder-to-shoulder in the street, in the booths, and most importantly, in the blocks-long lines to get into the museum and haunted house. I had bought tickets to these at $40/person online thinking to save myself trouble at the event, but was definitely not up to standing in line for another hour+ for the privilege.

Thinking that maybe by some miracle things would settle down once the live performances at the little stage got rolling, Tolerant and I wandered the vendor booths looking for something, anything that might be worth getting, and only found more disappointment. The vendors weren’t selling anything that we couldn’t either get elsewhere cheaper, or it was crap that wasn’t worth buying in the first place. Yes, 3D printers make some cool stuff. No, I will not buy something that will merely sit on the shelf and collect dust for $20 when I know it cost you $0.45 to print.

After wandering the whole length almost twice, we both decided we were too tired and disappointed with everything to put up with it any longer, and besides, it would probably take yet another hour to get back to the car, so we made for the bus stop and settled in to wait. This actually wasn’t as bad as the inbound trip (shaded, and we managed to get on the second bus out), so all-in-all I think we made it back to the car in 30-40 minutes.

Y’know, I could have cut them some slack if this had been a one-off event, but apparently they not only do this every year, they do this sort of thing several times a year. For them to show this level of incompetence is just criminal, and they owe me time and money I will never get back. My advice? Don’t bother next year.

Like several hundred million other folks, I play the Wordle daily. I like logic puzzles, and these generally don’t disappoint.

There is one type of puzzle, however, that just pisses me right the hell off: the one where the answer is one word out of many that fit the basic pattern and only change one letter. This puzzle from a week or so ago is one of the most egregious instances I have ever encountered:

I managed to get almost the maximum possible number of incorrect guesses on this puzzle and still didn’t manage to guess the word. And ‘guess’ is the operative word here, because there’s no effing logic in figuring this out. According to the quick research I did, there are over a dozen words that could have fit this format.

“But Wolfie” I hear you say, “the answer is always a word that’s in common usage. It shouldn’t be that hard to guess.” To which I say: that’s bullshit, because “common usage” is entirely subjective to who you commonly speak to. And lemmetellya, I apparently don’t talk to bakers or tree-scientists, because I haven’t heard the word ‘corer’ in forever. ‘Coder’ is by far more common in today’s vocabulary, and just about everyone is a coper cowering under cover in this climate.

To the creator of this puzzle, imagine a big hairy middle finger to go along with my “fuck you”. Your puzzle was bad, and you should feel bad about it. don’t pull this crap again.

So I finally got around to playing Skyrim after having picked up the Anniversary Edition a while back, and I have to admit this is the first time I think I have ever looked forward to playing a computer game the way I have looked forward to TTRPGs in the past. I’m kinda weird among Geeks in that I did not grow up playing console games all the time (the only console we ever owned was an Atari 1600 and there were 5 of us kids at the time, so I didn’t get a ton of time on it) so this is kind of a new experience for me.

I’m digging it.

Like any computer-generated thing, it of course has its quirks. The plot is pretty reliant on the idea of the player being the strongest security force in the entire region – I have lost count of how many bandit towers I have cleared out at this point, and I see tons of guards walking around every town. What the heck are these guys even doing?

Then there are AI decisions. I had just managed to smash some mage in a dungeon and steal his toys, and on the way back out we get interrupted by this Spy/Assassin Bad Guy Monologuing at me about how he’s going to kill me and take my stuff. Well, as soon as he stopped talking and regular action came back, I FUS-ROH-DAH‘d his Elven ass through a doorway and into next week, and my companion Lydia the Housecarl runs up and stands in the effing doorway so I can’t go finish him off. Like c’mon, dude, this is the thing we do, we knock them down and kick them in the teeth repeatedly!

Quirks aside, I can highly recommend the Anniversary Edition. I’m about 100 hours into the game and have only hit about 30% completion. Go play!

If you’ve recently encountered this error when trying to run a Windows update, the problem may be that your system reserved partition is full, which prevents the update procedure from starting. The trick is getting into it and clearing the space.

You may have seen some solutions for this already that just delete the fonts from the EFI\Microsoft\Boot\Fonts\ folder, but in my environment that wasn’t sufficient space reclamation so I had to go a step further and delete a bunch of the unused language files from the folder one level up. The trick here is to not delete the folders you actually need for your local language.

So, start of by launching an elevated PowerShell session, and then run the following commands to get into said folders:

mountvol y: /s
cd y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot
dir

This should get you a list of all the language folders. Copy that out and then build a script to mount the volume, delete the folders recursively, delete the fonts as well, and then unmount the partition. NOTE: take care to preserve your local language folders – you’ll notice the script below does not delete the English folders “en-US” or “en-GB” because I’m in the USA. In the end, you’ll get something like this:

mountvol y: /s
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bg-BG' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\cs-CZ' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\da-DK' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\de-DE' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\el-GR' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\es-MX' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\et-EE' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\fi-FI' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\fr-CA' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\fr-FR' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\hr-HR' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\hu-HU' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\it-IT' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\ja-JP' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\ko-KR' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\lt-LT' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\lv-LV' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\nb-NO' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\nl-NL' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\pl-PL' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\pt-BR' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\pt-PT' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\ro-RO' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\ru-RU' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\sk-SK' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\sl-SI' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\sv-SE' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\tr-TR' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\uk-UA' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\zh-CN' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\zh-TW' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\Fonts*.ttf'
mountvol y: /d

With luck, you can then run the normal install process.

So, waaaaay the heck back in 2011 I bought a 2009 Subaru Outback with 62K miles on it, replacing a Kia Optima that had enough engine problems to make it an upside-down trade, but I got a solid car in the process. And I’d been wanting another Subaru for years, having had one as my first freedom-wheels back in high school, so I thought it was great all-around.

It took me longer than I wanted it to, but I eventually paid it off. Along the way, the poor thing got side-swiped by some idiot turning left into a business from the lane to my right on a one-way street. Just about the time I was planning to use the money he gave me to fix the bodywork, a bolt backed it’s way out of the torque converter in the transmission and started chewing it’s way through the engine block. Luckily I had cash for repairs…

A couple years ago I started thinking maybe it was time for a new car, but the market wasn’t right yet – nothing really appealed to me yet, and without a solid incentive, I just couldn’t justify it to myself – so I bought a bike instead :D

Time has moved on, however, and certain developments finally made it a good time to buy something new. What with the dangers of global warming (fuck this ‘climate change’ crap, I call it what it is), I figured it was time to get out of the gasoline-drinking car lifestyle and go electric. So in August of 2021, I put an order in for a Tesla Model Y – in Blue, to match the bike ;)

The original estimated delivery date was late November / December, but that quickly got pushed into January 2022. It held there for a bit and I got distracted and wasn’t watching it, but shortly after Musk announced the deal for selling a bunch of Model 3’s to Alamo my delivery estimate slid out to March.

From there it drifted around, until finally it settled down into late May, which I was actually pretty good with, considering I had a week off of work first week of June. Maybe I’d be able to do a road trip or something?

Well, life came along and Tolerant got laid low with a bout of the ‘Rona the last week of May, so I wasn’t that distraught when the delivery date slipped out another week. Eventually, however, it arrived!

Considering how things work for our household, though, that meant it was time to let the Subaru go on to a new owner. Tesla gave us a pretty low-ball offer for trade-in, and I can’t really blame them what with the dinged-up door, but I wanted more out of it so I put her up on the Interwebs. I didn’t have a lot of patience for chasing the maximum payout for selling her, so I basically talked the first person to test drive it into a price I could live with and called it good.

So 130 thousand miles later, Sheila the Subaru Outback has moved on to a new owner.

For those idiots that absolutely insist on using fruit-flavored computers in a Windows environment…

Managing Macs in Active Directory

Oh look, I have survived one more year, so it must indeed be time to post something.

In this case, it’s a camping trip, but there’s a small twist: of the throttle!

This’ year’s B-Day vacation idea was to actually get the heck outta town for a couple days and mainly just … be somewhere else for a while. Small caveat in that it is hard to find a cat-sitter that lives up to my wife’s expectations, so she allowed me to wander off on my own. Actually, she financed the trip by gifting me a substantial pile of backpacker gear I could take on the bike rather than our 6-person cabin tent that honestly requires two people to set up.

Pictured above, we see the Vulcan stacked with a bunch of stuff. The neon-green thing is a new tent, the black thing with yellow stripes on the other saddlebag is a chair, and on the very back is a cooler backpack (more on that later). The Dufflebag of Holding on the passenger seat holds:

January 20th, 2021.

Inauguration Day.

Thus begins the reign of the 46th President of the United States, Joseph Robinette Biden jr.

Thankfully, with no bloodshed. No masses of idiots storming the Capital (again). No protests. Just an orderly swearing-in ceremony. I give points to (former) Vice President Mike Pence for being a mensch and showing up to the ceremony – as opposed to Dolt 45, who ran off a couple hours before showtime down to Mar-a-Lago with a frown on his face and his tail between his legs.

Now begins the countdown: how many days until the Senate completes the 2nd Impeachment trial? Will they convict and forever ban the schmuck from holding Federal office?

Get your bets in now, pool closes Friday at 5:00pm Pacific.

Meanwhile, I’ll be over here munching popcorn and watching QAnon implode.

I have survived yet another year (your assassins suck, by the way) and this past week I followed my latest tradition and took the week off. Mostly to decompress from the stress of Life in The Apocalypse, but also just ‘cuz it’s my birthday.

And also to get myself a gift. After nearly 20 years of telling myself it would be silly to buy a motorcycle again when due to work and such I would probably only be able to ride it one or two days a week, and that mainly in the summer considering how much rain we get up here (and how badly most drivers deal with it in the ‘Burbs).

This year though, several things came together in a rather nice conglomeration: the car is paid for, my student loans are finished, the Daughter-Unit aged out of support, and we aren’t moving or anything, so the tax returns were in savings rather than having been spent. We’re actually in pretty good shape financially.

(I feel kinda guilty saying that considering how many other people are having problems as I write this, but we’ve worked hard to get where we are and I’ll take whatever luck that brings me.)

Combine that with all the bullshit of 2020, plus work and, well, to paraphrase the Recruiter in Deadpool, “I finally hit fuck it.”

This is the result:

This being 2020 and all, however, means that things just won’t go smoothly. The Vulcan was not my first choice – that honor went to a Suzuki Boulevard S50 in silver paint that mysteriously disappeared from the dealership the day before I went to look at it. I almost bought a Honda Shadow 800 while I was there (signed the paperwork and everything), but my Credit Union didn’t like their numbers enough to push back on it, and I realized that while it was a good bike, it really wasn’t the one I wanted so I backed out.

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