Diary of a Wolfeman

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.

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Stuck at home? Need to burn a few hours a day? I’ve got a couple entertaining games for you.

Cat Quest

Reminiscent of all those old SNES games that I never played because of tiny town origins, this is a happy little run-around-and-smack-everything game with just enough plot to keep things moving.

It is also chock-a-block with cuteness and cat puns. The wife says the sequel is a good buy as well.

HOB

I also missed out on MYST and similar games when they came out, and if you like puzzles, dramatic vistas, and don’t mind losing a few hours of sleep due to “I just need one more butterfly”-itis, then HOB is a game for you.

The scenery is just gorgeous, and the team created several spectacular vistas for you to “collect” (there’s a special game mechanic for ‘stand on this spot and press X to check out this view!’).

Like the classic platformers, you spend most of the game running around and jumping from various bits of scenery to others, missing, falling flat on your face and respawning to go at it again.

I tend to play games kinda linearly, but this one kind of lends itself to wandering off on side quests without messing up the story. I actually stopped at the pre-boss save point to go back and collect stuff I had missed.

Well worth the money.

Charge those controller batteries and go forth!

Since one of the functions of a blog is to serve as a bit of a diary, I will jot down the following merely to place it in my personal narrative timeline if nothing else.

We moved last weekend. Just a couple miles up the road to Greyduck & Vyx’s complex, but in the process we crossed over the main East-West corridor of the area, which means one less traffic obstacle on the way to work. We also have a larger apartment now, on the second floor – which has already done wonders for foot comfort since we don’t have a concrete subfloor any longer. Lastly, we have a garage now, with enough room for the Outback and a small workbench plus storage area. That will make dying jobs simpler.

As part of moving, we also decided to treat ourselves a bit, and for the first time in nearly a dozen years we have an actual adult-style bed – with a headboard! Amazing! As an extra-special treat, I opted to replace the TV for a number of eminently logical reasons, (one of which is “cuz I wanna!” Really, the other one was too small for the area now, and very picky about viewing angles) and that will make for happier viewing. The new sound bar to go with it shows much promise.

The most specialest thing to happen this month, however, may be the simplest of all: I made the last and final payment to my student loans.

Twenty-seven freaking YEARS to pay that shit off. Those of you out there in similar conditions, my advice is always pay extra, even if it’s only a buck. Every penny over minimum you pay is a penny they can’t charge interest on, and it adds up.

On the downside of the newsfeed, the doctors tell me I have mildly high blood pressure, and the damage to my pancreas in my youth has finally caught up to a diagnosis of low-end diabetes. Both appear to be treatable with simple pills and some better dietary and exercise habits, so that’s good news.

And that catches us all up. G’night!

The Couch (ok, futon) of many years and at least one major rebuild has finally succumbed to the ravages of time and my notably fat keister. Note the stack of phone books, which I have kept specifically for the purpose of supporting the center, which is prone to sagging.

(Everyone on-deck to disassemble)

Long live the new Couch!

(Wasabi approved. Dig the hex pattern on the throws, that was my contribution.)

Shout-out to Christopher at Hollywood Furniture who helped us with the customizing process of this couch from Stanton Sofas here in Oregon. (Keeping my economy local when I can). Nice folks, very helpful and patient.