Diary of a Wolfeman

Took the Daughter Unit and her Bestie out for archery at the Washington Park field this morning and found two unexpected things:

First, Washington Park has put in parking meters everywhere, and it now costs $1.60 an hour to park. Still way cheaper than going to one of the indoor ranges, so it’s not a terrible hardship, just an unexpected cost.

Second: the filed gets ridiculously muddy in winter. I had no idea, as it was never this bad during the rainy parts of last summer, but apparently over the winter the place becomes nigh-unusable. There needs to be some ditch work done along the edges to allow the water table to sink lower.

So, have my skills atrophied any over the winter? Not noticeably. Of course, with that batch of arrows, it’s difficult to tell. I’ll need to do some additional repair work though, as one of my arrowheads decided to permanently reside inside a hay bale. Au revoir, my arrowhead.

Took about ten days in a row off from work for sanity – just coolin’ my heels around the house and whatnot, relax, let my guard down… and get sick about halfway through.

Yay.

So the Wife hands me a magazine this evening with a full-page picture spread of the “Best Camping Gear”, and I’m flipping through the list and trying not to hit the floor with my jaw. (There’s cat hair down there, tastes awful.)

Item the First: a “Restored” hatchet. Some yokel was digging out his barn apparently and found a hatchet head, so he wanders over to the bench grinder, cleans it up and shoves a new handle into it. “Not bad,” he says to hisself, “I should sell this. Mebbe even put up a page on them thar In-tar-webs…”

The website, I must admit, is a Hipster trap par excellance. It’s barely there – just a picture of one of their ‘restored’ (read: rusted to shit and re-ground then polished with WD-40) axes stuck in a stump with a “coming Soon” legend in the corner. So, what do they want for the hatchet? $165. ONE HUNDRED SIXTY-FIVE FUCKING DOLLARS. A buddy of mine has one looks just like it, he got it for $10 at Freddy’s, works like a charm. The things I could get for $165… like:

Item the Second: a three-legged folding stool with a leather seat. No design on the leather, just dyed a pleasant tan with three chunks of broomstick and a carrying strap. Guess how much. Yep – another $165. I thought it was ludicrous, because I’ve seen kits to make the same idea for less than $30, so I went looking for one. Didn’t find a kit, but I did find another stool for sale – only this time, they REALLY loved it, because they want TWO HUNDRED SEVENTY-FIVE FUCKING DOLLARS. $2!7!5!

If I could make and sell 5 of those a week I’d be set. Hell, I could sell the cheaper one 7 times a week and do just fine indeed.

If you need me, I’ll be in the garage.

Back in the early 90’s when I lived in ‘Vegas, a few of us were hanging out in Cafe Copioh drinking coffee and playing cards when we met a girl.

She was a bit shy, but had been watching us play cards for a bout 20 minutes when we dealt her in. Due to her long and tightly-curled Henna-tinted hair, she eventually picked up the name Fraggle, (referenced as lady D in this post) which fit her very well once we got her laughing. Once we got her laughing, the shyness went away and we had a good deal of fun. Everyone did, really – you could hear her laughing from down the block :)

Over the next year, she became a regular at our table and our various apartment gatherings, and she eventually hooked up with the Barbarian and we all moved into The Townhouse. She was a perfect example of why race-car drivers shouldn’t teach normal people how to drive. She had the skills to drive at speed – on a track. On the street, she was terrifying to behold. Just ask anyone on the sidewalk in her vicinity.

Life moved along. The EMC and I got hitched, and not long after The Fraggle married the Barbarian, bought a house, had kids. later she divorced the Barbarian because he developed a severe case of idiocy. A few years later she got together with and married one of our other crew members from the Cafe days. That guy turned out to be another sufferer of the idiocy gene, and was she arranging to divorce him. That was last month.

Unfortunately, the Universe had other plans for her. The Fraggle had a rather screwed-up metabolism that brought her no end of grief through the years, and earlier this week she succumbed to a heart attack.

The world will never again hear her flip her head open and laugh so loud the folks next door wonder what the hell was so damn funny.

When I was a child, somewhere around 3rd grade, my avid-outdoors-man stepfather managed to get something right and brought me home a child’s archery set – a lightweight fiberglass bow, a handful of arrows and a hay bale. I got pretty good at it, but it was yet another hobby that I fell out of practice in and it went by the wayside.

Some time ago, the leader of our SCA household expressed a desire for the whole household to get more involved in the SCA events that we went to, and archery was brought up as something several of us could pick up. When my daughter mentioned that she would like to do an archery camp of some sort this summer break, it seemed like a perfect opportunity for me to get back into that game as well.

After several trips to various on-line and physical archery shops, we’ve acquired the requisite gear. For my daughter, I went with a modern take-down wood recurve bow. The junior leagues aren’t that picky about what they shoot (so long as it isn’t a compound bow), so I figured it might be better for her to get a solid start with semi-modern gear and then move into the period stuff. We shot several before she decided upon a draw weight that felt right to her, and then she topped it off with a dozen purple-fletched arrows.

For myself, I found a good deal on woodbows.com and got myself a nice linen-backed Red Oak longbow, and spent a couple hours putting together the shooting kit I need. Longbows shoot off the knuckle, so I need protection for the left hand and the right fingers, plus an arm guard. The quiver will come later.

Having put all that together, I took it out today and spent a couple hours flinging arrows theoretically at a target; reality was more of “shoot at the wall and try hopelessly to hit the target”. English longbows, it seems take quite a lot of tuning in and getting used to. The string, for instance, will stretch a lot – I had to twist it up shorter twice during the session, and that has probably got the knock point a bit off by this point. Which doesn’t matter quite so much, because I’ll be pulling that off to “serve” the string. (“Serving” is the process of wrapping the bowstring in a different type of string at the point where you pull it.)

Still, I think I did make some progress today – or at least, I really hope I did, considering the chunk of skin I scraped off my finger and the three arrows that broke in the process. (The tips decided to stay in the target when the shafts came free.)

Stay tuned for further developments.

Those of you that know me may remember that I had a nasty eye infection a couple years ago that left me wearing an eye patch for weeks because my right eye was so sensitive to everything. The side-effects of that infection were the iris actually sticking to the lens (which meant it didn’t dilate correctly) and the creation of a cataract.

Many months later after I had grown used to but still annoyed with the situation, my eye doctor mentioned that someday I should get the cataract removed. I asked her when “someday” was, and she blinked for a sec and said “well, I don’t suppose there’s any reason to wait.”

I asked her who she would trust her eyes to, and she immediately handed me a card for Dr. James Wentzien, whom she described as “a rock-star ophthalmologist” and we set up the usual series of consults and preps.

Fast-forward to this morning, when the wife and I went in for the actual surgery appointment. We arrived what we thought would be way early, but they pulled us in within just a few minutes and started hooking me up to carious wires, pumps, monitors and whatnot.

As a warning to everyone else, don’t have any OJ before you go in. It is not on the list of allowed fluids before a surgery, and the nurses will give you endless crap about it without ever telling you why it’s such a big deal.

More bad news: an I.V. was installed. The good news: I.V.s are no longer actual needles requiring the nurse to strap a board to your arm with miles of tape, but rather a catheter-like flexible tube that lets you move around. Much more comfortable.

About 20 minutes of poking, prodding and OJ-related (but good-natured) harassment was followed by about 15 minutes of careful breathing as I tried to remain calm enough to not need any Quaaludes to keep my blood pressure down, and then a second set of nurses arrived to disconnect all the wires and wheel me back into the OR.

It’s funny, but every single person you talk to before going in for an eye surgery will ask you your name, birthdate and which eye they will be working on. Some people find that annoying; I for one am quite cool with making damn sure you get something like this right. Same thing in the OR – the doc called out the plan and parts required, the nurses repeated it all back as they pulled from stock. Very reassuring to a details guy.

As for the procedure itself, it’s kinda freaky, but thankfully over pretty quickly. Mine took a little longer than standard due to having to cut the iris away from the old lens, but it still only took about 15 minutes total – which was about three minutes short of how long I could go without screaming because someone was fucking with my eye. Which was very good, because I really didn’t want to scream at the guy who had itty-bitty tools stuck in my eye.

Priorities, man. Priorities.

In the process of the lens removal, I was treated to some very pretty blue lens flares, followed by a soothing yellow tint-and-flare as the new lens was installed. Once it flattened out, the blue was back in the form of an ‘X’, like two Hollywood-style searchlights crossing the beams with a blue filter on the light. The ‘X’ criss-crossed itself and then disappeared as Dr. W. aligned the lens correct to vertical. A few more adjustments and a wash, and I was out in post-op getting instructions on after-care. (And drinking more OJ – heh).

From this point, the plan is a couple of post-op appointments over the next couple weeks as my eye settles down, and then new glasses toward the end of the month. Currently, my vision is improved in that the fog is gone and I’ve got a round pupil again, but I’m still coming back from the numbing drops so I can’t focus much in the right eye. Still a solid improvement over before.

The best part, of course, is the Roy Orbison impression I do with the huge sunglasses they gave me.

You’ve installed Office 2010, but when you try and activate it you get an error “Please try again later (0x8007000D)”

Click on Start, then right-click on Computer and choose Properties. In the next window, click on Device Manager. If this opens an empty window, follow this procedure:

1. Log on to the machine as a local machine admin (<computername>\administrator)
2. Run Regedit as Administrator
3. Expand HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Enum
4. Right-click on Root and choose Permissions
5. Click Advanced, then Ownership tab, and take ownership as your current user name. “OK” out of property windows.
6. Go back into Permissions and on the rights tab grant Full to Everyone, click OK
7. Follow the instructions here: http://www.fixkb.com/2012/03/error-0x8007000d-when-activating-office-2010.html

With any luck, Office will now activate.

Repair install of Server 2008

Remember the ‘repair install’ option from Server 2003? Well, they renamed it (along with everything else) in Server 2008. Here’s the new method:

Boot from OS install disk

Select next after making sure the language options are correct.
Select Repair option
Select CMD
CD into recovery
Type Dir
Run the StartRep.exe command in the list.

That should do a basic repair to the OS. It will search out, discover and repair many things – like a corrupted/missing partition table. You may need to run it twice. Not sure why, but it took two tries to fix my corrupted partition table.

Moving your UPS WorldShip database

It used to be moving this around required a whole bunch of mayhem. Now, just move/copy/whatever, then go to the workstation(s) and click Start-Run wstdupswship.ini and edit the path to the new location. Viola.

If you’re not using the SharePoint site in your SBS network, there’s no need to clutter up the desktop with links to the Internal site. Here’s how you can remove this little annoyance:

1. Open the Group Policy Management console and navigate to Group Policy Objects – Windows SBS User Policy. Go to the Details tab and make note of the Unique ID. (Should look like {767E4A4B-9CA6-40A2-BE97-2E52F0B7FDD9} )
2. Open Explorer and navigate to %windir%\sysvol\sysvol\%userdnsdomain%\Policies and from there into the folder corresponding to the ID you found previously.

3. In that folder, navigate on to User\SBS\ and then open GP.xml in your favorite editor (as Administrator, of course.)

4. Comment out both lines that start with “<ShortCutLink” by surrounding them
   with “<!--“ and  “–>” , then save the file. This stops the GPO from reproducing the shortcuts on the desktop and adding them to favorites.

5. Add the following line to your login script:
   DEL “%USERPROFILE%\Desktop\Internal Web site.lnk”
   This deletes it from the desktop at login.

Thank you, Microsoft, for making something that should be very easy annoyingly difficult.

It’s been a while – time for a little rant.

Portland is known far and wide across the land for their progressive take on public and alternative transportation. Those of you that live or visit here know that the city is quite proud of it’s Pro-Bicycle stance and the things they have done to make things easier for bicyclists.

What they have not done, however, is sat all the damn bikers down and explained to them the laws actually governing their use on public roadways. This has gotten to the point that your average bicyclist thinks that none of the regular traffic laws apply to them. You want to know what the absolute rarest sight in Portland is? A cyclist stopping at a stop sign.

So, without further ado, this page lists all of the ordinances that exist in regards to riding a bicycle on public streets and sidewalks. I’ll be going through the most important ones to explain and amplify.

814.400 Application of vehicle laws to bicycles. (1) Every person riding a bicycle upon a public way is subject to the provisions applicable to and has the same rights and duties as the driver of any other vehicle concerning operating on highways, vehicle equipment and abandoned vehicles (minor exception follows).

(2) Subject to the provisions of subsection (1) of this section:

(a) A bicycle is a vehicle for purposes of the vehicle code; and
(b) When the term “vehicle” is used the term shall be deemed to be applicable to bicycles.

What this means to you: You must obey ALL traffic laws (not just the ones you want) and you must stop at all stop signs and red lights (California Rolls are not allowed.) Most importantly, the Oregon Driver’s Manual clearly states for motorcycles and mopeds that a full stop is defined as ceasing all motion and putting a foot down on the ground. Don’t do that wobbly shit where you try to balance on the pedals, and for fuck’s sake, if I have to sit my car at the light until it turns green, then so the fuck do you.

If any biker ever saw a car pulling the same stunts they do in traffic, the biker would be appalled and calling the driver all sorts of interesting names. Same thing goes both ways assholes, and every time I see you sailing through a red light with barely a glance or a break in stride, I want to go home and mount paintball guns on my car so I can hose you down.

814.420: Failure to use bicycle lane or path; exceptions; penalty.

(1) Except asprovided in subsections (2) and (3) of this section, a person commits the offense of failure to use a bicycle lane or path if the person operates a bicycle on any portion of a roadway that is not a bicycle lane or bicycle path when a bicycle lane or bicycle path is adjacent to or near the roadway.

What this means to you: This is very simple, and they list some reasonable exceptions. Basically, if you aren’t avoiding an obstacle or preparing to make a turn to the far side of the street, then keep your ass in the bike lane. The City/County/State Department of Transportation spent good taxpayer money to mark out those bike lanes, and the rest of us taxpayers expect you to use them.

This next one really pisses me off, because they’ve gone and misquoted the law on a bumper sticker. The sticker says “Bicycles Allowed Full Lane ORS 814.430(2)(c)”. Well the “(2)(c)” is the small section of the law they’re quoting, but the ORS in question reads:

814.430: Improper use of lanes; exceptions; penalty.

(1) A person commits the offense of improper use of lanes by a bicycle if the person is operating a bicycle on a roadway at less than the normal speed of traffic using the roadway at that time and place under the existing conditions and the person does not
ride as close as practicable to the right curb or edge of the roadway.

(2) A person is not in violation of the offense under this section if the person is not operating a bicycle as close as practicable to the right curb or edge of the roadway under any of the following circumstances:

(a) When overtaking and passing another bicycle or vehicle that is proceeding in the same direction.
(b) When preparing to execute a left turn.
(c) When reasonably necessary to avoid hazardous conditions including, but not limited to, fixed or moving objects, parked or moving vehicles, bicycles, pedestrians, animals, surface hazards or other conditions that make continued operation along the right curb or edge unsafe or to avoid unsafe operation in a lane on the roadway that is too narrow for a bicycle and vehicle to travel safely side by side. Nothing in this paragraph excuses the operator of a bicycle from the requirements under ORS 811.425 or from the penalties for failure to comply with those requirements.
(d) When operating within a city as near as practicable to the left curb or edge of a roadway that is designated to allow traffic to move in only one direction along the roadway. A bicycle that is operated under this paragraph is subject to the same requirements and exceptions when operating along the left curb or edge as are applicable when a bicycle is operating along the right curb or edge of the roadway.
(e) When operating a bicycle alongside not more than one other bicycle as long as the bicycles are both being operated within a single lane and in a manner that does not impede the normal and reasonable movement of traffic.
(f) When operating on a bicycle lane or bicycle path.

Ahh, so the revised statute in fact deals with the penalties of improper lane use! Subsection 2 paragraph ‘C’ there clearly states (in conjunction with the main paragraph) that you are allowed to use more of the lane when avoiding an obstacle – which is understandable. But go back up to the beginning, and the statute starts out saying that if you are bicycling slower than other vehicle traffic, you need to be riding close to the curb, not slowing down the whole lane.

And don’t forget the reference to ORS 811.425 – the full title of that one is “Failure of slower driver to yield to overtaking vehicle“. Yep! That’s right folks, if you can’t keep up with normal traffic, get your ass to the curb and let traffic pass you. You DO NOT get to lollygag and slow the rest of us down. Also, if you can’t keep up, you need to get out of the middle lane of those one-way streets Downtown. (Three days in a row I’ve been stuck behind some twat in the wrong gear going half the speed of everyone else while in the exact center of the middle lane.  Going downhill on 4th. Fucker.)

And don’t forget about this guy.

Here’s an easy one to wrap up:

814.440: Failure to signal turn

This one is as typically long-winded as the others, but the gist is simple: you are supposed to signal for 100 feet before a turn or stop – even if you are stopping for a red light or a stop sign. I have seen maybe three bikers EVER who signaled a turn, and only one that signaled a stop.

So, all you bikers out there: you want a safe road to ride on? You want to stop worrying so much about getting clipped by a car? Then stop riding like assholes and follow the laws. You are NOT a special and unique snowflake, and riding a bicycle does NOT mean that you get to do whatever you want.

Oh, and you pedestrians out there, I don’t want you to feel left out – you’ll get your own rant in a day or so.