Diary of a Wolfeman

9:30am. Breakfast with the lovely Illyana at Holman’s. (A great little dive, by the way; you should check it out on a day when I’m not going to be there – I like it quiet.)

11:30am. Left the restaurant and called my insurance company – and got the “please call back during business hours” message. I called back again, and this time impersonated a clinic and got into the automated system, which then confirmed I am eligible for lenses and frames; no idea on the value thereof. Went to the mall.

Noon. Saleslady confirmed that I indeed have a hardware credit available and priced things out for me – both sets of frames I chose fell under the coverage limit, but the lens options I wanted would bring the total up to $169. Money well-spent, I figure. It’ll take 10 days to get them though.

Crap.

This is where I give some mad points to Binyon’s: they offered to give me a pair of “loaner” lenses to use until my ordered lenses come in. This is extremely cool, because it involved them throwing away a set of basic lenses – it’s not like anyone else will have my exact ‘scrip, so they won’t be able to re-use the lenses.

So, either they are very cool about this, or the lenses and two hours’ worth of technician time to grind and fit them is really a lot cheaper than they want us to think it is. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt this time and say they’re cool.

Noon to 2:00pm. Wandered ’round the mall killing time while Binyon’s built my glasses.

2:00pm. Picked up my new glasses. I be stylin’ now. Once my eyes get used to the change in ‘scrip, I’ll be able to see a little better. Now time to vacate the mall because I have spent far too long there for one day.

5:00-8:00pm. Office Holiday Party at Uptown Billiards. Food was good, table arrangement in the party room is still poor – one of the pool tables is pushed too far to one side to allow for a dartboard, and wouldn’t you know it, half our group ended up hanging out on the narrow side of the room and were constantly being asked to step aside for a pool shot. I expect a little better out of a pool hall. The Boss stole all of my blackjack mojo, and I ended up just breaking even this year.

Saturday needed help, but the weekend turned out ok.

9:30am. Got up to get breakfast (yay for Lazy!)

10:30am. Some light shopping, got the car washed, stopped at Wendy’s for a quick bite.

1:30pm. Discovered I had missed getting into the bank by 31 minutes.

Damn.

Continue shopping.

3:00pm. Get home, pull shades off of glasses and notice that the left arm is out of position. Inspect carefully, left arm of glasses falls off.

Crap.

Run upstairs, make calls. My regular eye doctor is booked, but I can sneak into Binyon’s at the mall at 4:00, and they take my insurance. Print new insurance card and run to appointment.

6:00pm. Sales lady at Binyon’s informs me that my insurance company’s servers are down, so they have no idea what the dollar amount of my benefits are, please try back tomorrow.

Fuck!

On the good-news side of all this is the fact that my current glasses are frameless with super-light lenses, so I can still wear them with only one arm, provided I don’t move my head too quickly.

Been busy on a project over at the other blog. Check it out!

This makes me happy.

[Judge Emory A.] Pitt wrote: “Those of us who are public officials and are entrusted with the power of the state are ultimately accountable to the public. When we exercise that power in public fora, we should not expect our actions to be shielded from public observation. ‘Sed quis custodiet ipsos cutodes’ (“Who watches the watchmen?”).”

Thank you, Your Honor, for having the intelligence and wisdom to see to the heart of this matter. May all of your brothers and sisters of the black robe agree with you.

Have you ever had an argument – with yourself? And lost? Ahh, the joys of mild schizophrenia.

Here I am, already a JOAT (Jack Of All Trades) with enough varied interests to skin a cat, and here I am wanting to start up yet another hobby – and an expensive one, at that.

Well, expensive if I do it the way I want to, anyhow…

Lately I seem to have caught a bit of the blacksmithing bug, and have been doing a lot of reading online and watching various training videos on the subject. I’ve learned some good stuff (someone finally made a nice vid of an actual Japanese master bladesmith constructing a katana) and gotten a little frustrated by not being able to go out to the garage and pound something with a hammer.

Something tells me the city might complain if I built a forge on the sidewalk…

Got a letter from a lawyer’s office today, which is always a bit freaky. “what the hell did I do?” you think to yourself.

It turns out, it was more of what I didn’t do. Apparently, in 2004, I was supposed to have paid $9 in income tax and didn’t. (News to me, I have no recollection of 2004 at all). So, since I was so late with it, they added a $10 penalty.

And hired a legal firm to collect.

Now, it probably took said legal officers about 15 minutes to set up an account in their system for me, print out the letter, hand-address an envelope, run it through the postage meter and then drop it in the OUT box. With my understanding of the average legal fees, that probably cost the county $25 to collect $19.

Oh, wait, make that $18, there’s a discount for paying online. I hope the County gets a bulk discount for the other 20,000 people that owe them 10 bucks.

Okay, I understand that the legal firm is probably only charging the County a percentage of the funds collected, but still. It seems kind of a silly way to go about it, since the County could just as easily have tasked an intern with calling or mailing people to let them know they owe something before sending them to collections.

Cuz really – 6 years, and this is the first I’ve heard of it? Oi.

We’ve been missing camping since we haven’t been doing SCA stuff this year, so we decided to head out to a regular ol’ campground for a few days to get at least one use out of the tent this year.

We ended up choosing Lazy Bend Campground on the Clackamas River because:

1. It was available for reservations – I hate the stress of walk-up camping
2. It has flush toilets. Every other camp in Oregon has vault-type toilets, which are amazingly somehow worse than a porta-john.

There was also an entry in a guidebook saying how the camp was far enough away from the road that you wouldn’t be able to hear passing traffic, and that the site rated an 8 or 9 out of 10 for scenic qualities.

They lied about the road.

Really, either that or they managed to get all of their notes out of order when they sat down to write up their review. The highway is only between 25 and 75 feet away from all the sites in the camp, and a few of them are visible directly from the road which gets traffic at all hours, including semi trucks. The saving grace for about half of the sites is that the river is also really loud due to the rocky shallows it passes through and it drowns out the traffic.

There was another bummer in that we were hoping to get some swimming in, but the river is low, fast and rocky at that point (not to mention bone-jarringly cold) so that wasn’t an option. Promontory Park is about a mile down the road though, so you can drive down there if you feel like leaving the site.

The biggest disappointment for me, however, was arriving on-site just past check-in time to discover that not only had someone screwed up the reservation cards attached to each campsite, the Camp Hosts had changed their days off and were not in attendance. Tolerant and I were forced to drive the 10 miles back to Estacada to get a signal and make a few calls. We did eventually get things figured out, but it took until the next morning to finalize the arrangements and could have gone much easier if the Camp Host wasn’t such a crotchety old coot.

Thankfully, Tolerant and I were accompanied by one of our best pairs of friends, and we still managed to get a fair amount of fun packed into an extended weekend. We’re going to plan farther ahead for next year and reserve a site early at one of the really popular sites like Detroit Lake where we know they’ll have all the amenities we’re looking for.

What the Hell – Da Roomie did it, I may as well follow along. He told me to use the letter “O”, since I am such an Oingo Boingo fan.

1. If you’d like to play along, reply to this post and I’ll assign you a letter.
2. You then list (and upload or link to the video, if you feel like it) 5 songs that start with that letter.
3. Then, as I’m doing here, you’ll post the list to your journal with the instructions.

On with the meme, then..

1. One Little Victory – Rush
   …because Neil’s octopus impression is just hard to beat. (No link, as there are no official videos, just crappy bootlegs.)
2. One Vision – Queen
   Originally found on the Iron Eagle soundtrack, it always makes me think of fast jets.
3. Only Happy When It Rains – Garbage
   Redhead with a Scottish accent for the win.
4. Owner of a Lonely Heart – Yes
   Indeed, I am a child of the 80’s, and I can remember staying up late to watch Friday Night Videos when this particular video first came out. (Wow, I found the actual video for this one.)
5. One Love – Prodigy
   This is a dangerous song for me to be listening to when I drive, but it is a truly essential part of me proving to the rest of the morning commuters just how good I am at doing physics on the fly. (Hmm, gap in traffic ahead – if I increase speed by 12% within the next 10 seconds, I should be able to squeeze through with a foot to spare, which will set me up for passing that damn minivan…)

Somehow I managed not to include any Boingo in there…

To: the jerk down the street who was setting off mortars until the wee hours:

Learn how to fucking reload!

Honestly, if you had been able to fire those 5 or ten or however-many mortar shots you had in a reasonable succession, I would have been able to wait you out and then fall asleep. But No! You had to be the world’s slowest artillerist and only fire one about every 15 minutes, so just about the time I’d be drifting off, there’d be another *whump*… **boom!** knocking me back into wakefulness.

Combine this with the idiot that honks his horn outside my house every might around 10:15p, and I’m about ready to build some self-contained, automated paintball rifle emplacements on the power poles. Let’s see how long it goes on after the first 1000 rounds of neon pink paint.

Step 1: Purchase / acquire the Microsoft E-Learning courses #6320 – #6324. Study them carefully, expecting them to contain all of the information required to pass the exam. They are, after all, provided by Microsoft for this very reason.

Step 2: Schedule and take the exam. Answer the questions. Miss the questions they ask regarding installing Hyper-V onto a Server 2008 Core installation, because the bloody study guide never mentions how to do this.

That’s right – the entire “Installation” section a complete failure because I had never seen these commands, which they asked about three times:

To view the list of software updates and check if any are missing, at the command prompt, type:

wmic qfe list

If you do not see “kbid=950050”, download the Hyper-V updates and then type the following command at a command prompt:

wusa.exe Windows6.0-KB950050-x64.msu /quiet

There are three update packages. After you install the updates, you must restart the server. The Update for Windows Server 2008 x64 Edition (KB 950050) and Language Pack for Hyper-V (KB951636) must be installed on the parent partition of the Server Core installation.

Hyper-V role

To install the Hyper-V role, at a command prompt, type:

start /w ocsetup Microsoft-Hyper-V

To manage Hyper-V on a Server Core installation, use the Hyper-V management tools to manage the server remotely. These tools are available for Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista Service Pack 1.

*NOTE* – the above is for early releases of Server 2008. The R2 version has everything included, so all you need is the final ocsetup command.

Well, it wasn’t a total waste of a test. I was the first guy in the office to take the test, so I got to warn the others to study further afield and the next guy passed it.

I don’t know why I didn’t expect this, considering they asked me about Exchange clustering in a SBS exam.