Diary of a Wolfeman

For many years, I have been perfecting ways to compare computers to cars, since most of my clients know nothing about the magic box under their desk, but they usually know at least a little something about your average car – you change the oil, replace the tires, take it in for a tune-up, that sort of thing. Recently, a similar thought struck me about cell phones – specifically, smart phones – that compares rather well to certain brands of performance cars:

The iPhone is a Porsche 911

Think about it: back in 1963, Porsche unveiled the 911, and it has been in continuous production ever since, with only incremental changes. Tweak a little here, update the technology behind that thing over there, and roll it out onto the dealer lot with a minor incremental change in the type number. Porsche loves the 911 so much, that it can be argued rather well that in fact it is the only car they make, considering that the other models look more like they took a 911 through a funhouse and took pictures of the reflections in the funny mirrors than as car designs in their own right. (That’s right, Panamera, I’m looking at you…)

Well, we have the same thing with the iPhone. Any changes to the iPhone in each generation have been merely incremental tweaks – a slight change to a curve here, a slightly updated processor there, just enough to make sure that the end-users don’t think they are stagnating and not moving forward with the times. iOS compares rather straight across to the venerable rear-engine Boxer arrangement found in the 911 – which was air-cooled until 1998.

So, if the iPhone is a Porsche, then the other major brands can be equated to BMW, Audi, Mercedes and the like. While the iPhone sticks to that rear-engine Boxer, the other brands put the engine in front with Android, using a number of different engine configurations, body styles, performance packages and trim levels. Everything from zippy little two-seaters (your humble feature phones) up to massively overpowered station wagons that you can’t fit into your garage pocket (Samsung Galaxy Note).

Now, don’t get me wrong – the Porsche 911 and the iPhone it compares to are both capable machines – but sometimes, you have to wonder if maybe the designers have taken what was a good thing and dragged it out too long. While the other major players have been out there innovating and developing and taking risks with design, the iPhone has been playing the same song. With the release of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, it’s really playing catch-up with the other guys.

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.