The Return of The Site
I shuttered this site in early 2020 for personal reasons. Having found myself in need of an outlet, and a place to keep random thoughts and information, I decided to revive it.
I shuttered this site in early 2020 for personal reasons. Having found myself in need of an outlet, and a place to keep random thoughts and information, I decided to revive it.
This time last year, I’d just discovered I had a bone tumor in my left tibia. I’d been scheduled to fly to Florida for surgery to occur a year ago next week – a surgery that would wind up being just a biopsy because the tumor contents would appear atypical. I’d spend the next two weeks in Florida with a leg brace while my biopsy was shipped to various centers around the United States to try to determine whether or not it was cancerous, and what kind of tumor it was. It would be in the top 5 longest days, and nights, of my life.
Winter is coming. I can feel it in, well, my knee.
I find myself wondering, still, if it’s ever going to feel ‘normal’ again. Not stiff. Not tight. Not sore. Not tender. Not fragile. Not half numb. Because as of right now, it’s still all of those things. It’s almost nonsensical how susceptible it is to pain. The other day I was moving a cabinet in our garage and its door swung open and hit my knee right where the hardware is – and it was like lightning shooting through my leg. It was an impact that would have gone unnoticed on my other knee.
In the months immediately following surgery I was frustrated and frightened, wondering if I’d ever be able to walk normally again. Would I be able to bike? Hike? Run? Walk without a limp?
Huge strides have been made since then. I can bike and hike, albeit not for as far or as long as I once could. I still do not run, however, and there are still times when I catch myself limping, subconsciously favoring that leg because it feels stiff or sore or simply because it feels fragile.
We’ve used a variety of third party tools to monitor Active Directory domain account changes. They’ve all either been expensive or kind of sucked (or, unfortunately, both). But if you’re running a relatively new OS on your controller you can use the magick of Powershell to ship you alerts on account changes! Powershell can monitor the local Security Event Log on your controller and ship you an email when events matching your description are entered. Here’s an example Powershell script:
Easily dump to a csv a list of your scheduled tasks:
schtasks /query /FO CSV /V >sched_tasks.csv
My son’s first loose tooth was *that close* to coming out, and we wanted something special to give him for it. We’re not the type to start introducing money just yet. We’re still fostering his creativity and imagination. He has the rest of his life to covet the almighty dollar – why not give him as much time as possible without that soul sucking force?
So I bought a nice piece of walnut from a woodworking store, borrowed the neighbors band saw, and made this Tooth Fairy box.
I hand sanded it and rubbed the whole thing down with a beeswax finish to give it that deep color. Within there’s a slot to place the tooth:
…which the Fairy replaces with a magic bead to be used in crafting. That circle you see is the remains of my attempt to fuse the top and bottom on a swivel dowel. I was unhappy with the results, so I lopped it apart, sanded it all down, and bought the hinge and clasp at the local hardware store. I like the result much better than the dowel idea.
I’m pleased with it as a first attempt. I really want my next house to have a proper workshop so I can begin to slowly amass all the fun tools I’d like to have for projects like this.
Some wonderful people gave us this ancient, indestructible White sewing machine/treadle.
We got it tuned up and it’s ready to roll. We found the crumbling manual in one of its drawers. After searching in vain for a digital copy of it, I scanned what we have. I love the art in these old manuals:
The entire manual, such as it is, can be downloaded here in PDF format.
To enable QWERTY your Nuvi 1200, plug it into your computer, head to Keyboards, open the appropriate file in a text editor (in my case, en_US.kbd), find line:
<group name=”QWERTY” priority=”1″ wide_screen_only=”true”>
and change it to
<group name=”QWERTY” priority=”1″ wide_screen_only=”false”>
1823 Winchester. Great, established intown neighborhood.
computer · web · infrastructure · server · soup · nuts
“They say the bigger the headache, the bigger the pill!” – Parliament – Dr. Funkenstein
Over 20 years of experience in all facets of Information Technology at your disposal. Current projects include whitelighttattoo.com, frogstodogs.com, frogstodogsbend.com, bendwaldorf.org, wanderlustball.org and blackhandtattoo.co. Past projects include everything from website design to full medical office IT administration.
What can I do for you? Fix your computer, build your website, configure your network, administer your infrastructure? I’m always looking for interesting new projects. I’m also not opposed to working for trade. What can we do for each other? Just give me a shout and we can chat about it.