7 months at Dunwich Abbey: A State of the Fox post

Ugg, I've been productive today, and now I'm having what's becoming a Tsathoggua Tsathurday tradition, slowly building anxiety and an inability to focus on anything"fun". But, at least I've noticed it, so maybe I can get it under control.

Oh, for the curious, I managed to get the books I keep on my desk reorganized, using a "spice rack" shelving unit to add more room, looks a little weird, but it works. I also finally got the printer I bought months ago setup, plugged in, and configured. Lexmark color laser thingie. (People who know me know I dislike working with printers because they are...quirky, especially with linux). Simple config, seems to just work. Oh, and got packages, spicy Latin phrases, pins from a Kickstarter I'd forgotten about, and the bi-yearly journal foo from the Friends of Arthur Machen. (aka amazing levels of book nerdery).

As the subject says, today is 7 months since I moved in, and it's a little past 5 months since I basically went para-hermit. My plans for this place have slowed glacially, but bit by bit things are coming together. The library is just about setup, though nothing is terribly organized. But that will probably take forever, given how easily it is for me to slip into vapor lock right now.

Which will be my segue into the brainmeats. Not much has changed, Same executive dysfunction, distraction, doomscrolling news/social media. But I might be seeing an uptick. I've actually gotten some reading done lately, gotten back into DuoLingo: Latin edition, and even worked on some non work computer geek stuff. I still get the sads at the drop of a hat, and anxiety is everywhere. But I have meds, I'm putting various coping skills to use. One day at a time, one tentacle in front of another.

Other than that...oh yeah, any travel plans I had for this year are gone. The one last thing I wanted to travel for was the HPLFF in Portland. But the folks that run it made the logical/common sense call to make it all online, both festivals. So next weekend is a short fest, to replace the one that would be playing in Providence, and first weekend of October will be the big festival. I'm sad I don't get to be with my fellow Lovecraftians in person, which honestly is the best part of the 'fest. But I'll get my movie fixes, and hopefully we can use technology to get some socializing at a distance done. I'm also taking an little extra PTO for both, so I can be extra chill.

Ok, I got distracted from this post...so I'll go ahead and call it a post. And yeah, I know...two posts in one day. Don't get too excited.

Weekend of Electronic Entropy

This has been the weekend of electronics being a pain in the ass. Come home Thursday night, and my media PC is acting wonky. Can't reach the media drive via NFS. Verified the drive is readable, and NFS is running on Dagon. So I assume something got stuck, NFS is annoying that way, and reboot. Come up with a failed OS drive. Well, damn. Ok, I'd planned to swap it out with Shoggoth, my local network server that doesn't do much. Ok, so I spend my Friday off getting things moved around and hooked up. To find out sound doesn't work. Googling got me either 'use a USB sound card' or 'Sound works fine'. So I go and order a USB sound card that supports Linux with 1 day delivery. Which gets delayed Saturday, so...no media PC. I've watched a bunch of movies on my multi-region bluray player (which I had a frustrating time getting to change region til I remembered the remote control pattern).

I also planned to listen to audiobooks. My normal way to listen is on The Shining Trapezohedron (my phone), using a bluetooth speaker. So of course, what starts having issues ? Yep, the speaker is in flake mode. I verified it wasn't the phone using my bluetooth headset. *grumbles* Again, I have a work around (Audible's website), but it's bloody annoying. I like the bluetooth speaker, because I can wander around the apartment with it while doing chores. Feh.

Also, besides Amazon shipping fail, the post office has delayed two other packages due in Saturday. *sigh* But at least they managed to deliver a book of books from a Kickstarter I funded. Yay new book smell.

Otherwise, it's been a pretty lousy weekend. Not dreaming well, stressed and anxious. The holiday foo is getting to me pretty darn hard. Just have to get through the next 4 weeks. Hoping to have a better 2018. I can dream, after all.

Sleep? What the hell is that?

Rough week. I haven't slept a solid, or even semi-solid night since the weekend. Patching prod Tuesday generated 2 overnight calls, and a similar issue got me called on Wednesday/Thursday night. Last night I didn't get called, however I woke up anyway at 3am. Tried to go back to sleep and failed. Got up around 5am, futzed around, then got a little more sleep. Then I got up, got ready for work, got to work...found out I'd left my badge at home. Without my badge it's kind of difficult to get around Carcosa Corp, so after I drove home to get it, I said screw it and worked from home.

Last night was rough. Finishing up the non-customer facing production servers. And I had more problems with the last 4 servers than the almost 100 other servers. I ended up arguing with Nagios because the new version added weird example templates, creating phantom hosts that obviously were offline. Our cacti install just broke utterly, new version will not work with the old database. And since I didn't want to spend half the night fixing mysql issues, I rolled back to the snapshot I made before patching. (I had a bad feeling, and oh I am so glad I listened to it). *shakes head*

I'm really exhausted right now. I took a nap after I logged out of work, well mostly I just lay there and listening to the white noise generator (beach sounds). Got up again, listening to The Black Stone right now, but I'll be going back to bed soon. This weekend is a social get together tomorrow, and Sunday is probably going to see 'Murder on the Orient Express'. Plus the chores and stuff. Oh, in book news, I picked up something special. Many years ago, my uterine sibling was given a copy of 'The Collected works of Edgar Allan Poe' by a teacher. It was this epic gothic looking book, printed in the mid 20's. It really does look like something you'd read aloud from to summon 'something'. I 'borrowed' it for years, was how I got into Poe, right before I discovered Lovecraft. I eventually gave it back but I always remembered how cool it was. A few weeks ago, I decided to go hunting. All I remembered was the cover, and the approximate time it was published. After a few google searches I had the publisher, and looking on Amazon I found a copy for $20. Needless to say, I bought it. It came in today. And it's in amazing shape for a 90 year old book. Spine is pretty tight, no loose pages, a little browning, but all in all it's just about perfect. So it's sitting with some other treasured books of mine on my desk, next to my epic fancy editions of HPL, and other weirdness.

So that's this week in Vulpineland. Now, I'm going to fiddle around with some things, and probably make it an early night. Ciao.

A week of ups and downs (the ups)

And since we covered the downs a minute ago, here's what's up in Château Innsmouth. Work is going good, busy but good. I'm actually working tonight, prepatch work on our Windows servers before the Corporate Windows group does the actual updates. Unlike last time, I'm probably not staying up to 3am just in case. It's just easier for me to get up early tomorrow and check things. I've also gotten most of my usual chores done. I'm reading a bunch of good books, 'Bond: Unknown' probably the purest form of Spies vs Shoggoths. A history of Pyrrhus of Epirus (where we get the term Pyrrhic victory, among other books. I've been bouncing between subjects, a small lack of focus. So many books, so little time.

(Time passes...)

Chores are done, well done for today. Need to go to the store tomorrow, and I need to put up the dishes once they dry out. Went to pick up some dinner, came home, snagged a quick shower and going for classic Vincent Price movie, since my other picks today were less than spectacular. But I can always count on Vincent Price, especially in period horror flicks.

Windows snapshots are being taken. Not sure what I'm going to do when it's done, and 'Tomb of Ligera' is done. Maybe another classic horror flick, or hide in one of my books. I don't know. Probably go for the movie. Well a movie.

Not much in the way of plans for upcoming stuff. Friend's spawning day party next weekend, but that's about it. Next year I'm hoping to make some changes. A trip or two, probably moving out of Château Innsmouth 1.0 to a bit bigger (and better laid out) apartment. Been snagging pictures of ideas, floorplans and study/library shots. Of course, to be honest, I just need a place for a bed, a closet for clothes, kitchen, bathroom, etc and a desk for the shoggoth wrangling, the rest will probably be bookshelves. That's my style, Late Biblomaniac.

And on that note, I'm running out of words. So I'll catch you next time. *waves a tentacle*

The hits keep on coming

Well, it's been a week. Not a great week. Last weekend I felt lousy, had to miss visiting with a friend in from the Bay Area who I haven't seen in years. *sad fox* Was out sick Monday, everything felt wrong, so I mostly just napped. Work was work, patching before a release on Tuesday, aka how fast can we do this? Pretty darn fast actually. Last night we had emergency patching for Windows servers due to the latest ransomware BS. I hate windows. Slept for crap again last night, and I'm feeling pretty foul today. Stomach is unhappy, lungs are crunchy, and I'm off most of my allergy meds for the testing next week. I'm a mess. Also, my insurance denied my first request for the new depression treatment. Now my doc and my rep are appealing it, and I know for any expensive treatments insurance will push back hard, but emotionally this is a hit. We'll see what happens next week.

So yeah, I'm not doing hot. Mentally/emotionally I'm all over the place. Physically I covered already. At least I have Cthulhu covering the spiritual side of things *wink* Mother's Day is tomorrow, my plan to send out a bunch of mother's day cards to people has been delayed, I just really haven't had the spoons to write cards. Maybe later today/tomorrow. Not thinking too much otherwise about tomorrow...hoping there isn't a ton of emotional foo, I really don't have it in me to cope. So here's to not needing a ton of cope.

Not much else going on. Slowly upgrading my VM horde, at least the Ubuntu ones to 17.04. I need to look at what version of Fedora is default now, I haven't checked in a while. And there's the obvious windows updates. Plus movies, probably going to stick with favorites vs trying to find something new. Can't wait for next weekend and the new 'Alien' movie. I enjoyed 'Prometheus' and 'Alien vs Predator', so I'm pretty sure I'll be a fan.

So, I'll call this a post. Hopefully next week won't be as ick as this last one was, and maybe I'll even make some process into feeling human again. Laters gators.

Horror and the literate Vulpine

Had a good Saturday. Woke up way early, not originally the plan but I had weird dreams and I just wanted to be out of that weirdness. Did the usual Saturday foo (store run, other chores). I was going to leave early to go raid a bookstore and be social with friends, but I ended up dealing with a fiddly database server, so I didn't leave til later than I planned. Not a huge deal, just felt a tad off. Finally did leave, and headed up to the flagship Half Price Books in Dallas. Sold a few DVDs back, as much to clear up space as anything else, besides a few bucks I got a 10% off coupon for my purchases. Useful that. I only picked up 3 books, a bibliography of Lovecraft (it's the older edition, so it's out of date on stuff but still useful), a book called 'The Magick Bookshop', stories about an occult bookshop, and 'Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult', which I've had on my esoterica wishlist for years. Should make for some interesting reading. Well, not the bibliography, that's going to be more for digging into randomly.

After the book raid, I went to visit some friends and watch movies. We ended up shockingly watching horror flicks, well 2 of us did, while a certain raptor played Minecraft. Worked out well, got some puppy time, got to talk geek, was good. Had an amusing conversation with J about horror around the world, and we came to the realization that I've seen a LOT of horror movies from all over. I could rattle off theme differences between Spanish, Italian and French horror, or how Korean horror is what happens when you take Japanese and Hong Kong horror movies, and turn it up to 11. But I couldn't tell you about Vietnamese horror cinema at all, or names for Indian horror flicks (though I'm pretty sure Bollywood has some, and they have musical numbers). We also agreed that the world needs more Middle Eastern horror, and there's probably a ton of African movie makers who will scare the pants off people. (Not just South Africa, but Nigeria and others). So much horror, so little time.

Came home a while ago, watching more horror (Hammer Films). Book time in a while, then hopefully getting to sleep in. A fox can dream at least.

New Year’s Post

Well, it's 2017. New year started, old year in the rearview mirror. The old year wasn't that horrid for me, minus the holiday near meltdown. Job has been good, and good for my coping skills. I wasn't nearly as social as usual this last year, nor have I done as much computer geekery as I used to. Still keeping up with the books and bad movies though.

As is traditional for New Years Day, I've spent today doing the things I want to have happen more of in the new year. So bad movies, buying books, petting cats (doing critter care for some friends that are out of town), sleeping in, and computer geeking. Hoping it leads to good and nifty things.

Last night I went to a comic/geek convention, didn't do much besides some shopping, hanging out with friends, and attempting to go to the 'parties' in the evening. Figured out that I've gotten old. At one I wanted to yell 'Turn that crap down', and at the VIP party I listened to a decent cover band get mangled by lousy sound engineering. I cut out around 11, to avoid the drunks in Dallas, but they were already out in force. Came home, watched the year roll over. I did manage to find the only Cthulhu stuff in the 'con. (A new dice game, that had cool tshirts, and a tshirt vendor who had a HPL shirt that I didn't own), and a movie producer who aims to recreate 50's B movies. So I had to get two. Was fun, but not really my kind of 'con. Nothing on the tracks caught my attention, and most everything was comics or Harry Potter. Oh well, not every convention can be the HPLFF.

Really no plans for tonight, besides continuing with my superstition. I'm off work tomorrow, and I'll spend most of it doing the chores I'm not doing today (laundry, cleaning, store run) Then it's back to work. I don't have any New Years resolutions, I'm weird and do resolutions around my Spawning Day.

So that's about it. I may do a review of 2016, or I may not. All depends on what I get done tomorrow, and how many tentacles I'm left with, along with how much I want to dive into the last year. Might be better to just aim forward. But on that note, hope it's a good year to everyone. Talk to you later.

Weekend Computer Foo

And now we talk about computer foo. last night and today has been more geekery than I've done in a while. Dagon's new monitor is much of the shiny. I've switched to using multiple virtual desktops, scattering various apps that I can reach with with key combos. Here are the desktops and what they're used for.

  • Primus: Web browser and terminal windows, with Alpine (mail), CenterIM5 (IM client), one terminal with a screen session linked to every VM and physical box here at Château Innsmouth, and one for text editing (like this entry).
  • Secondus: Five larger terminal windows in a pattern. Good for sysadmin or coding or stuff. Larger = less eye strain.
  • Teritus: VirtualBox and VMs. This is the problem child, as I start working on a desktop VM, and forget about it with flipping back and forth.
  • Quartus: Misc stuff.

    As I said, it's easy to lose stuff in this setup, but I'm thinking I'll get used to it over time. The new video card in Dagon can support 2 of the big monitors, and I can double up on those cards, so I could upgrade to a 3 monitor rig in the future. Also, Hydra has DP ports as well, so I could split it, 2 on Dagon, 1 on Hydra. Doubt I'll do that anytime soon though, both for cost and the fact the Desk of Doom (tm) isn't sturdy or large enough. So, in the future. Maybe after I pay off the trip to Portland.

    Besides getting things updated and rebooted all the systems. Tried to upgrade Dagon to the latest stable kernel, but no dice, I couldn't make the new monitor play nice, and after 3 or 4 reboots and driver swaps I gave up for now. Hydra and Nyogtha came up fine after general maintenance and reboots, so did the VMs. I then turned my attention to my mini server Shoggoth, which has been offline for a week or so. On advice from my IT guy (yes I have a friend that does most of my hardware foo. I can do it soso, or he can do it right, and he's worth every cent. If you're in DFW, and need a geek, let me know) I popped out the drive, tried to see if it would get past the weird lock. It did. So I put the drive back in, and it booted fine. So I updated it, rebooted, came up fine. So, thinking the SSHD drive in Shoggoth might be flaking, I enabled SMARTD to monitor the drive. So we'll see if it was a fluke or a drive giving up the ghost.

    Now I'm updating the assorted desktop VMs, and fiddling around with other stuff. Been a productive day geekwise. But soon it will be time to wind down and head to bed.
  • A Very Good Day

    Well, this Friday was a good day. Work was pretty good, even with a very long conf call. My mad skills at system monitoring came in handy, as I figured out a quick organization fix for Cacti, and came up with a 'in theory' way under Nagios to alert for processes that A. use 95% of the CPU, and B. last more than 30 min. And I could do it with the built in plugins. I've never DIY'd my own Nagios scripts before, but between my brainmeats and Nagios having good documentation it was a 5 min to have a plan. And since I'm working on a Nagios setup here at Château Innsmouth, I'll test it over the weekend before testing it more on the devel and stage networks at work.

    I also volunteered to help a fellow Lovecraftian in Hungary with a thesis he's doing on HP Lovecraft. He had a ebook copy of Joshi's epic 'I Am Providence', and had about a dozen citations, but he was worried his committee would argue that the citations didn't match the physical page numbers (which I've heard of before). So, I have the 1st edition hardbacks, so he sent me a list of quotations and their chapters and general location, and I verified the page numbers (which were way different than the ebook). Didn't take long, maybe 30 min. Felt good to help another adept of Grandpa Theobald. *gains 2d6% in Library Research*

    I've also watched some really bad horror movies. I'll post one of the reviews later (I did some of my best writing on Facebook ranting about this flick). I've moved on to 'The Descent', one of my favorites. Ubuntu released 16.04 yesterday, so I'm updating my test VMs. Tomorrow is hermit day, with a side of organizing, and possibly a marathon of the 'Hellraiser' flicks (random idea I had). I've got to move Dagon and Shoggoth onto the UPSes, as the last power blip showed me I oopsed there. There will probably also be a labeling fest, along with more VM updating and the aforementioned Nagios experimenting. Probably will be other experimenting, I have a list. Sunday is back to normal, laundry and TV and Amythest time. Then back to work. I have a meeting/lunch with my recruiter on...Wednesday? I definitely have to give my recruiter company this, they keep up with their placed minions. I also have a bunch of work to do, still playing catch up from being sick, and I keep coming up with ideas on how to do things, that lead to me getting assigned the deployment of said ideas. But, instead of freaking out (well for long) I take it as the challenge it's intended as and go with it. So I expect the next 3 months to be interesting, and not in the Chinese curse sense of the word.

    So that's the most of the state of the fox. I'm still feeling fairly meh physically. Worst allergies ever. Mood is better, then again given how low I swung for a while, I kind of have to be better. Looking forward to a number of book pre-orders and future geeking and well, stuff. Catch you all later. *waves a tentacle*

    Not as much computer stuff

    Been a decent week. Well minus the massive allergy attack at the begining. New level of allergies, I sneezed myself off a conf call. Work is still decent. Even when it's stressful it's not too stressful. Went with Amythest to see 'The Finest Hours', fun little seafaring/disaster flick. Especially at the cheap theater.

    Weekend has been good, hung out with Amythest watching bad movies last night. Came home fairly early for a Friday, and went to bed with a book before too long. Got up this morning, started the great migration. Did some chores, got dinner from Freebirds, and have been watching a bunch of horror flicks. Nice fun movies.

    Still working on the computer foo. I've mostly got everything working the way I want, currently migrating VMs to the new box. Need to also find my notes to how I had the posting to wordpress via Vim setup. Then I'll probably leave the old dagon up and running to copy the things I haven't thought of over, as that always seems to happen. Still, much less painful that some other builds of mine.

    Tomorrow I've got more chores to deal with, and probably more importing of VMs. And probably more cheesy horror movies. I do love them so. That's about all for today, tune in tomorrow for more rambles probably. *waves a tentacle*