Author: Daniel

Sysadmin turned bearpuncher. Whereabouts unknown.
Gaming Life Work
March 28, 2016

He must’ve been awfully bad at golf.

Last week, from a professional standpoint, is hard to describe without using the word “cluster.” I would probably take a mulligan on it. It’s part of why there weren’t any posts from me last week. I think I know where it all went wrong, too. Around this time last week, I forgot my thermos, you see. My thermos serves double duty as morning life-giver and lunchtime Ramen Water Measuring Apparatus. So I’m already fucked up from a lack of coffee, and I decide to go hit up the local food truck for eight bucks rather than the ramen I already have and paid a quarter for. Anyway, get home, end up with nasty food poisoning, stomach’s cramping like mad, whole nine yards.

Then we’re in bed, and we hear the dog barf, not hard since he sleeps beside the bed about a foot from my ear. I’m trying very hard not to throw up in the first place, dog isn’t helping, Diana goes and cleans it up. In the middle of cleaning it up, she knocks over a glass in the kitchen. I hear it roll to the edge of the table, then fall off. This thing detonates. It absolutely pulverized, a jet of glass about six feet in every direction. It’s after midnight at this point. I have to hold barf-dog while Diana makes an attempt at getting the glass out of the bedroom carpet. A lint roller is quite good at it, it turns out. It’s after 1 at this point, I’m still feeling very ill and need to be up in four hours, Diana is pretty much done. We decide to both take a sick day. And I don’t regret it, it was the right choice. I’m just bummed that I’m totally out of sick leave … (More) “He must’ve been awfully bad at golf.”

Gaming Life
March 21, 2016

Wouldn’t you not want to never not pass up this deal?

I saw one of the dumber attempts at deceptive advertising today by Comcast. Really, the sort of thing that makes you wonder where that “most hated company in America” title came from. In looking at internet options for the area of the house we’re looking at buying, their site gives the breakouts; you get 5Mbps for this much, 25 for this much, 75 for this much, 150 for this much…and 2000Mbps.

Wait, what? 2Gbps service? I mean, as a professional nerd, I don’t even have to look at the terms and conditions to know something stupid is being presented. For non-nerds, nothing in your house has the capability to go past 1Gbps for download. So what Comcast is doing here is listing the 1Gbps down, the 1Gbps up, and adding them up to get 2Gbps to make them look twice as good as Google Fiber, even though it’s the exact same service. This is the only one in their lineup that they present in such a manner. The others are only your download speed, and this one is download + upload.

The thing is, it’s $300 a month. It’s gigabit internet. Who are you trying to deceive, Comcast? The one demographic that immediately sees through your shady bait-and-switch, nerds that want gigabit speeds and are only going with Comcast because Google Fiber isn’t in their market yet. I’m one of those! And I’m not impressed or amused.

I played a fair bit of Cities: Skylines yesterday for the first time in a few months. The last few cities I built made use of the Unlimited Money/All Buildings Unlocked mods that come stock with the game (and a big thanks to Colossal Order for that and the Steam Workshop integration). Going back to a standard playthrough, it was rather liberating because … (More) “Wouldn’t you not want to never not pass up this deal?”

Life
March 21, 2016

I See a Red Door and I Want to Leave it Red

I really want to believe there will come a time again where I don’t need to wear my ski jacket to catch the 6:34 train. It’s unreasonably cold every morning.

I just sent one of the more potentially life-altering texts of my life. Diana and I have an offer in on a house. The price is hard to beat for the city, but it had as many things that concerned us as things we liked about the place. Since it was a short sale, we’ve gone from early January to now without anyone bothering to look at or accept our offer, and nothing had come up on the market in the last few months to justify jumping ship on it. Nothing until Saturday, that is. We were supposed to be looking at two properties. One of them cancelled on us at the last minute, but another came on the market the day prior, and it was just a couple of blocks from our non-cancelled appointment.

By sheer serendipity we managed to get a time for a viewing within an hour, and let me tell you, it’s got a lot more right than it does wrong. The things I dislike are no different than the house we’ve been on the hook for (air conditioning and ductwork are alien concepts to a city at 7000 feet), but it gets a lot of our concerns about the other property right. It also represents about a 20% increase in price, but it looks like that premium might be needed to not have to sink an equivalent amount into repairs and maintenance right away. I told Diana that anything at this price range would have to be damn near perfect. This one is. So we’re retracting our offer and putting in one for this new … (More) “I See a Red Door and I Want to Leave it Red”

Life
March 18, 2016

Stream of Consciousness, 3/18/16

It’s no small concern of mine that nobody is asking me for a house-buying license during the process of trying to find a home in Santa Fe. At what point was I mentally capable of processing the reality of a 30-year mortgage? When was the class on repairing the myriad items and components that make up a domicile? I missed it. I missed a lot of classes, though. That’s not a big surprise.

That we collectively decided that agreeing to terms of payment on the next 30 years of life is odd. If you’re in a position where you need a mortgage, you’re also not in a position to guarantee that things will be just as good 30 years down the road, really. Hell, getting into state government is one of the safest possible choices in that regard, once you’re in and off your probationary period getting fired is a battle. Things could happen, though.

We’re looking at two more houses tomorrow, we’ve had an offer in on a different one for over two months now, but they weren’t lying when they said it was a “short sale opportunity for the patient buyer.” One is more “homey” and with a great location, a ten-minute bike ride to work if that. The other looks ridiculously nice, like in the realm of “What the hell? I get to live here?” kind of nice. So it appears in the pictures, anyway. Maybe it’s actually a small house photographed by a smaller human, or an iguana.

I was a little bit bothered a few days ago when someone mentioned that they were diagnosed bipolar and one of the markers was having days where they just stay inside and hide from the world, for lack of a better description. That was me not terribly long … (More) “Stream of Consciousness, 3/18/16”

Nerd Stuff
March 18, 2016

Ransomware is the future.

(crossposted from bluesoul.me)

When I first started fighting ransomware in late 2013, I had a premonition that this was something serious. While CryptoLocker was rather easily defeated in the enterprise and ultimately killed by killing the botnet, media outlets and tech sites ran with the story. It showed this small group making millions and millions of dollars. Guess what? More people started writing ransomware.

Cut to now. Ransomware-as-a-service is a real thing you can buy, some variants have live chat support to receive payment, and we routinely see new versions with bugfixes and feature-adds. One of the last major flaws in ransomware, the inability to enumerate non-mapped network shares, was overcome in the latest Locky build that calls WNetOpenEnum() to attempt to traverse every share on the network.

For several years, the endgame was more abstract. Hit the PC with your rootkit, join it to your botnet, sell botnet access to spammers for a fee. Now they can cut out the middle man and have less overhead, since there’s not a need for constant command-control oversight. It’s a path to riches hampered only by the still-high knowledge barrier to acquire and send bitcoin. And by affecting the user’s files, rather than a popup about the FBI or TotesLegit AntiVirus which can simply be fixed by backing up the data and nuking the PC, you’ve got them at your mercy.

This is going to get worse way before it gets better. You’ll see builds that try to invoke APIs for popular cloud storage providers to delete the versioning. They’ll find ways to avoid taking ownership of a file to quickly spot the vector of infection. While it’s almost impossible to be truly proactive to effectively block ransomware, there are things that can be done.

  • Avoid mapping your drives and hide your
… (More) “Ransomware is the future.”
Life
March 18, 2016

I’m afraid it’s Exploding Head Syndrome.

I feel like there should be a better barometer for being an adult than completing unwanted medical appointments. Somewhere towards the top of my list of fears is needles, and I’ve been staring down this appointment for weeks, knowing that it involved an IV whereby they supplement my blood with some bullshit that is most definitely not blood. I completed the appointment yesterday and the whole drive home I was doing these sighs of relief like I had just spent 20 minutes outrunning a hungry bear.

I bought a Fitbit Surge a couple of months ago, and it’s pretty entertaining watching my own heart rate skyrocket when anxiety kicks in. With good breathing exercises, I can get my heart rate down to about 60-62. Normally it’s around 97-100. Five minutes prior to the appointment it was 135.

What was going on was a CT scan to try and figure out what the problem is in my lower abdomen. My digestive health in general has been lousy for two or three years. I had a bit of a breakthrough a bit less than a year ago when Diana and I figured out that I’m lactose intolerant. So I’ve solved one mystery, but I’m still living with more-or-less constant pain and spasming of my lower left abdomen, a section of the colon that is particularly vulnerable to chronic problems like diverticulitis, divertculosis, and IBS. The smart money is on the latter.

We seem to do a pretty bad job of conveying the severity of an ailment with its name. Shingles are a construction thing, not a nerve-damaging rash that will affect you for the rest of your life. (The iodine injection yesterday very nearly triggered a flare-up right on the table.) Lactose intolerance sounds like you’re a milk-racist. Fuck your “ebony and … (More) “I’m afraid it’s Exploding Head Syndrome.”

Gaming
March 15, 2016

New-U? No U.

So I finished up my first playthrough of Borderlands 2 yesterday, after about 3 weekend sessions. I have a few thoughts, and some of them are spoilers, so if you haven’t already been spoiled on a 3-year-old game, uh, watch out.

  • The Gunzerker is a ridiculously fun class. You get to play at any range, and while there are bonuses available to pistols, you’re not locked into them by any stretch. The bullet regeneration makes it feel like a whole new game, in a great example of addition by subtraction. By removing the concern of running out of ammo, it relieves a fairly pervasive stress that permeates the whole game, particularly after about the halfway point, where they throw numbers at you and start increasing quantity as well as quality of foe.
  • Mal in Eridium Blight gave me a pistol called the Fibber. There are a lot of variants of this gun, as is the Borderlands way. I got a hell of a variant, though. It’s a pistol, but it shoots a very slow moving blast of pellets like a shotgun. In my case, they’re also slag rounds, and the damage output is in the area of 8-10k per round at a time where SMGs are doing 200-400 damage a round, and shotguns are doing maybe 3k. Point-blank, this thing was absolutely lethal. It took care of the Jack fight, which I could tell would be a hell of a fight if you came in underpowered, in well under a minute. For that matter, it took care of every boss fight from the moment I got it onwards pretty much by itself, or gunzerking with another slow projectile weapon, just making a wall of sluggy slaggy death.
  • I have some gripes with the use of death as a plot device
… (More) “New-U? No U.”
Life
March 14, 2016

Sunrise Deferred

This is a year where I’ve been looking forward to Daylight Saving Time very much. With the job requiring about a 90-minute commute each way to work, in winter that meant I was going to work before the sun came up, and didn’t get out until the sun was down. So today, I know there’ll be plenty of sunlight when I get home, nearly another hour. But I neglected to think of what it would do to the mornings, which is essentially reset it to how it looked in November when I started this job.

There’s that part of me that always likes to tease out a deeper meaning to the mundane, that this would feel like a reset of my time at this job. That part of me is kind of a silly pseudointellectual asshole. The fact is, even if it was a reset, the last four months have been great, and were I to start again with the familiarity with the people and the experience with the infrastructure that I’ve accumulated, I’d crush it.

I’m in my probationary period with the state until this coming November, right around Thanksgiving. Last year it was pretty slick, getting to start with a three-day week and having all those holidays, and the relaxed atmosphere of the place. If you ever get a chance to accept a life-changing job offer, I highly recommend doing it around Thanksgiving.

I had a bout of…something, on Saturday. It felt an awful lot like depression, with a side-order of spring allergies. I know there doesn’t have to be something immediately wrong to trigger depression, and it has taken a long time to not blame myself for it. I felt fine again yesterday. Diana writes through her problems in a private diary. I write through them on … (More) “Sunrise Deferred”

Gaming
March 11, 2016

I’m probably bad at StarCraft, too.

So I saw the post yesterday on reddit on how Google’s AlphaGo AI beat a world-class Go player for the second consecutive time. This is a big deal given that Go has a rather intractable nature, it’s as much felt as analyzed at the top level. It also reminded me that I tried to learn Go like a year ago.

While I understand the rules, the aim of the game, and more or less how to score it, I’m missing something rather important, which is understanding the context of why I would want to, or not want to, make a particular move. How to defend myself, how to spot an attack before it gets out of hand. I’m so bad at this part of it.

For reference, the ranking system in Go starts with 30 Kyu at the bottom of the tier, it counts down as you get better, to 1 Kyu, then there’s 1 Dan, and it starts counting up. So 30 is the bottom, to be clear.

According to this Go AI, I am 32 Kyu. That’s like, bizarro world bad. I’m that goddamn bad. The game is spotting me 4 turns, and I still blow it most of the time. I was twice given four black stones at the start of the game and lost by 89.5 and 88.5 points. To compare, it would be like if you were playing basketball, and you were given 40 points at the start of the game, then lost 129-40.

I am 8-23 with an average play of 32.1 Kyu. I mean, it’s better than the Sixers. But it would be like if the Sixers were still this bad against, like, an elementary school. I don’t actually know at what age the average Go player was this bad. Five? Probably.

What … (More) “I’m probably bad at StarCraft, too.”

Nerd Stuff
March 10, 2016

Wheneverly

As I alluded to in my last entry, I tend to become fairly worthless if I miss self-imposed deadlines, even when they’re for things that really never needed to be on a deadline. Sometimes I can get around it by using the concept of “updated wheneverly.” On the bright side, I function pretty well in that setup. A significant problem, though, is that I end up with a lot of projects, all updated wheneverly.

In no particular order, here’s some of them:

Funcrusherpl.us – I overreached on this one initially and kind of got stung by a shitload of work. I got some good encouragement to get back into this by Ander Other, and it’s kind of fun to follow along with the release cycle.

bluesoul.me – Hey, I just launched this one! IT articles posted wheneverly. Sometimes the inspiration hits at work and off you go.

imissgrantland.com – This is one of the smoother launches I’ve ever had. Totally automated service that lots of people are enjoying. Those are ideal for me, people keep enjoying it and I don’t have to do a damn thing. Damn shame that Kimono is gone.

iskbook.com – This did technically work, but it needed a little more automation, and more sports offered. This was, for the uninitiated, a sports betting site playable only with the in-game currency of EVE Online. A related site that I wanted to get going, papersportsbook.com, is a betting site where you bet play money and see how well you do.

ogregamelabs.com – Great idea at the time. Unfortunately it takes way more free time than I actually have to do it in the way I envisioned.

statsonstats.net – This one is going hand-in-hand with a deeper education in statistics, as they can be applied to the NBA. The … (More) “Wheneverly”