Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1390
Getting back into the groove after the holidays, laying 10g fiber between the houses, finishing building a miter saw stand, PWEI, Plex nonsense, I am not great at vacations. Kids acting like popcorn.
Good morning, hello. Greetings from Chatham County, North Carolina. My Name is Rick and I am your host. I am a husband, a father of a wonderful seven-year-old daughter, the CEO of an obscure but well-regarded and (mostly) successful adtech company that helps app publishers make a living without Apple taking a giant cut. I am a writer, a sometime-musician, and a tinkerer and diy enthusiast. I am coming off of an 11-day vacation and boy, did it mess me up. Only writing 2 GMHHAYs in eleven days? Not great. I mean, one the one hand, it is fine, absolutely fine. I could have spent all day every day tinkering and doing chores. But on the other, it is absolutely terrifying how easily we would just abandon one of the best things we’ve ever done. Daily habits are crazy, they are just crazy.
We are listening to my new vinyl copy of Pop Will Eat Itself At Weird’s Bar and Grill, their live album on RCA, before they left for Infected and Nothing, Trent Reznor’s label. Trent Reznor, America’s other giant PWEI fan besides myself. My god, I was obsessed with this band, I probably saw them 20 times. Flew to London for the reunion shows. Their live shows were so energetic and amazing, just phenomenal. One day I saw the Pet Shop Boys at the Orpheum on that awesome tour with all the sets and stuff, and it ended early enough that I could go to Axis and see Pop Will Eat Itself and Mr Bungle and it might have been one of the best live music days of my life. Oh and their Limelight show where Dave Kendall introduced them that was pretty awesome too. US debut of “Bulletproof.”
Should I regale you with
the chores I got done this holiday? I set out with three goals and, more or less, I completed them. But I did not actually complete them until EOD yesterday, so all holiday I was just stressed. I cannot honestly tell you I enjoyed my holiday as a whole. But I think I enjoyed most moments of my holiday.
Except Friday, Friday sucked. I tried to fix my Plex. It took all day. I was so desperate I made a post to a Reddit community. I haave been a registered member of Reddit for sixteen years. In all that time, I have never posted or commented. I had exactly one karma point. But I guess never fear, since the whole ordeal netted me exactly negative one comment point. I guess I’m the asshole. Anyway, they had no good ideas, just a bunch of stuff I already tried. I also posted to the Plex forums, once I could registrer. They couldn’t help either. I spent an entire day on this, I got exactly nothing done. It was like watching a pet get really sick. Just horrible.
Buuuuut, most of the holiday, the chores went swimmingly. Big news, I finished my miter saw stand. This was one of two things I vowed to get done before I go work on the studio floor — because I will need the miter saw while working on the studio. It is awesome! It is not some fancy-ass miter-saw stand like the youtubers love to make with edge banding and drawers and shit, but it gets the job done, and I am very proud of it.
It is not exactly, technically done. There is no t-track on the right side to mount stop blocks. I will have to figure this out. Gonna have to do it with a router, over several passes, because I am scared of dado stacks and in any case, I glued the top down. But we will get to that.
Getting this built and all that shit off the floor was a key step in the whole studio build process, because until this was done, I couldn’t make space in my garage for the massive amount of OSB of which I am going to have to take delivery. So it is done! Done! Boy I should be so proud of this.
The other big thing I wanted to get done before I started on the studio floor was to connect the two houses with fiber. And it is done! I mean, it’s not completely done, I still have to conduit and bury the fiber: did you know that that split-tube plastic conduit you can put around wires is called a “wiring loom?” This is very exciting to me because there were so many wiring looms you needed to buy to craft things in No Man’s Sky, and I thought they made them up or something but nope, totally normal thing in all car builds. Anyway, total pain to put on 600’ for wiring, but I discovered they make tools for it. I have a wiring loom insertion tool headed my way. Reasonably priced! Another item I had no idea where to buy aside from Amazon, though it’s occurring to me right this moment, I probably coulda got it at an auto supply shop.
So I did not get the wiring done, but I got the fiber laid — and three cat6 lines to grammy’s house and two spots for outdoor wifi to boot. I got the Dream Machine Pro moved to the main house, and used an old POE switch with a SFP port to receive the fiber from the main house. I laid my custom 650’ 6-strand, single-mode fiber cable from one house to the other. I have one master network to rule them all at the moment, with ten gigs of speed between the two houses. It is fantastic. I love it. I hated Asus routers so much, for almost 7 years they gave me guff and shit. I only ever went in on Asus because the week I was deciding on wifi platforms was the week Ubiquiti had a big hack and lost a bunch of “personal data.” But I realized a) I don’t care anymore, the thing about Ubiquiti is that most of my shit is stored on my hardware, so there’s just not that much to steal. And in any case, it just works. Its so much better. I have to keep the old Asus network up at the main house for a month or so as we transition every fuckin iot garbage device to the new network, which means that I had to reconfigure the Asus routers yesterday and oh my god they are so bad. So bad. Done done done. Sell ‘em off on eBay. Anyone want seven Asus XT9 routers cheap?
While I was redoing the server rack to get the Dream Machine Pro in there and a new POE switch, I thought to myself “oh yeah huh the QNAP has multiple ethernet interfaces and I have them all connected maybe the multiple internet connections is confusing Plex when it makes calls to the network to validate my user ID haha that would be so dumb.” But it is exactly what was happening, and as soon as I unplugged one of the two ethernet interfaces from the QNAP, everything started working again. My Plex library is back up. Friday was wasted for no good reason. I am still bitter about it. I probably still have to re-add all you Plex friends to the new library. Hopefully I get to that today.
Anyway I still gotta get Plex, Time Machine, and our Cold Storage off of the QNAP and onto some American steel before I can stop paying four hundred dollars a month to Backblaze, but we are very close and as of today, I can save $100 a month by turning off the second internet connection over at Chore House. We will make up my entire investment in this absurdity in eight months. All very exciting.
If I didn’t have this splitting headache today.
Anyway, I am not great at vacations, I spend them doing huge chore projects and stressing about how many days I have left of vacation. Remember my insane week of re-panelling the three-season room at the Somerville apartment? A whole week, 12 hours a day, just staining and cutting panelling. I haven’t even seen it since! It better look fucking awesome when I walk into that apartment in 2 weeks or so. I mean, I am absolutely at my happiest puttering and doing chore projects in exactly any order my addled mind feels like doing them, that really is pretty great. But I ought to learn to… relax more?
I mean, to be clear, we had a great thanksgiving, it was very relaxing. Well, after I cooked for ten hours. But Jane helped and that was super cute. But then dinner was awesome, then I saw in a comfy chair listening to every version of “Do They Know its Christmas” — the 84 original version, the 85 Live Aid version, the Band Aid 20 version, the Band Aid 30 version and the new Band Aid 40 megammix (pretty iffy, that one, but may well end up being the definitive version) — while Emma and Jane decorated the Christmas tree. It was great. My god I love watching my daughter put Christmas ornaments on the tree.
Jane had a great time on vacation. We had some of her friends over on Friday and they all watched The Wild Robot. The parents did too. It was chaos but kind of fun. I made popcorn and tried not to feel terrible about my Plex failures. The movie was a lovely distraction.
Jane and I ate out every morning. We went to the local cafe and it was so good and I think I have Jane convinced to go there instead of McDonald’s some mornings. We played at playgrounds at 30 degrees when most kids wouldn’t leave the home she is such a good Alaskan. She was mostly kind, no huge freakouts. Just one minor one where she kept mispronouncing Shellac over and over, a thousand times, wouldn’t stop for anything, though it was just hilarious. Mind just stuck in some funny rut. I set her down and kindly said I didn’t want to talk about that anymore but I would be right here when she was done. She immediately stopped and told me I was a terrible dad and ran off. Which, you know, par for the course. BUT, she actually got over it pretty quickly and it went about as well as such an incident can go.
Oh and during the movie when I was making popcorn all the kids pretended they were popcorn and curled up into balls and then bursted out and “popped” and my god it was so cute. Just the best.
I did listen to a lot of music, but I did not listen to a lot of streaming music, and I didn’t work on my playlists at all, so here I am after eleven days off without a playlist to present to you, that is somewhat embarrassing. Hrm this Moody and Quiet one is pretty close to being done, let’s just finish it up for you. All right, here you go. Added Glenn Campbell covering U2, the Wolfgang Press because they have been going through my head a lot lately what with their reunion and all, Hub with a song I had in my head for 20 years but didn’t know who it was by until Larry Curl from Alaska told me about a different great song by Hub, “Taken,” and upon listening to that and falling in love with it, I discovered that that same album had this song on it and that blew my mind. And Leonard because he’s in my head again because of “Who By Fire” being the title theme music to Bad Sisters. I am watching Season 2 of Bad Sisters and it is very good but… too much misfortune. It hurts my sensitive soul.
All right we are back with our regularly scheduled programming, thank you for your patience. Like I said, I missed you guys.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.