What a BuzzKill

So I recently got back into playing D&D with a group of guys I know. It’s been decades since I’d played and I’m finding it to be a lot of fun. This ultimately led me into getting myself a 3D printer so I could start printing my own miniatures.

^{My modest work area. I’ve added to it since this photo was taken.}

I started off with an ANYCUBIC Photon Mono 4K, which is a (relatively) inexpensive model that can handle the miniatures and some other things. Soon after that I got the ANYCUBIC Wash & Cure Station so I could properly finish the prints. It turned out to be a lot of fun, but there was a pretty steep learning curve. While I still can’t say I’m anywhere near mastering it, I’m able to print what I want on it without stressing too much anymore. There was a week straight when I couldn’t seem to print anything but blobs on the printer, which was very frustrating. I did some research and managed to learn how to print successfully most of the time. After using it for a few months I began to find myself disappointed that I wasn’t also able to print anything too big and that resin printing doesn’t produce very strong objects – even though it really prints detailed models quite well.

^{This is one of the miniatures I printed for one of the guys in the group.}

This lead to my newest addition to the 3D printing game: The ELEGOO Neptune 4 Pro. Printing with filament really changes what I’m able to make! Very strong objects and a lot larger. I figure that this will allow me to print useful items and not just silly stuff for D&D. One thing I realized very quickly was that this type of printer is a lot easier to get started with than resin printing. I still have plenty to learn, but it’s been a fun hobby.

^{This tower has space for dice and a miniature figure in two different compartments.}

As you can see in the above photo, I’ve also got model paints, which I haven’t even started doing yet. The red paint holders were printed on the FDM printer, too. So that’s another part of the hobby that I need to learn to do. It’s been ages since I’ve done any painting, at least in an artistic way. Should be fun!

_{This entry has more hobbies than time on its hands.}

I just discovered a cool service called Qik. It allows you to live stream video from your phone to their website, plus it saves it for later. I’m only using the free service to see how I like it for now. To view my live stream you can either click on the Videos link above, or go to:

www.qik.com/itrogue

Not much at this point other than my lame first video test.

_{This entry will make lemons out of lemonade.}

Here’s a late night … or rather early morning update session. Got started on updating a server for a client a couple of hours later than I had hoped. So here I sit, waiting for a server to finish installing a bunch of updates because the prior IT guy never applied them. Joy.

_{This entry doesn’t want to talk about yawning.}

I love my Google Voice service. The tools it provides in managing phone calls and message alerts is incredible, considering it’s a free service. One nice thing that it does is translates voice mail into text, then sends it to me as an email to my Gmail account and as an SMS Text message to my phone (breaking it into multiple texts, if longer than 160 characters).

Every so often I’ll get a message that proves to be a challenge for Google Voice to translate properly. Incidentally, it seems to have this problem with the same people leaving a message. I thought I’d share the latest voice mail-to-text message, as I found it quite perplexing …

“Hey Dave It’s wrong that I hey Canada capacity as money and not And I need everything over into a folder called old email, and I want to gmail. Like mail the on Dot Com and i are tied on my own messages and I just needed all of You know my older contacts in Bernie my old emails women archives front about how it works or whatever, so I’m not sure I would think that maybe I would just check in with you again and it doesn’t look like it’s doing and I sent some test from my work email to my personal email so if you can. 8 call me just definitely yeah. So anyway, I’ll look forward to hearing from you get when you get a chance talk to you soon bye bye.”

I’m not exactly sure, but there seems to be some sort of problem with Canada’s capacity that I need to resolve. I’ll see what I can do to fix that.

_{This entry wants Dave to know that he can’t do that.}

I was helping a client today troubleshoot their Internet connection. Their office is over 600 miles away, so on-site support was out of the question. I had to work with one of the 2 people that works in their office and walk them through checking cables, indicator lights, resetting things, etc. This is part of our conversation:

Client: OK, so what am I looking for again?

Me: A network cable.

Client: Oh, OK. They’re the fat phone cord looking ones, right?

Me: Yes. The ends look like large phone cord connectors.

Client: All right … (sounds of her moving things around for about 30 seconds) .. Oh! Here’s one.

Me: Great, now let’s follow it to one end and see where it’s connected.

Client: This is a long sucker, must be almost a hundred feet.

Me: Are you sure it’s a network cable? It should be just like the ones we were connecting to the router, but longer.

Client: Yeah, this looks just like those.

Me: Good. Are you able to trace it back to where it’s connected?

Client: Yeah, I think so … it’s pretty tangled up, though.

Me: All right. When you find where it plugs in, unplug it and plug it back in until you hear or feel it click to make sure it’s connected properly.

Client: Ah! I think I found it *click*

Me: Hello?

Just another day in tech support.

_{This entry still can’t stop shaking its head.}

I was helping my friend Rana with her computer; she’s a graphic artist and enjoys photography as well. While sitting around waiting for a malware scan to finish, I spotted one of the old components we took out her computer and thought it would make for a good subject for a photo. We discussed how it might best photograph and experimented with a few angles and focal points. This was the result.

This is an AGP video card. The big part you see here is the heatsink for the GPU. Either this video card or the memory stick in her computer was bad and causing some errors and/or random restarts. I swapped them both out with some spare parts I had laying about and her computer was back to behaving as it should.

_{This entry loves macro shots.}

I just read a very interesting article about time, technology, media, participation, and gin. While I don’t especially care for gin, the article was fascinating. Check it out if you have some time.

_{This entry has surplus time.}

This is an actual email from one of my personal clients:

“I only use outlook for my calendar on my home computer and blackberry contact info and on my current work computer (desktop that I am not going to use anymore) I used MSN email and no outlook for anything but I think I will be using that with the new laptop for email and blackberry since that is where the technology has gone. I will still have my MSN email address but using it through outlook right? All the contact info is on my home computer to load and with my MSN email addresses. I have most of them but I know this is confusing but I can sort it out with you in person.
Basically I use the following:
Home computer-I log into MSN hotmail and do emails from home-It also has my blackberry contacts through outlook that you put there from my sony clie and I can add new ones and use the calendar but I have yet to sync it to my blackberry. I just use the calendar on the blackberry itself to use the reminder and not sync it to my home computer.
Work destop (will not use anymore) has my sony clie contacts and I use the sony clie for my calendar-(will not use that anymore either I will use the outlook on the new computer) I will need to take my email addresses from MSN and put them in outlook on the new computer laptop as I will no longer be using MSN (I don’t think) and will be using outlook with the calendar and contacts.
We will get this organized and you wil see where I want to go and hopefully I am doing the right thing. To many places that I go instead of using outlook for everything and it is compatable with the blackberry. I am used to that now and it is nice but still some kinks.
See you Thurs..R”

_{This entry is still trying to recover!}

I found a cool interactive photo gallery that I could plug in to my site. It’s just a test for now, but you can check it out at:

https://standlikeaman.com/im/

It would take quite a lot of effort to keep it maintained, unless I was adept at scripting (which I am most definitely not), so I figure it’d be a place where I’d post only my favorite photos.

Anyhow, let me know what you think!

_{This entry has apparently come down with a tweaking bug.}

This will be the way I post pictures from now on. Very handy and slick interface!

The new gallery to the right will automatically choose random recent photos from my Flickr account.