I want to go on an adventure.

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I think I’m getting a little stir-crazy around here because after spending a good hour this evening browsing random Google Maps of one of the cities I almost ended up in before moving to Florida, I did the math and realized that it’s been almost two years since I’ve left Central Florida for anything … and even then the event in question was an unexpected trip up to snowy Michigan in January 2014 for my Grandpa’s funeral.

Before that was only six months earlier when we went up during the summer of 2013 to celebrate his 90th birthday.

And don’t get me wrong, we’ve most certainly had a busy couple of years!!!

Between IVF and having the baby, and then the last year of learning how to be parents from scratch, and I’m sure lots of other stuff in between. We’ve also had lots … I guess just about everyone … come down to visit either for the holidays last year or to meet Christopher between last year and his first birthday. And part of that’s my fault because Sara was more eager to travel the baby around right after he was born when I didn’t want to…

But regardless, I guess it’s a little weird to think that we really haven’t traveled outside of 90 miles from home in the last couple of years because in our younger years we were a lot more adventurous! We’d gone on a couple of cruises, and our ginormous, month-long road trip, and yet now even if we can wrangle up a sitter it still seems prohibitively expensive trying to sneak away for the weekend after we factor in boarding the dog, coordinating time off, money, etc, etc…

I mean, Disney World is great and all, but I think I’m kind of itching to see something different for a change.

falls

It takes an awesome wife to let you run cat6 overhead through her kitchen…

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Just did an experiment because Plex videos have been buffering more than usual, especially some new home videos that I added tonight from our phones, so I ran a cable from the TV in our living room directly to our router to see if it really is the wifi bogging down.

Verdict … yes and no.

Random stuttering seems to have improved and I was able to play a couple of key movies that have given me troubles in the past without a sputter in sight. That said, apparently there’s a known issue with Plex sending .MOV files to Samsung TVs on the home movie side, so I’ll have to do some more digging there…

I also learned – because I had to move my router into the spare room next door where the server is for the cables to all reach – that apparently the coax jack in that room isn’t live after all! Wonderful. Thankfully I had a piece of coax long enough to run around the corner from my office, but that’s one more thing I’m going to have to look into when I’m poking around the attic, which is now going to have to happen sooner rather than later on account of the ethernet cable now running overhead in the kitchen!

I think I need to get one of those dorky headlamps to wear before I plan my adventure upstairs… 😕

Home Tech Talk, Part 2

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So picking up where I left off last night, I think these are going to be my next points of focus around the house…

Run Cat6 to the Living Room and Bedrooms
Not really looking forward to this because it means I have to go up into the attic and I’m always afraid of falling through the ceiling, but I’m figuring that wiring up these two rooms so that Plex doesn’t have to run over the wifi is right now probably the easiest thing I can do for the occasionally freezing that we see during playback.

Run Cat6 Out to the Garage for FiOS
Right now we have 75 Mbps symmetrical service, which is awesome, but to upgrade to anything faster we actually have to move away from using coax and run ethernet direct from where the fiber comes into the house to our router. Verizon claims that they’ll do this themselves during the upgrade, but who knows what the quality will be, and if I have to be up in the attic for wiring the other rooms anyways, it makes sense to just do this one at the same time.

Improving Backups on My Local Server
Part of this will be easy and part will be a pain. The easy part … right now I have a local install of CrashPlan pushing something from the server into the cloud, but I honestly don’t even remember what … it could just be test files from when I first got it setup, for all I know! So I just need to review and update the backup plan so that it includes more of the things that it should – Plex’s database and local settings, and some other random stuff sitting there that I want to preserve. It’s probably still not appropriate to push 20 TB of media files into the cloud, but I’m cool with sending 100 GB of music files for now.

The less easy part is facilitating backups from my web server that hosts all of my sites from an actual data center. They technically do regular backups within their own network at no charge to me, but just to be on the safe side I wouldn’t mind pulling down another copy of everything to keep archived here just in case. It’s only like 15 GB for everything anyways, so it’s not a ton of files, and I think that WHM even has an option to FTP another copy of the backup set to another location when it’s running. I just need to take an afternoon to figure it all out and get the thing working…

Organizing and Sharing Photos
Now with bringing my wife’s iPhone/iPad photos into the mix, we’re sitting on a collection of something like 40,000 photos over the last 15 years and as unmotivated as I am to print them out and fill photo books, it’s still fun to flip through them online so I think I want to finally figure out a manageable way to put them online for regular browsing. Not sure if it’s going to be Flickr, or a self-hosted WordPress install, or something else … I guess that Plex has options for Photos & Home Videos, too, so this one’s still wide open, but it’s something I’d like to do before we get up to 50,000!!!

Automated Christmas!
And the last one is something that I eluded to yesterday, and tonight I found another cool option, but their beginner set still costs upwards of $500 so it’s going to be a while before I can splurge here and it still might not happen this year. Still, I love the idea of a truly customizable Christmas light display where not only can I make the lights dance to music, but can even choose the color of each bulb as well, so no more fighting for the right combinations of colors at Lowe’s and Walmart and wherever else my lighting takes me…

…although at &^(%% per string, they’d better turn any color you want them to! 😯

Envisioning My Automated Home…

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So I spent some time reviewing my home server/network setup as it stands so far and it got me thinking about what might be the next steps on down the road.

I’m fairly happy with my media server, and aside from squeezing in maybe one more hard drive to satiate demand, it’s pretty much as far as I can take it until I can drop a couple of grand into expanding to new rack-mount hardware and a separate, high-end NAS for storage.

Backups are good, too, as all of my most important files (writing, pictures, tax and finance stuff) are triple backed up between a local backup and two independent cloud destinations, and just tonight I’m finally looping my wife’s devices into the schema so that the bajillion photos of Christopher that she takes will be safe and secure, too! 😉

So what’s next???

At first I started thinking about trying to automate our Christmas light display outside, though I’m not sure what kind of costs are reasonable on that front. I’ve seen a few setups where people just setup controls to flip the individual strands on and off, though I’m not sure how safe that is for your standard, residential Christmas lights that one buys at Home Depot.

I also briefly researched the idea of going the landscape lighting route because it’s probably more durable for the task, and I found this custom LED system that looks really freaking sweet, but the fixtures alone are about $100 a piece … I’m kind of afraid to ask how much the controller that runs everything is!

Maybe some day… 

Then there’s your more traditional automated home offerings – security system, cameras, thermostat, etc… – and although I really have no idea what I want at this point, maybe it would be something fun to tinker with until I both figure that out and hit the lottery to be able to fund it all!

I figure I’ve got a couple of years to get there, anyways, because I honestly see this house that we’re in right now as more of a test house, at least from this regard. Our goal in the next five years is to be able to built our dream house where we’ll ideally spend the rest of our days, so that’s where we’ll want to splurge on all of these kinds of bells and whistles, but just like our home server has been resurrected and grown so far this year, it’s still fun to experiment and play around with what I can get my hands on in the meantime until we build up to that point of dropping thousands of dollars on network-connected fixtures and wiring the entire house to best fit our modern, connected lifestyles! 😀

In the meantime, I can still see a more immediate need to at least hardwire connectivity to the rooms where Plex gets used, and I’m thinking we might splurge and upgrade the FiOS to that 150 Mbps package they offer before long … because I just learned that apparently they’ve got a promo giving the $200 router we need to upgrade to away for free with the upgrades right now!

We’ll see – maybe come Christmastime I’ll start tinkering with a single network camera or controlling the star on the Christmas tree via computer … gotta start somewhere.

I can’t even…

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I’ve watched a lot of disturbing stuff on the Internet, particularly involving two girls and one cup, but right now there’s one video floating around that I just can’t bring myself to watch.

I just read some tweets from staff members of the news channel in Virginia that saw a reporter and her cameraman murdered in cold blood on live TV yesterday morning – it sounds by now that it was by a disgruntled former employee – and not only was the reporter dating someone in the newsroom, but the cameraman was engaged to someone in the control room who watched the entire thing happen live.

I can’t even imagine watching someone unrelated’s death live on TV, so to see someone like that unfold for the person who you’re planning on marrying???

He was 27. She had just turned 24.

The guy even wore a camera and filmed his attack, posting it immediately online afterwards.

Shock is the only word I can use to describe what happened, and yet frankly it happens so often in America that asking the questions doesn’t even seem relevant anymore. Hearing about somebody getting gunned down out of nowhere in the streets isn’t just something that happens in other, less-civilized countries anymore. Here in the Land of the Free, it happens in our schools and on our streets in cities big and small … there’s been almost 250 mass shootings in the United States in 2015 alone … or more than one a day.

The only reason this one even managed to ride the news cycle all day is because it literally happened on the news.

They were just reporting the local news … just like those first-graders were just trying to learn…

Hello, Birthday #35.

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I’ve been expecting you…

Not really, though. I think people anticipate the big ones – 21, 30, 40, other numbers even higher than 40 – but 35 is kind of an oddball age. You’re not old old just yet, but you’re not exactly young anymore, either.

I mean, fuck – I’ve been out of high school for almost two decades now!

If anything, 35 is certainly proof that I ain’t getting any younger here…

And I think I’m ok with that, for the most part, anyways.

I don’t really want to be 18 anymore – girls wouldn’t talk to me and I still lived in my Mom’s basement.

25 was a little better – some girls were willing to talk to me and I played video games every moment of free time that I had.

30? Meh … by then I was already married and found myself bludgeoned by the fact that reproduction was going to be significantly more expensive for my family than it was for most.

31 – 34 … I honestly don’t even remember those birthdays anymore!

And that brings us to the big 35 – right in the middle between 30 and 40, and I suppose if I had to put it into words that’s about where I feel I am. There’s always something more just off on the horizon – more kids, more career opportunities, more changes. Admittedly it kind of makes it hard to live in the moment when you’re constantly focusing on the future like that – I guess that’s one thing in particular that I’m trying to keep in mind at this particular focal point of my life.

I also think that I’m starting to acquire just the smallest amount of that so-called wisdom that you sometimes hear old timers talking about. For me, it’s been in trying to filter out the things that I actually care about in life from the rest of the noise, and there’s a lot of noise, I’m certainly finding! Occasionally I’ll come across something that not five years ago I was immensely passionate about, and yet nowadays I find myself just shrugging my shoulders and saying, “Whatever…”

Right now more than ever, I recognize that time is my most valuable asset, and I think that wisdom is simply in trying not to waste it on stupid things that just don’t really matter in the big picture anymore.

I have a sneaky feeling that the next five years are going to pass by a lot more quickly than I would like, which I guess is a little ironic considering all of that forward-thinking stuff that I mentioned earlier … by the time that I turn 40, Christopher will be starting school and hopefully we’ll have two more in his footsteps, we’ll be getting ready to move into a new house, Cleo will be just as loud and obnoxious as ever…

Thankfully some things never change! 😉

As a little inspirational message to my future self whenever I circle back to this blog post again, here’s a video that I’ve watched many, many times before but the words ring true each and every time that I hear them. This clip dates back to 1984 from the eulogy that Muppet performer Richard Hunt gave at Jim Henson’s memorial service…

“Jim did not cling to the past, he did not worry about the future – that would work itself out…

And he did not live for the moment.

Instead, he lived in the moment … because that’s all we really have.”

So as I turn the big, old number 35, here’s to living in the moment. Above anything else, let’s have some fun… 😀

movie thoughts … John Wick

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johnwickI actually first watched this a couple of months ago, but recently I’ve gotten sucked into bits and pieces of it a few different times and I realized that I’d never written about it the first time, so here we are!

I think I enjoy this movie because John Wick is a complete and total badass.

Nobody fucks with John Wick, and yet the son of a crime lord ignorantly fucks with John Wick anyways, and thus we get to watch John Wick enact his revenge by killing pretty much anyone who crosses his path.

I loved Keanu Reeves in this role – the way he delivers is flawless, both in terms of badass-ed-ness as well as the heavy clout that anyone who really knows who John Wick is continues to honor even as he’s on the warpath. Some of my favorite exchanges are with the people from his past whom he comes back into contact with through this new ordeal…

  • Jimmy, the all-too-familiar police officer sent to respond to John’s “noise complaint”
  • Francis, the VIP doorman at the Red Circle who John courteously pardons
  • The Manager at the Continental, who professes that no laundry service is good enough to clean John’s blood-soaked shirt after his assault on the Red Circle

The whole build up of The John Wick Legend – mostly by Viggo himself, who’s arguably the second-most feared man in the city – is damn near perfectly executed in such a select few lines of dialog. It’s clear that this is the kind of guy you don’t underestimate – no matter who you are, and if you do, you’re as good as dead.

“John wasn’t exactly the Boogey Man … he was the one you sent to kill the fucking Boogey Man.”

“You will do nothing because you can do nothing.”

“They know you’re coming…”

(John himself) “Of course, but it won’t matter.”

What can I say – I loved Keanu Reeves in this movie! I’ve always been a huge fan of his, from The Matrix to Speed to even The Devil’s Advocate … the man plays a great lead and an even better action star.

And fun fact – at one point Keanu was actually in a band! They called themselves Dogstar and I remember going to see them play at some casino in Michigan back in my early 20s. I have no recollection whatsoever whether they were any good – Keanu played bass guitar, mind you – but it was really cool just to see him up on stage in person. 🙂

This was a sweet action movie, and apparently they’re now talking about making a second. Interesting, though admittedly part of the mystique of this one was knowing just enough about John Wick’s past to be absolutely terrified of him. A sequel could go either way…

Fighting the Counterfeit Lego Fight on eBay

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dcExGBJN2g

This is a little frustrating because as I’m nearing the end of my Collectible Lego Minifig collection, the few minifigs that I still need (22 of 266 as of today) are all pretty rare and expensive, so I’ve been wandering the web searching for the most economical ways to help close the remaining gaps in my collection.

I picked up a few series 1 minifigs from an eBay auction last week, and also found myself irritatingly reminded about the joys of sniping as I watched three other auctions that I was in lost by pennies a piece, but I also came across a scary number of copycat minifigs from overseas sellers that makes me hesitant to order anything else Lego from eBay in the future.

Case in point #1 – I still need Bunny Suit Guy from series 7, which currently averages on Bricklink for about $35-45 … however I found a guy on eBay who’s selling lots of five of them starting at only $25…

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Depending on the minifig, if you’re paying attention you might catch on via the posting – for example with this one, the carrot that the real Bunny Suit Guy comes with is actually orange and green in two separate pieces whereas the fake ones were made all as one orange piece…

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And of course, you should trigger your too good to be true flag for seeing a lot of one of the rarer minifigs for so cheap, but if you’re in a hurry trying to jump on cheap prices, it would be easy to see how you might not realize it until the package shows up and you’re able to take a closer look in person. The video above has some great examples to show how although they may look the same from a distance, disassembly shows that some are made exceedingly cheaply and sometimes in no way like actual Legos are made underneath the surface!

A lot of these guys get away with this stuff because although they’re directly copying popular Lego minifigs, they don’t specifically use the brand name “Lego” anywhere in their listings. A common term that I found was “custom,” but “toys” or “bricks” as the video explains are also popular keywords.

I think what makes me the most nervous though is that although it’s fairly easy to identify these lots of the same minifig … from Taiwan or China and simply overlook those, today I found “a complete set” of series 1 minifigs that’s entirely counterfeit selling for only $29.99 Buy It Now out of Hong Kong…

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You’d be hard pressed to eyeball any errors out of that picture, which just makes it worse for genuine collectors and fans once these minifigs leak out through “custom auctions” and into the general population of things that look like Legos, but really aren’t.

It kind of makes me glad that I’m not even in the market for Mr. Gold right now because although I do eventually want one for completion’s sake, I’m honestly not sure where I’m going to find a $500+ minifig that I feel comfortable buying online! Right now Bricklink only has 5 sellers with them, all listed for at least $2,000 a piece, and maybe 4 out of 64 legit listings on eBay.

Thankfully it’ll be a while yet before I’m ready to figure that one out – maybe I can find a private seller and make arrangements to travel and meet in person for it – but as for those other 22 that I’m still after, I’d rather pay a little more for better vetted sales via Bricklink than risk getting a ripoff that’s masquerading as a bargain… 🙁

Planned Parenthood is not “Selling Baby Parts”

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I’ve been wanting to write about my thoughts on this since I first heard about the ridiculous allegations and watched the edited video in question that depicted a Planned Parenthood executive discussing the sale of baby parts with an anonymous party.

I think this video pretty much sums up the sarcastic angle of my opinion here because if you listened to the outrage, you’d think they were literally selling baby hearts and baby lungs on the black market! I mean, seriously – I watched a clip of Sean Hannity asking whether these parts were being used for transplants…

Just to be clear – even when a fetus hits the 22nd week (roughly time when a fetus is considered viable outside of the womb), it’s about the size of a banana, making the lungs about the size of a quarter and the heart and everything else even smaller.

So what per se would we be transplanting these micro-sized organs into, anyways???

Anyways, the rational angle of my opinion comes from personal experience because my wife and I actually went through something similar two years ago with regards to the fertility treatments we went through that resulted in the birth of our son.

Our first IVF cycle produced 12 human embryos, of which only 3 ended up being viable at the 5-day mark.

2 were unsuccessful in our first attempt, and the third was frozen cryogenically for six months before being used successfully in our second attempt and eventually became our son, Christopher.

As for those other 9 embryos, however, we were given a choice.

They could either be discarded simply as medical waste, or we could donate them for scientific research.

It was one of the few decisions throughout the entire process that we didn’t even have to stop to think about because if research from our failed embryos could help in any way to make the process a little easier for people on down the road by learning more about fetal development or the effect of hormones on maternity or anything else, it was well worth it because otherwise they were just going in the trash anyways.

We had to sign special consent paperwork agreeing to this in advance, and I’m sure just like Planned Parenthood, our clinic collected a small fee for the care and transport of the fetal tissue being delivered to their research partners. It’s not like you can just take discarded embryos and throw them in a box for the UPS guy to pick up once a week! Anything under $100/specimen for professional scientific services once you factor in storage, courier services, etc… is comical to be considered “profit.”

If you want a look at what actual profiting from the illegal sale of human tissue looks like, check out this undercover investigation that VICE did over in Bangladesh about the black market trade of kidneys. Selling an adult kidney for the price of a used car is very different from selling unborn fetal tissue for medical research that was otherwise headed for the garbage…

Of course, it was abundantly clear to me from the moment I heard about this controversy that the stink about Planned Parenthood isn’t really about what they do with their medical waste, it ultimately just ties back to people believing that abortion shouldn’t be legal as a medical procedure at all. Even though it’s this type of research that ultimately serves to make pregnancy safer and more viable for women around the world, and even if abortion only accounts for 3% of Planned Parenthood’s business, who also happens to provide its variety of services to 1 in 5 women in America.

If something’s too ridiculous to be true, it probably is.

Lego Collectible Minifig Display, phase 3

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As mentioned last month, the time had come once again to reorganize my minifig collection, as noted by the minifigs that were hanging upside down and otherwise cluttering up entirely too much real estate on my desk!

Some sixteen series in with at least 2-3 new lines coming out each year, scalability was a primary concern.

Also, well … space, because this collection is starting to get mighty big!!!

Mighty big, indeed…

LEGO1

So I started by doubling the number of baseplates that my last display used – the alternating colors are pretty much because I learned the hard way that blue is out and apparently the tan baseplates are now officially in. 🙁

I pretty much hung them the same way that I did last time – drilled a hole in the top corners and then tacked them up to the wall, with the one major difference being that this time I did what I should’ve done last time and went the extra step to connect them all together so that the baseplates would all be touching like one giant display area.

It’s honestly about the same number of rows per plate, but I think I like how it looks better.

LEGO2

To save you from counting the whole lot (because I just spent the last two hours dusting and putting them up 16 at a time!), my current count is 235 minifigs total … still missing most of series 1 and then a few random figures from the rest, along with the 9-figure limited edition Team GB set done in 2012 for the Olympics, and of course, the elusive and way too expensive Mr. Gold.

My rough estimate is that I can fit about another 8 series up on my new wall as-is, and if need be after that I can relocate a row of picture frames beneath its position on the wall to add another row of baseplates that would at least give me another year.

I’m not going to worry out more than a few years because at that point we may be in a different house altogether and despite the horror of having to move this whole thing, I’d still love to do something a little classier looking with custom-made shadow boxes and whatnot … though as you can see, wall space even with this configuration is tight so I’d need to have a ton of new space to work with to do proper cabinets or something.

Oh well, for the time being I’m happy once again – now it’s time to hop on Bricklink and order another couple of series 1 minifigs before they’re all going for $20+ a piece! 😯