(the UPS package that was supposedly held up while the address was “corrected” arrived without any difficulty, on time)

Komi 2.12

White Day, in which Our Hero solicits advice from his sister for a return gift for Komi, while pretending that it’s for Katai (the only other person who gave him chocolate), which doesn’t fool her a bit.

A bit too angsty for my tastes, and I found myself wishing that he’d just break down and confess. And yes, Our Psycho Lesbian Stalker’s return gift to Komi was as disturbing as expected.

And finally the moment we’ve all been waiting for, as the new school year begins, and… they’re still working on it. Good luck, kids, it looks like you’re going to need to be locked in a love hotel by Najimi before you admit that you’ve fallen for each other. Hopefully that happens in season 3, which is not yet confirmed, but highly likely.

Just store it in the cloud!

As part of moving back to Ohio, I built up an extensive collection of saved locations (restaurants, shopping, services, etc) in the Maps app on my new Windows laptop. Yes, using my Microsoft Account to sync them to all devices.

They were there yesterday. All but one of them are gone today, disappearing while I slept, and swiftly synced across all devices so I can’t get them back.

Good thing it wasn’t anything important, eh?

No double votes for me!

I received the official notice that California has processed my request for my voter registration to be cancelled. I of course had no intention of voting twice; I just wanted to make sure that Benito Newsom didn’t illegally mail out a ballot to my old address (again).

Also, it’s additional evidence that I’m no longer a CA resident for tax purposes, which is important when extracting yourself from California.

Go home, Amazon, you’re drunk…

…on cheap wine!

Quad9 outage!

I have my Pi-hole set to use 9.9.9.9 as the primary DNS. When one of the servers answering at that address goes away, the failure mode is peculiar. Lots of partial failures as things time out and fail over to another, and some total failures depending on how name resolution is cached on things like iOS devices.

It was annoying to figure out, because it looked like some pieces of the Internet were completely unreachable (including many DNS servers) and other pieces were half-functional. For instance, Amazon’s web server worked from a browser, but not from the iOS app, and Prime Video played normally from my FireTV Stick but not from my iPad. Meanwhile, the customer-service site for my ISP reported that their customer service itself was down. It all depended on which DNS lookups they were making, and when the results had been cached.

The most interesting bit was that right-clicking to save a picture from Microsoft Edge was timing out, despite the fact that the picture had already been downloaded and cached by the browser.

Ayako Fuji, age 61

I don’t enjoy enka singing, but I’ll respect the singer in the morning.

(via, site NSFW!)

This is not a legit error:

Check your delivery info

Your package can still arrive today

UPS fixed the address issue, so please check back later for more delivery info. Check and update the address info in Your Account to avoid this issue next time.

UPS doesn’t actually think my shipping address is wrong. They think you either put the wrong label on the package or multiple contradictory labels. I can guarantee that I don’t need to “update the address info”, especially given that I’ve had 10 deliveries from Amazon at this address just in the past week, at least two of them delivered via UPS.

Now, I do have an issue with FedEx leaning a recent Amazon package against the garage door instead of walking an extra 20 feet to put it on the covered front porch, but fortunately I found it before the large felt pad inside got rained on.

(Kiki is sad that delivery standards have fallen so low since her day…)

SSD lifetime…

The Crucial mSATA SSD that I put in my OpenBSD firewall in 2014 finally started to die. It’s actually failing gracefully, enough that I could boot it and have it stay up long enough for me to grab any data off of it that I needed.

Which I didn’t, because I ran full backups of it two days ago and stored them on my Synology NAS. I just needed enough of a manual network config so that I could mount the NAS, copy the tarball of /etc over to the spare OpenBSD box (that I had fortunately unpacked recently), and swap them.

I had originally intended to make them a failover pair with carp and pfsync, but I just never got around to it. Maybe once they run the structured wiring and some dedicated circuits in the new house, I can take the time to do it right.

The two Shuttles are starting to show their age in other ways, so maybe it’s time to replace them. I should see if pfSense or OPNsense has enough flexibility to replace my custom PF config.

Elliptical Amusement

I went to the local fitness store and bought a new elliptical. I was explaining to the sales rep that I wanted something more compact than the 20-year-old one I left behind in California that was 7 feet long with all the weight in the back end, and then I looked around, and saw that exact model in the store, used (LifeFitness 5500HR).

They’d recently reconditioned one and sold it for a good price. Not surprising that it was still in good shape; I deliberately bought a gym-grade model that was designed to survive heavy use.

By the way, I went with the True ES700 T9 Touchscreen; I paid considerably less at Tiger Joe’s than the price they sell it for on their web site. I’ll probably go back over there soon, because they have a large selection of premium rubber puzzle mats on sale because an order got canceled, and they look like they’d interlock with the ones I already have, so I could expand the workout area in my massive basement.

Definitely not in California any more…

It took me nearly an hour to buy a new handgun… because the guy in line in front of me was buying a suppressor. 😁

Fleming’s Steakhouse

Took my folks to Fleming’s to celebrate being completely out of California. The food was fantastic, our waiter Tyrece was terrific, and everything about the restaurant itself was excellent… except the music, which would have been more at home in a supermarket or convenience store.

(NSFW after the jump)

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Komi 2.11

Lots of short segments in this one, which went well, even though one of them involved Our Deranged Lesbian Stalker. Mostly because she managed to pull herself together and think about Our Komi’s feelings for once.

Lycoris Recall episode 1

Yeah, no. Let’s just say that the voice actresses for the two leads do a good job of bringing life to characters I want no part of.

(shivering Shamiko accurately captures my feelings about the blonde)

Closed!

It took multiple contract extensions and a lot of patience, but the house in California is officially sold. All that’s left is cancelling all the utilities so the new owners can start paying them. And taxes. Definitely going to be some taxing going on here.

Time to renovate!

ST:SNW season finale

I didn’t really buy the casting for a young James T Kirk, but everything else worked well.

(Pike cooked again…)

Haven’t watched any of the new-season first episodes yet. Still a few episodes of Komi left to go, I think.

“Yer a wizard, Harry”

A new Dresden Files novella came out this week…

(“yer a witch, Kiki”)

What’s worse than systemd?

Microsoft systemd. Lennart Poettering’s career move has made me fear for the future of WSL.

Special thanks to Pixy…

…for the LG monitor straightening tip.

Omelas and Aliens

I was a bit surprised that the producers of ST:SNW didn’t give even a little credit to Ursula K. Le Guin for inspiring the plot of episode 6. It was about as subtle as a chest-burster (episode 9).

The less said about episode 8, the better. Still, at least the moon didn’t hatch into a giant spider and immediately lay an egg the size of the moon. Which used to be the low-water mark for the modern Dr. Who series, until they decided that Ensign Sue Must Die didn’t go far enough.

One more to go for this season, releasing Thursday.

(picture is definitely unrelated, unless Pike cooks again)

Google doesn’t seem to celebrate Moa Metal’s birthday properly: the logo colors are all wrong. 😁

Fireworks!

In my dishwasher! Glad I ordered a new one back in May! Now it just needs to be delivered and hooked up!

Fortunately it had just finished the wash cycle before the sparks flew and the blue smoke escaped, so it wasn’t full of water. Also, remember that wall switch controlling the power to the dishwasher, something I’d never seen in a house before? Kind of glad it’s there now, so I didn’t have to run down to the basement and figure out which breaker to flip.

Why, yes, I did get a home warranty when I bought the place; since I already ordered the replacement, they’ll give me a credit toward the price.

Actual fireworks!

If I could get up onto my roof, I’d have the best view in town for fireworks, based on Saturday night’s show. As it is, it was still pretty impressive.

I presume the larger official shows were Saturday because the 4th is on a Monday this year.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Surprisingly, this doesn’t suck so far. Except maybe for the hair, which seems more Millenial than Regulation.

Having skipped Discovery, I was not aware that Anson Mount (who I had only previously seen in Mr. Right) had appeared as Captain Pike in that show. Reading a few episode summaries suggests that I will continue to skip Discovery, and not feel like I’ve missed anything worthwhile.

Unrelated: “Wide base to prevent loss”

Demon Girl Next Door 2.12

The big finish, with Our Demon Girl bringing everyone together to solve Our Other Magical Girl’s bad-luck problem once and for all.

Special bonus Crisis Management Form transformations included:

Komi 2.10

Valentine’s Day went so well that even the presence of Katai couldn’t ruin it.

Super Harem Version + OVA

Kadokawa’s solution to releasing a new isekai show where the whole point of the original story is Our Slavehumper banging his fantasy-race slave harem every chance he gets is to release it in three versions: broadcast, harem, and “super harem”. The Bluray/DVD box sets will contain the super harem version plus bonus I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-hentai OVAs.

(platonic not-a-slave-harem is unrelated)

Cast Off!

What cheat power hasn’t been given to an isekai hero yet? I was going to say the Most Common Special Attack, otherwise known as effortlessly stripping women like anime figurines, but then I remembered Those Who Hunt Elves…

Down to the wireACH…

I got a call from the title company that cleared up the current state of the house sale: the buyers simply didn’t understand how long it takes to get money out of a 401K, their loan officer didn’t explain it to them, and their explanation to the realtor (relayed to me) reflected this cluelessness. To put the cherry on top, the 401K provider didn’t wire the money to the title company’s escrow account this morning, they’re sending it via ACH, which adds at least another day… as we go into a three-day bank-holiday weekend.

So they asked me to extend the closing date until the 6th, while hoping to be able to do it on the 5th. Their loan is approved, all the paperwork is signed, and the deal is done… as soon as they hand over the money.

My mortgage payment on the old house is due today, but not considered late until the 15th, so we don’t have to redo all the numbers based on a change in the balance. Yet.

Shield Hero 2.13

Story time! After last week’s big, messy finish, they even skipped the opening credits this week so they could spend time having multiple characters reminisce, suggesting that they really couldn’t figure out how to get more than 12 episodes out of the roughly 3.5 books they covered (Ost shows up about 2/3 of the way through book 6, and book 9 finishes off the other-other-world story). So that’s 5.5 books in 25 episodes versus 3.5 in 12, which explains part of the problem.

Looking at the descriptions and chapter titles of the upcoming books, for October’s season 3 they pretty much have to either do books 10-12 or 10-14, and while the latter would be far more fan-friendly (13-14 are heavy on the Raphtalia content), they’d have to butcher their way through it even more aggressively than they did for season 2.

Turns out…

…what liberals really want is to abort fetuses right up until the end of the 360th trimester, especially if they’re on the Supreme Court.

New children’s book!

Soon to be required reading in school districts across America: Hunter Hired A Ho