This Space for Rent

(Approximately) Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

—orc Sun Jul 20 01:48:46 2025

Friday(ish) Dust Mite Blogging™

I was distracted by a book & Dust Mite was distracted by the peaches, but it’s still Friday somewhere so it’s all good.

—orc Sat Jul 12 00:45:52 2025

At the airport

I was coming back from dropping SWITCTBN at the airport, so why not plunk myself down by the glidepath and try to take pictures of incoming traffic?

—orc Wed Jul 9 18:32:44 2025

First cherry pie of the year

On Sunday, we (SWITCTBN & I) went down to the Milwaukie farmer’s market and discovered that the pie cherries had come in. When we got home, I pithed all of them (except for one or two I had to do quality control on), and SWITCTBN made a pie.

The pie was ready to eat at 11pm, and I took a tiny slice out of it because I’m trying to step on my overeating. But when I woke up the this morning were only two slices left, and I made sure they went to a good home.

I think the pie lasted 10 hours, and I’m going to have to back down to the Milwaukie farmer’s market next weekend and get a bigger pile of pie cherries.

—orc Mon Jul 7 21:00:21 2025

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

Some people online were talking about Malört’s bizarre flavo(u)r profile, so I just had to have half a shot of it. Dust Mite does not partake, but was willing to pose with it.

In case you’ve never tried Malört, but have heard the horror stories, this is what it tastes like to me: very bitter, a little sour, which a somewhat sweet mouth feel and a loooooong bitter finish, fading to a sour metallic residue at the back of my mouth.

I don’t think it would work well with many other flavors and is best drunk neat or maybe iced. You do need to have a taste for sour and/or bitter, I think.

—orc Fri Jul 4 17:43:49 2025

A slow climb up a steep ramp

I have anemia, and it’s really obvious that I have it when I climb a steep ramp. LaView Drive is only about a third of a mile long, but it has an average grade of 5-6% and a ruling grade that’s at least 10%. It took me almost half an hour to make that climb.

Ugh.

—orc Wed Jul 2 21:38:28 2025

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

We subscribe to Who Gives A Crap for our toilet paper (at least for now; they keep increasing their prices and we have a Costco membership, so the battle between do good and inexpensive toilet paper is being a closely fought one) and the TP usually arrives in a WGAC-branded box.

But that’s not what happened this delivery; we had a big old Gilden-branded box plunked down on our doorstep with 65 rolls shovelled randomly into it and a fragment of the original box w/ a shipping label taped onto it I’m guessing that collaboration of flimsy WGAC box & UPS ended up with pallet of shredded boxes and toilet paper rolls rolling all around the UPS warehouse.

(I went into WGAC’s awful website and tried to use their “contact us” page to let them know, but – yes you guessed it – that page doesn’t actually work. I’m not sure why their prices keep going up, but I know it’s not because they’re hiring competent UI people to develop their website.)

—orc Fri Jun 27 23:46:24 2025

Trolley picture of the day

A southbound train left the Tacoma/99E station just as I started to cross the bridge over the line, so I had to stop and take a picture.

—orc Sun Jun 22 21:40:30 2025

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

—orc Fri Jun 20 01:46:16 2025

A mikado & an avanto

Polson Lumber Company #2 on the left, A Tri-Met Avanto running west on the Portland-Milwaukie Light Rail to the right.

—orc Sun Jun 15 23:50:37 2025

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

—orc Fri Jun 13 19:31:13 2025

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

—orc Fri Jun 6 23:38:10 2025

Yup. Trans joy is a thing.

Little things like seeing my chosen name on a coffee cup makes me happy. TBH, I didn’t think I could be so happy as an ongoing thing after 60 years of increasingly desperate attempts to keep from disintegrating into absolute despair.

Mind you, I still have to clean up the absolute chaos I’ve made of my life, but it seems actually doable now.

—orc Thu Jun 5 23:38:46 2025

Counting down the days

… and taking as many photos as I can of the BN/Bombardier “Type 1” high-floor cars before Tri-Met scraps them.

(I am quite displeased with this decision, of course, but at least the Oregon Electric Railway Historical Society is getting one of them.)

—orc Wed Jun 4 19:22:19 2025

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

Another couple of weeks; still no wideband internet, but the pile of routers various techs have left here to try to make things work keeps growing.

Maybe we’ll end up with enough of them to build a plastic stone summer house?

—orc Fri May 30 23:31:21 2025

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

—orc Fri May 23 23:45:39 2025

Voting (a photo from yesterday evening)

I do not miss in the slightest the pre vote-by-mail days, when I had to schlep over to the local voting location to actually cast the votes. These days it’s just delivering the votes, which we filled out at home, and which doesn’t involve locking the bike up in front of the voting place and taking my chances that nobody will attempt the five-finger discount on it.

—orc Wed May 21 22:27:56 2025

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

Our saga of not having internet continues. After a week of centuryline promising that the outage would be “done tonight”, they finally texted me to say that it was fixed (it turned out that the original outage was a fiber bundle being severed; not, as I originally thought, by BACKHOE JUSTICE, but instead a pole fell, draping the fiber over a railroad track, and getting it cut by a train) I wrote up a script describing the outage and what I did to try and remedy it, got onto chat with centurylink, and cut & pasted the script into the chat, which made the agent throw up their hands in despair and schedule a service call.

This afternoon, a technician arrived with a new router in hand (the one that Dust Mite is gazing skeptically at) and hopeful that swapping out my OpenWRT One with the centurylink one (a C4000BZ) would make the connection work again.

Not surprisingly, it – like the two routers I tried to use in the first place – didn’t.

So their next plan was to have the backend administrative system re-push my profile to the actual backend routers.

This didn’t work either.

So they went into a spasm of walking through internal tech support, bouncing between different technical silos until they discovered that it wasn’t just me, but there was a different outage in the same area but this time the people inside the company (unlike the poor staff at the call center, who are kept in the dark and fed shit) didn’t know what is was.

So the tech apologized, said they’d update my ticket and have another tech out as soon as they figured out what was going on.

sigh So I’m going to leave this monstrosity connected to my network for now (since it’s centurylink, of course it’s got their reskinned crippled OpenWRT-alike software installed) and as soon as traffic starts flowing again it’s gonna be taken out and replaced with the OpenWRT One like I originally planned.

Ugh (I am not particularly pleased with the OpenWRT web interface, but at least I can get to the Unix that’s running the router!)

Note that we are not completely without a broadband connection; last friday I ordered t-mobile broadband, and it’s now patched into our network. It’s pretty awful (200mbit if there’s a following wind) and it comes with an inhospitable Unix that doesn’t let me get in and change anything, so I’m stuck with their wifi (for now), their dnsmasq, and their hardwired (192.168.12) private network. But even with this (I need to call t-mobile customer support and see if there’s any way to configure their routers) it’s a whole shitload better than phone tethering.

Now it’s simply a matter of the sophie’s choice between centurylink and comcast. Yuckko. If Dust Mite had a digestive tract, it would be drinking heavily right now. Me, it’s just another lesson of since I let myself be infected with system administration when I was young and foolish I’m going to be stuck doing system administration until the day they heave my cooling body into the incinerator.

—orc Fri May 16 23:42:45 2025

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

On thursday our stupid network connection just stopped authentication, and after several hours of runaround with goddamn centurylink (made even better by having to use my phone as a bridge to the outside world and lemme tell you it’s *fun* trying to cram modern bloated webpages through a 1mbit phone signal) their call center people told me that oh the (centurylink supplied and locked down so I can’t shell into it) router was dead.

So I dragged out this openwrt one I’d gotten last year to replace the centurylink one and it failed too.

All hardware sucks, all software sucks, and openwrt does not surprise here.

So now I’ve got the (not working) centurylink router back in place and I’m trying to find a browser that will let me schedule a repair appointment for the stupid thing, while, at least in the short term, I’m looking into other service providers so I can bail on centurylink if they continue to be horrible.

Happy friday, all!

—orc Fri May 9 23:16:01 2025

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

Dust Mite helps me go through and draw from scratch all the motors & locomotives that I originally kitbashed from railroad paintshop drawings. Today we’re working on a new drawing of the South Loren Railway’s class 309 motor (in both 600vdc third rail + trolley pole and 3000vdc pantograph variants)

—orc Fri May 2 23:04:20 2025

May Day

—orc Thu May 1 11:52:39 2025