This Space for Rent

May 21, 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

May 16, 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

May 09, 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

May 02, 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 01, 2025

May Day

Workers of the world, unite! (now more than ever, particularly in the American Imperium)

—orc Thu May 1 11:52:39 2025

Apr 25, 2025

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

The choice was to buy a house or have avocado toast. Dust Mite chose violence.

—orc Fri Apr 25 23:57:31 2025

Apr 21, 2025

Gone shopping

A 15 mile r/t shopping trip (which is not my record; I’ve ridden my xtracycle out to the New Seasons in Happy! Valley! and that’s closer to 30 miles) out to the Clackamas Costco. I didn’t need that much food (mainly snacks for the bears) but Russell asked for soda and I brought back 30 pounds of Coke (bringing the total weight of the cargo up to ~55-60 pounds.)

One of the staffers at Costco asked where I was coming from, and was dumbfounded when I said Sellwood. They took this picture, too, so I didn’t have to race a self-timer to get in the photo.

—orc Mon Apr 21 22:39:43 2025

Apr 18, 2025

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

Dust Mite assembles an army

—orc Fri Apr 18 23:35:32 2025

Apr 16, 2025

A dyke & her bike (again)

I spent the first 60 years of my life trying my damnedest to avoid being photographed, so now that I’m in a body I’m happy with I don’t know how to pose myself so I don’t look like a gawky plump stick insect.

—orc Wed Apr 16 21:38:11 2025

Apr 11, 2025

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

It’s time to pay the neo-Nazis for the privilege of having my rights stripped away

—orc Fri Apr 11 23:58:23 2025

Apr 07, 2025

Amtrak photo of the day

Two boxcabs on a northbound Coast Starlight

A northbound Coast Starlight showed up just as we got off the trolley on the way back from the antifa rally, so I had to stop and take some pictures as it passed by.

—orc Mon Apr 7 00:02:34 2025