Orion’s End of the Year Wisdom

I’ve had some thoughts this year, and I think I’ve come up with some bits that others may find helpful. At the very minimum, I find them helpful.

    • Never buy 1-ply toilet paper. You just need to use twice as much to take care of business.
    • When reaching for a cup or glass, make no assumptions about the contents. Misjudging the required strength to lift it can yield unfavorable results. Move slowly at first to properly gauge the weight. Your shirt and pants will thank you.
    • Never think that you earned life’s rewards completely on your own. You had help from God, family, friends, and even strangers. Enjoy your blessings, but remain humble.
    • Pity fools. Empathy is a virtue.
    • Don’t wait until New Year’s Day to make a positive change; that is only punishing your future self while training your mind to procrastinate. Do it now!
    • Don’t be the driver on the road that everyone else hates. This isn’t Mad Max, no one thinks you’re cool when you drive like a terrorist.
    • The best thing since sliced bread is toasted sliced bread; followed immediately by buttered toasted sliced bread. Google, Apple, and Microsoft can’t compete in this category.
    • When life gives you lemons, it probably means you were growing a lemon tree. Next time, plant ice cream seeds.
    • Poison Oak sucks. Please don’t bring it into my house ever again.
    • Every day, find at least one thing to give thanks for. Gratitude is the path to joy.

Cursed dashed, broken lines in AutoCAD 2016. Be gone!

I am known for having unique technical problems. When I call tech support for various services and software, it’s rarely anything that the manual covers. I am blessed with the ability to discover bugs and “unintended features”.

At work this week, I upgraded a years-old-laptop to a Microsoft Surface Pro 4 with an i7 processor. I don’t do a lot of CAD work, but I do work on controls drawings for our MACS Coolers periodically. Because of this occasional need, I picked up a higher-end Surface Pro 4, if not for the AutoCAD work, an i5 would have been plenty.

Since I was overly curious about the new AutoCAD and installed our company’s latest version, AutoCAD 2016, and I was on a Surface Pro 4 running Windows 10, the newness of it all was doomed to end poorly.

Continue reading →

I can now announce that I’m creating music for a video game.

It’s been a couple of months since I was asked to contribute music for an upcoming video game. Many studio meetings and much prayer and contemplation, but we’re hitting a milestone and now I can actually share officially that I am making music for BeatBoxer by R2Wgames.

BeatBoxer is a mobile game, in the rhythm genre, where you fight different wacky characters to the music (provided my myself) and try to knock out these fools while banging my beats. The team behind the game is very small and spread out over quite a bit of geographic distance, but we seem to be working well together despite the divide.

We recently launched a Kickstarter for BeatBoxer and if funded, I should get paid in actual money! This is exciting to me because even though I have written several songs about video games, I have never written music to be officially included in a video game.

If you happen to be interested to learn more about BeatBoxer, you can visit the Studio’s site and the official Kickstarter below.

http://www.r2wgames.com/

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/r2wgames/beatboxer

Can’t send an email to an AOL.com address? Thank the lizards.

AOL support page

Look at this impressive display of English language comprehension.

Recently I had an issue where sending email from our domain to any AOL.com address resulted in a bounce-back error several hours later and an undelivered email. Our domain sends exactly zero spam messages, and our email always makes it through to other email hosts, so I wondered why AOL was any different.

It became apparent to me, after reading their official support page, that a small team of monitor lizards (citation needed) is running support at AOL. Now that this information has come to light, I wanted to highlight the progress that monitor lizards have made in the technical support field. Given a few more decades, I think we might see an increase in delivered non-spam messages, as well as a more general acceptance of Monitor Lizards in our increasingly tolerant society. Some day, the Monitor Lizards may even enjoy employment at email providers such as Yahoo! and Outlook.com. But we are going to need to see a big push in the civil rights movement before that day comes.

Below is the text from the above picture in case you can’t see it. Yay Monitor Lizards! And yay AOL!

redacted IP address [redacted] Reputation is Neutral

What is a neutral reputation?

The IP address has a neutral reputation. This means AOL has enough data to determine that is a know mail server and that the reputation is not bad or good.

Why am I revieving Temp Fail errors?

You may be experiencing temporary failure errors such as DYN:T1 or RLY:B1 due to recent activity that not is not yet yet available to this page. Temporary Failure errors are transient and may go away as your IP reputation improves.

Before sumitting a postmaster support request please review Guidelines & Best Practices page, and take whatever steps are necessary to remedy the situation.

How can I improve my reputation

To review ways to improve the reputation of your IP address please visit the Guidelines & Best Practices page, and take whatever steps are necessary to improve your reputation.

Solitaire Marathon Challenge Achievement

Update: Marathon screwed me I hate this achievement and regret the amount of time I spent trying to conquer this piece of crap so much that I can’t punctuate correctly

Marathon achievement

Windows 10 officially launched July 29th, 2015. It comes with some great new features, but the one that has me the most enthralled is the Microsoft Solitaire Collection. I don’t know why these simple card games are so appealing, but since Windows 3.1, we have been fascinated with Solitaire, am I right?

The Microsoft Solitaire Collection has something for every Solitaire fan. From the classic Klondike Solitaire, to TriPeaks, to Spider, FreeCell, and Pyramid, there is plenty here to feed your Solitaire addiction.

And for the rest of the month of August, I pledge to be addicted to Solitaire for Windows 10. Why? Because of this stupid Achievement, “Marathon”. For those of you that don’t know, Achievements are little digital “badges of honor” that you unlock for doing various tasks in a game or app. They are programmed in by the developers of said games. Sometimes, Achievements are unlocked for something simple like trying a new mode, or beating a level. Other times, Achievements are used to mark doing a great amount of something, like the Blizzard of Bliss achievement in Microsoft Solitaire Collection.

Still, other achievements are both quantity and time-based. This is where this cursed Marathon achievement comes in. The description for is particular achievement reads “Come back each day of an entire month and complete at least one Daily Challenge“. So not only do I have to do a minimum of 31 daily challenges, I have to do them consecutively. And not only consecutively, but in the same calendar month. This is ridiculous! If I miss a daily challenge, then I have to wait until the next month to try again!! Madness.

Yet for some reason, I am going to attempt to dedicate a few minutes of each day until August 31st to beating a daily challenge just to get that virtual pat on the back.

Update: So, it’s August 31st and I faithfully completed a daily challenge every day of the month in hopes of completing the Marathon Challenge and getting the STUPID achievement for my troubles.

After completing the INANE challenge, I received no achievement, so I went to check my challenge progress and saw this miserable visual.

Screenshot (15)

Yes that says I have 30/31 daily challenges completed. Oh really Stupid Solitaire game? Is that right? Then what do you say to this?

Every dumb day of august

That says I did at least a daily challenge for every day. And my anger should tell you that I did them on the day they were assigned, because I set my stupid calendar to remind me to do the dumb daily challenges.

So, to literal heck with you Microsoft Solitaire. Apparently you thought I skipped a day somewhere in that 31 day month. But you probably got paid for every ad video I watched through that 31 day month just to get to the daily challenges!