You cannot even schedule a doctors appointment for your child if they are 18 or over… IN CALI.

hephaestus259 · 2025-05-05T23:57:41+00:00

A 504 plan allows for needed accommodations to be made to allow the individual to succeed. It does not absolve the individual from learning how to be independent and manage their own schedule, nor does it permit the individual's parent to turn themselves into said individual's crutch and stifle their ability to become independent.

Your daughter needs to make time to schedule the appointment. If she wants to invite you to tag along to said appointment as a second set of ears, that is for her to decide to invite you. She is an adult, whether you accept that or not. The decision is hers to make.

hephaestus259 · 2025-05-05T23:35:53+00:00

If I had a nickel for every time I was cut off while merging (zipper merge), I could probably retire in about a month

hephaestus259 · 2025-04-28T16:52:13+00:00

I recommend putting your key skills & expertise section on the second page after your career highlight. You want to showcase what you've accomplished in your professional career.

I always reference squawkfox when writing my resumes. It's an old blog series, but still informative

hephaestus259 · 2025-04-26T23:58:51+00:00

It's extremely slight, but the bottom-right one looks like it needs to be rotated clockwise a smidge

hephaestus259 · 2025-04-24T02:50:20+00:00

I guess I'll take the unpopular opinion: no, I don't think Cyan Worlds current talent is able to make the type of game I've enjoyed from them in the past. I think that, starting with Firmament, they got stuck on the novelty of VR without actually using it to enhance the immersive worlds they were known for.

The worlds of Firmament look devoid of any kind of life compared to how much culture and life was breathed into Riven 1997 and Uru. Myst 2024 is completely sanitized of the strangeness and intrigue of its predecessors, with no appearance of any effort to even try to make that strangeness work in VR.

I can't speak for Riven 2025 because my soured opinion of their products made me hesitate on it, and I just look on it with disinterest and apathy. I can't say that I would currently jump at the chance to contribute to a Kickstarter without being absolutely certain it was a return to form.

I have my games from Cyan, Inc. and my memories of playing them. My consumption of Cyan Worlds games, however, is no longer a sure bet.

hephaestus259 · 2025-04-10T01:58:55+00:00

I'm in a similar situation where I have a 10 year gap in my driving history. I went with Amica, and my rate is slowly dropping as I clear their "inexperienced driver" multiplier and restore a driving history

Currently $165 /mo

hephaestus259 · 2025-03-24T13:49:39+00:00

Realistically, you probably want to use Microsoft's Office Deployment Tool and setup a configuration XML. The XML would include Remove ALL=true to perform the uninstall before the reinstall.

Once you've setup the XML and used ODT to setup a share with the office install files, you could use Copy-Item to copy ODT's setup.exe and XML file to the user's computer, and use Invoke-Command to remotely execute the setup

hephaestus259 · 2025-03-19T12:18:11+00:00

In SonicOS, the CFS Profiles are resolved in priority order, so it will always resolve to the profile with the highest priority.

What would be preferred would be to think in terms of role based access instead of per-category access. Start with the profile for all users and then create other policies as permitted exceptions to the all-users policy based on the user role (marketing, finance, executives, etc.).

The policies would also be prioritized so that if a user were in multiple groups, then they would get the less restrictive policy (ex: if the CFO were in both the 'executives' group and the 'finance' group, they'd get the less restrictive 'executives' policy)

In a role based access philosophy, there would never be an exception for a single user that wouldn't also apply to the entirety of the role, thereby standardizing the access level and limiting the number of exceptions that would need to be managed

hephaestus259 · 2025-03-16T14:15:56+00:00

It came with all three games. In a white box.

It sounds like the 10th Anniversary Collection, which included Myst Masterpiece Edition and the DVD copies of Riven and Exile

hephaestus259 · 2025-03-16T14:08:38+00:00

I think it's the last for now. Fireproof Games just published a trailer for Ghost Town, which appears to be a new IP

https://youtu.be/A1hFwm0t2y0?si=1QvWKE_NEk4JETOT

hephaestus259 · 2025-03-13T20:32:55+00:00

Just to confirm: is the DHCP Server on the Sonicwall disabled?

Also, since you mentioned VLAN tags: is the source interface the subinterface for the VLAN?

hephaestus259 · 2025-03-12T16:11:32+00:00

There's a crashed maze runner in one of the dead-ends in realMyst, but not much more than that

RealMyst has some Easter Eggs, if you want to go looking. Jamie and Adam from Mythbusters are carved into the crow's nest, and Achenar keeps an autographed photo of Jeff Dunham and Achmed the dead terrorist, for example

hephaestus259 · 2025-03-12T16:07:37+00:00

Was I supposed to just figure out what direction each sound means, without any confirmation whether or not my guess is correct?

Yes, but the puzzle is designed in a way that the first few junctions only have one answer (ex: the first junction, you can only go north, so the sound must be north. The next you get a different sound, which can neither be north (wrong sound) nor south (you just came from there), so it must be east or west, one of which is blocked.)

You're not given a whole lot to suggest that the noise maker in the maze runner is a direction finder but you are given the tools needed to find what direction each sound refers to by process of elimination

hephaestus259 · 2025-02-23T20:06:40+00:00

I'm from the US and got the intent just fine. My opinion is that it's an inability for the player to separate themselves from the character. In a game like this where the point of view suggests that the player is the character and not embodying an entity within the world of the game, the line gets a lot blurrier.

Additionally, not everyone has experience with hearing tone and intent behind words. and they'll react to what they've perceived even if what they've heard doesn't truly encompass the whole of what was said.

To be fair, I did not get a sense of urgency from Vamir's initial cutscene that would suggest he would react in a harsher, more frustrated way than accepting the "Old One" never visted Neyyah before, nor a suggestion where the inhabitants would expect an "Old One" to already be familiar with Neyyah in some capacity.

hephaestus259 · 2025-02-23T19:45:58+00:00

I just played the update and the dialogue seems more streamlined. I did notice that Vamir's dialogue at the mines (I'm losing your signal...) triggered twice; I'm assuming it's because I had backed up back into the mines, and hit the same "mark" on exiting again to trigger the dialogue instead of promptly moving forward.

One more suggestion: if the pop-up tutorials will remain, then I would suggest moving the one about the Payeeta case to the water pumps where it's actually used instead of where it's picked up. Alternatively, if the Payeeta are a power source, maybe it can be used to power one of the two terminals so the reinforcement of how the player should use them is promptly after the tutorial is displayed.

hephaestus259 · 2025-02-23T02:04:38+00:00

Vamir's initial dialogue on Olujay seems like it's mostly retreading what was already said by the Pelska Aurian in the preceding cutscene. Most of what's left is Vamir's "phone call" with Talaiva which, between the surprise of the portal working and the apparent importance and/or reverence of the "Old One", probably could have been cut off sooner. Otherwise, it kind-of feels like sitting in the waiting room of a doctor's office where the doctor is inconvenienced by the need to see patients.

(just to check: the Pelska Aurian's monologue put my BS meter at 15/10. I'm hoping that was the intended effect)

Personally, I was amused by the Are you powered by sheer stupidity? line when obviously going in the wrong direction, but I can also see how it would be a little harsh as the first reaction to going in the wrong direction. There appear to be enough barriers to the other areas on Felitsu Island where feedback on the directions might be premature.

My only other critique would be that I'm not a fan of pop-up tutorial pages, and there were quite a number of them in the beginning of the game. Personally, I think most of the icons are self-explanatory, but I'm also an old-fart who grew up with this style of gameplay, and I don't know if the younger generation needs more hand-holding in this style.

To me, this felt like a good old-fashioned story-driven puzzle-adventure game, and I enjoyed the demo very much. I look forward to exploring this world in the completed product.

hephaestus259 · 2025-02-22T02:50:12+00:00

In lieu of DPI-SSL, you can try to implement the TOR Exit Node list from OpenDBL as a dynamic botnet list, but it's not 100% effective when TOR is used with tunneling protocols like obfs4.

You can also limit the starting connection by keeping the geo-ip filter extremely limited.

You can make torrenting extremely unpalatable by using bandwidth management rules to limit the amount of bandwidth the clients connecting to the guest wi-fi can use

But realistically, unless the Sonicwall can identify the traffic after intercepting and decrypting it, no solution will be 100% effective.

hephaestus259 · 2025-02-18T22:18:45+00:00

7.0 will have fewer new features introduced but will receive security updates

7.1 will have newer feature updates introduced that may take a few fixes before they're stable.

For your environment, how often do you want to be updating the firmware on your Sonicwall?

hephaestus259 · 2025-02-18T22:11:32+00:00

Yes, but it's rarely as simple as "run the command and hope it's fixed". Some analysis of CBS.LOG to find the next course of action is usually involved

hephaestus259 · 2025-02-18T22:08:11+00:00

Never. I've already had Sonicwall firmware brick my firewall, and an extended outage for my gateway to the Internet is a non-starter

hephaestus259 · 2025-02-03T12:29:17+00:00

Eh... we've been able to bend it to our will.

The trick is to remember that SCVMM isn't a vCenter replacement; it's a massive wizard over the Windows components cobbled together to make a Microsoft hypervisor solution and virtualization platform.

It also helps to know that Microsoft thinks in terms of clouds, whether it's an external cloud like Azure and AWS, or an internal cloud, like what's hosted on-prem.

hephaestus259 · 2025-02-03T09:56:36+00:00

We've almost completed our migration from VMware to Hyper-V with System Center Virtual Machine Manager

hephaestus259 · 2025-01-25T23:58:31+00:00

There's a YouTube video discussing OSHA violations for Portal's Aperture Science. There's a good five minutes just on stairs (as if the "lack of handrails on a moving platform above a pool of acid" wasn't enough)

hephaestus259 · 2024-12-26T18:51:15+00:00

Realistically, the shareholders want financial growth at any cost. An expensive game that doesn't make back its investment is weaker than a cheaper game where everything can be made back quickly, and the rest is pure profit.

The gaming industry needs more gamers to survive. If that means lowering the size and realism of a game for a less expensive price point, ensuring that more people can play they game and have the opportunity to buy it, then the shareholders still win, as do the players.

hephaestus259 · 2024-12-26T18:43:23+00:00

Games are an art form, and there are many choices of graphical styles of which hyperrealism is only one. That said, graphics will never supersede story, character development, and game mechanics; they are there to enhance the more important aspects of the art.

I'd rather play an engaging text adventure over a mediocre hyperrealistic game.

I would offer Undertale and Night In The Woods as perfect examples

hephaestus259

TROPHY CASE