Wed. April 18, 2018 – open thread

By on April 18th, 2018 in Random Stuff

67F and clear here today, probably gonna get HOT in the sun.

Walked a couple miles yesterday and my knees hurt today. Worked a bit and my back aches. Doing too much mouse clicking (graphics work) and my shoulder and wrist hurt.

Gah, getting old is not for the weak.

n

34 Comments and discussion on "Wed. April 18, 2018 – open thread"

  1. DadCooks says:

    I’m trying to think of a part that doesn’t hurt. Fail, it all hurts.

    WRT Barbara Bush: the last story I read about her yesterday before she died was that she was still enjoying her daily bourbon. Now that is what I call comfort care.

  2. Harold says:

    Gloating Headline “Justice Gorsuch Joins Supreme Court’s Liberals to Strike Down Deportation Law”. But, if you read the details, you see that Gorsuch took a very conservative approach in striking down a badly written law. Congress needs to apply more rigor in writing statutes.
    A former Immigration Attorney I work with pointed out that breaking immigration law is a misdemeanor and the ONLY misdemeanor that can result in a life sentence. Persons can be imprisoned indefinitely by ICE under current immigration law. We desperately need a complete re-write of our immigration legislation. Having been through the process in three countries (UK, HK, NZ) I would recommend we adopt an approach similar to New Zealand, where immigration is based on simple a points based system that assigns points for things like education level, English proficiency, needed skills, holding a job offer, etc. We MUST get rid of our insane chain immigration provision. Giving illegals a path to legal residency, NOT citizenship, based on paying fines and fees with strict deportation for failure to do so would be a good plan. We have bad law and fail to enforce most of it anyway. Time to fix.

  3. DadCooks says:

    I agree with you @Harold, about Justice Gorsuch’s opinion and immigration.

    We need a new Paul Harvey so we can get not just the “rest of the story”, but the real story. I had to do a lot of digging to get to what Justice Gorsuch really said in his opinion, too bad it is beyond the reach or comprehension of way too many people.

    I have ancestors who have emigrated to the “Colonies” and the USofA since the first settlements up to prior to WWI. None came here with empty pockets, no skills, poor health.

    Ellis Island was established to control the quality and rate of immigrants so that they could contribute and assimilate. Assimilation is a verboten word these days, so is “a contributing member of society”>

    Where are The Borg when you need them. (statement, not a question)

  4. nick flandrey says:

    NZ changed their system some years ago. When I looked into it, it was still points, but then changed to something much different. I have a work friend who owns a home there for years but had to leave because of the rule change. I had plenty of points, and the money, but wasn’t ready to leave. Then lord of the rings came out, and that all changed.

    n

  5. Harold says:

    We emmigrated to NZ in 2001 after MCI folded and Hong Kongs STRICT policy says if you have no job they will escort you to the airport after 30 days. So I visited NZ and had two job offers in a week. Returned to HK, packed the family, and flew down under. I showed up at the Wellington immigration office on a Monday morning at 9am, filled out the questionaire, showed them my job offers, and had the whole family visas by noon. We stayed for four years and I was ready to get my permanent residency when my wife had a heart attack and we discovered that the NZ National Insurance system that worked so well for small things didn’t do so well for big ones. After wife recovered we decided to return to the US where we could get all the care we could afford. I wish we would have stayed as they changed the law to allow private health insurance shortly after we left. But we are now over 55 and without a million NZ dollar inward investment we can’t get residency now. Beautiful country, wonderful people, but an expensive place to live.

  6. Greg Norton says:

    We need a new Paul Harvey so we can get not just the “rest of the story”, but the real story. I had to do a lot of digging to get to what Justice Gorsuch really said in his opinion, too bad it is beyond the reach or comprehension of way too many people.

    IIRC, Mrs. Paul Harvey did the writing. The show was definitely not the same after she died. I wasn’t surprised when he passed within a year of her death.

  7. JimL says:

    I nominate Jamie Dupree.

    36º and cloudy. I’m going to get in a run a lunch time – finally. Looks like we’re not hitting that record today, but tomorrow offers opportunity.

    Clonezilla Live and many iterations are helping on that SCO problem. I’m working with the backup box so that a mistake won’t kill us, but it’s close enough. I have the Hyper-V machine booting, but it won’t read the rest of the disk, and that was using an img file. Now I’m doing a disk-to-disk copy (through a USB 1.1 port) to a 32 GB jump drive. The HyperV on my desktop won’t let me mount it, but Disk2VHD will make a vhd out of it, which is how I got that img file to work.

    Progress. I hope to make progress. Eventually, I’ll get there.

    In other Nooz, I have a phone system update scheduled for 4:30 pm today. Scheduled it last week. I sent out notices last week, yesterday, and this morning. Today I was asked why it couldn’t be scheduled for after 5:00 pm. Gaah. I’m doing it at 4:30.

  8. nick flandrey says:

    Some really cool looking stuff here

    https://machineagelamps.com/collections/ready-to-ship

    warning- timesink

  9. Greg Norton says:

    I nominate Jamie Dupree.

    His scope is more limited than Paul Harvey, but Dupree works hard to be objective.

    After Paul Harvey died, the 1-2 of Dupree and Neal Boortz in the Noon hour of Boortz’ show was probably the reason syndicators quickly gave up trying to replace Harvey in the same timeslot.

    Hopefully, Dupree’s voice problem gets resolved soon.

  10. Harold says:

    Some really cool looking stuff here
    True – but the prices are too steep for my budget

  11. Chad says:

    Some really cool looking stuff here

    https://machineagelamps.com/collections/ready-to-ship

    Many would probably call a lot of that steampunk.

  12. mediumwave says:

    It was only a matter of time:

    Mocking Dead Women Is Wrong, Unless They’re Republicans

    When one of my coworkers encountered this kind of Leftist idiocy, he could be heard to say “En-cee-double-a”, meaning No Class At All.

    The first sentence in the article:

    “One of my favorite rules of thumb is this: ‘Liberals want conservatives to shut up. Conservatives want liberals to keep talking.’ ”

    Yes, the Proggies should be given every chance to beclown themselves.

  13. lynn says:

    “Amazon Echo Silver”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvT_gqs5ETk

    I like the “Uh huh” feature.

  14. lynn says:

    And yes, Austin is still weird. I was staying at the La Quinta Inn in south Austin on I-35. The price was good, $239 for three nights. There was a homeless couple living under a tarp next to a fireplug between the inn and the freeway service road. And, they had a dog.

    I used Uber for the first time on Tuesday after paying $48 to park my truck in a parking garage in downtown Austin. I paid $11 in the morning for Uber and then rode for free on Uber back to the hotel with another engineer who was staying there also.

  15. lynn says:

    Well, our Levee Board has decided what to do about our levee and the Brazos River.
    1. They are going to dig one of our water retention ponds another X feet deeper and use the dirt to raise our levee by two feet by the I-69 bridge
    2. They are going to upgrade our 40,000 gpm of pumps to 100,000 gpm
    3. They are going to drain the golf course ponds (currently constant level ponds) before any river, rain, or hurricane event to the river so we can retain more rain water

    There are no definite details nor time schedule yet for these improvements. My SWAG on the cost is about $20 million to protect 4,000 homes.

  16. lynn says:

    “Intel, Microsoft to use GPU to scan memory for malware”
    http://www.osnews.com/story/30270/Intel_Microsoft_to_use_GPU_to_scan_memory_for_malware

    For some weird reason, the first thing to pop into my head was, who defines what malware is ? I am getting paranoid XXXXXXXX suspicious in my old age.

  17. SteveF says:

    who defines what malware is ?

    Fifteen or twenty years ago, the Cult of the Dead Cow hacker team released Back Orifice for Windows. It provided very similar functionality to Microsoft’s remote client management tool, but MS’s tool was a vital part of every Windows systems administrator’s toolkit while Back Orifice was a hacker tool with no redeeming value. Antivirus toolkits were quickly updated to hunt for Back Orifice. For reasons.

  18. Greg Norton says:

    And yes, Austin is still weird. I was staying at the La Quinta Inn in south Austin on I-35. The price was good, $239 for three nights. There was a homeless couple living under a tarp next to a fireplug between the inn and the freeway service road. And, they had a dog.

    Again, Austin wants to be Portland. God only knows why.

    Parking is killing my new employer. And my spot still requires a very careful route between homeless services, along the perimeter of the US Government’s complex downtown.

  19. Greg Norton says:

    For some weird reason, the first thing to pop into my head was, who defines what malware is ? I am getting paranoid XXXXXXXX suspicious in my old age.

    Microsoft and Apple want the general purpose PC (can boot Linux) to go away.

  20. lynn says:

    For some weird reason, the first thing to pop into my head was, who defines what malware is ? I am getting paranoid XXXXXXXX suspicious in my old age.

    Microsoft and Apple want the general purpose PC (can boot Linux) to go away.

    I was specifically thinking of desktop software that was not purchased through the new Windows store. Like mine.

  21. lynn says:

    Parking is killing my new employer. And my spot still requires a very careful route between homeless services, along the perimeter of the US Government’s complex downtown.

    I don’t doubt that the cost of parking is killing your new employer. That cost is crazy.

    My first Uber driver told me that the Austin city council proposed upping the homeless services budget from $30 million to $150 million next year (I commented on all of the homeless in our five mile drive). Sounds like Austin is going to get a lot more homeless if anything like that budget is passed.

  22. lynn says:

    _Darkship Revenge_ by Sarah Hoyt
    https://www.amazon.com/Darkship-Revenge-Sarah-Hoyt/dp/1476781923/

    Book number five of a five book paranormal space opera series. I read the well formatted and bound trade paperback from Baen. I am fairly sure that there will be one or more books in the series to come in the future.

    Elves in Space ! ! ! Does it get any cooler than that ?

    300+ years in the future, the Earth is all screwed up. The Biolords in the 21st century gen-engineered plagues and people to meet their needs. The results were the desertification of Europe and the “Good Men”. Yet people being people, people are warring and thriving to beat the band. And the Usaian cult has successfully risen to take most of North American back. But not all of the Biolords plagues have been seen yet.

    The author has a very popular and active libertarian blog at:
    https://accordingtohoyt.com/

    My rating: 4.4 out of 5 stars
    Amazon rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars (41 reviews)

  23. Greg Norton says:

    My first Uber driver told me that the Austin city council proposed upping the homeless services budget from $30 million to $150 million next year (I commented on all of the homeless in our five mile drive). Sounds like Austin is going to get a lot more homeless if anything like that budget is passed.

    People in Austin/Travis County vote in politicians who support that lefty, progressive cr*p, and as soon as the hipsters have children, they’re shopping for houses in my neighborhood, preferably as close to the big LDS church as possible.

    Williamson County is the relief valve for Metro Austin, much like East Vancouver, WA is for Portland.

  24. lynn says:

    Sounds like Austin wants to be San Francisco:

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5627213/San-Francisco-visitors-bureau-head-begs-city-officials-clean-streets.html

    budget is about the same.

    I’m not going back to San Fransisco again. The homeless people last time (15 years ago) were overwhelming. We had to get off the trolley car for the driver to turn it and about 300 beggars XXXXXXX homeless were waiting for us with open palms.

  25. Greg Norton says:

    Sounds like Austin wants to be San Francisco:

    Bee Cave aspires to be Marin, but Austin likes having the Portland-style relief valve of nearby suburbs (Round Rock) with affordable housing, Republican congressmen, and Mormons.

    Parents in San Francisco have nowhere to go except Arizona.

    Austin was a compromise for us. My wife had a TX license and no interest in returning to Florida. I was done with the Northwest to the point that I don’t even look at the place on a map anymore.

  26. mediumwave says:

    budget is about the same.

    As JEP used to say: If you want more of something, subsidize it.

    At least SFO isn’t Anaheim (yet.)

    Added: According to the video, CA has about one quarter of the USA’s homeless; at ~114,000 that would make the total US homeless population ~500,000, most of them concentrated in Lefty-run large cities. It doesn’t take a big-data guru to see the correlation.

  27. Greg Norton says:

    My first Uber driver told me that the Austin city council proposed upping the homeless services budget from $30 million to $150 million next year

    Maybe Uber is paying for the increase. The Austin politicians kicked Uber out for about a year in some kind of strange shakedown play to line their pockets and protect the cabbies working the Barbara Jordan Terminal at the airport.

    (The name of the terminal just about says it all about Austin. At least they’re up front about it.)

  28. lynn says:

    “PC Gender Offender”
    https://comicallyincorrect.com/bathroom-rights/

    ROTFLMAO !

  29. mediumwave says:

    This was linked to over at Instapundit in the context of poor, poor Colin Kaepernick being unemploy(ed|able), but it’s good enough to stand on its own:

    Free Speech

    Remember to hover over the drawing!

  30. mediumwave says:

    Very apropos the SF public poop situation is this comment over at Eric S, Raymond’s blog.

  31. Greg Norton says:

    I was specifically thinking of desktop software that was not purchased through the new Windows store. Like mine.

    Microsoft would like to have Windows buttoned up like an iPhone, but, for now, they can’t get away with that.

    In the case of your specific application, IIRC, you have a compiler/runtime for Fortran which allows the system to be extended with files obtained from the outside world. Apple has very strict rules about VMs on iOS, and Microsoft would probably love to enforce something similar for the Windows store.

    I don’t see Microsoft getting away with lowering the boom on all the independent developers, but sheeple love their pr0n and “free” overseas Microsoft Office downloads. We’re probably one major malware attack from big companies demanding something be done.

  32. Dave says:

    Walked a couple miles yesterday and my knees hurt today. Worked a bit and my back aches. Doing too much mouse clicking (graphics work) and my shoulder and wrist hurt.

    I have two different PCs set up. One setup is much more ergonomic than the other. One makes my shoulders hurt, and the other doesn’t. It’s time I switched the PCs between the two locations as the most used PC is currently at the not so ergonomic location.

    I have a Kensington adjustable keyboard tray on the more ergonomic desk. Half of if is cheap plastic, and I wind up replacing it every five or six years, but they are well worth the money.

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