Wet, cool, and wet. With a side order of wet.
Yesterday was rain alternating with drizzle and misty drizzle.
Plumbing was accomplished. Plumbers will be arranged.
Leftovers were eaten. These are the good old times. Make the most of them.
I came into a conversation mid-sentence. My wife was suggesting to Daughter 1 that she get started with me learning how to shoot, first the BB and airsoft, then the real guns later. WELL. Ok then 🙂 That’s not a change of heart on her part or anything but it’s the first time she’s brought it up and the first time with a timeframe. FWIW, I think she’s right and probably a bit overdue.
Today I’ll be working on the kitchen range hood, continuing my local auction prepping, and getting stuff picked up so we can get the Christmas decor up. I’d like to do several new things this year but I haven’t decided on anything specific. (Yes, if I think CWII is going to kick off, why worry about Christmas decor? Because that is normal real life. Kids need to learn the traditions and the stories and they need the memories. I need the memories. The bad thing ™ usually doesn’t happen, so I prep for it, but also make sure to live my life right now.)
Speaking of, power went out and I’m closing this on my phone. Keep stacking. You’ll need it.
n
Well, by “closing this by phone” I guess I really meant “stick it into some sort of limbo”…
Cut off mid thought, here it is.
Power came on then went back out, then finally came back very late. I am very tired from all the interrupted sleep and my back is killing me (happens when I stay in bed too long.) Caffeine withdrawal headache will start if I don’t get some coffee going.
n
I’d help out with the posting of the day’s post, but I live in the PST time zone.
And I usually don’t get up until the ‘crack of 9’.
Although I do stay up until midnight. Being retired lets me do that.
It is comforting that no one was thinking of my death as a reason for late posting…
n
I’ve got a web site that will send out things after one’s passing. About 95% ready for use.
But I procrastinate, out of fear that when it is done, I’ll have to use it….or it will be used for me.
I’ll settle in any time between about 2130 and 0100, though normally on the early end of that, then work on the laptop until either I’ve finished what I wanted to do or get too tired to be productive. Then read until I pass out. But I’m almost always up by 0400 and often before 0300, so it’s not like I’m one of those slugs who gets more than six hours of sleep out of 24.
Since I’m up early anyway, I’ll check on the database at work, which are prone to failure. Either one of the customer’s databases will choke, causing a failed or corrupted data load, or our vendor’s DB processing system (aka, tinkertoy, string, and fervent wishes, though they get annoyed when I describe it that way) will have a hiccup and require something to be kicked in order to have things ready for running the reports which go out to the end user customers at the start of their workday. It’s not that something goes wrong every night but it’s common enough that things should be checked very early in hopes of getting things back on track by 0830. The DBs are (mostly) not my responsibility, but a couple of the DB team had been having to get up before dawn, six days per week, screwing up their sleep and their days. As noted, I’m awake anyway, so I told them I’d check and deal with what I could.
“Texas man dies under a collapsed stack of boxes, is used as a cautionary tale against hoarding”
Hah!
No sirree, never occurred to me…
But it’s amusing, because I spent nearly an hour on the phone yesterday helping a friend set up their mother’s phone so that she can ‘cast the newspapers to her TV. Apparently she like to check the obits regularly.
You get to a point in your life, where the obits exceed the wedding and birth announcements.
n
I’d actually offered my ancient Kindle Graphite 3g, which amazingly still works, but the screen is too small.
Man it’s light to hold though. A fraction of the iPad or Tab.
Wasn’t there a fictional detective who read the obituaries every morning? Nero Wolfe?
You have to read the obits every morning to be sure you’re not in them.
I’ve concluded a while back that college football and basketball are just frauds. Nothing educational about them whatsoever, just minor leagues of the NFL and NBA.
For example, yesterday afternoon local, OTA, Fox channel had a college football game on. Both teams had losing won loss records, 0 – 2 and 1 – 2. Even boxing doesn’t do that, they won’t even show a “fight” where only one has a losing record. Where can I view a boxing event with two losing record actors? Worse yet, wrasslin’. WWE wrasslin’ won’t even quote won loss records.
For some reason I felt the need to lookup this comic.
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20000801
Blast from the past.
n
I’ve concluded a while back that college football and basketball are just frauds. Nothing educational about them whatsoever, just minor leagues of the NFL and NBA.
To be fair, the NBA does have a kind of minor league system, but the NFL doesn’t even try.
Which reminds me — the UT alumni are screaming for another football coach to be fired this morning. The buyout on Tom Herman’s contract is $16 million.
“CIA cyber-crime expert: Hundreds of thousands of votes flipped to Biden”
https://www.wnd.com/2020/11/4873267/
I just don’t know what the courts are going to do as I do not think that they are willing to do much. The only solution here is to throw out the bad ballots but who knows which one they are.
Hat tip to:
https://thelibertydaily.com/
In Pennsylvania and Michigan that can’t be done — the batches were mixed and at least some of the envelopes were thrown away. One might almost think that was deliberate in order to muddy the trail of falsification, but of course that’s unthinkable.
The solution is to throw out the popular vote where there’s evidence of fraud and the election boards can’t adequately demonstrate that the problems have been resolved and an honest tally of honest votes has been made. This cannot be done because of the deliberate muddying. Throw out the popular vote and have the state legislatures choose the electors. The communists and parasites will of course scream about invalid results but that’s just the temper tantrum of babies not getting their way. The reported results that we now have will not be accepted by 80 million Trump voters, and we have evidence, laws, and constitutions on our side, as well as a lot of guns.
I have been binging “Agents of Shield” on Netflix. They use a heavily modified Globemaster C-17 with six afterburning turbofans to fly and VTOL that they call the Bus.
https://marvel-movies.fandom.com/wiki/Bus
I thought that afterburning turbofans were imagination but turns out that they are real things and built into modern miltary jets such as as the B1, B2, F14, F15, F16, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Electric_F110
Wet, cool, and wet. With a side order of wet.
Yesterday was rain alternating with drizzle and misty drizzle.
I’ve got two feet of water in the front ditch at the house. That is at least 5 to 6 inches of rain. And the ground was really dry when this rain started late Thursday night. It is still going strong.
I just don’t know what the courts are going to do as I do not think that they are willing to do much. The only solution here is to throw out the bad ballots but who knows which one they are.
The legislatures will have to decide what to do as far as certifying and empaneling electors. The courts won’t touch it because a remedy already exists.
I’ve concluded a while back that college football and basketball are just frauds. Nothing educational about them whatsoever, just minor leagues of the NFL and NBA.
To be fair, the NBA does have a kind of minor league system, but the NFL doesn’t even try.
Which reminds me — the UT alumni are screaming for another football coach to be fired this morning. The buyout on Tom Herman’s contract is $16 million.
Do you know how many billionaires are UT alumni ? Several. I know one of them, his attitude on money is interesting. He bought a 6,000 ft2 condo for his daughter to attend UT last year, about three blocks away from the campus. He bought it big enough so that he and his wife could visit and hang for a week or two.
Anyway, they can buy out the contract any time they want. The problem is finding a winning coach that is better than Jimbo at TAMU who is 5-1 and forecasted to beat LSU tonight. That is some rarefied air.
I just don’t know what the courts are going to do as I do not think that they are willing to do much. The only solution here is to throw out the bad ballots but who knows which one they are.
The legislatures will have to decide what to do as far as certifying and empaneling electors. The courts won’t touch it because a remedy already exists.
That is the real solution to the problem. Sorting out the votes is a freaking disaster and will take months, if ever.
But will the Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona legislatures do the right thing ? “Pennsylvania Legislature Seeks to Label Presidential Election as ‘In Dispute’ With the US Congress”
https://mediarightnews.com/pennsylvania-legislature-seeks-to-label-presidential-election-as-in-dispute-with-the-us-congress/
HOW THE COVID NUMBERS WORK
Verrry interestingk!
Anyway, they can buy out the contract any time they want. The problem is finding a winning coach that is better than Jimbo at TAMU who is 5-1 and forecasted to beat LSU tonight. That is some rarefied air.
Jimbo has a lot of skeletons hanging around in his closet. He’s lucky the Yucs signed Tom Brady and the Jameis Winston era ended quietly in Tampa without the vault doors creaking open at One Buc Place.
Jimbo has a lot of skeletons hanging around in his closet. He’s lucky the Yucs signed Tom Brady and the Jameis Winston era ended quietly in Tampa without the vault doors creaking open at One Buc Place.
They all have skeletons in their closets. They are dealing with 100+ teenagers who are for the most part from poverty homes. That is a recipe for disaster.
Replaced the last spinning disc drive in my desktop with the SSD that was purchased Friday. I now a 0.5 TB boot SSD that is used for programs, a 2T TB SSD that is used to store data files, a 0.5 TB SSD that is used a temporary working disc for Photoshop and video editing. The old discs are stacked on the shelf and will be left alone for another year. At which point they will be wiped, possibly destroyed, and tossed. A couple of them I may recycle in a church PC for additional storage. Or maybe create a NAS for the church.
And back from Atlanta.
Ray, what kind of speed increase do you notice when you replace the boot drive with an SSD? I haven’t looked at any benchmarks for about a decade, preferring instead to just go by “feel.”
I ask because I have been playing with an old single processor 4 core Xeon ~3.2 GHz box with a fresh W10 install. I notice that the spinning boot drive is at 100% for maybe a minute after either a cold boot or a resume from hibernate, but the processor is only loaded a few percent and speed-stepped down to about 1 GHz. This is indicated by the Windows Task Manager. The system “feels” normally responsive, even when copying files to/from it or starting an application. I am so far very satisfied with its responsiveness.
If I were to install an SSD, it might be a bus card, as these look to be much faster than an SSD on the SATA bus. The only downside is that it might not be usable in a newer machine. The prices on these have fallen dramatically, so they are almost as affordable as SATA SSDs.
All this is just preliminary poking around. Just curious.
From 90 seconds to about 20 seconds to be completely accomplished. This is excluding the BIOS time which cannot be improved.
HOW THE COVID NUMBERS WORK
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/416882/
Verrry interestingk!
Dad was telling me the other day about growing up with polio everywhere around them in College Station, Texas. Dad is 82, born in 1938. He constantly knew people getting the polio. His family was careful but they went to church, went to school, went to the grocery store. Polio is a real disease with very debilitating effects unlike covid which mostly kills people who are already very ill.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio
Replaced the last spinning disc drive in my desktop with the SSD that was purchased Friday. I now a 0.5 TB boot SSD that is used for programs, a 2T TB SSD that is used to store data files, a 0.5 TB SSD that is used a temporary working disc for Photoshop and video editing. The old discs are stacked on the shelf and will be left alone for another year. At which point they will be wiped, possibly destroyed, and tossed. A couple of them I may recycle in a church PC for additional storage. Or maybe create a NAS for the church.
Where is your online backup hard drive ? And do you have external backup hard drives ?
Adding an SSD as boot drive breathed new life into half a dozen systems here. It’s the easiest upgrade you can do to get more life out of a system that’s feeling pokey. That is, as long as your memory is maxed too.
n
Here’s one refutation of that claim. Dominion systems were not used to generate the ballots in Georgia, just to count them. They did a hand count that verified the tally from the machines.
Powell is a clown.
External spinning disc. Backed up every Sunday about 6:00 PM. Critical files are stored in the cloud, OneDrive, manual copy. Remember I said in the case. Still spinning discs for external, cheap and large capacity.
Dad was telling me the other day about growing up with polio everywhere around them in College Station, Texas. Dad is 82, born in 1938. He constantly knew people getting the polio. His family was careful but they went to church, went to school, went to the grocery store. Polio is a real disease with very debilitating effects unlike covid which mostly kills people who are already very ill.
This pandemic ignores centuries of public health practice with regard to “incurable” diseases.
Dr. Pournelle said it wasn’t a dark age until we forget that we can do a specific thing. We seem to have a handle on TB, and no one says anything about those patients’ civil rights being infringed even though the initial screening test has a *lot* of false positives.
Ray, what kind of speed increase do you notice when you replace the boot drive with an SSD?
From 90 seconds to about 20 seconds to be completely accomplished. This is excluding the BIOS time which cannot be improved.
Sorry, I asked the wrong question. I don’t care much about boot times. I care about stressful operations, maybe editing photos or videos, something you do a lot.
That said, I haven’t done any photo editing on this test system yet. I haven’t installed much software so far. I have only tried loading applications. For example, loading a browser (often one of the slower loads I do) on a slower system takes a while, but on the faster system it is almost instantaneous. Same browser, different OS. I realize this is not precise, but is a start, and is promising. I can’t imagine that an SSD would make a practical difference from what I have seen so far.
Just to confirm I am nutz, many years ago, I knew a guy who ran monte carlo simulations on various systems. He had budget, and was always looking for something faster. The test run was the same calculation, but of necessity the program had to be compiled to run natively on each candidate system. Test systems were anything he could get his hands on, and ranged up to a DEC VAX cluster with shared RAM, claimed to be well suited. These runs typically took a day or two, so a stopwatch was unnecessary. The guy who did the tests was very diligent, and had lots of help, so the results were likely representative. The rankings were sometimes more than a little surprising. I wish I had the numbers and a list of systems. It would of course be irrelevant today. I have seen similar results with chip layout software on UNIX workstations, just before Windows displaced them. Look at specs, but verify with tests.
I ask because I have been playing with an old single processor 4 core Xeon ~3.2 GHz box with a fresh W10 install. I notice that the spinning boot drive is at 100% for maybe a minute after either a cold boot or a resume from hibernate, but the processor is only loaded a few percent and speed-stepped down to about 1 GHz. This is indicated by the Windows Task Manager. The system “feels” normally responsive, even when copying files to/from it or starting an application. I am so far very satisfied with its responsiveness.
Ever since I replaced the spinning metal HD in my primary desktop a couple of years ago, I’ve noticed some strange behavior, including 100% utilization after boot, and noises from the drive that I’ve never experienced with previous swap outs, running under both Windows 7 and 10 in a multi boot arrangement along with Linux Mint. Linux seems fine except the grinding noise upon shutdown. For the record: WD Black, 2 TB.
A WD Black 1 TB drive I installed around the same time in my home server has been flawless.
Now that the warranty period is up, I’m going to replace the drive.
My latest laptop (bought in 2019) is an HP Envy 17″, with a 500GB C/SSD, and a 1 TB/D drive (spinner), with 12GB RAM, Intel i7-8500CPU/1.7ghz, Windows 10 Pro x64.
Windows and apps/programs are on C. Data (lots of it) are on D:. Windows startup from power off, and from sleep mode are quite fast, under 10 seconds easily. Even restarts are fast.
The C/Windows drive is starting to get full, so some newer (and less-used) apps are installed on the D drive. Still, snappy performance; much faster than my previous HP laptop (bought 2016).
Pleased with the performance of this system. Next system (maybe next year) will probably have all SSD drives. Maybe even two SSD drives. I need the disk space – the 1TB drive is about 80% full (I need to do a bit of pruning.)
Main use is web site programming, graphics (using the new Affinity photo editor – $39; PhotoShop-level photo editor; they have other graphics products; and reduced price for the “Friday of Color”), word processing / book writing (Office 2019 standalone, purchased for $49 via Cheapify; mostly using Word), web browsing (FireFox), File Transfer (WinSCP).
Just to confirm I am nutz, many years ago, I knew a guy who ran monte carlo simulations on various systems. He had budget, and was always looking for something faster. The test run was the same calculation, but of necessity the program had to be compiled to run natively on each candidate system. Test systems were anything he could get his hands on, and ranged up to a DEC VAX cluster with shared RAM, claimed to be well suited. These runs typically took a day or two, so a stopwatch was unnecessary. The guy who did the tests was very diligent, and had lots of help, so the results were likely representative. The rankings were sometimes more than a little surprising. I wish I had the numbers and a list of systems. It would of course be irrelevant today. I have seen similar results with chip layout software on UNIX workstations, just before Windows displaced them. Look at specs, but verify with tests.
Until I got my first 1.0 GHz Pentium, the fastest machine that I ran on was a 15 ??? mips IBM 3090 back in the 1980s. We had three of them, one for the GIS database (had 300 standalone hard drives connected to it, looked like one of the “Aliens” pod fields), one for operations, and one for engineering. I ran on the operations 3090 and my simulations took about an hour each. At first they limited me to one run then they limited me to one run 6pm to 6am.
The IBM mainframes (and the Univac and the CDC) are unique in that their cpu processing is pure cpu, all of the i/o is offloaded to secondary processors. They run like blue blazes. The only thing that I had come close to it was an Apollo DN/10000 dual cpu box in 1993 until the 1 Ghz Pentiums came out. That Apollo DN/10000 box was the precursor for the HP PA-RISC machine.
My experience is that CPU horsepower and lots of memory in those situations will be a bigger benefit. 32 gig would be a nice round number. 8 cores or better. Also a high end video card. Unless the editing software is swapping to disk, a SSD would not help.
Oooh, Univac and Apollo. I used to run sims at night on our Univac (can’t remember model) mainframe when CPU time was available in larger blocks, and discounted. Later, I was on to different things, but the Apollo workstations were the hot setup. Had Token Ring networking and shared processing. Slick.
Also did some hardware in the loop stuff. That setup had analog computing because it was fast. Ten years later, we were working on a much bigger (and different) HWIL setup that was all digital. It was to take a couple years to build, but was canceled part way through. By then, I had transitioned into the facilities aspects because I was the only one interested. That was great fun. I always wanted to see that behemoth run, but it was not to be.
My experience is that CPU horsepower and lots of memory in those situations will be a bigger benefit.
Yup. Small steps for me. Sometimes the journey is more fun than the destination.
Oooh, Univac and Apollo. I used to run sims at night on our Univac (can’t remember model) mainframe when CPU time was available in larger blocks, and discounted. Later, I was on to different things, but the Apollo workstations were the hot setup. Had Token Ring networking and shared processing. Slick.
Probably a Univac 1108 with 64K words of memory (32K words data, 32K words instructions). Awesome machine. 6 bytes of 6 bits each, 36 bit words, no lower case. I learned how to write Fortran on one of these in 1975.
Yeah, we had 5 or 6 of the Apollo workstations (25 inch high res monitors !) along with the DN/10000 from 1985 to 1995. We were running simulations of two cryogenic natural gas plants in Wyoming in realtime on the DN/10000. They had to decide whether to make propane each day or just sell the natural gas to the pipelines after removing the nitrogen in it.
Yeah, the token ring networking was weird. We had a token ring to ethernet converter and it was a mess. Worked great until it did not work and then we had to reboot half of the world.
Probably a Univac 1108
Bingo! I really was just an unwashed user trying to get my work done. Cards in, paper out. No terminal. Not much fun.
But… ANALOG! Another part of my job was to plug the results from the 1108 into that analog setup and run the hardware. After many runs (about 10 seconds each,) I would have results. Then, make a small change, rinse and repeat. Today, what took us a month probably could be done in a day.
Today, what took us a month probably could be done in a day.
In a freaking spreadsheet !
One was forced to be cancelled by NYS:
https://nypost.com/2020/10/17/wedding-of-hasidic-leaders-grandchild-was-to-draw-10k-to-nyc/
A second was carried off in secrecy:
https://nypost.com/2020/11/21/secret-plans-helped-synagogue-pull-off-massive-maskless-wedding/
Intel “generations” matter. My 2019 i5 Mac mini blows the doors off my 2012 i7 MacBook Pro using slightly less speed and half the ram – 20 seconds to compile 12,000 lines of code versus 120 seconds.
Linux problem, I still haven’t figured out the disk space usage limit settings in my NVR and I’ve been deleting files as needed.
Today I didn’t delete when I noticed the drive was full, and now I can’t mount the drive!
I get ‘can’t create mount point, no space on disk’ so how the heck can I delete files to make space? The file manager wants to mount in /media/username/…… Is the drive actually already mounted elsewhere that I can perform some file deletes?
mint 19.3
n