Cool and clear? Yesterday was, with a gusting blustery wind. In the afternoon it was 81F in the sun, with only 19%RH. Gorgeous. I’d like some more of that please.
I did my one pickup, missed the others. I’ll be getting those today.
I heard back from the septic engineer finally, and he can’t meet this weekend, so I will not have to dash up to the BOL. It’s my non-prepping hobby meeting weekend so I’m really glad not to miss getting together with the guys.
It occurred to me that we move through time like a drunk lurching down a hallway. The hallway is the constraints of what is possible. Sometimes the hallway is wide and we don’t find the walls. Sometimes the hallway is narrow and the drunk walks straight down the center. Sometimes he slides down one wall or the other. Sometimes, he bounces off the edge of what’s possible and moves backward for a short period before moving on down the hall. Occasionally there is a doorway or an alcove and since the drunk is leaning on the wall as he moves, he gets stuck in the slight widening of the hall. Often as not, he’ll spin around eventually and lurch down the main part of the hallway again.
Our hallway is very narrow at this moment. We’re rushing down the hall, bouncing rapidly from wall to wall. Some of us are spinning around with every bounce, trying to reorient on moving forward. Some are holding a hand against one side to steady us as we go, but we are all becoming more and more constrained as we go along.
As a nation, a culture, a people, and as individuals, we are coming to a place where the hallway ends. Is it a door that we can pass through and then continue down the same hallway? Or is it a wall, and the door opens to our left or right and takes us in a different direction? Do the walls just squeeze us down, like a cattle chute, until we can only go forward, in single file, pushed by the mass behind us?
I think I know where we are headed. I don’t know how long the remaining hallway is, nor how we continue. History says that “we” as a whole WILL continue, but not necessarily any specific one of the “we”. The mass of people behind us in the hallway pushes us forward, even if we’d prefer to stop. You can shelter in an alcove for a short while, but eventually the mass carries you on. Just as I don’t know how long the hallway is, I don’t know how wide it still might be.
It feels pretty narrow, with very little room to lurch around. It feels like we’re pretty close to the door, or the jog in the hall, or even the complete change of turning right or left.
My plan is to get me and mine through to what comes next. I’ll move with the crowd down the hall, lurching a bit less, and focused on moving at my own pace, and not just getting carried by the force of the pushing masses, until we pass through and the door opens on a new hall, or the constraint of what is possible widens out again.
Stack the things you need, so that the crowd has fewer handles to grab as they pull you along.
nick
@Rick: Text in the comments is no longer wrapping when reading on my iPad using Safari.
https://www.dailypundit.com/dailypundit.wordpress/2022/03/31/constitutional-interpretation/
The same goes for U-Haul trucks, though. The answer, I think, is very firm liability rules and insurance premiums to match.
No normal car is going to survive a serious collision with a monster like that.
– ditto for hitting a brick wall or concrete abutment. Or a tree. Lots of pix online of small cars broken in half by collisions with trees.
The size thing gets self regulated by the costs imposed. The vehicles are expensive, they cost more to run, insure, etc. They can be very inconvenient day to day, wrt parking, restaurant drive thru’s, etc. So not everyone wants or gets one.
———————
46F this morning, and not saturated. Probably another cool, dry day. Hurray!
n
WRT Flash Data Retention: I was involved in a a survey of the data available and we determined that SLC (Single Level Cell, one bit per location) Flash was good for about 10 years over extreme temperature range, -40 degrees. Cold was the constraining temperature, oddly enough. We never could get good data on MLC Flash (Multi Level Cell, two bits per location) and TLC (Triple Level Cell, three bits per location) was just beginning to sample.
ALL of the technologies we were looking at were for parts with at least 10K read/write cycles. There are parts with lower cycle counts, some as low as 100 R/W cycles.
Thumb drives and SD cards are cheap for a reason. They are MLC or TLC technology, have lower cycle counts, and the controllers do not have wear levelling and data correction technology. I would not trust them for data retention more than 5 years, even in an office environment. I also would not trust them for more than about 1000 R/W cycles unless I knew they were rated for that. Of course 1000 R/W cycles is about 3 years of daily use, which is hard usage for a thumb drive, in my experience. Unless someone tries to use it as a drive replacement.
Brady was free to do whatever he wanted after the season ended. This is an ugly salary cap year in the NFL.
As for the Yucs, of course they were willing to “leave the door” open for Brady’s return, up to and including the coaching change which happened last week. They have a stadium in Germany to fill this Fall, and the name “Blaine Gabbert” isn’t going to get the job done, regardless of potential.
The Dophins story has floated around Tampa for weeks.
When did google mapping decide that they should offer me the “most fuel efficient” routing instead of the quickest?
n
Adding 60 A of household electrical service. Of course, that will be a factor for any similar-sized EV, but Mayor Pete hasn’t told you about that.
I’ve seen bigger get used as grocery getters. Pre-9/11, the stay-at-home-mommies in the Tampa suburbs were eying Unimogs, and I even saw one kitted out that way in a neighbor’s driveway one afternoon, driven by a visiting friend.
The Silverado-based H2 the neighbor owned was puny in comparison.
Which reminds me – the first generation “civilian” Hummer H2s were really just GMC pickups in disguise. If you can find one, they’re actually fairly practical and reliable.
“open frame” mining rigs are hitting the returns auctions. “GPUs not included”.
n
Business? Establish an lifecycle replacement policy and stick with it (until funding is reduced, of course).
Home? I go by the simple rule of how important something is to me. Most things, I’ll run until there is a problem, with a failure or something showing a real need for upgrade. I have my server on a 4 year life cycle, currently just over a year in. I have added drives to it though – upgrading from some spinning metal to SSD.
My NAS is also critical, and I’m contemplating how to handle it. It’s a 2 drive synology. The drives area couple years old (one WD and one Seagate). I’ve been thinking about replacing one at a time, but even a complete failure of the unit and both drives wouldn’t kill me, as I have 4 copies of the critical data on external WD drives, a copy on my main desktop, and a copy at backblaze. I think I’ll wait until I start seeing SMART errors on one of the drives. Synology is pretty good at predicting failure ahead of time. Of course, that means you have to check every so often…
That’s a powerful analogy Nick. One of the best I’ve seen to describe how it feels out here. Do you mind if I lift the story to share on GAB, with a link back to here?
I’ve seen costs on GPUs and CPUs decline since Christmas. The fad might be diminishing just a bit, but the Bitcoin dweebs just had a big cheerleading session in Miami earlier in the week.
Plus, new cooling tech is coming. My wife had a patient in this week who was probably running his mouth a little too much about what his startup was trying to sell the DoD in terms of total immersion cooling. Civilian ripoff versions from Chinese manufacturers for mining rigs are inevitable.
If I am not mistaken wasn’t the CRAY system liquid cooled many years in the past? Some type of special fluorocarbon fluid that cooled the system. The CPU portion looked like a circular couch or bench.
I have also seen something on the web where some major geek used immersion to keep the system cool. Highly purified de-ionized water is non-conductive and will work if the corrosion issue can be solved. Spinning metal cannot be immersed unless that tiny pressure equalization hole can be sealed. Even a single drop of fluid in a spinning drive would destroy the heads and turn the drive into a miniature lathe.
On my system the CPU is liquid cooled via a heat transfer block. That is about as adventurous as I want to be with fluid. I have no idea what is being used as the liquid transfer media.
Cray used 3M Fluorinert IIRC.
The same family of materials is used for wave soldering.
For a time sink here is a link to some softball images that I captured.
http://www.raymondthompsonphotography.com/GCA/index.html
Get to page 3 to see some close calls sliding into second base.
@pecancorner, sure. I was hoping for evocative. Hit me last night before I sat down to write something for the post.
n
I think one of the GeekTV shows with Leo Laporte immersed a gaming rig in Flourinert when overclocking was big fun for geeks.
Then came case modders, and their liquid cooling kits, and now you can buy sealed systems to liquid cool cpus. I think gpu liquid cooling is still roll your own with a kit.
n
I saw an interesting take on the future of smart cars with a nod to our current Pay-to-Play/SaaS/Subscription environment where nobody owns anything and it’s all a subscription. Cold outside? Want heated seats? Enable that feature for just $4.99/month.
Back at $EMPLOYER in the early ’00s, we used G5 Mac Pros as low res video capture workstations, as a replacement for VHS tape. These Mac Pros were liquid-cooled (probably water) from the factory. The motherboard was fitted vertically, to one side, but guess where the power supply was…
Yes, at the bottom. So if the cooling circuit leaked… I know this because one of them suffered exactly this problem. No magic smoke, just lots of spitz and sparken. It took us months to convince the beancounters that they had to spend to replace it.
And don’t ask me about the effort we had to put in to get a second audio compressor… That was only £450-odd.
And yet they paid to hire 2no DigiBeta VTRs at £700 per week. For 2 years. The identical machine could then be bought for about £40,000.
But that was opex. The capex budget, from which the compressor would have come, was tapped out.
G.
Ah, the Cray.
I remember using those CRAY‘s at NASA Ames back in the day (late 80s or early 1990s?). Prospective users got a little tour and it was cool to see.
Using them was a different matter. Your Fortran code had to be specially modified with Cray specific modules, then compiled with their compiler. All fairly straight forward stuff. There was a one or two week training class on site at Ames.
The turnaround was the killer. You only got so much of the machine per week (we were bit players at a remote facility and has no priority or pull with the system admin 🙁 ).
Going from fallible memory:
You would assemble your executable and data on your machine.
At a certain time it would be allowed to be loaded onto a sub unit of the Cray (with very limited storage) and put into the queue to run.
At some point the actual Cray would be free and your job would automatically be transferred to it and your job attempted. You had no idea or control over when – you just had to check a status page each day to see what was happening (no automatic email notifications then).
When it was done (or failed) results and log files were sent automatically back to the queue machine. After 24 hours your data was purged because of the limited storage on the queue machine).
I think my initial enthusiasm died when I realized I was getting about 9 minutes of actual CPU work per week, after six months of effort: rather fewer effective mFlops (dp) per day than we were getting on our dedicated Vaxen.
The final straw was when a analysis for a flight test project was submitted on a Monday, automatically started on a Friday before a long weekend, run, then the results deleted before the following Tuesday morning.
So, my boss called me in for a status report, after hearing from the project manager about the delays. I explained the issue, showed him and the that manager my notes and logs and it was decided, in short order, to shutdown the Cray effort and simply use the funding to dedicate a Vax solely to the project work.
It was theoretically slower by about 20x at least, but it was dedicated and could run 24/7 on a job, for weeks if need be, and the turnaround and debugging time was much faster.
I happily tossed the manuals and guides for the Cray and process flow. I did keep the rather cool speciality binders for other projects.
…..and capital punishment for causing a death while DUI.
Last month I was doing some after car wash wiping around the doors and jambs of a car. Caught the edge of the door pillar trim on the outside of the drivers door and popped it off. Unc
Thanks to @Clayton W for that little dissertation on flash drives. I knew I didn’t trust them for long term storage for a reason.
@ITGuy1998 has a good strategy. I might look into Backblaze for secure offsite storage, but I can’t seem to trust any off site security. I would like to have access when I am away from home, though.
Funny (and maybe true) story about Cray. (Picture here).
The computer looked like one of those round benches you see in hotels wrapped around a pillar.
The central part was processor boards, and the “seat” part was all the ancillary hardware and memory.
It was round to keep the wires as short as possible, which helped the speed (I was told).
All smoky plexiglass and had seals to keep the coolant in.
To do maintenance, you pump the coolant into a storage tank, open the seals, do your work, seal it up again, and pump the coolant back in.
When the machine was brand new, they had an early working model in a computer room, and they wanted some PR photos. The machine was in constant use but they trooped the executives into the room and set up the camera.
Photog took one picture, and the system administrator ran into the room and told everyone to leave; the system crashed and they needed to figure out why, and reboot.
Some time later, they all trooped back in. Photog took another shot, and the system administrator ran back in; “What did you do to my computer?”
Field service eventually figured out it was a sensor. Running without coolant would be bad, and expensive to fix. So there was this photoelectric sensor to sense the coolant level. When it saw light, it shut everything down, right now.
The camera flash was sufficient to trigger it, even when coolant was present.
Backblaze has a synology app that makes backups easy and automatic. The backups are encrypted. wouldn’t rely on it as my only option though, I really like having multiple copies of data.Storage space is cheap.
On Cray and liquid cooling, I don’t trust any liquid cooling to be maintenance free. Leaks and corrosion are always issues. Air cooling has problems with dust, however.
When I was looking at solar space heat for our house, there were many issues with the popular liquid systems. Freezing, boiling, leaks, expensive special fluids and additives, etc. I chose an air system, and it is still running after more than 40 years.
Automotive cooling systems are maintenance intensive, especially if I want to keep a car for decades. Even the new ones with 10 year coolant have their share of potential problems.
One good thing about liquid cooling is that it is compact, quiet, and energy efficient. Sometimes that overrules other concerns.
Regarding large vehicles, everyone mentions things like large pickups, Hummers, rental box trucks, etc., but almost always forgets the ever-present big rigs. All of these are extremely hazardous to any vehicle a regular person might operate. They will literally crush any car or pickup. They don’t have any side guards to prevent a car from under-riding the trailer and having its roof crushed, with predictable results to the people inside. They can’t be maneuvered very well, and can do great damage if they hit smaller vehicles. If you hit one, you will lose.
More weirdness. The comment text is really small. I had not changed my text size. But now it is necessary to make the text, what to me is, a normal size.
I don’t have an iPad or Safari to test, but the site looks OK in the FireFox device emulator. The latest version (33.0.0, which is the one used here) shows these compatibilities; perhaps your Safari version is not current?
CKEditor 5 is currently supported in the following desktop browsers:
Mobile environment
CKEditor 5 is currently supported in the following mobile environments:
Agree with Mr. Ray. On my MacBook, Safari, text is smaller compared to yesterday. No word wrap.
Also, no word wrap on the mobile version sucks dead bunnies.
I looked up California rules for large vehicles. A Commercial Driver’s License is required for, “Any single vehicle with a gross vehicle weight rating (GVWR) of 26,001 pounds or more. Any single vehicle with a GVWR less than 26,000 pounds which is designed, used, or maintained to transport more than 10 passengers (including the driver).”
Pretty clear, but there are some complications. The normal noncommercial license is called a Class C license. That allows, “A 2-axle vehicle with a GVWR of 26,000 lbs. or less. A 3-axle vehicle weighing 6,000 lbs. gross or less. Any housecar 40’or less.” “A housecar is a motor vehicle originally designed, or permanently altered, and equipped for human habitation, or to which a camper has been permanently attached.” This would be a typical motorhome. Above these limits, a noncommercial Class A or B license is required.
It goes on, but my head began to hurt. I had no idea it was so complicated. I do remember that a neighbor a long time ago bought a shiny new three axle fifth wheel travel trailer and towed it home. He found out that this required some sort of commercial license, and he couldn’t qualify. He explained why, but I don’t remember his reasons. He sold the trailer at a substantial loss. I still think he could have been given bad information. Maybe the above noncommercial license classes are a solution to that problem. No longer matters.
Rick, the new editor is great here. No wrap issues, and some new features I like.
One problem is that the site sometimes takes at least 30 seconds to respond to a refresh or post, and this has been going on for a few weeks. All other sites are normal to me. Thought you would like to know.
Font size was screwed up by another plugin. Fixed it.
Can’t see the word wrap problem in my FireFox of Chrome device emulator.
I’ve noticed the slower response time when loading all the comments. The issue seems to be the number of comments in that datbase table…approaching 30,000. That is a lot of comments to query and filter to display.
I’m going to look at the page loading times to see if there is a specific page element that could be the issue. And look at the database query times to see if there is something needed there.
It may be that a caching thing might help, but not sure it would for comments, as the comments table changes with every new comment, so the cache for that table would need to be refreshed. Some caching add-ins actually slow the site down under some circumstances.
Text is now wrapping (LOL) on MB using Safari.
We’ve been watching Severance on Apple TV. Good show. Funny and scary.
Font size is still much smaller than what was normal yesterday. Only the comments and links. Increasing the font size using the + button makes all the text larger, including the headings. Right now I am sitting at 15px for the font size.
Using Edge on my Surface Laptop.
@ray:
Indeed. But I didn’t see the fix until I did a ctrl-F5, for a full reload of the page. Merely refreshing had no effect.
The font size buttons, while the size funny was in effect, only affected the headers – body text did not change size.
G.
Over The Hedge: Raiding The Two Guys House
https://www.gocomics.com/overthehedge/2022/04/07
I almost feel like there should be a visual warning for the two guys. I mean, that is scary to me. If it weren’t for the wife, there goes I.
Huh, we don’t have any limitation on towed weight, or combined weight that I know of. Certain large motorhomes require a big truck license, but that might be because of size.
We have a commercial restriction that you must get if you drive for pay, either as a limo driver, or a big truck. There are classes of commercial that might include weight brackets..
I know I can rent a 24ft box truck or stake bed truck with my normal passenger car license, I’ve done it. I can also rent any trailer my vehicle can tow. I rented a 10,000 pound capacity trailer to move my forklift using my Expedition as tow vehicle. It has a max tow rating of 10,000 pounds.
Motorcycle is another class, with specialized training classes, a practical road test, and written test. I let my motorcycle endorsement drop years ago.
And of course, driving licenses are issued by the states, which all have slightly different laws. For example, some restrict where and when kids can drive. Some don’t. Some let kids drive at 16 with all privileges, some restrict until 18.
Fedgov jumps in for “interstate commerce” and regulates trucking and passenger busses.
n
If you are driving for pay, then you must have a CDL B drivers license if your vehicle plus your trailer GWVR (Gross vehicle weight rating) is over 26,000 lbs (11,818 kg). Driving for pay includes towing your race car across state lines, many people have gotten tickets for that.
If your vehicle plus your trailer GWVR (Gross vehicle weight rating) is over 36,000 lbs (16,364 kg), you must have a CDL A drivers license.
Plus, if your vehicle or your trailer has air brakes, you must have the air brake extension on your license.
The Hot Shot guy behind my office property just got nailed for the 36,001 lb from Texas to New Mexico. He has a Dodge Dually diesel one ton with a double axle enclosed trailer. They were waiting for him as he crossed the state line. Multiple thousand dollar ticket. He is not happy but he is upgrading to CDL A.
You might generate static HTML pages from the old posts+comments and then move each post+comment to an archive database. There’s probably a plugin to do that. (I’ve done that on other content management systems but not on WordPress that I recall.)
Re the Hummer EV, if it meets FMVSS, it comes down to if there are enough “boys” who want new “toys” for GMC to build them. Seems to have worked enough to sell almost 12K of the Hummer H1.
And speaking of pickups, this gently used 2017 Ford F250 Super Duty sold last week in Houston for only 170K. I imagine the build cost was ‘slightly’ more.
something very much like that, the KV-2092r. Black with woodgrain body…
Wish I had the 36″ multisync units with VGA inputs that we trashed years ago. We used to use them on the trade show floor, and there were thousands scrapped by the school districts.
n
My Dad had a Sony 40+ inch tube. Weighed over 200 lbs.
Just an observation, I see that the new editor changes asterisk text asterisk to italics.
Like this.
ADDED: Looking at the source in the posted comment editor I see it converted the asterisk pair to i and slash i tags.
@Rick, am I correct that there is no longer a way to view Source in the pre-comment post editor? Also, do the Insert image and Inset media buttons actually do anything?
Well, shucky darn. That worked. Who knew? Obviously not me.
Some of the fonts are still small, like the text below add your comment. Never read that part any way. And probably intentional.
A lot of web pages are personal preference. Although some are just flat out bad designs.
I really despise auto advancing form fields. It makes it tough to sometimes change the contents of a full field. Another pet peeve is entering credit card numbers. Whether I chose to use spaces or not I should be allowed to enter the number. Computers should be able to properly parse what I input. Zip codes are another. The site asks for my zip code then rejects the zip+4. Attention site: If you don’t want zip+4 just chop off all but the first five digits. Another is when presented a list of countries. Coming from a USA site why is the United States all the way at the bottom?
I have an issue with my credit union. My accounts are presented on a page the CU allowed some personal customization. A change from the old site. When I go to the bill pay site from the CU’s site, then return, I am presented with the old page. I then have to click on another button to get back to my customized page. I complained to the CU and they said it is working as designed. My response is the design is wrong and should be fixed.
This is the same CU that showed an account hold from 20 years in the past, that had expired. I complained and the CU said I would have to come in and personally remove the hold. I responded back the hold was expired and should have been removed automatically. Their SQL code accessing the database was incorrect and the CU refused to acknowledge the issue. A week later it was fixed, a problem they said did not exist.
I also had a credit card with a “000” CV number. I tried using that on a one website to order something and the site said the CV number was invalid. I complained to the site and they stated no cards have a “000” CV number. I said mine did. I had to have a new card issued with a new expiration date to make the card work on some sites.
I really have no sympathy for stupid human interfaces and lazy site developers. Minor stuff such as fonts and text size, so what, no big deal.
xkcd: Linguistics Degree
https://xkcd.com/2602/
Yes, non-STEM degrees must be loaded down with responsibility.
Explained at:
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2602:_Linguistics_Degree
And no, the A in STEAM degrees are not exempt.
How does one enter and leave that beast? Was a ladder included in the price? It’s high enough off the ground OSHA probably requires a safety harness when climbing into the cab.
I also had a credit card with a “000” CV number.
This is about a guy who was granted a personalized license plate that read NULL. That was the beginning of his fun. I’ll let Steve Lehto explain, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MV7abI4ddCs
I enjoy Steve Lehto, but he does talk a lot. Most of it is entertaining.
While on the subject of license plates, I have a picture of a Volkswagen Bug with the personalized plate FEATURE. Some of you might enjoy that.
And speaking of pickups, this gently used 2017 Ford F250 Super Duty sold last week in Houston for only 170K.
I couldn’t buy that. I live on a dirt road, and would hate to get those big tires dirty. Boom-tish!
I see lots of immaculate off road capable vehicles, and would bet most of them have never been off the pavement. Also see lots of ones that look like they have been bounced off rocks. Some of those have brush guards on their sides, and they are not adequate. The desert always wins.
Over The Hedge; Explosive Diarrhea
https://www.gocomics.com/overthehedge/2022/04/08
I wonder if Verne survived the blast ?
Don’t worry, nothing else bad can happen to us right now, right?
Chicken thighs were completely wiped out at Sam’s yesterday when I made the weekly run. What chicken they had, mostly drumsticks and some wings, was spread out over two refrigerator cases in a single layer of trays.
I had one with 666 a few years ago. Good times. 🙂
We still have a 2001 Grand Wega 36″ tube TV in our family room.
The plan is to go flat screen when the TV finally dies, but I think we’ll have to change the plan before too long. After one in-warranty repair on the power supply about six months into owning the TV, the set has been flawless for 20 years.
I told my wife to find a decent stand for a flat screen and I would give in on getting rid of the tube TV. That will be an even longer wait.
Pearls Before Swine: A Group Of Zebras
https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2022/04/07
Is called a Dazzle ?
We still have a 2001 Grand Wega 36″ tube TV in our family room.
The plan is to go flat screen when the TV finally dies, but I think we’ll have to change the plan before too long. After one in-warranty repair on the power supply about six months into owning the TV, the set has been flawless for 20 years.
I told my wife to find a decent stand for a flat screen and I would give in on getting rid of the tube TV. That will be an even longer wait.
You should probably get rid of it before your son leaves home or you become too decrepit to lift your end.
@Rick, am I correct that there is no longer a way to view Source in the pre-comment post editor? Also, do the Insert image and Inset media buttons actually do anything?
The ‘classic’ CKEditor5 interface doesn’t have that Source button.
The image/media buttons don’t work correctly; they are only intended for external sources. Will be going away.
I might try to figure out how to get the Source button back.
The font issue was that the Paragraph tag was hard-coded to 14px by another plugin, so the font adjust buttons couldn’t affect that. The font adjust button just adds a font size to the ‘body’ CSS class (via the DOM document, if you are interested), but other things can override that.
Most of the CSS font-size in the CSS styles file are set to percentages, so they won’t override the setting that the font-adjust buttons do to the body tag.
The comment editor is configured to allow basic changes to the text, but not fancy formatting. My opinion is that any fancy formatting is just not needed in comments here.
We’ve always had movers in to deal with the beast, even when we moved it within the same house.
The big Trinitrons literally have concrete blocks in the bottom of the console to balance the glass tube. The Grand Wega 36″ probably weighs 250 lbs.
>> How does one enter and leave that beast? Was a ladder included in the price? It’s high enough off the ground OSHA probably requires a safety harness when climbing into the cab.
The guy who built it, Bill Carlton, (also in Houston) says (but didn’t demonstrate) that you get in by climbing up tire.
“Dark Lightning (Thunder and Lightning)” by John Varley
https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Lightning-Thunder-John-Varley/dp/042527408X?tag=ttgnet-20/
Book number four of a four book young adult space opera series. I read the well printed and well bound MMPB published by Ace in 2014 that I bought new on Amazon since my books are packed in the garage and the book is out of print. This is my second or third reread of this book. I will buy any fifth book in the series. In fact, I will buy and read just about any new Varley book.
Each one of the Thunder and Lighting books highlights a new generation in the connected families since the first generation of the connected families in the first book. This book specifically covers Podkayne and Jubal Broussard’s twin eighteen year old daughters: Cassie (Cassiopeia) and Polly (Pollyanna), the fourth generation to live off the Earth. And yes, there are serious Heinlein fanboy comments all throughout the series as Varley is very heavily influenced by Robert Heinlein.
Cassie and Polly were born and raised on the “Rolling Thunder”, the hollowed out eight mile long by four mile wife asteroid that Travis and Jubal Broussard, their families, and 200,000 other people are taking to a faraway star system. The journey is taking many decades so most of the people are spending the entire journey is stasis, the black bubble technology invented by Jubal Broussard using his squeezer technology as a base. BTW, Earth is becoming uninhabitable at this point due to seven huge aliens from Europa who have destroyed the climate.
Jubal Broussard comes out of his bubble every month for a week to spend time with his wife and daughters. But this time, he comes out of the bubble and yells, “Stop the ship, or everyone will die”. The ship is traveling at 0.77 of the speed of light and cannot be stopped easily, requiring twenty years of deceleration. Due to the seriousness of the situation, a significant portion of the 20,000 crew members who are awake decide to mutiny and take over. Not good.
My previous review of this book: “Book number four of a four book series. This is a MMPB book. This is probably the end of the series. I have yet to read a bad Varley book and this is certainly one of his best ones. Very heavily influenced by Heinlein’s young adult series as one of the characters is named Podkayne.
This is a series about the creation of a new power source and the subsequent application of that power source for intrasolar and interstellar space travel. The Earth is becoming uninhabitable due to an alien invasion so Travis, Jubal and 20,000+ of their best friends build a spaceship out of a six mile by four mile asteroid and leave.
The story is told from the perspective of the two twin daughters of Jubal who pops in and out occasionally using a stasis bubble.”
John Varley has an active website at:
https://varley.net/
My rating: 4.6 out of 5 stars
Amazon rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars (185 reviews)
“JOHNSTON: Is Ketanji Brown Jackson Pro-2A?”
https://dailycaller.com/2022/04/05/johnson-ketanji-brown-jackson-supreme-court-second-amendment/
“Listening to the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, a layman might be forgiven for misinterpreting her recent affirmation of the D.C. v Heller decision as support for the right to keep and bear arms.”
As if !
Working on laptop today, did notice that iPhone seemed to have found word wrapping again for the site and the comments. Better. Looks great on laptop.
I’ve been considering moving our personal site from GoDaddy for awhile. I started with GoDaddy as a name registrar around 2000. We set up a server at home, built a rudimentary web page and mail server for the pleasure of learning how to do so. Geeks. Eventually we shifted all of it to GoDaddy.
Current needs are for half a dozen emails, with mail storage on the host. We tend to accumulate a lot of email. Site itself is WordPress with minimal plugins and simple theme. I can use either cPanel or Plesk, though I think I prefer cPanel. I do like to fool around with mySQL, and GoDaddy has been fine for this. None of the databases I build in mySQL are complex nor do they have an extensive number of rows or tables. I also like fooling around with the different WordPress plug-ins, usually for the purpose of learning how they work so I can aid someone else with their site.
Motivators for leaving GoDaddy:
-I loathe their O365 mail move. It’s horrible and the biggest motivator.
-They’ve steadily increased in cost
-Degradation of performance
Bluehost has been mentioned here a few times. I’m reading reviews and poking around. I’m not keen to move, because I’m lazy, but the mail thing is really driving me batty. I’m also considering having GoDaddy shift me to cPanel and set up mail through cPanel. Something I’ve messed with for other hosted sites but not sure if it would meet our needs.
Input and opinions welcome.
In the non-digital world, we are gathering quotes to replace our all-in-one furnace. Triangle Tube, domestic hot water and baseboard. At old house we had a Navien. Liked it for the most part. This time we are looking at IBC brand. Getting quotes for another Navien too, though the local providers are saying they had higher failures with Naviens than they find acceptable. Our groundwater is very cold year around, and Alaska can be hard on furnaces. Our plan is to get it done in the next month or so. Three quotes so far, all $15k-$20k. Ouch. Not more than we expected but still shocking to see it on paper.
Re: hosting –
I use JustHost for my personal sites (and some that I manage), and BlueHost is used for Dr. Pournelle’s sites. I have many WordPress sites, and also many custom-programmed sites.
I’ve used JustHost for about 10 years, and it works well for me. I like that I can have unlimited domains, unlimited storage (although not used for backup) and unlimited databases. They have a good intro pricing, and reasonable after-intro pricing. They sometimes throw in free domain registrations, so some of my domains are registered there; others are via GoDaddy . And all sites get free SSL (even add-on domains) automatically installed.
Both have unlimited email accounts, so you can set up multiple accounts per domain if you want. They have a web-based mail client (RoundCube or Hoarde) that works well. BlueHost occasionally complained about the number of emails in Jerry’s account – they got into the 10K+ range often – he got a lot of spam mail.
Back-end stuff managed through cPanel.
So, happy with my use of both hosting places. I’m even an affiliate, so you could use this link so that I get a little ‘spiff’ on signup (doesn’t affect your cost): http://tinyurl.com/cellarweb .
I have used http://www.pair.com since 2000, 22 years now after RBT recommended it to me. Nothing but happy with the webhosting. I used their shared hosting until 2005 or so when I had my first major DNS attack. When pair and I worked that through, they recommended that I move to a dedicated server which I love. I pay $300/month and they do all the management. I have several flat file databases and tend to go wild on those so I don’t have to worry about messing other people’s websites up. I get 100 to 200 tire kickers on an average day viewing our website and downloading about a GB of stuff. When I release a new version of our software that rapidly zooms up to 10 GB/day for a few days and then drifts back down.
For email, I moved our main domain mail record (we have seven domains) mail handling to gmail back in 2005 or so. We have been Joe Jobbed many times over the years and gmail stopped that nonsense. You have not lived until you are editing the mail files directly on the web / mail server, deleting the bounced emails by hand using vi because everything else overflowed. Of course, I have been writing software on Unix using vi since 1989 just due to tight resources so I am very familiar with vi.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_job
Gmail did just start charging us $6 / month / email address after all these years so it is no longer free for small users. But the use of the Postini honey pots stops an incredible amount of spam and bounce backs. And we do get to POP our email down, IMAP it, or use the excellent gmail web interface.
My host went out of business last month, but I still have the domains registered with Domain Monger.
I’ve been with Domain Monger nearly 20 years. They offer hosting, but I’ve never used it.
I just used my site to host my resume and experiment with PHP.
Like Lynn, I used the free gmail service with my personal domain for years. I think I set it up in 2004 in beta. I run an exchange server at home, and I just pop the mail to it for three mailboxes. I recently switched to zoho.com. It’s cheap (3 users is $36/year total). The spam filtering is good enough where I haven’t missed gmail’s. I can also pop the email to my exchange server. Their web interface is ok. I like exchange’s owa much better, plus it keeps my skills up to date.
There is still wording out there that gmail may let the free gmail account’s continue, but strip them of all the other add ons. It would also be for non-commercial use. If that ends up being true, I will likely switch back. Im not holding my breath waiting though.
Last night’s low 38F, never got out of the 60s today and a frightful cold wind has been blowing all week. Low tonight anywhere from 40F down to 37F. It would not be so bad if it were still cold enough to keep a fire going, but it isn’t. But the house never warms up, and with the wind I can’t work outside without getting chilled. I am sick to death of winter and want it done.
On top of that, yet another year in which the new fruit trees, now 5 years in the ground, and 8 years old, failed to bloom. So no figs, no additional peaches, no crab apples. My old peach tree didn’t start bearing more than a handful until it was 10, but I thought it was a fluke, stunted by the Great Drought. Apparently not, as these others are on track not to do any better. Children are more productive at earlier ages than fruit trees!
/mutter
Hi RickH,
I put http://www.pair.com in my posting at
https://www.ttgnet.com/journal/2022/04/08/fri-apr-8-2022-like-a-drunk-lurching-down-a-hallway/#comment-232668
without the http:// and the visual text automatically gained the http://. But the actual link got a https://www.ttgnet.com in front of it. Looks like the wrong URL got substituted in the hyperlink ?
Last night’s low 38F, never got out of the 60s today and a frightful cold wind has been blowing all week. Low tonight anywhere from 40F down to 37F. It would not be so bad if it were still cold enough to keep a fire going, but it isn’t. But the house never warms up, and with the wind I can’t work outside without getting chilled. I am sick to death of winter and want it done.
It wasn’t just you. OK City was cold i the 50s F with a strong wind all week. I was at the downtown Sheraton with my truck in the parking garage. Monday I walked 8 blocks to the IHOP at 54 F at noon in a tshirt and jeans and got freaking cold with the 20 mph north wind. Three tall cups of coffee and I was doing better on the walk back. I ate in the hotel for the rest of the week.
We only hit 78 F here in Rosenberg, TX today and it has already dropped into the 60s F. The wife and I just walked 1.2 miles at 72 F, I wore a hoodie due to the north wind at 15 mph. Maybe a cool summer like last year ?
Speaking of email, I had 1,000 emails waiting for me here at the office today. Only 200 to go. And a contract to sign. I miss the days when I had a contract to sign almost every day back in the 2000s.
BTW, one of the conference speakers said that the direct employment in the oil and natural gas has dropped so much that the indirect employment has dropped from 15 million to 11 million people in the USA. And nobody is really hiring, everyone knows that the price boost are only temporary. Three months or three years is temporary in this business.
On top of that, yet another year in which the new fruit trees, now 5 years in the ground, and 8 years old, failed to bloom. So no figs, no additional peaches, no crab apples. My old peach tree didn’t start bearing more than a handful until it was 10, but I thought it was a fluke, stunted by the Great Drought. Apparently not, as these others are on track not to do any better. Children are more productive at earlier ages than fruit trees!
My new neighbor two doors to the east of us planted six fruit trees in March. I suspect that the baby in his wife’s belly will show first (she is due in August). They have a 13 year old boy already, big gap there. My neighbor to the west has a 15 year old boy and a one month old boy now.
Austin had a typical number of 100 degree days last Summer.
I left the house today for a work team building event, and I had to run the AC in the car on the way back home. The thermometer on the “infotainment” system read 82 at one point, but 79 was the official high at the airport.
I actually got to meet some of my co-workers today. I never saw anyone from the last job in person.
I also got a good look at Austin gentrification east of downtown and along the river near the Oracle (now HQ) Campus. Or should I call it Austin Californication.
@lynn
If you put a link in without the http(s):// part, the editor thinks it is a page on the site, so puts the current page’s URL in front of your link. This is common to all systems, and web programming. It’s a ‘relative link’ – ‘relative’ to the current page.
So, normal.
YOu have to put the http{s)// part in front of any link for it not to be a ‘relative’ link (called an ‘absolute link’).
The ‘relative link’ is the default in the CKEditor5 code. There is a way to automatically add the protocol with some configuration commands. But the default is to make a link ‘relative’ if you don’t specify the protocol.
“Human by Choice” by Travis S. Taylor and Darrell Bain
https://www.amazon.com/Human-Choice-Travis-S-Taylor/dp/1606190474?tag=ttgnet-20/
Book number one of a three book space opera series. I read the well printed and well bound POD trade paperback published in 2009 by Paladin Timeless Books. This is my second or third reading of this book. I have read the two follow-on books without Travis Taylor and they are not near as good.
My review from 2018: “Book number one of a three book space opera series. I read the well formatted and bound POD (print on demand) trade paperback. The author slate for the second and third books in the series drops Travis Taylor and adds Stephanie Osborn which is a little worrisome as I have ordered the second book in the series.
Wow, this is pulp science fiction at its best ! I loved it !
An alien space ship is passing through the Solar System when its FTL drive catastrophically fails. The aliens rush to the lifeboats and about a hundred of them make it off the space ship before it disintegrates. Many of the aliens and lifeboats perished with the space ship.
Several of the lifeboats land on the planet Earth. One crashes in Kyle Leverson’s yard. He rescues the alien who proceeds to fix her broken body with tools from the lifeboat. Since she has no prospect of communicating with her race, she decides to use her tools and mental abilities to convert her body to a human female. And then things get interesting.”
My rating: 5 out of 5 stars (awesome SF pulp !)
Amazon rating: 3.9 out of 5 stars (44 reviews)
“2 men acquitted in alleged plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer; jury deadlocks on other 2”
https://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/2022/04/2-men-acquitted-in-alleged-plot-to-kidnap-michigan-gov-gretchen-whitmer-jury-deadlocks-on-other-2.html
If you are in a group of people and someone starts talking crazy:
Hat tip to:
https://www.drudgereport.com/
>> Chicken thighs were completely wiped out at Sam’s yesterday when I made the weekly run. What chicken they had, mostly drumsticks and some wings, was spread out over two refrigerator cases in a single layer of trays.
Wife just got back from Costco and the eggs we buy (two dozen) have gone up $1.00 already.
>> Regarding large vehicles, everyone mentions things like large pickups, Hummers, rental box trucks, etc., but almost always forgets the ever-present big rigs. All of these are extremely hazardous to any vehicle a regular person might operate. They will literally crush any car or pickup. They don’t have any side guards to prevent a car from under-riding the trailer and having its roof crushed, with predictable results to the people inside. They can’t be maneuvered very well, and can do great damage if they hit smaller vehicles. If you hit one, you will lose.
All the more reason I hope these trucks are well marked so that I can stay far away if I encounter one on I10.
I’m OK with self-driving trucks – as long as they have a ‘pilot’ ready to take over if needed. Planes have had auto-pilots for a long time. But the plane’s auto-pilot is not used during landing and takeoff, and the pilot monitors things (hopefully) while the auto-pilot is being used. Auto-pilot is turned off during heavy ‘traffic’ and weather. Seems the same could be done with self-driving trucks.
It would seem to me that most (not all, of course) truck-car accidents are caused by stupid car drivers. There are ‘reels’ of truck dashboard mounted cameras that show stupid car drivers cutting front of trucks.
Discuss.
An eyewitness to the day that the asteriod hit, starting the process of wiping out the dinosaurs (here):
>> Regarding large vehicles, everyone mentions things like large pickups, Hummers, rental box trucks, etc., but almost always forgets the ever-present big rigs. All of these are extremely hazardous to any vehicle a regular person might operate. They will literally crush any car or pickup. They don’t have any side guards to prevent a car from under-riding the trailer and having its roof crushed, with predictable results to the people inside. They can’t be maneuvered very well, and can do great damage if they hit smaller vehicles. If you hit one, you will lose.
All the more reason I hope these trucks are well marked so that I can stay far away if I encounter one on I10.
I saw several of those trucks between Dallas and OK City on I-35 and wondered what all that stuff was on the roof of the cab !
All the more reason I hope these trucks are well marked so that I can stay far away if I encounter one on I10.
I agree. I think they should have a unique flashing beacon visible from all directions. Also agree with the “pilot” idea, but we know that will not happen. The major goal is to eliminate the expense of the driver.
Another thought is that these trucks will operate very well, until they don’t. The software will have to have pre-coded decisions to handle lots of abnormalities. Not everyone will agree with those decisions.
I drove that stretch from Phoenix to Tucson twice about three weeks ago. I watched for those experimental trucks, but didn’t see any. Maybe they don’t have obvious markings.
As an aside, Arizonans are some of the worst left lane hogs I have seen. I thought CA was bad. Also, no one seemed to go more than 5mph over the 75 mph speed limit on the Interstate. In CA, there are occasionally some who go a lot faster. I usually try to stay to the right and be as inconspicuous as possible. I also like to run a half mile or so behind some of the faster traffic. The trucks in the right land with hogs in the left lane made that impossible without getting rude. The I10 from San Bernardino to the AZ border is mostly more than two lanes, but in AZ it is two all the way from the border to just outside Phoenix. CA has speed traps, but AZ didn’t seem to have any. Still, I made better time in CA than in AZ, even though the speed limit was 5 mph less in CA. /rant
Nick, I also noticed that Google Maps now suggests a more “fuel-efficient” route, but that is only when the elapsed time (ET) is similar to the lowest ET route. There is a setting to enable that. I have that setting turned off, and it will prefer the lowest ET route. It will also show a more fuel-efficient route if any.
I put “fuel-efficient in quotes because there must be a better term. In this context, “fuel efficient” really means the route that uses the least fuel.
It would seem to me that most (not all, of course) truck-car accidents are caused by stupid car drivers. There are ‘reels’ of truck dashboard mounted cameras that show stupid car drivers cutting front of trucks.
True. A high percentage of American auto drivers are not very good. The biggest issue is inattention. Close second is probably a sense of entitlement.
In the old days, a very high percentage of truck drivers were very good. They were held to a higher standard, and could lose their license for seemingly small misjudgments. I can’t speak for the truckers today, because there seem to be a higher incidence of low skill ones. Most are still much better than four wheelers. Driving a truck is challenging, especially maintaining alertness.
>> I’m OK with self-driving trucks – as long as they have a ‘pilot’ ready to take over if needed.
No pilots in these, totally autonomous and they claim Level 4. Some further info can be found here. Certain stretches of that part of I-10 are susceptible to blinding dust storms. Hope they’ve got that fully covered in their AI. On the other hand, Waymo’s got driverless taxis in parts of Phoenix and they’ve been in a number of minor accidents (but their taxis don’t weigh 80,000 lbs.) and coming soon to San Francisco. That should be fun on the hills.
>> Another thought is that these trucks will operate very well, until they don’t. The software will have to have pre-coded decisions to handle lots of abnormalities. Not everyone will agree with those decisions.
Scenario: Kid rushes out from between two parked cars. Picked up by the self-driving system which determines that at the car’s current speed it will not be able to stop in time and absent any other change will hit the kid. What is the AI programmed to do? Turn the wheel 90 degrees and crash into a parked car? And who agreed? Mayor Pete??
What is the AI programmed to do? Turn the wheel 90 degrees and crash into a parked car? And who agreed?
Certainly not the passengers. 🙁
@rick, it seems like we use very few internal links here in comments, and they are usually fully spelled out urls that were cut and pasted if we do.
n
From SRW in the Fort Bend Journal:
“It’s a big dill in my house”
“I secretly relabeled all the spices in my cupboard. Gal pal Cindy is in for a big surprise next time she comes over and cooks for me. She hasn’t discovered my prank yet, but thyme is cumin.”