Sunny and cool, still damp. Should be clear. It stayed clear most of yesterday with only scattered clouds. I was in shorts and shirtsleeves, so nice temps too. Hoping for more of that, rather than heavy rain. Most of the bayous I crossed were at normal or only slightly elevated levels so they are doing a good job of managing the flow.
Shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone here that I didn’t get as much done as I’d have liked. I picked up another 200w panel, and a dented in “gub safe” that is really just a heavy sheet metal cabinet. I’ll knock out the dents and add a lock, and use it for ammo or accessories. Maybe use it for the air rifles.
I was going to make a scrap run. I might have mentioned picking up a stove and oven for only $12 total. If not, I got the stove for a ‘garage kitchen’ or summer kitchen at the BOL. It’s an ordinary GE gas stove and oven. I also got a Whirlpool 24″ wide gas oven for $2. It’s black glass and kinda dated, and was only $2, so when my wife wasn’t interested, I thought I’d just scrap it. Then I looked a bit more closely and it works for either natgas or LP gas… you only have to flip an internal part and close an air shield. I’m taking it to the BOL to sell up there, or maybe putting it on Craigslist here. Propane appliances sell for good money. Even if I only get $40 or 50 to move it quickly, the ROI is pretty good, and I’m helping someone out.
I missed out on some auction stuff I’d have liked. Ate dinner and fell asleep in the chair while waiting for the lots to close. There was a nice small woodstove, and a smaller fridge, and a mechanical clothes washer. The woodstove sold for $55, the washer for about the same, and the fridge for $35. There was another fridge in the sale that sold for $7. It was an ordinary top freezer Hotpoint, a little on the small side, but looked nice and clean. WAY nicer than my current beverage fridge at the BOL. I don’t NEED another fridge but I’d probably have bid on it if I was going up to the sale to pickup anyway…
My point is that there are still some great preps out there, and there are sales with low prices. I think this one closed low because of the late Saturday time, and it’s a bit far from Houston proper, which reduced the bidder pool. Oh well, I’d have been glad to win the items, but then I’d have had to pick them up and get them to the BOL. On the plus side, the sale was about a third of the way to the BOL.
Today I’ll keep working the list, and maybe deal with a pop up issue or two. There’s always more that needs doing.
And maybe I’ll stack something. I’ll want to, and mean to, but might not get to it. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t!
nick
The Hamfest on 3/1-3/2 on this side of the metro?
I’ve been meaning to get out there for a long time. We used to go to Sherwood Forest Faire around that time every year, but I won’t flog the deceased equine with the reason why I don’t anymore even if the family goes.
Time is the big problem right now. Of course, when the big monkey trick runs out of gas, that will be it for the tech industry in the current cycle and, possibly, my job.
Ok. I’ll flog an equine corpse. My Anglo Saxon genetics keep telling me that this twerp would look much better after a punch in the mouth. Or two. Or three.
https://www.sherwoodforestfaire.com/
It is best that I don’t go to the Faire. 🙂
In the mean time, my February is already completely booked with a bootleg project at work which is beyond radioactive.
Anytime you read about a startup receiving a gazillion dollars to explore the monkey trick, assume that they’ve talked to my current management.
The C-suites want to fire a lot of people doing white collar “symbol manipulation” work.
What? Use the command line? Like the old guy in the back of the office who has … books?
Human sacrifice! Dogs and cats living together! Mass hysteria!
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2024/02/vscode-drops-ubuntu-18-04-support-leaves-devs-screwed
Looking further, my guess is that Microsoft is using Coverity on their sh*t C code. IIRC, Glibc 2.27 was where I saw a problem with scans targeting compilation to x86_64 bit ABI not liking something in one of the structs in time.h, raising all kinds of alarms even though the compilation worked fine.
Suck it up, buttercups.
It’ll be a good long while before AIs replace programmers, or software developers more generally. The problem is not in writing a routine to bring in data and process it and store it someplace else. The problem is in getting the users or managers to tell you what they want, in a format and to a level of detail which can become a computer program.
In theory, that’s the role of the business analyst. In practice, very few of them have any real understanding of computer concepts like storage and processing threads and data formats and memory constraints. Quite a few BAs lack understanding of the problem domain, beyond the basics needed to use a few acronyms and buzzwords and act like they understand. In over twenty years, I’ve worked with only one good BA, and he was effectively mainly because he worked very closely with me, the tech lead, to make an accurate, usable, implementable product spec.
N Scott Momaday, Pulitzer-winning Native American novelist, dies aged 89
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/29/n-scott-momaday-dead-pulitzer-native-american-writer
RIP
It’s all a bit above my paygrade, but if you are saying MS pushed and update that broke stuff because it doesn’t play well with others, is anyone really shocked?? Maybe on the *nix side, but this happens on the windows side with depressing regularity.
—————
sunny and clear. mid 60s F.
Wife and D1 are gettin’ purdified… which involves spending time in the company of specialists…
So I should get going on my list.
After coffee of course.
n
Microsoft stopped supporting VSCode on a Linux distribution which went “EOL” six months ago after five years of updates and security fixes. The problem is that Ubuntu 18.04 was and still is an important release for development in the Android and Yocto (embedded Linux) communities, and many developers who came up in the last 20 years have zero familiarity with the Unix shell/philosophy even if they have spent most of their careers in Linux.
VSCode is a crutch which never should have become as important as it has, particularly since Microsoft acquired Github and the Atom editor upon which VSCode is based.
Tyler Durden cowardice protecting another mainstream journalist.
What’s interesting isn’t the neocon meltdown over Tucker interviewing Putin (!) but the news that the NSA may have broken Signal. That’s really bad if true.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/tucker-carlson-spotted-moscow-necons-meltdown-over-potential-putin-interview
I’m surprised anyone believed that wouldn’t eventually happen.
If you use your smartphone to communicate, the NSA is tracking you. If they can’t read your texts, they’re working on a way to do so.
They don’t have to invoke higher math. They just need to blackmail the right people.
While I hide behind an alias, I have no illusions that the three-letter agencies know everything about me, from my address to my work history to my travel habits to my medical history.
I installed Signal because it’s how my group communicates about our Houston Methodist lawsuit. I figured all along that maybe it keeps the opposing legal team from reading our texts, but all the comms are being read by spooks and cops.
Oh, for those who are interested, all the arguments and motions to dismiss, and counterarguments are completed, and the judge is sitting on the case, hoping for other cases to mature and save him the trouble of deciding anything. Actually, I’m hoping the same thing.
An observation which is unlikely to please anyone reading this:
https://www.dailypundit.com/dailypundit.wordpress/2024/02/04/gen-z-manliness/
https://coldfury.com/2024/02/04/gen-z-manliness/
If your build process is reliant on a particular development tool, someone needs to be asking the lead developer or the VP of Software Engineering some hard questions.
One of my tasks on a gig a few years ago was to automate the build process for Java code. It had been dependent on one particular person using one particular computer loading up Eclipse and building the deployable file – a .jar or .war – and then copying that to a particular location on the application server. The process wouldn’t work on any other computer … or so he said. He never gave anyone enough information to perform the process so we weren’t able to check his work. The VP was fine with that guy hoarding the information “for security”, because a build process is so sensitive, after all – but that didn’t stop him from bitching at me for not being able to automate the process. That was a crappy three months, which I didn’t leave after a few weeks for the sole reason that I needed the money.
Tools are tools. It may take a few days to swap, but it’s not a huge problem. I tried VSCode, and it’s fine, but I prefer IntelliJ for what I do, or Eclipse, because it doesn’t belong to a big corporation.
Anyway Ubuntu 18.04 may be LTS, but that makes it good for servers or machines running delivered apps. I cannot imagine using a distro that old on a development machine. Seriously, that’s weird.
VSCode is an industry wide problem.
Most of my group is dependent on VSCode to navigate the source tree, edit files, and manage Git repositories, but I get along fine without the tool. Our build process does not depend on VSCode or anything else which is closed source.
Except when the developer can’t write code without VSCode’s prompts. Or can’t build code without right-clicking and choosing the “Build” menu option.
My opinion is that a Java developer who can’t write a simple project with a text editor and build it with command-line tools (including Maven, Gradle, Ant, or whatever is appropriate) is not needed on the team. But I’m old and a man and just don’t understand today’s workforce and I’m probably a covid denier, so the parasites, deadweights, and lumpenprogrammers stay on the team and I’m supposed to clean up their work or just do their work because they’re doing important things.
https://areaocho.com/this-is-why-we-arent-a-democracy/
– stack.
n
So someone finally noticed. Bit too late though. Hey, maybe someone will see the somoli problem in MN… /sarc
n
It was interesting to listen to the ESG (or whatever the hip acronym is today) consultant pontificate about navigating university hiring quotas to several girls seeking employment in her U. Wisc. Madison office while sitting in the deli just off the lobby of the school’s very serious Dairy program which, IIRC, built the industry in Wisconsin – the real purpose of the land grant schools like UW.
The chickens were out 7 ½ hours today, minus a few minutes in which a couple would come in to get a drink and a few pellets. Temperature was well below freezing in the morning, a bit above now, but not bad with the sun shining. They figured out pretty quickly that sitting in the bushes on the south side of the house was pleasantly warm (compared to everywhere else), plus there was plenty of mulch to scratch in even if there were approximately zero ticks or worms.
They’re pretty good about staying near our house. They’ll go into the trees (and mulch) on the one neighbor’s yard and all over the other neighbor’s yard, but that’s it.
This afternoon I chivvied them back to their happy home because they were in the neighbor’s yard but I’m not sure it was needed. When it started getting dark they may have gone home on their own. They’ve done it before when they were in the bushes around the fruit trees or similarly close to the run. I hesitate to claim that my chickens are smarter than a mealworm but it’s possible that they’ve surpassed that bar.
On the minus side, only one egg today. One of the hens went into the coop for a while. The others either didn’t lay or laid in the bushes or the forest.
Dearborn has been building for a long time. 30 years, minimum. Maybe even longer.
The I-4 corridor in Florida is bad too. That mosque featured in the “swatting” story yesterday seems really creepy the more I look into it.
Sanford just isn’t the kind of place people imagine that kind of activity taking place.
“Chief, shots fired at the mosque just off Ronald Reagan Blvd. Should we roll the SWAT unit?”
Someone wanted police attention on that building, which is why they hired the “consultant”.
There was a video on the local nextdoor.com feed for west San Antonio; a Ford F-150 truck with the cab fully engulfed in flames, with gray smoke poring out. I was thinking, “That’s probably one of those electric F-150s”.
Does anybody know where the battery is for an electric F-150 is?
The battery runs the entire length of the truck except for the “frunk”.
The aftermath photos in this clip show the damage from a fire concentrated in the cab.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVbUJtfQEus
Yeah, that’s pretty much what this one looked like. Thanks; I’m pretty sure this was an F150 Lightning.
The SMRs just got canceled in the USA. “The collapse of NuScale’s project should spell the end for small modular nuclear reactors. Although there were problems specific to the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems project, the financial challenges and cost trends witnessed in that case will afflict any SMR project.”
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/nuscale-uamps-project-small-modular-reactor-ramanasmr-/705717/
Not good.
Another “green” boondoggle out of Oregon? I’m shocked. Shocked!
Isn’t the TerraPower project still moving forward? The effort with Gates and Warren Buffett involved?
>>….and I’m supposed to clean up their work or just do their work because they’re doing important things.
Yeah, kid’s got an important soccer game today.
It’s not just IT, I can’t tell you how many times I was waiting for a part in the field, and the office guy who was supposed to get it to me just left the office because he had hockey or his kid did.
Given that I would have to return the next week to complete the work, his leaving before shipping me what I needed cost the company another set of flights, purchased day before travel, another several hotel nights, rental car, my salary, and most critical, delay to whatever I was supposed to be moving on to.
These weren’t shipping clerks or schlubs, they were project engineers who were part of the team. ‘Course they worked 35.5 hours a week in the office, and we worked 80-100 or more hours per week in the field, and were away from home. One year I was on the road 250 days. No leaving for hockey games.
Which is why I don’t do that anymore.
n
“Reflex: A Jumper Novel” by Steven Gould
https://www.amazon.com/Reflex-Jumper-Novel-Steven-Gould/dp/0812578546?tag=ttgnet-20/
Book number two of a four book science fiction series. Or is it a fantasy series ? I have read this book several times, maybe five or six times now. I read the well printed and well bound MMPB published by Tor in 2005. I am reading the third book in the series now.
I have always wanted to be a teleporter. I mean, it is the ultimate for a lazy man. I first picked this book up on a lark in 2005 and was extremely surprised at how good it is. The characters are well developed and suck you into their stories. I actually read this book before “Jumper” and bought “Jumper” after I finished “Reflex”.
Would you like to be able to teleport ? What happens if someone kidnaps and chains you to the wall while they “train” you to perform their nefarious deeds ?
My rating: 6 out of 5 stars
Amazon rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars (1,113 reviews)
Lynn
I used to love all the 50s and 60s SF that thought we’d develop our mental powers, teleportation, telekinesis, telepathy… Jack of Eagles springs to mind, but there were many others. There was a story about a baby raised to believe he had the abilities (by controlling every aspect of his world and faking the talents) until one day he really develops them and teleports out to freedom…
I think one anthology was called “Children of Wonder”. Loved those stories.
The ‘grand old men’ of SF did lots of stories.
n
Pearls Before Swine: Banned Books
https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2024/02/04
I am a devout Christian but I don’t want to live in a theocracy. I also don’t trust anyone to make up a list of banned books.
“Saturday Snippet: The Warlock In Spite Of Himself”
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2024/02/saturday-snippet-warlock-in-spite-of.html
A very nice tribute to the late Christopher Stasheff and, a very good book series that I read many years ago.