Warm and damp. Clear if the forecast is good, but locally we could get anything. After yesterday’s misty start, it did clear and turn into a pretty nice day. Windows down until later afternoon, then the humidity with the higher temp made A/C welcome…
Did one pickup, although it was three invoices. Got my ventless propane heater for the BOL backup heat. Got a couple of other speculative things too. Sometimes I’ll get something without knowing why at the time, but it usually works out. Has to be cheap and close by.
After getting the kids from school, I went back to poking at my non-prepping hobby website build. I’d spent the morning doing auction stuff and poking at it, and thought I’d poke some more. All I can say is that if you want to do simple things, it can be simple. Still not as easy as the demos. The demo guys are NEVER trying to re-create something existing- I don’t care if it’s a website or a CAD drawing, it’s always easy to just breeze along adding new stuff. Much less easy to keep referring to the old, and trying to incorporate that stuff into the new.
I made progress though, so that was good. I’m hoping I can poke at it enough to have a pretty good “go live” site by Saturday. My non-prepping hobby meets this Saturday and it would be good to put it in front of the board and get sign off on the switchover. It means I’ll be poking more than I’d like during the next few days.
Took some time off to watch Red Dawn with the kids last night. It held up pretty well. I’ve got a list of formative movies and books, and they are receptive to it. Just have to make the time.
Culture. It’s important. They are a bit surprised by movies from before PC and the diversite’. They can name 3 female scientists, but can they name three male? Yeah, that is just one of my issues with school… and it crops up in the strangest places. So, pop culture from the before time as a balance.
Might work. I like watching the movies anyway.
Stack some together time. And ammo.
Wolverines!
nick
(“it’s fried rice you plick!”)
Robin Williams is on fire doing 100% improv in “Dead Again” from that same era.
Williams has the task of selling what is essentially a ridiculous premise behind Sir Kenneth’s script, and sell it he does with 100% improv.
Sir Derek Jacobi gets the scripted money line, however, and Emma Thompson has the best movie wedding dress ever, which gets an interesting reaction from Branagh in the director’s commentary.
Sir Kenneth messed up with Bellatrix LeStrange. Big time.
Rated ‘R’ for naughty language, mostly from Williams, but, wow, what a flick.
Woody Harrelson’s uncredited cameo in “Wag the Dog” is intense. I don’t remember if that flick is rated ‘R’.
If you’re doing “Dave”, try to find some of the other Reitman the Elder output of that time period. “Junior” and “Kindergarten Cop”. Even “Legal Eagles” is worth the time IMHO to watch Robert Redford play against Debra Winger.
Vim. Let the religious arguments begin.
My problems at the tolling company started with the interview, but the key moment that got me in trouble with this guy, a 20 year Windows veteran and world-class whiner, was the suggestion that he use vimdiff to reconcile differences in config files across toll plazas in the Linux environment where using an IDE was not possible.
The response was an angry, “Are you calling me out?”
He was in the guards and his father uses him as a wastepaper basket.
https://www.sherwoodforestfaire.com/
I don’t think the AI in the IDE is as much about providing an assist for the clueless as it is for feeding experienced developers’ approach to Jira tickets into the ChatBot and seeing what may come out in the long run after 10,000 watts of electricity gets applied to the scenario. Throw it all against the wall and see what sticks. THAT is why my using the tool is important.
Fixed the typo in the movie quote above. Late night brain frat… hah!
—————
D1 has a tournament today so she’s up and out early. Nothing to make a sandwich with in the house. If you use the last of something, and I don’t know, it’s unlikely there will be more magically appearing. I’ve got lunch meat in the freezer, and peanut butter on a shelf, but none in the pantry at 6:14 am. And still none when I get up at 6:30.
Sometimes I look around, and look back, and see all the folks who did nothing more than live minute to minute, day to day, and they are still here… so why bother with the prepping.
I can make lists but
but.
nick
n
Defense trying to shift blame, and discredit witnesses…
which is their job. Must suck trying to save someone you know is guilty.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13158421/Halyna-Hutchins-ammo-expert-Rust-dummy-rounds.html
– wrt the charges against pinky, it doesn’t matter what Baldwin did or didn’t do. It doesn’t matter what the supplier did or didn’t do. The trial is about what SHE did or didn’t do. EVERYTHING else is distraction. If she had done her job, the live round wouldn’t have been in the gun. If the live round wasn’t in the gun, there wouldn’t have been a tragedy.
Bullets in boxes don’t kill people.
I think they are hoping that by spreading the blame they can get her sentence reduced. Or confuse the jury.
n
When I’m programming, I often have an AI window open. Mostly simple questions, like “what is the API function that does X”, but faster than calling up the API documentation for stuff I don’t use very often. Also: I tend to mix up the syntax of different programming languages, so sometimes I just draw a blank, like “how the heck do you X in language Y?”
What I don’t do, is use it for creating the actual algorithms. It isn’t that good, at least not yet.
Pretty crazy numbers…
The idea is supposed to be: check their stories while they are in their home countries. That way you don’t have to deport them, when it turns out that they are just economic migrants, which most of them are. Of course, none of them are getting deported anyway, so…
The thing which impresses me the most about the establishment response to the invasion of the US is the spew of made-up numbers of invaders currently here. Twenty-five years ago it was admitted that there were about 10,000,000 invaders, though many conservatives and patriots were sure it was much higher. That 10M number was the party line despite the steady inflow. Recently the number of invaders was stated to be about 8M even as they acknowledge that thousands per day are coming in.
The NGOs like Catholic Charities are complicit in the trafficking too.
Who made Minneapolis into Somalia?
Or Detroit into Islamabad?
It’s organized, it’s big, and it’s going to end in tragedy.
n
Somebody got themselves a ‘glock switch’. Full auto, or at least auto triplets…
https://twitter.com/2timeguy/status/1764661808651026780?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1764661808651026780%7Ctwgr%5E02af54fb24e06c34c5e7b0cf6cce36888221d792%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thegatewaypundit.com%2F2024%2F03%2Fmassive-brawls-break-inside-six-flags-georgia-500%2F
n
Actual, official numbers. And an official document that calls them “catastrophic”.
3.2 million “encounters”. That (obviously) does not count the ones they didn’t “encounter”. If there were that many in one year, you can imagine the cumulative total over the past decades of non-enforcement. Here, we are running about 50,000 per year (again, those that get caught). Relative to population, that is around 60% of the US rate. So also crazily high.
Here, at least, the politicians are finally being forced to think about considering maybe possibly doing something. Which is, at least, a first step.
Short of a genocide it won’t matter. The change has been made, and we’ll be living with the results for my kids’ lifetime.
No one who walked across mexico, was raped by each group of traffickers, and finally made it here will self deport. They’ve got too much invested.
The males will just do what they did at home, petty or organized crime, violence, and destruction.
Unless the chinese take over. They won’t hesitate to replace the footsoldiers with their own when the time comes. Ni hao!
n
– and there’s no such thing as the B-3 bomber.
If she runs, the gutless RINOs better be showing the loop of her saying that for the first time in her life she was proud to be an American, 24/7. Alternate with her crying poor when they left the whitehouse, over drone footage of the compound in Hawaii.
n
Yep. I’ve been saying for a while now that it’ll be a genocide or the destruction of the United States as we know it. No other option.
Or the Aurora.
The SR71 was not retired without a successor in place.
Moochelle will be Game Over for Republicans and Trump in this cycle. Half of the country has to get Big Mike out of their system and learn the hard lesson about voting for Marxism.
Of course, we will all pay the price.
I don’t know. My first 10 years were in that city; however, never saw one of them, so I never acquired any knowledge.
“Who made Minneapolis into Somalia? “
Obama, with the willing help of the PLT’s.
Catching up after being AFK…
Re password security theater, a website I use occasionally has paste disabled for bank routing numbers and account numbers, so I have to type each of them twice. They always want a review, so I have a polite but firm statement that it is error prone, and negates using a password manager to enhance security. They recently added a question about how many times I have made this suggestion, so I give them a realistic number. According to my logs, the number is pretty large, and I have made this suggestion for several years. They should act instead of just collecting statistics.
This reminds me about the lack of spaces or hyphens in those loooong numbers. There should never be more than four numbers without some separation. We are humans, not computers.
Finally, I hate all this nonsense about re-verifying my credentials every quarter, with the obligatory email, or, horror, SMS, for a verification code. This, especially, for some site where I have no risk if there is a compromise. Cretins (hi, Ray.)
End rant.
@Stu, I did not know that Monoprice had a physical store, or that it had been closed.
Glad their mail order still works. Their web site is a little quirky, but their service and shipping have always been great. I sometimes get an order delivered next day, and this is very unusual for my location. Many of their sale items are free shipping. Good folks.
Colleagues of mine giving the “run, hide, fight” talk pointed out the value of having a simple hardwood wedge on hand in one’s office or classroom (or hotel room). If the door can’t be locked, it can at least be wedged shut. In a pinch, a stapler or a hole punch can function as a wedge, assuming one doesn’t have four people to hand to make a human barrier.
It was eight people. Two people wide, four people deep. The other advantage was that the shooter did not think to shoot low so all the bullets through the door went above them. Unreal.
This is how I think of the distinction between coding vs. programing.
Elon Musk bashed President Biden’s administration after they admitted to flying 320,000 unvetted migrants into the US as Musk said it could mean ‘something far words than 9/11.’ Musk took to his platform X on Tuesday and said that the president’s administration is ‘importing voters and creating a national security threat’ for secretly allowing illegal immigrants in the country. ‘It is highly probable that the groundwork is being laid for something far worse than 9/11 . Just a matter of time,’ Musk said as he reposted a story from DailyMail.com.
“A warning from Elon Musk”
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2024/03/a-warning-from-elon-musk.html
The actual article is at:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13155765/biden-illegal-migrant-flying-program-national-security-vulnerability.html
I wish that I did not understand what is going on. Civil War II, here we come. A bunch of old citizens against a bunch of young invaders. The funny thing is that the Amish think that they will not be affected by the invaders but they are starting to realize that they will be overrun also.
“Crude oil processing in China hit all-time high in 2023″
https://www.ogj.com/refining-processing/refining/article/14309951/crude-oil-processing-in-china-hit-all-time-high-in-2023
“China set a new crude oil processing milestone with an average of 14.8 million b/d in 2023.”
Meanwhile in the real world, people are building their country infrastructures.
Massive Reserve of Helium Found by Minnesota Exploratory Drill, Likely the Biggest Find Ever in North America
‘Economically Viable’ Helium Discovered in Minnesota
https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/03/economically-viable-helium-discovered-in-minnesota/
It will be interesting to see a more comprehensive article. If the find proves out, this appears to be a very atypical deposit. The geology should be interesting and it may lead to a better understanding of deep crustal helium production from radioactive decay.
As far as commercialization, Deep Blue Minnesota will make sure it takes decades and the costs are not economically viable.
“Citizen of the Galaxy” by Robert A. Heinlein
https://www.amazon.com/Citizen-Galaxy-Robert-Heinlein/dp/1416505520?tag=ttgnet-20/
A standalone Young Adult “juvenile” science fiction book. I reread my used 1986 MMPB copy that somebody converted into a hardback. The font is kinda small but the after market Demco binding was solid. The book was first published as a hardback by Scribner in 1957. Warning, the story moves quickly and is very hard to put down. Good luck on getting a new dead tree MMPB or trade paperback as the book is out of print again.
One of my top ten favorite books of all time. This book just pushes all my buttons: space opera, thousands of occupied planets, the free traders spaceships, military sf, well thought out space aliens, a rich and infinite universe, a likable protagonist, great mentors, good people making tough and good decisions, FTL spaceships, air cars, the 3,000+ light year Terran Hegemony sphere, etc, etc, etc.
The book is really three books in one: slave, trader, military. It was originally serialized in Astounding magazine in three issues in 1957. Heinlein could have easily made this book into a long series but chose not to. Interesting decision. For instance, did Leda and Thorby get married ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_of_the_Galaxy
Jo Walton’s much better review is at:
https://reactormag.com/citizengalaxy/
My rating: 6 out of 5 stars
Amazon rating: 4.7 out of 5 stars (1,419 reviews)
Lynn
“Warning: The annual flu vaccine is being transformed into a mRNA jab…”
https://revolver.news/2024/03/warning-annual-flu-vaccine-is-being-transformed-into-mrna-jab/
“A lot of you have been getting your flu shots for years without a hitch. But, heads up, there’s a big shift on the horizon you should be aware of. The annual flu vaccine is morphing into an mRNA shot. And chances are, they’re not going to broadcast this change, especially with all the health debates swirling around mRNA technology.”
I do not want to take any more mRNA shots until I read the 30 year report.
Hat tip to:
https://thelibertydaily.com/
Node is coding. So is Python in a lot of situations even though it is important in CS classrooms, paricularly Algorithms classes taught out of CLRS, the standard text in the US.
Home from my errands. Did pickups all over the place. Stopped at the store for some recreational fire materials. Picked up the kid. Voted. No waiting at the elementary school at 440pm…
Lot of people running unopposed.
n
Sh*t. Voting. My whole day was shot because another overseas developer decided that they didn’t want to do the research with the vendor that I’m doing this week.
Well there’s your mistake right there.
More broadly, a large part of my professional career has been spent in doing the job that someone else was supposed to do, but they did it wrong or they did it half-vast or they didn’t do it at all. But they’re long on excuses and justifications, so that makes it all right.
To repeat: I’ve told The Child not to allow anyone to give her any shots unless I’m there and give the go-ahead, which I won’t do unless I’ve read the bottle and the packaging and watched the process of filling the needles. Sorry, medical “professionals”, but you destroyed your institutional credibility. Burned it right to the ground.
Home from my errands. Did pickups all over the place. Stopped at the store for some recreational fire materials. Picked up the kid. Voted. No waiting at the elementary school at 440pm…
Our little country church on FM 2759 that we vote at has a line out the door about 60 or 80 feet long at 7pm.
I’m an advocate for early voting for that very reason. We voted on Feb 29; walked right in, there was no line and no crowd, and we were in and out in 15 minutes.
@nick – re images in WP (in case you didn’t see this yesterday; added and clarified)
In WordPress, images (uploaded files) are stored via the Media admin screens. You don’t reference them by file name or location, but by ‘add media’ in the post/page editor (or the equivalent in a slide show plugin). A ‘media’ files (which is any file that is uploaded, PDF, images, etc) are stored in the uploads folder by ‘year/month’ folder according to the date you upload. B
As for slide shows – I like the ‘Smart Slider 3’ plugin. Works well, multiple slide shows, easy to add and rearrange, placed in a page/post by a shortcode. Lots of tutorials on the wpbeginner.com site about media and slide shows.
Home from taking wife to hospital in Seattle for hysterectomy operation – left Sunday, home today. So far, indications are only possible stage 1 cancer (lowest risk), no evidence of spreading. Awaiting pathology report in a week for final determination. My job as chauffeur, chief cook and bottle washer, laundry maid, grocery getter, etc, will continue as before.
@Rick: Best wishes for the missus.
Robot or standard surgery?
Hoping for a speedy recovery.
Robot assisted, I believe.
Thanks.
@Rick: Prayers for a good outcome.
@rickh, thanks for that update, I’ll look at that plugin. The two I’ve tried so far are less than I’d hoped.
The problem for me with “media files”, and I had seen that bit about date, is that I don’t know the content, and it’s coming in in a folder “2012-bob-retirement-party”, img0001 – img0219.jpg, and the date WP uses for a folder is the UPLOAD DATE. IE- all my photos are in the SAME folder because I’m moving them at the same time, and I’ve lost the context of the original folder provided by the name of that folder.
So if I upload all the existing photos, they’ll all be in one folder, and I lose whatever identifying info they had beyond filename.
The CatFolders plugin gives me a way to do named folders, but SUB folders costs a yearly upgrade…Still one extra layer of folders is doable.
The bit about ‘media files’ not displaying file size is the sux too, as I used the thumbnail files instead of the actual image files, several times in a row. Some of the pix are old enough their actual file size is pretty dang small anyway, so the image I want looks pretty much the same as the thumbnail image I don’t want when viewed as thumbnails in the Media folder…
All of which is to say, some things are clearly legacy with WP, and the result of early design decisions. And additional functionality has been provided by third parties, but there are a lot of choices, even if I search for “best free WP gallery tool” and pick the result that was posted this year or last…
Which is why I appreciate the advice from someone who knows their business.
n
@rick, I’ll second the best wishes for your wife, and you.
n
Paging General Burkhalter …
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/german-minister-says-participant-dialed-into-military-call-via-non-secure-line-2024-03-05/?ref=upstract.com
Home from taking wife to hospital in Seattle for hysterectomy operation – left Sunday, home today. So far, indications are only possible stage 1 cancer (lowest risk), no evidence of spreading. Awaiting pathology report in a week for final determination. My job as chauffeur, chief cook and bottle washer, laundry maid, grocery getter, etc, will continue as before.
Best wishes to the wife and you. She will probably be sore for six months. My daughter came home with a catheter after two days in the hospital. It is not unusual for the urethra not to work for a few days after getting beat up and rerouted in the surgery.
@Nick
If you single-click on any media item in Admin, Media, the right side of the screen displays all the info about that item, including the file size. And you can use the left/right arrows in the upper right corner of that screen to go through the media items. If you click on the ‘list view’ icon (left side of the thumbnail list), you can see a few details of each item in a list (doesn’t include file size, though).
If you want to organize the files differently, there’s a plugin for that. (There’s a plugin for everything.) See the article here https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-organize-wordpress-files-in-media-library-folders/ . You can use that plugin to move things around without breaking links.
(You can’t just more the files around in the formulas, as WP works with media not as files, but as a kind of ‘post/page’ that has a virtual link to the physical file The plugin mentioned in the above link takes care of adjusting virtual links in the database as you organize the files.
Note that the above plugin has a ‘pro’ version that has an annual cost. But I think the non-pro (free) plugin might work.
Another one that appears to be totally free is this one https://wordpress.org/plugins/organize-media-folder/ .
I haven’t used either one, so you might try to test each one with a few media files before you do all of them.
As for the slide show thing, another good one is ‘Meta Slider’. (Not from the Meta folks.)
“Poll: 45% of young voters unwilling to spend $10/month to fight ‘climate change’ despite it apparently being a top priority”
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/03/poll_45_of_young_voters_unwilling_to_spend_10month_to_fight_climate_change_despite_it_apparently_being_a_top_priority.html
Lets not tax you, lets not tax me, lets tax that guy over there behind that tree.
Maybe the young voters are starting to realize that they are getting scammed.
Younger people in general are figuring out that they are being scammed.
n
“Federal Debt Is up $100 Billion in Just 4 Days”
https://rumble.com/v4hh0yc-federal-debt-is-up-100-billion-in-just-4-days.html
$37 trillion in debt this year, $40 trillion in debt next year.
“Your next wallet could be a wheelbarrow.”
I wonder how much money we are spending to bring 320,000 illegals to the USA on planes ?
“The Attack” by Kurt Schlichter
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0CRR7WFZT?tag=ttgnet-20/
“With input from key military and counterterrorism experts, THE ATTACK tells the story of a cunning, implacable, and brutal enemy taking advantage of a confused and weak president to launch an assault that dwarfs Hamas’s strike on Israel. With a wide-open border and American law enforcement focused on churchgoers and parents attending schoolboard meetings, the jihadist enemy can pick the time and place for its deadly attack. The only things standing in its way are the courage of America’s brave first responders and military, as well as regular citizens who are caught up in the bloodshed and are forced to fight back.”
I am tempted. I am also under orders to curtail my excessive books purchases. I’ve got 50 books on my nightstand and 500 books in my SBR. She calls that excessive.
Tom Clancy’s last (I think) book was “The Teeth of the Tiger”, which started by describing several coordinated Islamic terrorist attacks across the USA. Between those two books, it’s beginning to sound likely to happen. But an attack before the November election would guarantee a Trump victory, so if the imams doing the planning were smart – which they are NOT – they’d hold off until December.
“A24’s ‘Civil War’ Movie Provokes Timing Debate Amid Some Fearing Actual Civil War”
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/civil-war-movie-timing-maga-violence-1235831454/
“The Alex Garland film is sparking discussion about its release during a contentious election year: “The idea of civil war actually keeps me up at night.””
Coming to a movie picture screen near you on April 12.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDyQxtg0V2w
The Franklin Horton books start with a coordinated and distributed attack on infrastructure…
What is super sucky is that the agencies that should be looking for those things are enabling them, and focused on the pretend threat of white anger. Not that there isn’t a phenomenon that could be generally described as white anger, but that if they weren’t messing up the country, they wouldn’t raise the anger…
they are creating a self fulfilling prophesy.
n
I don’t have that one. Thought to buy it on Kindle, but – geez – the price is the same as for a newly written book, and Heinlein is long dead. I’d pay them a buck or two for having converted it, but not full price. Copyright really needs to expire. Thankfully, there are alternatives. Ahoy, matey!
I understand that. At the same time, it is a very promising technology – a lot more refined than growing viruses in chicken eggs and injecting the result.
The main question seems to be how they decide which aspects of the virus to program into the RNA. The Covid “spikes” were an obvious choice, but provoked some of the same side effects as the virus itself. Which maybe isn’t surprising. Still, even having had some of those effects, I’m happier having the shots than the disease…
My successor for the weeder course (first semester programming) has convinced the school to stay with Java as a first language. Precisely because it make you think about things like data types. It’s too easy to be sloppy with Python, and you don’t want people to start out sloppy.
Good successor *pat* *pat*
We just had a Tunesian guy stab a random jewish guy (orthodox, so easily identifiable) on the street. The victim survived, barely. The Tunesian guy recently got Swiss citizenship, which they could take away if he is convicted. That would let them deport him after his prison sentence. Even better, of course, would be to save money by paying Tunesia to put him in jail.
Of course, the lefties are crying “he’s just a kid, give him a chance”. Um, no, he’s 17, that’s not a kid anymore. Go around trying to murder random pedestrians, collect the consequences.
Rick, prayers and best wishes for you and your wife. A friend of my wife just had a laparoscopic Hysterectomy on Monday. Short hospital stay, but some bad pain, which was somewhat controlled by meds. She is allergic to some common pain meds, so that is tricky.
She is known among friends as the bionic woman. She has had shoulder(s), knee(s), and hip(s) replaced, plus some back surgery. I have lost count of how many of each. There’s more, but not sure what. She has been through the wringer with pain, but still keeps going. Modern medicine is wonderful, but must have patience and endurance. In between surgeries, she is active, and no one would guess that she has had any procedures. Wow.
I say all of this as encouragement; an inspiration for the rest of us.
Nick, re your photo archive problems, would it work to rename the files to include the folder name and then upload “2012-bob-retirement-party_img0001.jpg” and such?