Sunny and clear, moderate wind and temps. Like yesterday. Which I ignored and stayed inside all day.
I did office stuff. I meant to get out in the sun and wind, but I was feeling a bit under the weather, and with wife sick and one kid getting over the sick, I didn’t feel like doing much more than sitting. They watched TV all day, Grey’s Anatomy and Walking Dead. Not sure which show is which any more, they are both sudsier than most soap operas.
Today I’ve got a visit to my client for a troubleshooting mission. He’s got two TVs not working. That is a bit of a mystery, as the simple failures would take out 4, and I can’t think of anything to just take out the two… so I have to go poke at it.
I’ve also got some auction pickups to do, so I hope to get the site visit out of the way quickly.
All the normal home stuff is still waiting for attention too. So I’ll be a busy boy after my Spring break…
At least I’m not broke.
Stack something. Fix something. Make something. Meet someone.
nick
Happy Saint Patrick’s Day to the Irish, and those who wish they were!
Working today. Meh. No parade for me.
Nick, wishing your family members a speedy recovery, and that you don’t get whatever they had.
Whatever Nick’s client’s TVs have does seem to be contagious. W1 complains of intermittent function of her satellite TV.
Of course, all my satellite and coax tools, testers and supplies are at the BOL, where I am not. Quick and dirty inspection late last night indicates that there is no signal on one of two coax cables coming in from the dish to her TV room. This morning’s extracurricular task is to diagnose that further. I also have my doubts about her 15-plus year-old satellite receiver.
Perhaps a wee beastie nibbled a cable, or W1 hit one with the grass trimmer. Diagnostics. Joy.
The Brits are weird. It is (still) easy to hold a shotgun, though the current government is looking to make shotguns as hard to have as rifles. If you have paperwork for a rifle, having a suppressor is no problem at all, though I did notice that Plod in some places now wants to know serial numbers off the cans.
Pest control can still be found on YT, but they do their best to hide it. I have noticed that I was surreptitiously unsubscribed from, and had notifications turned off on, several channels, including Nathan’s.
The non-moonbat alternatives to YT have pretty much failed to take off, but perhaps 4 years of Trump followed by eight of Vance will turn the public square around.
@Nick
Food rationing in the UK ended in July 1954.
Interestingly, research from 1939 indicated that UK food production was adequate for maintaining a healthy population. Boring diet of course.
@paulthemanc, what continued into the sixties? I’m pretty confident I remember that part correctly.
——
The wartime scarcity and “we’re all in this together” along with the rebuilding effort shaped europe in ways that still echo. Socialism in the cold countries. Soft socialism elsewhere. A culture of scarcity vs our culture of abundance….
——
Up and moving. W is going in to work today despite still feeling sick. Kid is mostly over it and will be back in school today.
I still plan to get to my client’s house in the later morning and either fix the problem, or figure out what I need to order to do so… then do my normal daily stuff.
—–
Had a really detailed and mildly weird dream about a ham radio estate, youtube, and a piece of gear. I still can’t quite shake the feeling it really happened.
nick
Take a look at the response of the AI in the paper when posed the non-coding question about what the woman should do about her husband.
When we stayed in Southlake two weeks ago, the hotel parking lot often overflowed during daylight hours so I parked in the lot of the XO Marriage building across the street. One day I got curious about what that was about and hit The Duck.
Maybe their clients’ emails were part of the material used to train the AI.
XO looks like Ramsey Solutions for marriage therapy. The building was huge, but most of the cars in the lot seemed related to the hotel.
Most large corporate codebases are garbage. Too many diversity hires and H1Bs with “Electronics and Communication Technologies” undergrad diplomas for which the institution back home won’t issue sealed transcripts.
Assuming a code base is “secure” just because it passes a Coverity scan and a few other static analysis tools is dangerous, but that’s what most places do with their build pipelines. Hot Skillz!
Gotta have the bandwidth and advertising revenue to support the service. Plus, an army of staff psychologists working on the web and app UIs for 20 years like Twitter is a competitive advantage most managers don’t completely understand.
Twitter’s appeal is the dopamine hit from that app’s interface. The model for the messaging service itself is a long afternoon CS grad student project.
@Nick
In 1957 the then Prime Minister said “most of our people have never had it so good”, which was the overwhelming feeling of the population at the time, resulting in him being reelected in 1959. I am unaware of what you might be thinking. The 60’s are still referred to as the ‘swinging 60’s’ which brought money and freedom to the youth in the UK – I was one of them. Compared to today, what we had then was limited, but so much more than pre and immediately post WW2.
Gotta have the bandwidth and advertising revenue to support the service.
Indeed. The incumbent has a huge advantage. The problem with all the alternatives is that they need subscriptions to keep the door open, and who is going to put up a subscription for content that might not might not be of usable quality? With the possible exception of Ian McCollum’s Forgotten Weapons, for which I might fork over some of my scarce beer money, I have yet to come across content for which I would be willing to pay real money. I don’t even pay YT to go ad-free.
Thank you!
I used to wish I was Irish, and then one day I discovered that I AM Irish. That was way back in grade school when I attended an Irish wake for a distant relative. That was in the nearby town of Plymouth, Michigan, where my mother was born. It was a beautiful day, so we kids played outside the home where the deceased was on display in the parlor, and the food was being prepared in the kitchen. There were way too many people to eat inside, so the yard was filled with borrowed tables and chairs.
I remember talking with other kids, and two things were notable. One was that we weren’t sure HOW we were related to the deceased, and the other was that we tried to figure out how we were related to each other, with last names we didn’t recognize as relatives. Yes, a big family.
Fun times. All I really remember is that somewhere on my mother’s side were folks of Irish descent. When I went back to school, I told some of my obviously Irish friends my story, and was perhaps a little more welcome in the clan.
I just looked up clan, and discovered it is of Gaelic origin, and simply means family in a loose sense. I like that. I used to think it was only used by Scots. Not that it makes any real difference. We are all cousins in a loose sense. Even the Hatfields and McCoys were originally related. I’ll bet that frosts some descendants to this day.
Enough learning for today. I do consider a day wasted if I don’t learn something.
Missing caption:
Soon to be deposed Emperor denies failing powers but fails to make Sith sparks
https://redstate.com/sister-toldjah/2025/03/17/chuck-schumer-post-cr-vote-book-tour-n2186744
In other news, Marjoe Gortner offers to share static electricity tricks.
Oh yes. I browse a lot. Goes back to my days visiting libraries. Sometimes I would just walk down a random aisle and grab at books until I found one I wanted to read. I would usually find a comfy spot and spend a few minutes with it. I would rarely check those out, but just enjoyed a little distraction. The WWW is my replacement for reference libraries, and is so much more accessible.
I came close to paying YT to go ad-free, but decided to try the Brave browser. A friend had been reminding me to try it, but I put it off for months. I had tried extensions in Firefox, but they required constant tinkering, and that was a chore. Vivaldi looked good, but procrastination won again. Besides, I preferred Chromium (the open source version, the closed source version was not available in my Linux repo.) It had certain features others lacked, and it worked as well as Chrome on Android. IIRC, it had no ad-killer extensions at that time. So, I tried Brave on my Android phone.
A miracle occurred! No ads! Clean! Fast! And… it used the Chrome codebase, so it had the search features I liked. I was hooked, and will use the slightest provocation to plug it. I have been provoked!
Seriously, give Brave a try. I did, and have been using it as my primary browser for several years. I have not had any desire to try any others. Well, maybe Vivaldi. It IS Italian, isn’t it? I like Italian.