Sunday, 6 December 2015

By on December 6th, 2015 in Uncategorized

12:32 – We got moved up to Sparta on Friday. Two moving vans worth of stuff. The only casualty was my main desktop PC, which now claims not to be able to find a bootable disk. I may be able to get it fixed when I have a moment. Meanwhile, I can’t connect to my D-link DIR-615 router to configure it to allow MAC addresses for things like my notebook, the Roku (which was previously hardwired), my network printer, and so on.

I just happen to have a spare 615 NIB, which I’ll swap in for the current one once I post this. It may be a few more days before my Internet access is back to normal.


58 Comments and discussion on "Sunday, 6 December 2015"

  1. Lynn says:

    Congratulations on closing and safe move. I am assuming safe because you are still alive.

    Pournelle says it is usually a loose cable as you know. I agree with him as that seems to be 80% of our problems.

  2. Lynn says:

    Btw, you forgot the word “precious” in front of “stuff”.

  3. Ray Thompson says:

    I can’t connect to my D-link DIR-615 router

    Reset to factory condition with no firmware, generally by holding the reset button while you plug the device in. Then go to the correct IP address with a wired (and good) cable to a laptop. Load the current firmware and Redo the configuration to your liking.

  4. Al says:

    Speaking of Pournelle, what’s up with his site? Did it get hacked?

  5. OFD says:

    Glad to hear y’all made it to the mountains OK, Dr. Bob! Excellent! And as always, there are issues with hooking back up to the net; been there and done that. Your main desktop probably does have, as Mr. Lynn sez, some loose cable or other stupid and simple problem to fix.

    Just checked Dr. Pournelle’s site and yeah, WTF?

  6. medium wave says:

    In re JP’s site: This works for me.

  7. Paul says:

    Jerry Pournelle, took me a bit to find yesterday also – try https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/

  8. DadCooks says:

    @RBT’s experience getting his tech back on line should be a learning/teaching experience for us all and may be something to add to his prepping book.

    In my experience, if a router is left unplugged/unpowered for an extended amount of time (YMMV) it tends to revert to its original default settings. That make the usually hidden feature of backing up the router’s configuration to a file an exercise that is easily forgotten or updates neglected.

    I have also found that putting a router on a new “network” can only be done after only a standalone computer has been connected directly to the modem (no routers, no switches) and all the configurations with the Internet Provider completed. Then I connect the router only to my laptop (disconnected from the modem) and configure (or reload) the backed up configuration. Then I connect the router to the modem, connect everything (one at a time) that is being connected by LAN cable. Finally I reconnect everything (again, one at a time) that is connected via WiFi.

    No two Internet Providers do things the same way, and by that I mean even if the name is the same if you are in a different town the connection is not the same.

  9. Roy Harvey says:

    Two moving vans worth of stuff. The only casualty was my main desktop PC…

    Did you actually allow them to move your PC??? When I move a desktop it is in my car, belted into a seat, preferably with lots of stuff around it to remove any chance of it moving.

    Nope, found this on Barbara’s blog.

    Bob had his PC and another load of science kits.

  10. OFD says:

    Thanks for them Pournelle links, Mr. medium wave and Mr. Paul. Also a tip o’ the hat to Mr. DadCooks for the trip down memory lane on connecting routers and pooters after a move. Always a fun comedy of errors throughout.

    When I move desktops or laptops, they’re boxed up with lots of padding and secured, either in the back seat (usually) or the trunk. Did that over three years ago with our move here and all was copacetic on arrival.

    Speaking of which, I changed one desktop over from CentOS 7 to Fedora 23 and that will be the attic workstation running the gun and radio stuff. Leaving the RHEL 7 desktop down here with me for more study, just in case I can snag either a regular job or periodic remote consult stuff. That sits next to the Tecsun shortwave/SSB radio and the Uniden scanner. Near them I have one of the Pow-Fungs. Antenna configs and experiments pending.

    Meanwhile I applied for SS, finally, just so we have SOME additional regular revenue here and if I land something better with more money I’m sure they’ll take me off it. And the VA disability paperwork is in-progress; no idea what will happen with that. But the SS will cover the mortgage, at least; if I got a similar amount from the VA, I’d also be covering heat year-round whether wood or oil or both, electricity, car payment, and the landline/tee-vee/net. Wife’s pay would cover groceries, Princess expenses, and all back and current taxes and we could pay them all off finally. Then get to work paying off the mortgage way early. And she could dial back to one week of work per month, half of what she does now.

    But of course I’m also working on ginning up other revenue.

  11. MrAtoz says:

    I would like to forget the days of configuring dialup modems. What a PITA.

  12. Rick H says:

    Regarding Jerry’s site:

    Not a ‘hacked’ problem, except for those that I caused while reconfiguring a few things.

    The main page had an issue earlier that I fixed (bad config on a htaccess file pointing to an index.php when it should be index.html). My bad. Trying to fix another problem, but didn’t have my htaccess hat pointed in the right direction.

    Partly related to converting his main site to SSL. Some configuration things had to change also, so whacking those bugs as I find them.

    All is well now; at last check.

    Regarding RBT’s router: I suspect that it might be a different downstream IP address that needs to be reconfigured. So starting out with a factory-reset settings is a good idea.

  13. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    The router was fine. I forgot the Roku 3 is hopeless with WiFi.

  14. Chuck W. says:

    Um, I don’t think you can undo SS, once you start it. Bad thing is that when you start getting it from your own SS account, you are locked into the amount due you for the age you started. A friend started his at age 62, fearing that he would not get anything if he waited until the ‘normal’ SS retirement age of 66. IIRC, his amount at that age was $900. Except for the quite minimal ‘raises’ they give for what they always say is near non-existent cost-of-living increases, he will be at that level for the rest of his life. Had he waited until 66, he would be getting about $1,600, which is not a paltry difference in the current economy. He did not really need the early SS, as 5 years later, this is the first year he was ‘retired’ from his normal income job, he was just scared by friends who told him the government was going to stop paying if you did not get on the train at the earliest age opportunity.

    I have explained before that I am on a “death benefit”, collecting my wife’s SS and letting mine ride until I am forced to take it at age 70. Thanks to an insurance salesman (long-time friend of the family) I learned of that possibility, because the SSA never even hinted that option was available to me. My take from SS will more than double in a few years when I am forced to take my own. Meanwhile, great thanks to my wife (who insisted we get married when I really did not care whether we were married or just living together), I have had enough pad that I can pursue work besides Walmart, now that I am back in my native country which has no jobs for people who are older and want work. Due to Germany’s wisdom, they were practically untouched by unemployment effects of the Great Recession.

    If you earn over a certain amount (the poverty wage threshold, which is around $14k), then they reduce your SS benefit until you reach age 67; they do not take you ‘off’ SS ever—once on it,—they just reduce what they pay you based on your earnings. Since I consider my situation to be a windfall, those reductions don’t needle me. But I will soon be clear of those reductions. Once past 67, you can earn as much as you want with no SS reduction penalty.

    On the computing front, I run computers/monitors/printers/etc. 24/7 and nearly 365. But if it is going to fail, it usually does on the rare occasions when I shut down. And I lost a backup hard drive over Thanksgiving when I shut things down for the weekend in Chicago. Got back, and the drive refuses to appear when plugged in. Can hear it spinning and clicking when plugged in, but it never appears (USB external drive).

    As has always been the case when I have a drive failure, it turns out that there are a couple things on there that should have been elsewhere and it would be convenient if I could get things resurrected just long enough to get those off, but this is the first time I have lost a drive after switching fully to Linux. The drive is NTFS formatted and I have never worked with Linux tools to try drive recovery. It’s an external drive I bought in Deutschland and brought back with me, so it is a good 7 or 8 years old. I should have been paying more attention to its age, as my own experience is that hard drives are good for 3 to 5 years, then can fail at any moment. Next few weeks look lighter than the last several months, so maybe I can get to it sooner than later.

  15. Chuck W. says:

    While I am on computing, I really cannot recommend Linux Mint anymore; in fact, I now recommend strongly against it. Its Cinnamon desktop was a truly good idea—the natural evolution of the WinXP desktop. But Mint has degenerated into chaos. For a year, I have been running tests of the radio automation on Mint 17. The automation has worked flawlessly until the past month. Although I do not upgrade anything related to the automation, I have upgraded Mint itself (which had practically no updates throughout the summer—until last month when a raft of them started pouring through). For the last several weeks, the automation has occasionally stopped dead and the logs specify seg faults caused by Mint libraries. Although I cannot get off Mint until we get past the holidays, I am going to move to CentOS 6.7, which the current release of the open-source radio automation software is developed on. A totally new version of the automation software which abandons QT3 is due out next year, and it is being developed on CentOS 7. I will move to that when it is released. This idea of multiple competing Linux OS releases has turned out to be a bad news, IMO. It is truly ironic that people who insist on using Debian-based distros to run the radio automation, are the only ones writing to the forum with problems. People running on CentOS never have a problem once they are past the strange initial partitioning problems when first installing CentOS.

    Hate the thought of facing that OS change, because it will cause me a couple days of downtime which I can ill-afford, but I am confident it will solve many problems—including getting me connected to my Google Contact List with Evolution again. Evolution is being developed on Red Hat, so hopefully the trailing CentOS release will insure it will work flawlessly. I am now getting seg faults with Evolution, and a couple features have never worked properly on Mint. Linux OS’es are just not interchangeable, regardless of what the fanboys say.

  16. pcb_duffer says:

    [snip] I would like to forget the days of configuring dialup modems. What a PITA. [snip]

    I remember jumper configured modems and other peripherals being better than the first generation of Plug & Play (known colloquially as Plug & Pray). And if I may tell a story on myself: In the early 1990s, a college buddy was doing post doctoral research at the Triangle Universities Nuclear Lab (TUNL) on Duke University’s campus. I was up there visiting, and he happened to mention some problem the researchers there were having with their dial up connections. I casually rattled off the Hayes dialing string that would fix the problem. Suddenly, a room full of physics PhDs are looking at me like I’m the smart guy. Uh, no.

  17. OFD says:

    On the SS; we just need a regular income source here ASAP, thanks mainly to wife’s employer screwing us over with late checks all the time now, and ongoing Princess and house expenses that must be covered. If I start making more money than that each month, they can go ahead and reduce it all they want, and thanks for the info, that I’ll get it back at 67, assuming I make it that far and haven’t been put before a firing squad or SWATed.

    I’ll see how the Fedora 23 runs for a while and may well go back to CentOS at some point; I’ve come to prefer, by far, the RH family of Linux more than the Debian side. Probably because it’s what I’ve worked with most and longest, I guess, but I’ve also kept seeing weird and goofy little problems with Ubuntu and Mint and more so recently; also not that happy with how they run their organizations or with their “community” of smartypants arrogant users out here; YMMV, of course.

  18. Chuck W. says:

    MM exactly. From what I can ascertain, when SuSE sold out, most developers ran to RH and CentOS from wherever they were—even if it was not SuSE. So a terrific amount of stuff now appears to be developed on some Red Hat derivative. A guy just recently wrote in to the automation forum that Intel video on an Asus mobo was not working, using Debian. Chief developer said he has built several systems using the same mobo with zero problems running CentOS 6.7 and 7.

    I’m not really sure what got me on Ubuntu/Mint originally. Possibly my struggle with Red Hat over in Berlin around 2004, which ended in utter failure.

    BTW, although there are lots of complaints about systemd and SELinux, developers appear to be embracing it, saying if one takes the time to learn it, it really is an advancement over previous methods. Users are the complainers; developers are accepting. It does require keeping a closer eye on various logs, as some service denials are otherwise silent.

  19. Miles_Teg says:

    DadCooks wrote:

    “(no routers, no switches)”

    I thought switches were completely invisible to the stuff they were plugged into.

  20. OFD says:

    “I’m not really sure what got me on Ubuntu/Mint originally.”

    I plead guilty. I recommended it a while back as solving a lot of issues for people who were used to Winblows. And I have it on the netbook here mainly as a backup now for wife’s Winblows 7 laptop. Otherwise all my other stuff is RH-centric except for my Kali Linux laptop and my OpenBSD big-ass laptop. Oh, and this here Winblows 8.1 machine, which I’m gently lobbying to change over to Linux; I’ll even tell Mrs. OFD that we can run Turbo Tax and the one or two other Windoze apps in a vm from now on when needed.

    Systemd doesn’t really faze me and yeah, you gotta pay attention to chit. Read the logs, learn the CLI. Otherwise, both RHEL and CentOS 6 and 7 have full-blown GUI menus now if you want them but I spend a lotta time in the terminals anyway.

  21. dkreck says:

    Basic income. Brilliant! Why wasn’t this already in place. Hell just because the cost is higher than the revenue that should be easy to fix.

    Anyone with a business had better pack up and leave, or are there any left there now.

  22. nick says:

    Sitting here tuning around the bands, thinking ‘nothing much getting thru’ and suddenly I’m gettting good DX on the shortwave bands.

    BBC in english from assencion island, voice of turkey, 10k+ km, Cuba of course, and the local US stations in TN and FL.

    Nothing from CO on 10.000mhz tho, strange.

    nick

    Hey getting Japan ATM, first time for japan on 9.595

    and VOA in french from the middle of africa is booming in. totally clean, 14k+ km. @9.885mhz cool

    Also Turkey

  23. Ray Thompson says:

    Just got bad news late last night. My best friend of 28 years died in a diving incident in the Cayman Islands. I don’t have many details. His wife borrowed a cell phone to call her daughter in the states who then called us.

    My friend and a dive buddy were diving and the buddy came up but my friend did not. Buddy went back down and brought my friend to the boat and they were not able to find a pulse or revive him. An autopsy will be performed to determine the cause of death. Equipment failure, personal failure, or health issues.

    I am still in shock, slept little last night, the reality has not yet become reality.

    He was 3 months older than me and had just retired about 5 months ago.

    Damn, I am going to miss him.

  24. nick says:

    Sorry for your loss Ray,

    nick

  25. nick says:

    Someone in a comment on Glenn Beck called obammy

    “King Putt”

    Never heard that before!

    nick

  26. OFD says:

    Very sorry, Ray, my condolences.

    Life seems to keep having nasty surprises for us when maybe we’ve already had enough.

  27. OFD says:

    @Mr. nick; my WRTH tells me that for us in the northeast, our best SW listening is during the twilight hours, around dawn and dusk, and that we’ll easily pick up stuff from Mexico and South America but Europe is harder. Also that the U.S. is now down to four or five SW stations and they broadcast almost all religious programming.

    I’m still trying to see what I can pick up on my various radios with the supplied stock antennas; it’s kinda problematic here so far, and may be related to why our cell service blows.

  28. MrAtoz says:

    Sorry for your loss, Mr. Ray. I gave up diving early in my milspec career. I hope he at least was enjoying retirement. RIP

  29. Ray Thompson says:

    I found this link about the incident. Nothing in the story that I did not already know.

    https://caymannewsservice.com/2015/12/visitor-dies-after-diving-off-north-west-point/

  30. DadCooks says:

    @Ray, my sincerest condolences on the loss of your friend. I assume he liked diving so at least he went doing what he liked to do. Peace be with you.

    @Miles_Teg wrote: “I thought switches were completely invisible to the stuff they were plugged into.”

    Should be, but when I have tried to self install a new modem or router Charter has made me remove a switch that I normally use between the modem and router (they cannot provide a logical explanation and I am tired of arguing with them).

    @nick, I think “King Putz” would be even better. Whatever though, he does not deserve to be called anything better than Traitor In Chief.

  31. nick says:

    @ofd,

    On the few US stations, it’s primarily religious, but a couple have programming other than non-stop sermons.

    WTWW in Lebanon TN has a ham radio show Tues and Sat nights, followed by a very eclectic music show. They seem to be doing mostly christmas music ATM.

    RMI Tru News transmitting from Okeechobee FL is “the only end time news program counting down to the return of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” They often have very interesting guests, and pretty good reporting and commentary, despite their focus. I think they also rebroadcast the Art Bell show (someone does).

    Weeknights the Alex Jones Show is on around 4.865. Alex is a kook, and at times his whole shtick seems to be an excuse to sell his nutritional supplements, but in between, there are some good guests, and good on the scene reporting.

    Like anything, grain of salt…. and a lot of the kookier stuff turns out to hit the MSM later on. ‘Course a lot of it doesn’t.

    Radio Havana has a good ham show, forget the time but it must be around 9 or 10pm CT, around 6.060 and 6200. Forget what day…. much of the rest of the time they are playing latin jazz, which is always good. Surprisingly their news isn’t the laughfest you might expect. It’s mostly obscure local issues.

    Radio Romania plays some interesting music, and I hear them most nights (when I can hear anyone).

    Vatican radio has music programming too.

    Brazil has some interesting latin pop when I can hear them.

    I’m using a random long wire on the top rail of my fence for my SW receiver. Wire is about 240ft long, in a big C shape. It suffers from being only 6 ft off the ground. Most nights, the signal is about the same on my SW with the wire, and my Yaesu FT847 ham radio with a multiband vertical, about 20 ft up. I’m looking at a way to get the long wire up into a pine in my front yard, that might give me 70ft altitude. That should help.

    BTW, the good DX vanished in a half hour. Sometimes you just get lucky.

    As far as the best time, well, I only get the time I get. And so far, the best at night for me seems to be 10- midnight CT. (Although I posted the other day about being surprised when I dialed around during the day.)

    I’m just hoping to get to a point where I can instinctively know what is possible on which band, most of the time. Listening for DX on SW is more fun for me than hoping to catch someone calling CQ on the ham bands. Or listening in on an established rag chew on 80m or 40m.

    And now, I got errands to run, and a flag to put out.

    nick

  32. dkreck says:

    @Miles_Teg wrote: “I thought switches were completely invisible to the stuff they were plugged into.”

    Should be, but when I have tried to self install a new modem or router Charter has made me remove a switch that I normally use between the modem and router (they cannot provide a logical explanation and I am tired of arguing with them).

    Smart or managed switches could be a problem but most likely not and few would have one at home. When tech support ask you to do something you know better just tell them you did it. I once had a HP tech try to make me do a whole lot stupid steps for a second time on an inkjet printer so as she made each request I told her okay. After all, I knew the response from the first time. They sent the in warranty replacement at that point.

  33. OFD says:

    ” I’m looking at a way to get the long wire up into a pine in my front yard, that might give me 70ft altitude. That should help.”

    Given that most of us don’t have the space or money to put up a few nice tall antennas in our back or front yards or up on our roofs, how do people get longwire or dipoles or whatever up that high via trees or poles? Throw a weight attached to the end? Have a really tall extension ladder on hand? Borrow the ladder truck from the local FD? A helicopter from the local Guard outfit?

  34. MrAtoz says:

    A helicopter from the local Guard outfit?

    +1000

    How about a lead line attached to your drone? I have a tiny grappling hook for 550 line. I guess a crossbow would work.

  35. MrAtoz says:

    lol I got a “missed call” on my Ooma phone last night from Searchlight, NV. Guess who hails from there? Was it something I said?

  36. nick says:

    @ofd,

    I guess normally you throw something over the branch and pull up. I’m thinking about using a fishing pole. I’ll tie on some black string and pull that up. The trick for me is the swag of wire from the house to the tree. Not sure how that will look.

    I might have to settle for a shorter tree closer to the house.

    nick

  37. nick says:

    Or one of those sticks they sell as a dog toy, that lets you throw a tennis ball farther…

    n

  38. OFD says:

    Okey-dokey, just as I thought; low-tech methods from around the bend…crossbows, throwing chit up in the air, drones, fishing poles, dawg toyz…

    …I’ll try just throwing a weight attached to the line over a tree at the rear perimeter and than hauling it taut the rest of the way. Still looking at ground-based antennas, though; sounds promising, with less athletic effort. Might go for the crossbow thing, though; nice to have a multi-use tool like that around anyway.

    “Guess who hails from there? Was it something I said?”

    Harry wants you to beat him up again.

  39. ech says:

    Joke my wife got in an email today:

    Knock, knock!
    Who’s there?
    HIPAA!
    HIPAA who?
    I can’t tell you.

  40. MrAtoz says:

    HIPAA jokes, lol!

    Anyone familiar with Apple’s Swift language? Comments? I read it’s the fastest growing language evah. Not sure if that’s true or an Apple lie.

    I’m doing some Python today, but I believe Swift is compiled and reads like a higher level scripting language.

  41. MrAtoz says:

    I’d like to personally thank Cankles, The Heroine of Tripoli, for bringing stability to Libya. Now wonder our southern border is a super highway for terrorist traffic into the US. With Ofukstik’s “come one, come all” policy, we’ll all be immigrating to Canada.

  42. MrAtoz says:

    Ha ha! ObolaLynch has to eat crow on her “prosecuting violence” speech. But, we know what she really meant: GET WHITEY! Reparations! Jail Christians! Did I mention GET WHITEY!

  43. Dave says:

    @MrAtoz

    Until the Canadians went and elected a Trudeau, I was thinking of moving a few hundred miles north if HRC wins the election.

  44. OFD says:

    Yo, homies, there ain’t no place left to go anymore! Commies to the north of us, narcotrafficante oligarchs to the south, commies to the east, hadjis all around us, and many, many more to come!

    The key thing is to GTFO of the cities or near them and to avoid them afterward, also avoiding large public events and crowds, like sports, concerts, etc. Dr. Bob made the right move and he is among the sharpest knives in anybody’s friggin’ drawer, so if HE and his wife and dawg have made that move, it would behoove sensible citizens to seriously consider doing likewise while it is still feasible.

    We got nobody and nowhere left to go, though; the globalist elites have a certain amount of control now. Bear in mind that goes away to a large extent if the Grid/net go down. Then everything becomes local/regional and meatspace is King!

  45. Lynn says:

    I just went to lunch with two of my employees. The two people in line in front of us appeared to be muslims. The woman was a face veil short of wearing a burka. The guy was fully bearded and was wearing a large backpack. Am I racist for being nervous about the backpack?

  46. JimL says:

    You’re being rational. Perhaps overcautious, but rational. Just as anyone (especially blacks) would be nervous if the folks in front of you were wearing white robes & hoods, or hillbilly gear and carrying AR15s.

    How we present ourselves has a bearing on others’ perceptions of us. These folks, if they are NOT aware of perceptions, are not paying attention. If they are aware, they should not be surprised if others are cautious when they are around.

  47. OFD says:

    “…Just as anyone (especially blacks) would be nervous if the folks in front of you were wearing white robes & hoods, or hillbilly gear and carrying AR15s.”

    The key difference here is that the folks in the robes and hoods and “hillbilly’ gear toting AR15s are not likely to be lynching anybody in this day and age and neither are they likely to be shooting up unarmed citizens at a movie theater, church, or exploding suicide vests and backpacks with funny homemade pressure cookers in them. I wouldn’t be the slightest bit nervous about Duck Dynasty types toting rifles and backpacks, but then again, I wouldn’t expect them to be swanning around a big city or shopping mall in that getup.

    “If they are aware, they should not be surprised if others are cautious when they are around.”

    And bear in mind that your “cautious” is their rabid and high-decibel accusation of racism these days. They SHOULD be able to be-bop around anywhere they like in fucking burkhas and veils and backpacks and beards. You even noticing them is tantamount to being RAYCISS!

    Our Dear Leader tells us so; by far the vast majority of musloids are nice quiet peace-loving types who abhor and decry these atrocities and aberrations. Oh wait—what do we hear? Yeah…crickets. They’re just worried and angry that we might start being…..cautious…around them….

  48. JimL says:

    So I’m a rayciss. BFD. I also plan to be alive. Situational awareness. Taking the blinders off. That’s what it is. The guy might be coming back from knitting class. But would you take a chance?

    Kids aren’t allowed in the convenience stores in this area with backpacks. Agism? Really? Of course it is. You don’t take chances with anyone when there’s a history. Profiling is what it is. Any idiot that wants to stay in business (or stay alive) does the same thing.

    Timothy McVeigh was an outlier.

    The next “mass shooting” (not counting gang-banger activity) will involve someone from one of these two groups: (Moslem radicals) and (Mentally unstable / medicated nuts). It will take place in a gun free zone. It will be geared to maximize casualties.

    Who here doesn’t already know this?

  49. OFD says:

    Yup, and this:

    “We have met the enemy, and we pay it taxes to destroy us. It is not only that the government is indifferent to majority interests—it is actively hostile toward them.”

    http://takimag.com/article/when_your_leaders_are_leading_you_off_a_cliff_jim_goad/print#axzz3tfpYtxJH

  50. Miles_Teg says:

    Germany’s getting a million migrants this year. Can’t believe Merkel hasn’t been lynched yet…

    http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-12-08/germany-on-course-for-1-million-asylum-seekers-in-2015/7008804

  51. OFD says:

    I think the Diplomad guy is mainly correct; Le Pen, like several other Euro leaders we never hear about back here in our crummy MSM, is indeed a bright light in the firmament of blood and darkness. There are alternative leaders in Germany, Hungary and Austria, too. Who have we got? Trump? Please. We have nobody.

    I know far less about the situation in Venezuela, although one of my former IT colleagues back at EDS is still working as a programmer type in the greater Boston area and his dad is some kind of big wheel down there. I should contact him; it’s been sporadic over the years but he’s on Linked-In and would respond.

    Plus there’s always shortwave!

  52. Ray Thompson says:

    Who here doesn’t already know this?

    Obuttwad, Kankles, Fein-Franken-Stein, and any other liberal.

  53. MrAtoz says:

    The Mighty Trump ™ has the country club Redumblicans in an uproar with his proposed ban of all Mooslim immigrants. The primaries are going to be “Moxie & pretzels” from start to finish.

    Trump 2016! “All Mooslims are terrorists anyway”

  54. OFD says:

    I’m stocking up on Moxie and pretzels as we “speak” here. I really dunno what the imbecile Repub hierarchy is gonna do; they’re kinda screwed. They desperately want Mittens or Jebster or Cruz or Rubio for the nomination but what to do when your front-runner is WAY ahead of them. Jebster’s recent tee-vee ads have him fulminating about ISIS and being very bellicose; Cankles is shown in her ads yakking at an audience of like-minded socialists somewhere and she’s gonna fix health care and jobs, etc., etc.

    What’s sad is that millions of Murkan derps will watch this shit and listen to it and actually make voting decisions accordingly.

    Overcast and in the high 30s this week, when the weather liars said it would be ten degrees warmer; doing outside yard stuff, putting tools away, stacking firewood, taking breaks with online course stuff, etc.

    Another late fall day in Retroville, where yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang upon those boughs which shake against the cold…bare ruined choirs…

  55. nick says:

    Nice day here, and I’m gonna spend it pulling cables in an attic. Fun.

    News is fun today!

    Fences going up. dire economic news. $38bbl oil. paying moochers to leave.

    Pictures of trump are back to his distorted ‘scream face’ and sieg heil – ing. Funny to see the opposite of the constant ‘halo-ing’ o the lightbringer….

    I better get to work.

    nick

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