08:12 – It was 53.6F (12C) when I took Colin out at 0700, partly cloudy.
We’re taking the day off to do personal stuff. Barbara is volunteering at the historical society this morning, and we have a lot of stuff to get done around the house this afternoon. We’re in good shape on finished goods inventory for this time of year, and we have enough finished subassemblies to make up a bunch more kits on the fly if necessary.
Barbara’s friend Joanne and her son Colin stopped by yesterday afternoon with their new rescue puppy, Abby. She’s about six months old, and adorable. She and Colin (our Colin) sniffed each other thoroughly.
They’re still working on the house next door, but making good progress. It should be finished in a couple of weeks, after which Grace will be moving in. She loves dogs, but as much as she wants one of her own she’s going to wait until next spring to get a puppy. As a teacher, she’ll be away from home all day until school lets out, and she didn’t think it’d be fair to a puppy to be left on its own all day. If she waits until next spring, she’ll have three months to be with the puppy all day long before she has to start back to work. I told her that in the interim she was welcome to borrow Colin as often as she wants to. He’ll love it.
Pahtly sunny with some bright overcast and clouds, hardly any breeze yesterday or today.
More chores and errands and taxes and cleanup stuff; another exciting day.
“Terror lockdown” with troops on the streets in Londonistan and riots in St. Louis. Plus the usual chicanery, grifting, outright theft, lying, and treason here at home in FUSA. The world’s third-most-populous empire teeters, shudders, wobbles and staggers on.
From the Security/Insecurity Department:
https://greycoder.com/all-my-recommendations-for-2017/
And updated:
https://securityinabox.org/en/
A word to the wise.
94F with 54%RH so it feels stifling out… sunny too.
So many projects I’m just milling around afraid to start something. Or finish something.
Given my druthers I’ll be working inside today.
With that in mind…..
n
77 here now with humidity of 70% and wind speed at 3 MPH. And no chance of rain/showers at all until Wednesday. Makes for a steamy last week of summah in this AO, and means I gotta water everything at least once a day, which is a real chore/PITA that it didn’t used to be, thanks to the limping around bit.
Got some big fat beefsteak tomatoes outta there last night. We’re gonna plant some stuff this fall, probably garlic and kale, at least, and for future endeavors w/tomatoes, one plant per grow bag and higher wire supports. Expansion of raised beds, maybe another four to six can be squeezed in back there, plus more grow bags and containers. And this fall/winter/spring we’ll experiment with grow lights in the attic and cellar.
Meanwhile, for defense and security stuff, I’ve become the de facto armorer for my brother down there in MA. And I hope to get wife to one or more NRA classes up the road this fall, depending on her work schedule. Also working on back door security hardware as best as I can manage with an eye to the hands-on being a good prelude to doing the front door, wife’s studio door, and our master bedroom, office and attic doors. Nice winta projects inside. We need a new storm door on the back and another one on the back porch at some point and we need to fix a couple of the screens back there, another royal PITA.
Homework today and tomorrow, among which is a pile of reading in psychoanalytic theory and counseling strategies and techniques, plus a few PowerPoint slides I’ve already seen, and a clip from “Ordinary People,” which I’d never seen, and the whole “Analyze This,” hitherto unseen also.
Will do the due diligence and take a gander at the first episode or double-episode of the new Ken Burns series on the Vietnam (Second Indochina) War, with not much optimism as to how it will be treated. Other vets won’t even bother watching it.
Monday I gotta stand by for the new laptop/printer delivery because they require someone over 21 to be present and sign for it. If it gets here early enough, I’ll leave early for the school so I can get my student ID and health insurance info. Otherwise I’ll have to make a separate trip for that.
Six more days of summah!
Oh yeah, my small local indoor range closed yesterday. Got kicked out by their landlord, with only a day or 2 notice. Don’t know how that works, but that’s what the guy said.
Sucks because it was nearby and cheap.
n
Son #1 ran into that some years ago, when he was 19 or 20. He was old enough to order something online and pay for it himself, but not old enough to receive it when it was delivered. He lucked out that an “adult” was home so he could get his stuff.
“Growth Faults and Flooding in Houston”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rsy8nd6IAns&feature=youtu.be
“An enhanced LIDAR Residual map is used to visualize the drainage and fault systems in west and northwest Houston.”
We are going to have to stop using ground water in the Houston metroplex. Period. Almost all of the wells in Harris county have been shutdown. But very few of the surrounding eight county’s wells have been shutdown (Fort Bend, Brazoria, Liberty, Montgomery, etc).
_All These Worlds (Bobiverse) (Volume 3)_ by Dennis E. Taylor
https://www.amazon.com/All-These-Worlds-Bobiverse-3/dp/1680680609/
Book number three of a three book series. I read the excellent POD (print on demand) trade paperback. I will purchase any future volumes in the Bobiverse. Or any other books by Dennis Taylor who is planning on publishing two more books in his Outland series in the next year.
The author dedicated this book to his wife for allowing him to retire to write full-time. And “For Bill Paxton, who brought a little more humanity to some great SF movies”.
This is just plain old space opera. Good stuff, awesome stuff. It has been 200 years since Bob and the other two Von Neumann probes left the Solar System and started colonizing other star systems. There are now over 500 Bob derivative space ships with 12 G drives and full nuclear weapon armaments. But the Others captured the Chinese Von Neumann and now know where the Solar System is located. And the Others’s Dyson sphere needs a lot more of raw materials and now they know where to find them. The Solar System.
I was a little disconcerted at the beginning as the perspective shifted from Bob to Bob in each short chapter. But at the end, I liked it.
The author has a fairly active blog at:
http://dennisetaylor.org/
My rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Amazon rating: 4.7 out of 5 stars (434 reviews)
The ‘net here has been up and down since about 3PM Thursday. Mostly down. I’m on a wISP. Wireless from a radio here to the tower. My radio talks to the tower, mostly, but then nothing.
I don’t think it’s the wISP. There is new fiber trenching in along hwy 281 and plenty of digging in town. Who knows? I don’t. The “experts” sure don’t… they set an electric pole last month and drilled right through one of AT&T’s buried cables. That trashed their cellphone coverage for a couple of days.
I suppose this is just more of the same. Low bidders and other lazy folks.
I suppose this is just more of the same. Low bidders and other lazy folks.
Add in that 2018 is a strike year for AT&T and the union thugs have a history of cutting/spiking the lines to make a point.
If you live in legacy PacBell in CA, things might get exciting this year. The union suspects, probably correctly, that AT&T will sell CA to Frontier once the contract is settled. Paying for Bugs Bunny will take priority over everything else at Death Star Telephone.
Cue the Loony Tunes music.
Any recommendations for a driveway announcer?
I need a sensor that detects vehicles instead of a motion sensor. Cattle wandering around at 2 dark thirty setting off the alarm is not a wanted feature.
I want about 150 feet of range, 200 would be better for reliability.
It would be nice to know when the gate, 900 feet up the driveway, opens but that option is more than I want to pay. I’m going for a redneck doorbell that anyone driving in will trip if they come directly to the house or turn to the boat shed/carport.
I’m looking. Suggestions welcome.
Verizon nee GTE nee Contel has “divested” the copper to Frontier.
I have no clue about quality of service. We’ve gone cellular.
I’m sitting here in the gameroom watching my second football game of the day (Houston Texans then my Aggies). The dogs and I be hangin’. They are both asleep …
Verizon nee GTE nee Contel has “divested” the copper to Frontier.
Sadly, you’re still dependent on Frontier “service” for the lines to the cell towers.
Frontier has become the new GTE — a dumping ground for the other RBOCs’ unprofitable territories and anything else they care to shed. One crazy telco rumor that won’t go away is that Death Star Telephone will “gift” Uverse to Frontier along with CA.
I’d discard the rumor, but, eight years in, AT&T still hasn’t replaced my (flawed) script that generates the guide data for the Uverse mobile DVR apps. They obviously aren’t going to keep the tech long term.
I’d discard the rumor, but, eight years in, AT&T still hasn’t replaced my (flawed) script that generates the guide data for the Uverse mobile DVR apps. They obviously aren’t going to keep the tech long term.
One of my favorite sayings from Jerry Pournelle is “good enough”. Obviously your script is good enough.
EDIT: I used to think that buggy software was the rarity. Now I am surprised that any software works for anything other than than the bare essentials. Users are crafty and seem to have the ability to use software in unanticipated ways that are able to intermittently cause the software to fail.
I once crashed our company’s “Gold Release” candidate with one click. Crashed so hard the pc rebooted.
All I did was right click on the blank part of the gui. “Why would you do that????!!!?!?!?!” “Um, ‘cuz?”
No release candidate for YOU! And that was the last time they asked the field guys to test the control interface software.
n
One of my favorite sayings from Jerry Pournelle is “good enough”. Obviously your script is good enough.
More important, my single thread Python script ran in three minutes on my MacBook. The outsource vendor’s multi-threaded C#/.Net attempt required eight hours on a server class machine, a benchmark which inspired my rewrite.
I knew nothing about Python when I started the script, proving another Dr. Pournelle point that Python itself was “good enough” for most computing tasks where a guru wasn’t needed and performance was not critical (though, in my case, the performance was quite good).
I did disagree with Dr. Pournelle about C/C++, especially after C++11 introduced smart pointers and closures — ironically, Godsends for doing any performance critical iOS development in my experience.
One of my favorite testing tricks is to go in reverse order.
We would design, install, program, etc a GUI control interface for our systems, either Crestron or AMX. We hired some good programmers and some less good. Everyone tests by going left to right, top to bottom, pressing buttons on every page. Well, I do that as part of commissioning the system, it has to actually do the work. So to test, I start at the last page, and go backwards through the whole thing (multiple tabs on the interface, popup controls, etc) I found LOTS of math errors where the programmer was tracking button presses, or adding 100 to the button numbers on each tab, or some other tricksy thing.
I didn’t do it to be a dick, but I knew our main customer’s rep would sit down and just start “monkey punching” buttons at random, and quickly. He has his test protocol, I had mine. Since mine involved actually pressing EVERY SINGLE BUTTON on every page, (something NO ONE else actually did), I usually found everything before the customer.
n
[snip] Low bidders and other lazy folks. [snip]
It’s not *always* the contractor’s fault. A good buddy here used to be a contractor in Michigan. One day, knowing he was going to be doing some digging, he called the central phone number to get things mapped ahead of time, just like he was supposed to. The orange paint was the gas line, so he avoided it and dug elsewhere. Cue the characteristic PSSS sound effect of natural gas escaping. It turns out that when the gas company installed the lines, they ran into a giant boulder, so their crews diverted the lines without actually telling anyone. Sigh.
I did disagree with Dr. Pournelle about C/C++, especially after C++11 introduced smart pointers and closures — ironically, Godsends for doing any performance critical iOS development in my experience.
I love C++ even though it gives you a 1,000 mile long rope to hang yourself with. The project to convert our user interface data from distributed to sparse was humbling to me, once again. But, I got a 2X to 35X reduction in our dataset size which is important when many of our customers email their flowsheet file to us daily for help.
I knew nothing about Python when I started the script, proving another Dr. Pournelle point that Python itself was “good enough” for most computing tasks where a guru wasn’t needed and performance was not critical (though, in my case, the performance was quite good).
I have written a little bit in Python. Kinda reminds me of Basic. Easy to use but I would hate to do anything more than 10,000 lines of code in it. And today’s JITs bytecode interpreters are freaking amazing. I worked on our embedded bytecode interpreter a couple of months ago and walked away from that with a weird twitch. Took me weeks to get rid of that twitch.