Tues. Dec. 31, 2019 – good bye 2019

By on December 31st, 2019 in Random Stuff

Cold and wet.

Yesterday was not warm, but wasn’t too cold either. I suck as a weather forecaster, just like the pros!

I did get my tire fixed, but that was about all. I just didn’t feel right all day. Not the time to be doing anything heavy.

I’m not going to do a big ‘year in review’ post, but I encourage you all to take stock mentally (or actually) of your current condition, vs a year ago. Take a good look around and see if things have changed, and in what direction. Re-read a few of the blog posts and comments from a year ago, then two years, then 3. Look at a whole week in case the day you choose was a slow day for some reason.

Because prepping is a focus for me, and was for RBT, take a look at your level of preparedness. Consider skills, knowledge, physicality, financial state, and stored value….

Take a few moments to consider which paths you need to walk this coming year, and which you feel ok with.

None of us are sure of the future. We make predictions, but no one gets them right in detail or in totality both. Most of us have decided to act as if we can know something about the future though, and take steps to work within what we expect.

The changing of the year is a great time for both reflection and prediction. Don’t beat yourself up too badly for failures during the year- after all, you got through them. Don’t get too committed to your predictions for the future- after all, how good were they last year? Most of us will try to do a little better than simply muddling through, and most of us will succeed.

I’ve got a feeling that we’ll look back on this year as one of ‘the good old days’.

n

47 Comments and discussion on "Tues. Dec. 31, 2019 – good bye 2019"

  1. Denis says:

    Thanks for all your efforts, Nick. Best wishes to you and all the readers for a peaceful and prosperous year in 2020.
    Denis

  2. Alan says:

    Ditto – kudos to Nick and Rick (and all the others) for keeping the lights on here. Always reading, trying to post more often.

    Because prepping is a focus for me, and was for RBT, take a look at your level of preparedness.

    Does anyone know what became of Bob’s in-progress prepping book? Perhaps what was already completed could be made available via this forum?

    Best wishes for a safe and happy new year!

  3. Greg Norton says:

    Does anyone know what became of Bob’s in-progress prepping book? Perhaps what was already completed could be made available via this forum?

    IIRC, he sent chapters out to his “kitchen cabinet” (or was that a Pournelle term) for feedback in late 2017.

    Before his health suddenly took a dramatic turn, Bob posted that the book needed a lot of editing and was (working from memory) about 50% larger than it should have been to pass muster at O’Reilly.

  4. JimB says:

    I join everyone in thanking Nick, Rick, and all the others who work so hard to make this the best site I know of. This place has a lot of the good kind of diversity of thought, combined with folks who always try to help others solve problems. It is entertaining and humorous. Here’s wishing for a great 2020!

  5. JLP says:

    I also look on the new year as a time to reflect. What did I do right and what did I do wrong over the last 365 planetary revolutions? We all fall short somewhere, so what should I change?

    As for prepping: I need to organize my stuff. I know what I have, mostly, but I just can’t seem to find things. 3 years ago I acquired a roommate. That’s a good thing, but she came with a lot of stuff. My carefully arranged, sorted, categorized, and inventoried disaster preparations have been moved, used, boxed, and re-purposed without always taking the time to inform me.

    I have seized control of the part of the basement without the washer and dryer (she calls it the “scary part”) and my first project of the year will be to clean it out, put up decent shelving and uncover the work benches. I know they are there, I saw them a couple of years ago.

  6. nick flandrey says:

    Hah, I’ve got a workbench in the garage… but I use the top of the chest freezer. That has to be accessible or we don’t eat!

    n

  7. nick flandrey says:

    WRT RBT’s prepping book….

    I have what is available. SteveF has the same parts, iirc. From the initial look at it, lots of chapters were still missing, ie, RBT mentioned working on them but no one (including Barbara) had them or had seen them.

    Much of what I looked at reflected Bob’s early stages. He would stub out a book by chapters and then ‘toss’ stuff into the chapters when he thought of it, or had some research. Then he’d go thru and write the chapter, often (says he 😉 )with minimal re-writes. The chapters I looked at were in the ‘toss stuff here’ stage with multiple paragraphs covering the same idea, and unconnected thoughts in no particular order.

    I put it to the side pretty quickly, and the fictional novel too. The novel was very clearly his own life, and was hard to read at the time.

    Going thru both books as they stand keeps bubbling toward the top of my stack, but other things have gotten in the way.

    The prepping book would certainly entail finding and incorporating all of his longer form posts here. MOST of them are tagged with keywords from the column on the right. I added tags to some of the posts that engendered comments that were useful but were not initially about prepping. Many of the posts are also tagged with a name and involve people who asked specific questions. In other words, lots of the stuff, particularly regarding food, is here.

    Collecting and integrating it all is a big job.

    n

    iirc, Rick has scraped and assembled some stuff based on either posts or tags, but it has the same problems

  8. SteveF says:

    SteveF has the same parts

    Not even that much. All I have is the chapter on communications.

  9. Rick Hellewell says:

    I’ve got the source of the entire site here – all of the entries since RBT started this place, including pre-WordPress stuff. Most of it is available here online.

    Gathering all of the ‘prep posts’ and info into a singular manuscript would take a bit of effort, and then putting that into a coherent form would take even more effort. Once it was in a readable form, it could be put into an ebook (with Barbara’s permission, of course, since she is the copyright holder). Publishing it on the Zon would be easy. Marketing it would be hard.

    The question would be if there is a ‘demand’ for the information. Is there info in there that would be unique and more valuable than any existing information? The googles/bings/ducks contain much info, although parsing out the bad advice is always an effort.

    I (and Nick) also have the draft copies of RBT’s fictional apocalypse book. It is also incomplete, and has no ending. It does contain the equivalent of prepping (pre-TEOTWAWKI) information presented by the fictional characters. But it is not complete.

    Putting that into a completed book would require additional info – story and prepping info. Again, a bit of work. Publishing, again, is easy, once you have a completed manuscript (again, with Barbara’s approval). Marketing is hard. How would you differentiate it from all of the other post-apocalypic type books?

    There is a lot of information here about prepping. But organizing it into a coherent and meaningful publication would be difficult, and time-consuming. And, would it be worth the effort to more than the couple-hundred people that visit this place?

  10. SteveF says:

    From Brad, yesterday:

    “Learn to code”. Go ahead, teach the world to code. It really doesn’t make a difference, because most of the world is not capable of productive coding.

    Heck, most of the people employed as programmers are not capable of productive coding.

  11. CowboySlim says:

    US Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq under attack.
    https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/10645506/pro-iran-protesters-smash-down-gates-and-storm-us-embassy-in-iraq/

    Trump should send USN SEAL Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher back.

  12. nick flandrey says:

    I think I could drive additional traffic, if that was the goal. That was never RBT’s goal though. I’ve been selfish in that regard, as we have become as much a chat room as a general blog… and I’m reluctant to give up that feel.

    Of course, the other side of that is that Bob did want to sell the books, and the kits, and help people do the things he was doing. I haven’t done a long form post in a while, which is the kind of thing that brings new readers. I purposely haven’t linked back to here when commenting on a couple of other sites, where I think I have enough name recognition to drive some traffic.

    If we had something to sell, or feature, like Bob’s completed books (for whatever values of ‘completed’) I think we could do so. Bob’s name has been trusted for how to books for a long time, and well beyond the 300 or so daily unique visitors here.

    Whether that’s something to pursue, I don’t know. I still intend to go thru the stuff I have and see if it can be made complete enough to at least post here and permalink, but honestly it’s a lot more work than Bob indicated (there may be more complete versions somewhere, I got the feeling that Bob’s main computer is inaccessible.)

    I still think of myself as a caretaker here, and am reluctant to change much…

    n

  13. JimB says:

    My new 2019 F-150 has an AGM battery in it for the start-stop system.

    Lynn, I had avoided ESS (Engine Start Stop) reading until today while waking up. I just took a shallow dive, with a little searching. Come with me.

    First, your F-150 has one battery, contrasted with two for some other designs. Simpler, good. When the time comes, you just have to replace one battery. It is an AGM, which is top of the line for lead acid batteries, good. Finally, it is expensive and susceptible to sulfation, not so good. No way to avoid that sulfation susceptibility with lead acid chemistry; it is a normal part of the discharge process. Think of sulfation as a growing coating of insulation that reduces battery capacity. Unfortunately, AGM batteries, as I found out with my earlier adventure, are very hard to recover from sulfation. In my opinion, it is best to just avoid it.

    Unfortunately, ESS will leave the battery in a less than 100% state of charge most of the time, unless you disable ESS or only do highway driving. Avoiding sulfation is next to impossible without some external help. This article concludes that owners will have to get used to battery replacement on a schedule. “To gain the benefits of the start-stop system in terms of reduced CO2 for the environment and lower fuel consumption for consumers, the battery will need to evolve into a planned-maintenance replacement item to enhance the consumer experience, much like changing your tires,” he says. “It is important to realize regular battery replacement is required over the vehicle lifetime to ensure full start-stop system benefit to consumers.”
    https://www.moderntiredealer.com/article/312510/is-your-shop-ready-for-absorbent-glass-mat-batteries
    I read somewhere else that the ESS may stop working if the battery is below a certain state of charge or weak from age.

    I often turn to the repair business publications for insight into the auto industry. It seems ESS is a service opportunity, as claimed in some of these rather shallow articles. But wait, there’s more.

    https://cloreautomotive.com/blog/start-stop-system/
    This article, plus its links and comments, is interesting and revealing. The links are cleverly hidden as pictures: glance at ALL of them, but the link references are a mess, sorry. However… also read the impact on engine life, which is at the bottom of the article just before the comments.

    Unfortunately, the effect on engine life is unavoidable, even when heroic steps are taken. One of these steps is coatings designed to prevent metal to metal contact during start, which has appeared from time to time even before ESS. These are well understood, but not the total answer. The other is electric oil pumps, which I haven’t seen yet; these are the real answer, but are they enough?

    Back in the late 70s or early 80s, Ford did an excellent study on engine wear during cold start and warmup. It was titled something like The Hardest Minute on any Engine, and was associated with the then-new synthetic oils. It showed measured wear (cylinder walls and other parts) as a function of the number of starts. Its conclusion was a graph of wear as a function of time from a cold start. Something like 90% of the wear occurred in the first minute. After full warmup, the wear was almost undetectable. This kind of study is backed up by studies on stationary engines that run constantly, and run up unbelievable amounts of life. Note, however, that this is not hot-start wear, which is largely unstudied. It will be soon…

    Perhaps the real question is whether the small cost savings, estimated somewhere at $40 per year for typical driving, is worth all the hassles of ESS. Also elsewhere, it is mentioned that ESS is not well received in the US, with many owners turning it off. It is better accepted in Europe and Asia, where gasoline is costlier and traffic heavier.

    Back to batteries. Since you have a warranty, I wouldn’t worry. After the warranty expires, and with one or two battery replacements, I would look into using a smart AGM battery charger. I would install it in such a way that I could plug it in whenever the vehicle is not driven, especially in hot weather after short trips with many restarts. It will bring the battery up to 100% charge safely. That could double the life of the battery. I also might recommend keeping the battery as cool as possible by opening the hood (battery in engine compartment?) on hot days. As Bob used to say, chemical reactions go twice as fast for every 9 degrees C increase. Lead acid batteries like to be below 80F.

    The future? Who knows? The current administration has already scaled back the CAFE regulations, but cars are now a world product, so expect more of this nonsense to be engineered into the basic package. The newer F-150 will probably eventually have a lithium battery supplemented with a super capacitor. That system will likely last 0.00001% longer, but will only cost 302.7% more. Progress!

  14. nick flandrey says:

    I’ll give the single line of the day award to Sarah Hoyt- “Sometimes the roads not taken were not worth the toll. ”

    n

  15. nick flandrey says:

    Very sore and stiff today. I am going to take a hot shower, and head to the chiropractor.

    n

  16. Greg Norton says:

    The future? Who knows? The current administration has already scaled back the CAFE regulations, but cars are now a world product, so expect more of this nonsense to be engineered into the basic package.

    Since the House went back to the Dems in 2018, the automakers have been hedging their bets that the Progs will retake the White House next year or, more likely, 2024 and reinstate the heavy “gas guzzler” fine increase schedule for not meeting the 2025 CAFE mandate of 54 MPG.

    The only question in the car execs’ minds is ‘when’ not ‘if’. Anything which will be on the market in 2025 has to be in the design pipeline now.

  17. lynn says:

    From @Greg yesterday:

    Surely nothing could go wrong upgrading the ten PCs at the office running Windows 7 x64 Pro.

    The upgrade tends to be easy, but then you’ll run into a motherboard component for which the driver is incorrect or missing when upgrading from 7 to 10. At that point, a maddening search begins because you never know if that one ‘!’ means an unstable system.

    Apple never released an updated Windows 10 driver set for the MacBook Pro Santa Rosa I used as a Windows 7 machine so it now runs Pop! OS 18.04 full time. I have to be careful with Linux kernel upgrades, but it works well enough to call the experiment a success. The alternative is throwing away the machine — Apple denies the machine still exists.

    The last full time Windows 7 machine I have in the house is my wife’s 2008 MacBook Pro, and it faces similar driver issues upgrading to Win 10. If Microsoft is serious about forcing the upgrade (I’m still not convinced), that machine will get Pop! OS 19.10 in January.

    I am having a fairly serious problem with Microsoft Security Essentials on my office pc. I have a full hard drive virus scan run every weekend. And I have both the C: and D: drives scanned. The C: drive is my local 500 GB SSD drive. The D: drive is a WD 4 TB green drive that cannot be upgraded to 8 GB due to a bug in my ancient BIOS. I backup the entire LAN to the D: every night at 10 pm.

    For some reason, every time Microsoft Security Essentials opens a file on D:, Windows 7 x64 Pro is losing that file handle memory. The memory leakage to scan D: is about 4 TB of ram. A simple reboot every Monday morning clears up the problem but then I spend 15 minutes resetting my PC to my desired operating environment. It is a pain and making me think about upgrading my PC to Windows 10. And if one PC goes to Windows 10, then the peer to peer networking that we use will get screwed up, that was my last experience.

    Decisions, decisions, decisions.

  18. Greg Norton says:

    Decisions, decisions, decisions.

    You didn’t have the intern experiment with putting a duplicate of the backup drive on a Linux machine, mounting to the PC running MSE via Samba?

    Sounds like a leak in the driver for the storage controller.

    Even if Microsoft keeps Windows 7 around after the deadline, sooner or later they will cut off support for MSE for everyone still on Win 7 except the top tier customers who pay them a lot of money.

  19. SteveF says:

    the real question is whether the small cost savings, estimated somewhere at $40 per year for typical driving, is worth all the hassles

    -ahem-

    You care about a small amount of savings? How dare you? The real cost is in added carbon, which will raise temperatures and then the flooding will start. How dare you? You are #LiterallyHitler.

  20. lynn says:

    “Minister: Texas gunman grew angry in past over cash requests”
    https://www.chron.com/news/texas/article/Minister-Texas-gunman-grew-angry-in-past-over-14941456.php

    Wow. He shot and killed two people because they would not give him any cash money. Probably for drugs and/or alcohol.

  21. lynn says:

    I’ll give the single line of the day award to Sarah Hoyt- “Sometimes the roads not taken were not worth the toll. ”

    “So, It’s the End, And the Beginning”
    https://accordingtohoyt.com/2019/12/31/so-its-the-end-and-the-beginning/

    “I was going to have a private sale of those, but tax laws for online sales (I’d have to collect taxes from each of you and KNOW your state’s tax laws) make that impossible. It’s almost like our laws and regulations are designed to hurt the little guy and protect large tech monopolies.”

    Yup.

    I am wondering what I will do when the California tax person shows up at the office front door again here in Texas. At minimum, I will tell them to get a search warrant.

  22. mediumwave says:

    I am wondering what I will do when the California tax person shows up at the office front door.

    ISTR that you have a ‘gator lurking in your pond …

    A tip o’ the hat to Nick, Rick, Barbara, and the rest of you who make this such a pleasant place to while away WAY too many hours of the day!

  23. Greg Norton says:

    I am wondering what I will do when the California tax person shows up at the office front door again here in Texas. At minimum, I will tell them to get a search warrant.

    Do you use a bank that operates in California, for either business or personal accounts?

    They will get creative in CA during the next downturn.

    We’ve been in TX-only credit unions since leaving WA State. I have no doubt that Seattle will try their income tax legal theory in court again sooner or later, and we have another two years before my wife’s Vantucky partnership buyout is complete.

    If Seattle gets income tax, Vantucky will be right behind. We paid almost 10% in sales taxes.

  24. lynn says:

    A tip o’ the hat to Nick, Rick, Barbara, and the rest of you who make this such a pleasant place to while away WAY too many hours of the day!

    Amen !

  25. MrAtoz says:

    How dare you?

    There will no mocking of Gretel Turdberg.

  26. Ray Thompson says:

    my brother lives in Idaho having moved there after retiring from the CA highway department. he gets retirement from the state of CA as do many others from CA. CA tried to tell these people, not living the state, that the individuals must pay CA state income tax on the money paid to the retirees. CA’s theory was the money was earned in CA. The case went to federal court and CA lost.

    that is why most game shows are taped in CA. The winners have to pay CA income tax, their home state income tax if their home state has such a tax, and federal income tax. That $20k really ugly bedroom set and wine keeper may cost the winner $8k in taxes. For a bedroom set the manufacturer dumped on the prize show as it would/could not sell. Meanwhile CA gets lots of money from people that do not live in CA.

  27. Greg Norton says:

    For a bedroom set the manufacturer dumped on the prize show as it would/could not sell.

    Maybe it was the set I returned after my wife got conned by a small town furniture store outside Tampa, trying to support local businesses and Made in USA products.

    Everything delivered was stamped Made in China.

    We try to be sympathetic to Main Street USA, but at least WalMart doesn’t hide where their stuff originates and they don’t quibble about returns.

    Not that we’re buying a bedroom set from WalMart.

  28. Vince says:

    A tip o’ the hat to Nick, Rick, Barbara, and the rest of you who make this such a pleasant place to while away WAY too many hours of the day!

    Definitely! Hope everyone has a better 2020.

  29. Jenny says:

    Gabe Suarez did a post about the Texas church shooting. He makes some sharp points that would have the conventional press in vapors. Worth the few minutes it takes to read, though I suspect most of us commenting here share much of his take.
    https://gabesuarez.com/fortutous-outcomes-lessons-learned

  30. lynn says:

    Gabe Suarez did a post about the Texas church shooting. He makes some sharp points that would have the conventional press in vapors. Worth the few minutes it takes to read, though I suspect most of us commenting here share much of his take.
    https://gabesuarez.com/fortutous-outcomes-lessons-learned

    Oh man, I see sniper nests in our church auditorium and foyer in the near future.

    To date, the worst thing that has happened in our church is a five ??? year old running into a 87 ??? year old lady earlier this year, breaking her leg or arm, I cannot remember. Our preacher asked us to slow down the kids the next Sunday. Of course, in a 2,700 member church, I really have no idea of all the crazy things that have happened there.

    I do know that we have three uniformed off duty police officers and deputies at church during each Sunday service. I am not sure about Wednesday night service as I am backsliding for years now. I also know that several members are also carrying during the services. Me, I won’t tell.

    One of my friends surprised me one Sunday a couple of years ago by showing me the .38 revolver in her purse. And she has shot it several times at our local gun range. She and her husband go shooting on couples night.

  31. Greg Norton says:

    Nobody wants The Rock, Jason Mamoa, and Hulk Hogan as greeters or ushers.

    Make all the “Florida Man” jokes you like, but The Rock and Hulk Hogan have long-standing ties to the Tampa area, and both are held in high esteem in the community. The Rock is also a Football Legend in Miami, having played on the UM National Championship team in the 80s. Both would be welcome to usher in any church on either end of the Tamiami Trail.

    Yes, The Hulkster, even after Bollea vs. Gawker.

  32. nick flandrey says:

    I think Gabe makes a couple of good points, but he might be overly harsh, in that you really can’t shoot before the guy draws and (likely) fires. You don’t want to make a mistake, don’t believe it’s really happening, or want to be CERTAIN before shooting the guy.

    n

  33. lynn says:

    Nobody wants The Rock, Jason Mamoa, and Hulk Hogan as greeters or ushers.

    My 6 ft 5 inch All American tight end friend is one of our greeters. He is 64 ? now and is back below 200 lbs since he just won the fight against stage 3 colon cancer. He has been a greeter in our church for 30+ years.

    Another 75 year old friend is a 6 ft 6 inch 300+ lb occasional greeter when his knees can take the standing. He played right tackle on the Houston Oilers back in the early 1970s. Both of them are loved by the congregation. Good, good men and fine examples to live up to.

    Shoot, they made me usher which I did for a few years back in the 2000s. But, you gotta be there 30 minutes before church starts and I am always late. The wife is always helping the daughter with something as we are leaving. I am learning patience all over again.

  34. Ray Thompson says:

    Having been trained in situations where shooting is life or death, courtesy of Uncle Sam, Gabe makes some invalid points. It takes a couple of seconds to assess the situation, especially in an environment where such danger is not expected. It takes a finite amount of time to draw the weapon, cock the weapon, aim, and then fire. I would guess that very few of the people in the church have had such training. The fact that the shooter was down in less than six seconds is excellent. The fact that it only took a couple of shots is probably better than 99% of the police officers on the force.

    Until someone has been faced with such a threat, been exposed to a kill or die situation, it is easy to make back seat judgement’s. The people that killed the cretin will never be the same. They had to make a decision that few have really had to make and they made the correct decision.

    Unfortunately the people that killed the cretin can now be subject to a civil lawsuit. No unanimous verdict required from six people, much easier than criminal. Think it won’t happen just remember OJ Simpson.

    In my opinion anyone that is absolved of any criminal wrong doing, no charges filed, or found innocent of criminal wrong doing in a court of law should be immune from any civil lawsuit. No crime has been committed.

    But this will cost the church and the people that took down the cretin thousands of dollars in legal fees. Some sleaze bag lawyer (redundant, I know) convince the cretin’s family,will take the case, seek a snowflake jury and liberal anti-gun judge. It ain’t over until Oprah howls.

  35. nick flandrey says:

    Speaking of gunfire, the shooting at the sky has started here.

    And I think I’m going to take a painkiller and lie down for a while. My chiropractic office was closed and I’m a huge knot of painful lumps and misaligned vertebra in my neck and low back.

    I’ll let the kids and wife ring in the new year, if I can. I usually stay up just to see that no one is walking mortar rounds into Times Square before I can relax.

    n

    If I do sleep, I’ll see you all next year.

  36. lynn says:

    The fact that the shooter was down in less than six seconds is excellent. The fact that it only took a couple of shots is probably better than 99% of the police officers on the force.

    And that was a 40+ foot (15 yard) shot with a pistol. Amazing accuracy in a horrible moment.

    Note that the shooter started right at the end of communion if I read the situation correctly. That is a time of reflection and many communion servers are wandering around the auditorium. At most Church of Christs, the song leader will stand up after the servers leave and lead a song before the sermon.

    I just don’t know how you protect the congregation in this situation. I am surprised that the shooter was taken down so quickly.

  37. lynn says:

    Unfortunately the people that killed the cretin can now be subject to a civil lawsuit. No unanimous verdict required from six people, much easier than criminal. Think it won’t happen just remember OJ Simpson.

    In my opinion anyone that is absolved of any criminal wrong doing, no charges filed, or found innocent of criminal wrong doing in a court of law should be immune from any civil lawsuit. No crime has been committed.

    But this will cost the church and the people that took down the cretin thousands of dollars in legal fees. Some sleaze bag lawyer (redundant, I know) convince the cretin’s family,will take the case, seek a snowflake jury and liberal anti-gun judge. It ain’t over until Oprah howls.

    I hope that you are wrong. Fort Worth is a very conservative town. Or, it used to be when I worked there in the 1980s.

  38. Harold Combs says:

    I learned a good lesson today. All the preps in the world are useless if you can’t get to them. I was invited to an impromptu cookout at a private campground this afternoon. They brought all the supplies for hot dogs and s’mores and we went about setting up a nice fire. Except the only BIC between us was dead. Not just out of gas but no spark either. My get home kits have a fire starter bag with BIC, matches, ferrite rod, magnifying glass and tinder. But I had left the get home kit in the garage to fit the wife’s wheelchair in the trunk. So here’s Mr Prepared left empty handed. I will now carry a ferrite rod on my keyring. We had to drive to a shop to get a working BIC but the smores were worth it.

  39. Ray Thompson says:

    I hope that you are wrong.

    I really hope the same. There are just too many lawyers looking to make a name for themselves, looking for an easy buck (settling is cheaper than litigation). A wrongful death civil lawsuit, civil rights violation (don’t know the shooter’s skin preference), or any number of plausible scenarios. The level of proof is much lower in a civil suit. Find several anti-gun jurors,precious snowflakes that have never had a job. Then a family that paints the shooter as having a troubled childhood, possible molested by a youth pastor, denied treatment for mental condition, etc. The possibilities are endless.

    Regardless, I hope I am wrong.

  40. lynn says:

    Speaking of gunfire, the shooting at the sky has started here.

    Yup, I am listening to firecrackers and mortar rounds all around me. The Booth Ranch is right next to the house and the office, and is not a part of Sugar Land yet. So it is the wild west out there.

  41. lynn says:

    And before I can sleep,

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7841637/Up-4-000-troops-ordered-prepare-rapid-deployment-Middle-East.html

    I am so glad that my son got out of this nonsense back in 2009. He is now 36, they can call him up until he is 45 ??? since he was a non-commissioned officer. He does not respond to their inquiries for phone number, address, etc. I have told him that they know where he is (the NSA) and he agrees.

    It is time for us to leave the Middle East and all of their craziness.

  42. lynn says:

    Man, I just found a bug in my calculation engine memory management C code that I rewrote back in 1994. We assume that all reallocated memory for our Fortran usage is zeroed for the memory extension. It was not. I had the comparison wrong in this code:

    /* zero out the new part of bank for safety */
    if (bank -> originalLength “LT” *nwrds)
    {
    for (i = bank -> originalLength + 1; i <= *nwrds; i++)
    newBank [i] = 0;
    }

    Sigh. My incompetence extends back 25 years. BTW, the "LT" is for the less than sign as it screws up the posting when it is present.

  43. mediumwave says:

    Man, I just found a bug in my calculation engine memory management C code that I rewrote back in 1994. …

    Instead of the loop, you might consider using C’s memset() function.

    memset(&newBank, 0, n)

    where n = (number of words in newBank) * (sizeof a newBank word in bytes).

    (Caveat: It’s been a while since I’ve done any serious C programming, so I’m unsure if the above is totally correct. Anyone in the RPOE should feel free to correct me.)

  44. Greg Norton says:

    I have told him that they know where he is (the NSA) and he agrees.

    Cell phone? 24/7. Doesn’t have to be a “smart” phone. Those are worse.

    SMS messages are technically maintenance transmissions, wide open to interception legallly for “quality control” purposes and available to law enforcement without a warrant. No NSA involved unless the other end originates overseas.

    You have some protection regarding the content of the voice communication. That requires a warrant, but the fact that you called a particular number or vise versa is, once again, quality control data.

    What protects your son right now is that Americans are tired of the 20 years of “wars” run by the alcoholic perverts in Tampa. Another Iraq will, to paraphrase Dennis Hopper (appropriately enough) in “Flashback”, stir the public to the point that makes the 60s look like the 50s. Guaranteed Trump will be done in a year.

  45. Greg Norton says:

    It was not. I had the comparison wrong in this code:

    i reaches *nwords instead of stopping at *nwords-1 when using the ‘<='.

    I'll concede that C is dangerous, but we have Valgrind on Linux which is pretty good at catching things like that. Cppcheck might do it too at this point; I haven’t checked in a while.

  46. lynn says:

    It was not. I had the comparison wrong in this code:

    i reaches *nwords instead of stopping at *nwords-1 when using the ‘<='.

    I'll concede that C is dangerous, but we have Valgrind on Linux which is pretty good at catching things like that. Cppcheck might do it too at this point; I haven’t checked in a while.

    Yes, there may be two off by one errors in that code. But, due to the underlying data structure which incorporates beginning and ending stop integrity words for each allocated array, the trailing off by one error does not matter.

    Sigh.

    And yes, I should have used memset.

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