Sun. Oct.11, 2020 – 2020 11 10 10 11 2020 11 10 10 11 2020

By on October 11th, 2020 in amateur radio, personal, rats, WuFlu

Maybe a bit cooler?  It would be nice.

Despite the overcast, yesterday stayed hot and stuffy all day.

I got a laundry list of small things done, and I’m going to take the ‘baby steps’ are still steps award.

Other than taking down my 40m dipole wire antenna, very little involved preps.  Oh, I had a can of mango explode, and another bulging.  I cleaned up that mess, and washed out the bin, and the cans.  Used another can to make cobbler for dessert.  I like mango cobbler better than peach so I stock mango.

While cleaning up that mess, I found some mouse droppings and a 2/3’s empty peanut butter jar.  Another jar was gnawed and open.  F me.   Set some glue traps in the shelves.  Cleaned up the mess.  Putting the cans (everything really) in shallow lidded bins payed off.  The mold from the exploding can only affected the one bin.   All the other food was untouched by mice except the aging peanut butter that wasn’t in a bin.  Given enough time, the peanut oil seems to migrate through the plastic jar, and I’m sure that was an attractant. The cans that failed were the ‘pop top’ style and the top did indeed POP.  It couldn’t be rats because my colony of rats learned that peanut butter = death, and they wouldn’t touch the stuff.  Time to refresh the poison bait boxes too.

I did manage to go through a couple of boxes in the garage that I haven’t opened in a while.  Moved some of the contents to the trash, some to the ebay pile, some to the local auction pile, and some to the ‘hamfest’ pile.  I really hope we can have our hamfest in March.  My non-prepping hobby club is planning a meeting next Saturday in a much larger space than we used to use.  I intend to attend.    I’ve got no problem masking and staying masked, most of the guys are older than me.  Funny, my ham radio meetings are that way too.  My part of the hamfest is the swapmeet and that is all outside anyway.

My plan for today is the same as always.  We’ll see how the plan does against reality.   Keep stacking.

nick

 

 

59 Comments and discussion on "Sun. Oct.11, 2020 – 2020 11 10 10 11 2020 11 10 10 11 2020"

  1. Pecancorner says:

    @pecancorner
    Why not one of these metal stove pipe hats? https://amzn.to/3nFNXYA ?

    That is what is on there now. That open grill area below the solid lid allows rain to blow into the stovepipe when it and the wind are from the wrong direction(s). What he is going to build is basically a large wide box to sit down over that and shield the mesh area to prevent rain from blowing in – while hopefully still having enough room on all sides for a good draft even in the very low pressure of storms.

  2. lynn says:

    “You Will Immediately Regret Your Neck Tattoo. Shayne Smith”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXYEqHgWcSg

    Yeek ! ! !

    Five years in Askaban, man !

  3. SteveF says:

    Wouldn’t it be easier to install a teleportation device to transport the rainwater to a spot just above your worst enemy’s bed? For that matter, you can have the teleportation device transport the smoke to your worst enemy’s bedroom, too, removing the need for the chimney in the first place.

    #PracticalTipsForPracticalPeople

  4. Greg Norton says:

    I’ll remind readers that even with the lengthy and odious process, FDA has approved some real doozies. Thalidimide. Phen-Fen. Just two that pop to mind. There was an anti-inflammatory that got a black box warning about heart damage- ?Viox? I took that for a while. The list is much longer than (nil) and the normal process has been thrown out the window for a covid vaccine. I think I’ll wait a bit.

    Every now and then, I’ll see a brave media outlet run a piece on the Swine Flu vaccine stupidity in 1976. I’m old enough to remember that clearly.

    If one of Gates’ groups finds a vaccine, the approval will be fast and everyone forced to submit to his needle fetish.

  5. Greg Norton says:

    “You Will Immediately Regret Your Neck Tattoo. Shayne Smith”

    Most of Austin in that age group looks like that guy.

    Back when she was in private practice, my wife had people come in all the time asking about the urban legend ointment regime that will fade the tattoo over time.

    She always tried to be respectful when breaking the news to them about the reality of “removal”.

  6. Greg Norton says:

    So Sweden is staying at roughly 583 deaths per million population while the USA and the rest of the world is bypassing it. I am not sure what is going on there to stop the disease from taking more people.

    To me, the US seems to have developed a bad case of FOMO over the last 30 years which has driven this pandemic.

  7. JimB says:

    I seem to have fear of FOMO. 🙂

  8. Harold Combs says:

    Remove New York and New Jersey from the numbers and the US ranks in the bottom quinine.

  9. Greg Norton says:

    Remove New York and New Jersey from the numbers and the US ranks in the bottom quinine.

    What about then removing the percentage of New York deaths in nursing homes?

  10. nick flandrey says:

    I’m up ma, really!

    Anyway, one minute it’s 7:26 and you are lying in bed, the next it’s 10:28. Someone teleported me directly from one time to the other. I’m sure that’s the most likely and reasonable explanation.

    When I sat down at my computer all my FF tabs were blank. Resource Monitor showed FF hammering at my pagefile, and physical memory usage at 80% with memory faults maxed. Closing tabs one by one suggests ebay or aol as the culprits but trendlines didn’t drop to zero until FF was closed for a minute or two.

    FF updated on restart. And Defender chose this time to scan every file in my downloads folder. WTF is the point of a monster machine if every cycle available gets hijacked to serve the machine?

    n

  11. MrAtoz says:

    Every now and then, I’ll see a brave media outlet run a piece on the Swine Flu vaccine stupidity in 1976. I’m old enough to remember that clearly.

    I was in Uni during that fiasco. I decided not to get the free vaccine at the Uni clinic. No other reason than: WTF, over, they just want me to take it no questions asked?

  12. nick flandrey says:

    @jenny, depending on the type of chimney you have around your stove pipe, something like this might work, or provide most of a starting point.

    https://www.amazon.com/Forever-Cap-CCPF1818-18-Inch-Stainless/dp/B00FHRFE66?tag=ttgnet-20

    I got one cheap at the auction, but it won’t work for me without mods. It has an ~8 ” round hole in the bottom that is meant to go around your pipe. And the outer box has holes to attach to L brackets mounted to the top of your chimney. The flat top is removable to clean the pipe.

    n

  13. nick flandrey says:

    “What about then removing the percentage of New York deaths in nursing homes? ”

    –can’t do that. Just like you can’t do it with gun shot victims or criminal violence statistics. Doing so reveals what violent cesspools the top 5 cities are. If you remove violence by big city blacks (for example) suddenly the US is one of the safest countries in the world.

    The big shitties (welcome to Shitty Wok/end SouthPark voice) have so much weight they move the center of the curve to the right.

    n

    1
    1
  14. nick flandrey says:

    A helo flew over the house low and slow, and I was reminded that I can see what’s in the air above me at FlightRadar24.com albeit on a 5 minute delay “for security”.

    The low flying helo never showed up, so I’m guessing HPD. There were two other helos during the period I watched, both LifeFlight. One flew from NW Houston to NE Houston and back to the Medical Center (Ben Taub, our level 1 trauma center). Someone got into trouble way out in the boonies. The other is landing at SR 90, NE of Crosby. Someone else is getting a ride to the hospital instead of home in their car…

    It’s interesting that air traffic is WAY down, like non-existent, compared to last year.

    n

    And once again, I want the tools to see the flights around me without the delay. Projects, I got ’em.

  15. nick flandrey says:

    From my FEMA status update…

    Health and Medical
    • LA: COVID-19 testing sites closed; in LA Region 5 and 6 until impacts are assessed
    LA: 30 (-1) medical facilities evacuated or sheltering in place; 54 on generator power

    Energy (Eagle-I as of 8:30 a.m. ET, Oct 11)
    • LA: 348k (-70k) (16.2%) customers without power
    o 7,500 utility workers on standby for restoration with another 8,000 available

    Communications
    • LA: 21 of 141 LWIN sites throughout LA are out of service impacting emergency responder
    radio communications; ETA unknown
    • Three 911 Dispatch Centers offline; 1 parish unable to identify callers and their locations

    –even in a relatively minor event, you might find that You Are On Your Own ™.

    n

    The Louisiana Wireless Information Network (LWIN) is the largest statewide radio system in the country. It provides daily voice communications to more than 99,000 users at the Federal, State, local and nongovernmental levels. Of these users, more than 70 percent are from local jurisdictions.

    –After 9-11 FedGov mandated changes to the way first responders communicated, in order to address real and serious interop issues. The result was massive trunked digital radio systems. I’m guessing TxWARN is the physically largest, and the LA article is out of date. The problem is when parts of the infrastructure go down, ALL the served agencies suffer, not just one or two.

  16. Mark W says:

    Notes from yesterday:

    Fix something. Get something old working again.

    I fixed my cooktop recently, one of the control knob mechanisms was black inside. New part was an easy fix. Repaired my fence. Replaced several incandescent lights with LEDs. That’s just the ones I remember. It never ends.

    A lot of modern airliner construction is done with double-sided tape

    I know that if you damage a modern plane, it’s totally ok to make a temporary repair with “speedtape”, basically aviation duct tape.

    Edit: private jets. I don’t know about commercial airliners.

  17. Greg Norton says:

    –can’t do that. Just like you can’t do it with gun shot victims or criminal violence statistics. Doing so reveals what violent cesspools the top 5 cities are. If you remove violence by big city blacks (for example) suddenly the US is one of the safest countries in the world.

    The same goes for education statistics.

    There are reasons that the most desired real estate among Progs in my neighborhood is the cluster of homes immediately adjacent to the Mormon church. As soon as the kids come along, everyone bails on Travis/Austin for Round Rock and points north if they have the means.

  18. nick flandrey says:

    94F in the sun. Not much of a cool day so far.

    n

  19. DadCooks says:

    @Nick, it sounds like you need to at least do a Ctrl-Shift-Del while in Firefox to clear your cache and cookies. No need to go nuclear, just pick for today in the pulldown.

    If that doesn’t work it might be time for a Firefox Refresh.
    https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-add-ons-and-settings
    It’s drastic but it cleans up all the detritus that Firefox hangs onto when it does updates. If you have been using Sync, and are patient, all of your add-ons and bookmarks will come back.

    As much of a PITA Firefox is it is still better than Chrome and Edge (forget about the few other also-rans, IMHO, and experience).

    So, add this to your schedule and get rid of the daily aggravation.

  20. Nick Flandrey says:

    @dadcooks, thanks for the advice, I’ll spend some time Tuesday (when I’m home with the kids and the roofer) looking at it.

    WRT Normalcy Bias….

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8828119/Heavy-shelling-dash-hopes-Russian-backed-ceasefire-Armenia-Azerbaijan.html

    I wonder how many of the people that lived and worked in the rubble thought “it can’t happen here, it can’t happen now” just three weeks ago.

    n

  21. Geoff Powell says:

    @nick:

    And once again, I want the tools to see the flights around me without the delay. Projects, I got ’em.

    You need a local instance of Dump1090. I run mine on a Raspberry Pi, and describe a detailed recipe for it, here. That uses Google Maps, which the Chocolate Factory now charge for, so I updated to use Open Street Map, here.

    edit:
    And re-reading that, you don’t need to do the first one at all. This is the system I currently run.

    G.

  22. Greg Norton says:

    And once again, I want the tools to see the flights around me without the delay. Projects, I got ’em.

    @Nick – dump1090 was part of my rejected thesis idea in WA State. I’ve built the support library, librtlsdr, and the binary itself recently for both Fedora and Ubuntu variants as well as the Raspberry Pi in the past.

    Even with the default antenna supplied with most Realtek dongles, reception range should cover the immediate vicinity of your house, possibly a mile or more in my experience, but the problem with using ADS-B “Out” to monitor law enforcement activities is that a rule change issued last year by the FAA permits the deactivation of the transponder if the aircraft is engaged in “sensitive” operations such as what you describe here regularly.

    My thesis idea wasn’t about targeting aircraft using ADS-B “Out”, but it did involve triangulation of the transponder signal’s origin, which turned out to be scary easy. I imagine that the rule change came out of concern that law enforcement could be targeted by inexpensive drones. I saw a presentation at Dallas MakerSpace a few years ago talking about remotely controlled drones with a few miles range built from a single sheet of precision cut foam and $100 worth of motors/electronics.

  23. RickH says:

    @pecancorner

    Then how about this one? https://amzn.to/30WDVIT

    Notice that the pipe from the stove sticks up a bit over the ‘base plate’ area, allowing rain to accumulate there, rather than down the pipe.

    Installing the pipe that way (so it sticks up just a bit past the base plate area) should prevent just about all of the rain from traveling down the inside of the stove pipe.

    I’d guess.

  24. ed says:

    Well, the replacement bath fan arrived. Actually it came with the plate, and to my astonishment was an easy drop-in install. OK, push-up.

    CFM was the same, but rated at 4 “sones”, not 2. In practice MUCH quieter than the failed unit.

    BTW: Did the delivery services announce they weren’t going to ring the doorbell now? The last few Amazon deliveries have been kind of stealthy…

  25. brad says:

    Big city blacks. Slashdot has an article about colleges dropping the SAT. I can only assume this is because Asians do so well and blacks so poorly. Which is just not PC. Asians doing well threatens Karen’s little darlings getting into the school of her choice. Blacks doing poorly conflicts with her inner SJW.

    That’s OK, though. I am pretty convinced that post-COVID college will bear no resemblance to what existed up through last year. Especially in the US, where costs are insane anyway. The game is over, it’s time to rethink higher education.

  26. Greg Norton says:

    The Number One Son next door moved out and put his house up for rent. Typical of the demographic, the property manager is the lowest cost service provider available, and a crew of human debris has been next door all weekend half-a**ing repairs, I assume in advance of the tenants moving in soon since the “For Rent” sign came down within 24 hours of going up in the yard.

    The crew already took a big chunk out of the corner of the fence between the yards, and they tossed a dead possum over the fence for me to deal with, I’m guessing some time this morning.

    I’d prefer if the crew were illegals. They have more a lot more pride in their work.

    I wonder if the tenants will show up with California plates. I see lots of those rolling around here lately. The school system allows a remote option until next year so the rush didn’t happen in August.

  27. Nick Flandrey says:

    @greg, I’d put that possum in their trash.

  28. Greg Norton says:

    @greg, I’d put that possum in their trash.

    I have the varmint bagged. I'll wait until everyone leaves tonight.

  29. ech says:

    There were two other helos during the period I watched, both LifeFlight. One flew from NW Houston to NE Houston and back to the Medical Center (Ben Taub, our level 1 trauma center).

    LifeFlight goes to Memorial Hermann, also a level 1 trauma center.

  30. paul says:

    @greg, I’d put that possum in their trash.

    Eh. Flip it up onto the roof so it falls into the rain gutter. Out of sight. It will be like visiting someone’s house, never seeing a cat or litter box but you know they have cats by the smell.

    Or drop it behind the shrubbery. A bit less work with the bonus of hoping the pesky dog leaving land mines in your front yard will find something make it “smell pretty”.

  31. lynn says:

    @greg, I’d put that possum in their trash.

    Eh. Flip it up onto the roof so it falls into the rain gutter. Out of sight. It will be like visiting someone’s house, never seeing a cat or litter box but you know they have cats by the smell.

    Or drop it behind the shrubbery. A bit less work with the bonus of hoping the pesky dog leaving land mines in your front yard will find something make it “smell pretty”.

    Dude, you rock !

  32. Mark W says:

    ADS-B

    My amazon account thanks you for another purchase.

  33. lynn says:

    Big city blacks. Slashdot has an article about colleges dropping the SAT. I can only assume this is because Asians do so well and blacks so poorly. Which is just not PC. Asians doing well threatens Karen’s little darlings getting into the school of her choice. Blacks doing poorly conflicts with her inner SJW.

    That’s OK, though. I am pretty convinced that post-COVID college will bear no resemblance to what existed up through last year. Especially in the US, where costs are insane anyway. The game is over, it’s time to rethink higher education.

    https://news.slashdot.org/story/20/06/16/1534220/harvard-joins-peers-dropping-sat-act-requirement-for-next-year

    I suspect that European college costs are out of sight also but those are subsidized by their various regions. You know, kinda like Texas A&M University and The University of Texas (about 90% of their operations costs are subsidized by the State of Texas Permanent University Fund).

    We have way too many kids going to college because of the failure of our primary education system. I was just told that many high schools are considering dropping Algebra II and replacing it with a glorified checkbook balancing class.

  34. paul says:

    Dude, you rock !

    Dunno about that, but… years and years ago we had the usual strips of grass between driveways. Maybe 15 feet each. Beau did his business just over the line, maybe 6 inches, down by the street. A-hole next door scooped it up with a paper cup, walked into my back yard where I was minding my beeswax and proceeded to cuss me out while dumping the cup ‘o poo on my patio. Beau was all of 40 pounds sopping wet.

    Seriously? Dude, chill the eff out of my yard before I go find my baseball bat.

    I found my own paper cup and tossed the contents under his car the next day. Hey, the garage door was open.

    Oh. Same genius went off at me because I was watering the yard. Austin had an odd number/even number address can water thing going on. They pissed around and lo and behold, we need more pipes from Lake Travis. So, odd number address….
    I sorta paid attention but the rose bushes and that one patch of grass don’t care about that kind of nonsense.
    I’m watering rose bushes and potted plants and he proceeded to get on my ass for watering on “not my day”. He wasn’t exactly pleased when I pointed out his driveway was wet because his 7 year old kid had just spent two hours washing it. Some kind of bar with jets on wheels, neat tool.

    I didn’t care about the kid using water. He was having a good time. Made me smile, anyway.

    And whatever Austin wanted to say…. pftt! We were on Austin water but out of the city limits.

    Mr You Can’t Water On The Wrong Days? His business was car washes. You know, drop a few quarters in the coin mech in a stall and wash your car. He also had a bad back from hauling so many quarters to the bank. Never thought of using a hand truck, from what I saw, but what do I know.

  35. paul says:

    We have way too many kids going to college because of the failure of our primary education system.

    I agree. Sort of.

    I tested “smart”. I forget the numbers. What’s the high score for the ASVAB? I almost hit it, one guy I knew by sight (he hung out in the shop class all of the time) beat me by a point. I wanted to do stuff. Shop. Welding maybe, mechanical and electrical stuff. The school didn’t have much of that beyond building BBQ pits in shop class. And in a school of 650 with 10 gringos where the morning PA announcements were in Spanish, I didn’t fit in.

    Library? Yeah. LOTS of books to read. Help the Librarian do stuff? Sure! The only Xerox machine in the school district? Mine. I’d get pulled from exciting classes such as American History taught by a football coach that could barely halba ingles and also sound like his teeth didn’t fit. He was a good guy. Not much of a teacher.

    But yeah, clearing paper jams was more interesting than most of my classes. Why none of the adults could figure it out was a mystery.

    And yeah. That record player isn’t. I’d fix it. 16mm projectors were a bit of a puzzle, but, yeah, fixed. I had a little corner in the library office and it was grand.

    Anyway, I was tired of school and the BS. College at PanAm was more of the same. Though living in the dorms was fun and the food was better than high school. But nothing has beat the chalupas HS had for lunch.

    And then I wrecked my motorcycle. Flew over her car and cracked the helmet when I landed in the gutter. Well. I have a leg. The brain stuff, erm, not the same. But I know and route around..

  36. Greg Norton says:

    ADS-B

    My amazon account thanks you for another purchase.

    The Realtek TV dongles capable of receiving ADS-B “Out” are much cheaper on EBay.

  37. paul says:

    Ok, HS was in LaJoya. HS had a Xerox. The next nearest copier I knew of was in McAllen. As I recall, Xerox tech was based in Corpus Christi. They opened an office in Harlingen or Brownsville. Google Map it.

    But no matter, you are not getting a tech out to clear paper jams. Ok, you will, it just takes three weeks.

    I remember when I had the machine gutted. Not the first time at all. Drum sitting on top. Corona wire assemblies all over the place. Rubber wheel things all over too. I was wiping out paper dust with a damp paper towel when suddenly someone said “what the hell are you doing?” and not in a friendly way.

    Lo! The Mighty Xerox Tech has appeared after FOUR weeks. And yeah man, you have a complaint? Go right over there (lots of glass walls) and talk to Mr Salinas. So I put it all back together while he grumped over there, turned the the beast on when he returned, and hit print. To get, what? A streaky blur? No, a perfect copy. Duh.

    The Xerox guy left a lot of alcohol pads… 🙂

  38. Mark W says:

    The Realtek TV dongles capable of receiving ADS-B “Out” are much cheaper on EBay.

    Now you tell me. I spent all of $28, I’ll be ok.

  39. Greg Norton says:

    “The Realtek TV dongles capable of receiving ADS-B “Out” are much cheaper on EBay.”

    Now you tell me. I spent all of $28, I’ll be ok.

    That’s about right for Realtek. EBay would only be a little less.

  40. lynn says:

    “Study: “mitigation costs of limiting global warming … are higher than … avoided damages this century””
    https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/10/10/study-mitigation-costs-of-limiting-global-warming-are-higher-than-avoided-damages-this-century/

    Why stop at five year economic models ? Lets go 200 years out for really bad assumptions and results that are truly worthless. And lets make policies that will affect the human race by trillions of dollars per year based on these worthless results.

    And as usual the first comment is good, “But think of the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren! Destroy the economy now for their sake!”

    “Oh, wait, we’re already doing that with free COVID-19 scare, it’s ok….”

    3
    1
  41. Nick Flandrey says:

    Got my antennas down. Moved everything away from the front of the house for the roofers. Moved the cars out of the driveway. Got out the new vents I want them to install. I’m as ready for them as I can be.

    When I put the antennas back up, I’m adding some distribution at my desk so I can get my realtek dongle hooked back up. There are some really cool things you can do with it.

    n

  42. Greg Norton says:

    When I put the antennas back up, I’m adding some distribution at my desk so I can get my realtek dongle hooked back up. There are some really cool things you can do with it.

    If you do the weather satellite image samples, post some samples. I’ve been thinking of doing that one.

    In WA State, my lab had an Ettus Research SDR transceiver box capable of running OpenBTS. Now *that* is a cool application of the technology.

    My guess is that the SDR hardware ended up trashed after I left, when the professor was fired the following Spring for doing something no one talks about. In retrospect, I wish I had committed an “oops”. I could have always walked it back.

    “What? Oh, that. I’ll drop it off before I leave.”

    The problem with OpenBTS at home is that it really requires a Faraday cage to avoid legal problems.

  43. MrAtoz says:

    Ha, ha. Jokes on you:

    Can’t make this up: The WHO is now AGAINST lockdowns to stop Covid-19

    The ProgLibTurds have achieved their goal. MADE THE POOR POORER!

    2
    1
  44. lynn says:

    Ha, ha. Jokes on you:

    Can’t make this up: The WHO is now AGAINST lockdowns to stop Covid-19
    https://twitchy.com/gregp-3534/2020/10/11/cant-make-this-up-the-who-is-now-against-lockdowns-to-stop-covid-19/

    The ProgLibTurds have achieved their goal. MADE THE POOR POORER!

    Every time ProgLibTurds do anything, they make the lives of the poor worse. I remember the yacht tax, turned out all of the employees of the yacht manufacturers were the working poor. And every time they raise the minimum wage, the working poor get laid off. And …

  45. Marcelo says:

    The ProgLibTurds have achieved their goal. MADE THE POOR POORER!

    The ProgLibTurds have achieved their goal. MADE everybody except the rich POORER! and dependent on the state -to be controlled by them.

  46. Marcelo says:

    For Lynn. Not sure if you need any rabbit holes for consideration. The article may not be worth your while but the language may be.

    https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/10/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of-the-julia-programming-language/

  47. lynn says:

    For Lynn. Not sure if you need any rabbit holes for consideration. The article may not be worth your while but the language may be.

    https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/10/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of-the-julia-programming-language/

    I am in love with C++. Smalltalk Win16 taught me a huge lesson about fringe computer languages. In the end we had so much stuff hardwired to C DLLs that we could not debug was a huge disaster. And even Fortran is a fringe language nowadays.

    And I hate garbage collection languages. Mark and Sweep was bad enough but these garbage collectors that can perform an emergency GC on the main thread like Java does are for the birds.

  48. Jenny says:

    Tired. Very tired.
    Processed 11 rabbits this afternoon. Was pretty quick by the last half dozen. Also pouring rain and not much above freezing. Sure am glad I’ve got shelter for these tasks.
    I did not save hides or heads (for brains for tanning) this time. Today’s goal was meat in freezer without any niceties. Didn’t take the time to do before / after weights. Will weigh them prior to freezing. Husband helped me slaughter four at a time in between his tasks. My hands aren’t strong enough to reliably release the captive bolt so he stuns them, swings them to the outdoor sink, I blood and behead them. Arterial blood sprays a ways. That’s all I’ve got to say about that.
    Three more to go. Husband goes in for gall bladder surgery tomorrow so last three have a reprieve. Next batch are due to be born about Halloween, with slaughter in January. That’ll give me time to make a place in the garage to process them. I’ve slaughtered small game when it’s the middle of the winter. Not a lot of fun.

    Glass of beer with dinner and an early night. Plus an ibuprofen. My hands hurt. And I need to sharpen my rabbit knife.

  49. Greg Norton says:

    And I hate garbage collection languages. Mark and Sweep was bad enough but these garbage collectors that can perform an emergency GC on the main thread like Java does are for the birds.

    It is still possible to leak memory in Java, particularly with IO and failing to close the layers of streams that are often necessary to read the stream, buffer the stream, and then make sure that reading the stream interprets the character set correctly.

    Julia is yet another LLVM language which means it is syntactic sugar for C++. I keep wondering what will get programming languages out of this cul-de-sac. Facecrack might have the right idea with HHVM and dynamic optimization, but Hack is a terrible language.

  50. Greg Norton says:

    I am in love with C++. Smalltalk Win16 taught me a huge lesson about fringe computer languages. In the end we had so much stuff hardwired to C DLLs that we could not debug was a huge disaster. And even Fortran is a fringe language nowadays.

    LEARN POWERBUILDER OR LOSE YOUR JOB!

    I know people who actually believed that.

    The Hot Skillz these days are Docker and The Cloud. Former management had to make some hard choices about upsetting people in my group this weekend because, as long as I was around to do real work, the lotus eaters could continue living in the AWS/Azure dreamland.

    My project in DC was the only one delivered for revenue this year.

  51. SteveF says:

    The article may not be worth your while

    Wasn’t. As usual, an Ars writer is an arse.

    1
    1
  52. Marcelo says:

    The writer is not part of the “normal” staff. (Not that they are normal…).

    Lee Phillips is a physicist and a repeat-contributor to Ars Technica. In the past, he’s written about topics like the legacy of the Fortran coding language, turbulence, and how Emmy Noether changed physics.
    Listing image by JuliaCon

    And by the contents of the article, this may be a Physicist that could only get a job as a writer but he did a really poor job if you ask me. Maybe paid by the word. 🙂

  53. Nick Flandrey says:

    @jenny, you are a prepping ROCK STAR. I am humbled. Best wishes and I’ll light a candle for your husband’s speedy recovery.

    n

  54. lynn says:

    And I hate garbage collection languages. Mark and Sweep was bad enough but these garbage collectors that can perform an emergency GC on the main thread like Java does are for the birds.

    It is still possible to leak memory in Java, particularly with IO and failing to close the layers of streams that are often necessary to read the stream, buffer the stream, and then make sure that reading the stream interprets the character set correctly.

    Shoot, my Windows 7 x64 Pro office PC leaks 5 to 7 GB of ram every weekend when I run Microsoft Security Essentials on my C: and D: internal drives and my F: USB external drive. Shutting down MSE allows Windows to recover about half of the leaked ram. The best way is just to reboot the whole mess.

  55. lynn says:

    Julia is yet another LLVM language which means it is syntactic sugar for C++. I keep wondering what will get programming languages out of this cul-de-sac. Facecrack might have the right idea with HHVM and dynamic optimization, but Hack is a terrible language.

    I would convert all my 750,000 lines of F77 to C++ today if I could. But the change of the first vector index from one in F77 to zero in C++ is a killer. The only Fortran to C converter that actually works is the old F2C program used on Unix. But F2C produces unreadable gibberish so it is just a one shot converter.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F2c

  56. Nick Flandrey says:

    This is worth your time. Watch the embedded video. This isn’t breaking news, but is worth thinking about. The prius driver thought he was clear. Then came the pursuit vehicle….

    When a pickup full of Antifa is trying to box you in to stop you and pull you from your car to kill you, you should have the right to defend yourself against a technical the way our soldiers to, with a 40mm grenade.

    Antifa has grenades, so should I.

    One man or one family against a mob needs all the firepower it can, full auto and HE need to be tools in the toolbox.

    2020 has changed the paradigm for self-defense. It’s not just the mugger or the rapist you may be facing, but an angry army of brownshirts out to Kristallnacht your neighborhood.

    –The video was from a helo, and the insurgents DO NOT CARE when the cops light them up with the NightSun.

    n

  57. lynn says:

    “Image of Biden-Harris campaign event in Arizona shows the polls are dead wrong”
    https://noqreport.com/2020/10/11/image-of-biden-harris-campaign-event-in-arizona-shows-the-polls-are-dead-wrong/

    “Nobody showed up. Literally nobody.”

    Tell me again how Sleepy Joe is going to win this shindig ?

  58. lynn says:

    This is worth your time. Watch the embedded video. This isn’t breaking news, but is worth thinking about. The prius driver thought he was clear. Then came the pursuit vehicle….

    First, don’t be there. Don’t be in 100,000+ city downtowns.

    Second, two loaded revolvers in the console. If your state does not count your vehicle as your castle like Texas does, just remember your choice is that six men carry you out to your grave or twelve men judge you. Your choice, make it quickly.

  59. Mike G. says:

    The Sec in DevSecOps says ‘no’ to Docker for the most part. For containerization, OpenShift and Kubernetes are a better solution for those concerned. AWS and Azure are fine for what they do, just don’t expect to do everything with them.

    .mg

Comments are closed.