Cool and damp. Maybe rain. Maybe not. Maybe for some people. It certainly threatened all day yesterday, and even got misty in various places for short periods. But it didn’t rain on my parade. Today should be more of the same.
I did a bunch of my stuff yesterday. Made some more slow progress at my client’s house. I was working well, and briskly, but didn’t have enough time on site to finish. My fault as I did other stuff before heading out there.
I think I finally got the port forwarding sorted out so my business partner can do the programming remotely. He sent me a list, I did it. We’ll see if he gets anything done this weekend.
I intend to attend a Christmas party. My non-prepping hobby would normally meet this morning, but we’re getting together at 1pm for our Christmas party instead. We’re having a potluck at the church we’ve been using for meetings as no one really wanted to host the event in their home this year. Given that the membership is also mostly in the prime ‘killed by covid’ demographic, a certain prudence is called for. On the other hand, we’ve been meeting monthly (albeit in a large space) mostly maskless since Feb? and had a regional meeting/swapmeet/tradeshow without incident. LARGE venue though, not shouting in each other’s faces. I think I’ll bring mango cobbler.
I’m on my own as D2 is away on a sleepover weekend, and D1 is with my wife at GS camp doing a backpacking overnight. Weather permitting I’ll get the rest of my holiday decor set up, and the rest of the auction stuff out of the foyer and library, then we can get a tree up and the inside decor set up and it will finally feel like Christmas is coming. I need to pack and send family gifts out too, and inventory what we have for the kids. If there are still any gaps, we don’t have a lot of time to fill them, and my wife told me she hasn’t purchased any big gifts for the girls yet. OH MY. I hope that doesn’t bite us on the @ss. We’ve got gifts, I just don’t know if the balance is good.
‘Cuz I’ve been stacking gifts all year. And I forget what I have. And gifts don’t go on a spreadsheet or out on shelves where I can see them. So it would be a good idea to get them all in one place and see what’s really there. Kinda like my canned goods. Or vac sealed meat. I’ve probably got both more and less of things than I think. And I know I’ve got stuff squirreled away.
Stack all the things. Really. But do a better job of managing the stacks than me.
nick
61F and 62%RH this morning at 730. In an hour I'll be swarmed with GScouts and piles of backpacks. Lots of squealing over the puppy…. Then silence. Just me and the dog.
n
Fears up to 100 people may have been killed after tornadoes ripped through Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky and Illinois 'shredding' nursing home and destroying Amazon warehouse
—–I hope no one here is in the affected area, but if you are, let us know what you need.
n
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10299117/At-50-DEAD-Kentucky-tornado-Fears-100-people-killed.html
Did you typeset in LaTeX for added effect?
Version 3.14159265? 🙂
Maybe for CS jokes in the follow up volume.
Ironically, most browsers are no longer able to download the latest TeX source from Knuth’s site.
Good Lord there are some mentally unbalanced people selling on EBay.
Two months ago, I sent an item back for a problem, which the seller acknowledged and promptly issued the mailing label followed by the refund once they received the shipment. No questions.
Now the accusation is that I damaged the item, creating said problem. Feedback and several of intra-site messages, all in the last few days.
All over $60.
The Turn:
What we do for gifts is to have a storage bin set aside as "the present box". When we buy something that's intended to be a present (birthday, Christmas, etc.) it gets put in the box. That way we can find it easily when it's time to give something. Sometimes the gifts are intended for a particular person, and sometimes they're just "wouldn't this make a nice present" items. It's also good for emergency gifts.
I’ve been using a hall cabinet as the “present stash” but I don’t put the “good” presents for the kids there. I put them in our bedroom closet. Then I had some stuff I took to my secondary location because it was bigger than I wanted to put in the closet, and the kids have started poking around. Add to that my wife usually orders stuff delivered to her office if the kids might see it, and me trying to get organized with a bin of stuff for mom and siblings– and my normally scattered but organized system goes to he77.
I’ve almost always got a couple of new in box items that would make good birthday presents for the kids’ age group. More than once we were caught off guard by a sudden birthday party… and I discovered some of it had ‘aged out’ because our kids’ peer group have aged…
It’s more complicated than it needs to be, but the flip side is not having to rush or shop during the Holidays.
n
Blue Origin had a nice flight and landing. Recovery vehicles there now.
Oh Texas, please never change, one truck has its hood open and a guy in a cowboy hat is looking at the engine and completely ignoring the rocket in the background…
+1 on Expanse. I believe this is the last book in the series.
To The Center of the Earth book #3 by Grieg Beck. I really like his books. SciFi/Horror/Fantasy. Go Australia.
USS Hamilton book #5 by Mark Wayne McGinnis. This is another of his Space Opera series. We’ll edited and reads fast. If you like Space Opera, try his Scrapyard Ship series and it’s follow on.
Just don't move here. We're full.
Just got an email from CPS in San Antonio. Power rate is going up 3.85% to cover “infrastructure reliability” in 2022. Somebody has to pay for goobermint screwups. That would be the dirt people.
Heh.
I live in the desert. Coyotes just got another neighbor’s chicken. There’s one running truck, three dead cars and a broken tractor back by the used shipping container(s) on the property.
I was thinking I’d fit right in…
Atmos Energy was approved for a big rate increase to cover losses from last February. Most of my gas bill is already something other than gas service.
Of course, the Griddy customers were all bailed out on the state's dime. Something smells there.
@lynn: Is that the Iron Druid series? I thought the author had wrapped everything up a few years back.
@mtAtoz: I do enjoy good space opera, i’ll look into those authors.
Gov of Kentucky in news conference:
70 confirmed dead and he expects 100+ by the end of the day.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10298967/Market-second-hand-Lego-rises-11-annually-faster-stocks-bonds-study-shows.html
n
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10298845/CNN-employee-accused-luring-mom-daughter-home-train-sexually-submissive.html
–yes it IS pedos all the way down.
n
Hearne’s follow up series to the Iron Druid is “Ink & Sigil”. I just finished the 2nd book and really liked it. The Iron Druid makes an appearance. The audio book of the first book is awesome if you like to listen.
The toy market doesn't need more arbitrage.
Lego has fiddled with the plastic formula in the last decade IIRC, experimenting with soy. The long-term durability will be a question mark for a while.
They gambled and lost. They should not be bailed out.
CNN.
When I was a kid, in the 70s, the CNN Center in Atlanta was originally built as a combination production facility and creepy theme park for Sid and Marty Kroft. The running joke is that the puppets are gone but the fishbowls of cocaine are obviously still there. As are the pedos.
Trading war stories with a former CNN developer at a training class in Atlanta about a decade ago, I learned Uncle Ted used to wander the Atrium in his bathrobe late at night in the 90s, keeping an eye on things. Maybe he knew something.
One of the treadmills kills a toddler — no big deal.
One of the bikes kills a fictional character on a TV show — stock tanks.
https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/tv/peloton-trending-thanks-death-sex-city-reboot-rcna8302
The market hasn't lived in reality for over a decade.
Kid lives in Hendersonville, TN. Got alerted at 3:00 AM there were tornados in the area. Took shelter, with wife and two kids and dog, in a downstairs closet. Power went out at 3:35 and was restored by 8:30. Rough night. But no damage. No damage here either. Kentucky got slammed.
Lots of people in Kentucky and elsewhere asking for prayers.
Mockery Ensues After USA Today Publishes Ludicrous Article Asking ‘Is Math Racist?’
USA Today changed the headline after well-deserved mockery.
Posted by Fuzzy Slippers Friday, December 10, 2021 at 03:00pm
https://legalinsurrection.com/2021/12/mockery-ensues-after-usa-today-publishes-ludicrous-article-asking-is-math-racist/
So, is it “racist” for me to build a bridge and put up a sign:
NO BIPOCS!
MATH WAS USED HERE!
USE YOUR MATH-FREE BRIDGE!
Or am I just using my slip-stick packing pocket-protector wearing I-know-what-the-square-root-of-minus-one-means-and-you-don't privilege?
>> @greg, I don't have any idea what the actual protocols are. Crestron is a pretty big company with customers from home users to DoD, and Fortune 50 and everything in between. Whatever they use, it's likely to be as secure as it can be. Certainly have been enough eyes looking at it over the decades.
When the programmer works on the system, I've got no idea how he actually connects at his end, but hard wire ethernet is most likely from his desk. At the client's end, it's all hard wire between boxes. Standard wifi for the ipads to operate the system, and any guests in the house. Client really doesn't do much of anything else online.
Isn't Crestron programming a niche Hot Skillz?
uh-oh
The vulnerability, dubbed ‘Log4Shell,’ was rated 10 on a scale of one to 10 the Apache Software Foundation, which oversees development of the software. Anyone with the exploit can obtain full access to an unpatched computer that uses the software,
Experts said the extreme ease with which the vulnerability lets an attacker access a web server — no password required — is what makes it so dangerous. New Zealand’s computer emergency response team was among the first to report that the flaw was being “actively exploited in the wild” just hours after it was publicly reported Thursday and a patch released.
The vulnerability, located in open-source Apache software used to run websites and other web services, was reported to the foundation on Nov. 24 by the Chinese tech giant Alibaba, it said. It took two weeks to develop and release a fix.
But patching systems around the world could be a complicated task. While most organizations and cloud providers such as Amazon should be able to update their web servers easily, the same Apache software is also often embedded in third-party programs, which often can only be updated by their owners.
Yoran, of Tenable, said organizations need to presume they’ve been compromised and act quickly. The first obvious signs of the flaw’s exploitation appeared in Minecraft, an online game hugely popular with kids and owned by Microsoft. Meyers and security expert Marcus Hutchins said Minecraft users were already using it to execute programs on the computers of other users by pasting a short message in a chat box.
Microsoft said it had issued a software update for Minecraft users. “Customers who apply the fix are protected,” it said.
Researchers reported finding evidence the vulnerability could be exploited in servers run by companies such as Apple, Amazon, Twitter and Cloudflare.
https://apnews.com/article/technology-business-lifestyle-software-apple-inc-aed3cc628fc602079b100757974c8f01
@Greg
Hah! Maybe the 'computer jokes' book should be written in binary.
Specifically, log4j, a drop-in library for Java, not the Apache server software.
The vulnerability is a big deal given the wide use of the library, but it doesn't affect the core Apache HTTP service.
When it comes to poorly understood/debugged infrastructure libraries, however, Java isn't nearly as bad as Node.js. Compounding the problem is how most Node servers are embedded in Docker containers, furthering the abstraction.
@Rick H
“Hah! Maybe the ‘computer jokes’ book should be written in binary.”
Write it in non-binary.
That's the current Hot Skilz.
I trust open source SSH more than any other form of secure connection. It is easy to tunnel other TCP links inside of SSH, and a lot more eyes continuously look at the code than any proprietary protocol.
Even the much-maligned Putty has tunnel settings for a Windows client, both remote and local tunneled over SSH.
I use Putty all the time since it is open source, but I'll occasionally catch cr*p from a network guy over the choice. Ironically, the last network guy who gave me grief preferred Solar Winds closed source SSH client on Windows. Doh!
That JAVA drop in is apparently common in Minecraft servers.
Old joke: Two plus two equals five, for sufficiently large values of two.
Harold, I hope you read this. First, condolences on your wife’s passing.
Please post on this site occasionally to update us on your adventures. Many here are a special kind of family, and we need to know how you are doing. This is an entirely selfish plea, because you are part of that HUGE knowledge and experience base that makes this site so great.
What you wrote yesterday was a summary of what a lot of people dream about, but you are taking action to make it real. Big changes have already taken place. I wish you the best. Just phone home once in a while.
Good Lord there are some mentally unbalanced people selling on EBay.
Two months ago, I sent an item back for a problem, which the seller acknowledged and promptly issued the mailing label followed by the refund once they received the shipment. No questions.
Now the accusation is that I damaged the item, creating said problem. Feedback and several of intra-site messages, all in the last few days.
All over $60.
My youngest brother sells a lot of stuff on Ebay and Big River that he liberates from various dumpsters, especially B&Ns. He definitely qualifies on the mentally unbalanced.
>> My youngest brother sells a lot of stuff on Ebay and Big River that he liberates from various dumpsters, especially B&Ns.
My most recent dumpster find was about 15 pounds of various sizes of Tapcon concrete screws. Thrown out by whomever was cleaning out the office of a defunct kitchen contractor. Already have used some, saving a trip to HD.
Books? Old magazines?
61F and 62%RH this morning at 730. In an hour I'll be swarmed with GScouts and piles of backpacks. Lots of squealing over the puppy…. Then silence. Just me and the dog.
n
I am very proud of your wife. Not an easy thing to do and the girls are gaining invaluable life experience.
I've made use of the vacuum sealer this weekend. First a couple of pork loins. Twenty pounds worth. Ok, 19.99 pounds but I'm rounding the numbers over here. $1.99 a pound.
They made 24 packages of two "chops" a bit thicker than half an inch plus a bowl of scraps equal to another three packages.
The scraps made for a good pot of stew. Two meals so far and enough to freeze for another meal later.
Twenty seven meals for two people for $40 worth of meat.
Next up, a couple of five pound chubs of hamburger. The price is up to $3 a pound but hey, you see the patties ready for the grill at priced at $6 a pound? They slice the chubs to make the patties.
Fourteen packages of two patties a bit over half and inch but less than three quarters of an inch. Plus about three patties worth of ends which will make for some nice spaghetti sauce. Call it fifteen, maybe sixteen meals for $30.
Now, if you want to get picky, and why not, I use the pre-made bags. They cost a little bit more than rolls but I save time and the wear on the vacuum sealer to make the bags. I just bought 200 6×12 inch bags…. mumble mumble… and it works to .29-something per bag. I'm going to call it 30¢ a bag.
Bottom line: Thirty-nine packages of meat in the freezer for $70 plus $11.70 worth of bags. Two bucks and ten cents a supper doing my version of Hamburger Helper plus cost of rice, pasta, sauces.
I think I'm doing a fine job of making that buffalo nickle bellow. 🙂
Oh, and using a can of Rotel Tomatoes instead of plain diced tomatoes in that pot of stew? Nope, not doing that again. Not quite "feed the disposal" but near the neighborhood.
Just got an email from CPS in San Antonio. Power rate is going up 3.85% to cover “infrastructure reliability” in 2022. Somebody has to pay for goobermint screwups. That would be the dirt people.
Be happy. Mine went up 15% back in September. Probably will never go down.
The screwup was that ERCOT turned off the power to the natural gas wells in west Texas. And I suspect that they turned off the power to the huge electric motors for the 50,000 hp natural gas compressors that the EPA mandated in the Houston area against engineering advice for a dadgum good reason.
"Brazos' $2 billion bill lawsuit survives ERCOT effort to dismiss"
https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/brazos-2-billion-bill-lawsuit-survives-ercot-effort-dismiss-2021-10-18/
The Texas Freeze is not over yet. Federal bankruptcy judges have incredible power to make things work.
I know first hand that ERCOT does not have pensions. The co-op probably does.
The Bankruptcy Court judges have consistently put pensioners first.
I took the ERCOT interview thinking that it was a government entity with something better than the non-profit equivalent of the 401(k). Bzzzzt.
Once again, I dodged a career bullet even if it meant staying at the tolling company.
Sometimes I think ERCOT extended the interview opportunity to find out what we did at our test site just across the runway.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/12/desantis-strikes-back.php
We still need a GoFundMeUp campaign to buy Nancy Pelosi's neighbor's house and turn it into a halfway house.
ADDED: And another one in ChiTown, right across from Bernadette Dorn and husband.
Books? Old magazines?
Especially tattoo magazines, those sell really well on ebay and big river.
Isn't Crestron programming a niche Hot Skillz?
— yep, I've recommended it as a second career to programmers here and elsewhere. AMX is the same sort of thing, but more closed and harder to get the tools. AMX only gives the tools to their approved dealers, crestron hands theirs out widely.
Both are essentially gui design, then assigning real world actions to the button presses. Of course there is more to it, but that's it at the core.
10 years ago a good AMX programmer made $1200/day plus expenses if working on site. I don't know what has happened to wages since, but the great guys are rock stars. The good guys made good money too.
control4 is a more open environment to do the same things, without making as much proprietary hardware as AMX and Crestron.
n
@lynn, I'm pretty proud of my wife too. She is great with the girls, and has made a friend of one of the other moms, which is a pretty big deal for her. The girls get a chance to do things they just wouldn't do if not for my wife and Girl Scouts.
n
Yearly office Christmas dinner party this evening. Was skipped last year because of Covid. The invite past staff members, board members, executive council along with spouses or significant others. Nice gesture. I go every year. I actually miss most of the people. Had the dinner in the Sunsphere in downtown Knoxville, that white elephant built for the 1982 World's Fair.
Today was eaten by a PC build for my daughter's Christmas gift. Essentially, I repeated my $200 server build except with a much better CPU, a Ryzen 5600X, and more memory.
Graphics card is the killer. Prices are easily four times where they should be right now.
I have spares which may have to suffice until the bitcoin fad craters.
"Legal, Financial Advisor Fees in Brazos Electric Ch. 11 Hit $33.6M"
https://texaslawbook.net/legal-fees-in-brazos-electric-ch-11-hit-33-6m/
"In the 259 days since Brazos Electric Cooperative Inc. filed for bankruptcy protection, 179 lawyers and financial advisors have worked more than 34,700 hours on the complex corporate restructuring and billed the utility more than $33.6 million for their services, according to court documents reviewed by The Texas Lawbook."
"Brazos filed for Chapter 11 protection on March 1 after the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), operator of the Texas power grid, hit the Waco-based electric provider with a $1.9 billion tab for power supplied to its customers during Winter Storm Uri last February."
"To put the matter into some perspective, Brazos, in court documents, offered this comparison: The amount sought by ERCOT just for the week of the winter storm is more than Brazos’s total revenues from wholesale delivery of power in 2019 and 2020 combined."
Wow. What a mess. And ERCOT caused this incompetence by not preparing properly for our winter storms that we have every ten years or so.
BTW, we have had much worse winter storms than Winter Storm Uri. December 24, 1989, the temperature was 6 F in Houston, TX and -4 F in Dallas, TX. Much worse. Yet the Texas grid did not go down nor did we have rotating blackouts.
I've been hearing that since 2011. Ethereum is probably more important in the long run.
Nick recommended Crestron programming to me back in 2019 when I was between jobs. I got an ok Cisco job a few months later. We do some cool stuff but the pay sucks and the manager has issues.
The company has a new building with lots of Crestron-based conference rooms, which were clearly not set up by someone with the skill level for $1200/day.
Cisco is a good career but without the high-end certs the salary isn't great.
https://thefederalist.com/2021/12/10/doctor-who-is-dead-but-perhaps-not-for-long/
It's tempting to propose writing a revision so sick, perverted, and disgusting that normal people would not be able to sit through it without extended bouts of projectile vomiting.
Butt he best way forward is probably simply re-edit the actual film of the last regeneration in a scene where the bad shiite drops on the cutting room floor, and cut briefly to it burning as the new Doctor catches a whiff of smoke and says. "Whew! Smells like the compost is on fire!" Cut back to the last two frames containing images of the director and his creations burn, with a reverse video image and voiceover from The Black Guardian shouting "Curse you again, Doctor!". Back to the Doctor as he drains the last of a bottle of Pepto, tosses it through the trash roundel, wipes his lips as says "That bad dreams over, then!"
Hope they do it well. Looks like more work looming on this side of the pond as the woke superheroes of the Marvel and DC universes implode.
There are hacks working with crestron gear, like anything else, and probably more of them than AMX because of Crestron's willingness to let pretty much anyone do it.
the weirdest thing about controls programming is that the same person often designs the gui as does the rest of the programming. Even on fairly big jobs. In the trad programming world, those skill sets don't overlap much, do they?
n
I've been hearing that since 2011. Ethereum is probably more important in the long run.
–I suspect the end will only come if the whole world crashes. And I don't want that to happen. Some other solution will emerge.
n
Dr Who: I haven't watched the last 2 seasons. That article is correct, the Dr needs to wake up from a dream where Chibnall & Whittaker never happened.
Crestron: GUIs are different and regular programmers often aren't good at them.
Bitcoin: The current solutions require stable electricity and internet, and won't survive TEOTWAWKI. On the other hand, current "real" money is even more fake than Bitcoin and has been managed ineptly by governments around the world. A currency that can't be controlled by government is surely better.
The retcon of the 1994 Fox/CBC TV movie was ignored when the show returned in 2005 even though Paul McGann is now established as lead #8 (well, depending on how “woke” you count).
Whitaker's regeneration should be preserved. It is an amazing feat of continuity that every transition in lead across 58 years has been filmed using both principals on set with two exceptions.
>> I have spares which may have to suffice until the bitcoin fad craters.
I presume you're looking for a mid to high end graphics card? Low end cards are still reasonably priced.
>> the weirdest thing about controls programming is that the same person often designs the gui as does the rest of the programming. Even on fairly big jobs. In the trad programming world, those skill sets don't overlap much, do they?
They overlapped when I was coding COBOL with CICS…but then that was a green screen UI, not GUI.
Although at times we had to get creative within the 24×80 limitations.
Well, I've got the scanner on and they are working street racers again. Interesting that the guy doing the on air briefing mentioned that the racers were 'using some app' to 'show then where the helicopters are'.
I'm guessing something adb?
Or as simple as flightaware?
Getting to be more cat and mouse than ever.
n
Hah, the cops just identified someone that they were chasing, looked up his address on google, and realized that not only is the actual vehicle in the streetview, the guy is in the picture too.
So they confirmed the vehicle is normally at the address, that the guy whose name is associated with the vehicle is also at that address, and now they are going there to seize the vehicle (and presumably arrest the guy.)
n
added- and they just matched a picture of a guy from an instagram ‘story’ to the driver’s license of their wanted guy… presumably the ‘story’ documents his bad behaviour. The car is also in the ‘story’.
@nick:
The street racing scene evidently has "face" issues as well.It's not just doing it, but being seen to be doing it.
And the fuzz will take advantage of that. Maybe even to the extent of fabricating posts.
This is one reason why I attempt to fly "under the radar". You all know somewhat about me, but I've only posted one item of identifying information here. Everything else is generalities. Not that I'm doing anything illegal. I try to bear in mind Cardinal Richelieu.
G.