Less cold and damp, more sunny. I hope. It was pretty nice yesterday considering. I was outside in shirtsleeves, but my nose and fingers were cold.
My plan for the day needs it to not be raining, so, fingers crossed.
I got most of what I wanted to get done finished at my client’s house. There are a couple of things remaining, but I need some remote support from the programmer to make progress with them.
Today I’m hoping to move at least a truck load from the one unit to my closer storage unit. During that move, I’ll try to get another truckload for the local auction sorted out and delivered.
Spring Break is next week and my wife wants to spend the week at the BOL, doing work and exploring the area. I know the work needs doing, but it does take me away from my endless lists of stuff to do for a week. Like I said before, I’m going to have to step up my game.
Y’all need to think about stepping up your game too. Things are already worse than a week ago, and two weeks ago. There aren’t many things happening to make them better any time soon. We may not get to Mad Max, but I bet we get to ’30s depression, or WWII levels of scarcity. And it could be worse. So get to stacking…
nick
41F and 99%RH is a bit cold and damp. No actual rain though.
n
Welp, I've now officially cancelled my commuter apartment. First, much more looks like it is going to stay virtual, even now that all the Covid-measures have been lifted. Second, my department is being really good about scheduling. The few overnights I will have going forward, I can spend in a B&B or even in a hotel.
The apartment is in an old building, which generally has mold problems. We had a couple of massive leaks from the apartment above, which made the problems worse. I have pics and even a video of the water coming in, but I still expect pushback. Not wanting to deal with this, I've hiring a professional company to clean the apartment and handle the turnover. The level of cleaning involved is similar to what y'all may know from military housing: very picky, definitely needs professionals.
Meanwhile, the weather here is cold but sunny, so I'm going to spend the rest of this afternoon working on a garden project. Almost no rain falls under the south overhang of the house, so nothing grows there. So I'm putting in paving tiles, and my wife is going to use it for peppers and tomatoes in pots. Seeing as I tend to overdo projects, I'm cementing in edging, and the tiles will go on a gravel bed. A neighbor has too much gravel, so I already shoveled a trailer-full, and have it ready to go. Today, I start cementing in the edging…
LOL, I almost missed this:
China Threatens to Use Dreaded N-Bomb Against the United States
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10597587/Sweden-DOUBLE-defence-budget-wake-Russias-invasion-Ukraine.html
— so Sweden doesn't think the world political order is going back to the way it was.
n
Yeah. That station and the competition across the street.
They've been exempted from Florida's asinine price gouging laws by threading a very fine legal needle going back at least 30 years.
The Fumes of Mordor have been inhaled:
NOT the way to go, BRO! Duck Duck Go CEO blasted for bragging about how they’re now manipulating search results
Sad.
I remember the media attacking Sean Spicer as a great liar and spin merchant. pSaki puts him to shame. I don't think I could stand in front of the media and spew the shite she does. She must see big $$ in her future, or is a plugs/Dumbo sycophant to the max. And the LSM supports her, mostly, some are beginning to question the BS. Maybe they are feeling it in their pocketbook.
Psaki is going to cash out soon. The problem is that the gay Hatian woman token hire replacement isn't as good at lying with a straight face.
Psaki learned from Robert Gibbs back in the glory days of The Chosen One’s administration. Maybe they'll bring him back to train the padawan.
Of course, even Gibbs couldn’t stick around after the “If you like your doctor …” Obamacare lie blew up — even he may not be able to handle what’s coming with the vaccine kabuki needing to get swept under the rug.
I’m proud that I’ve had a hand in roughly 10,000 people learning that the “If you like your doctor …” line is a crock since 2014. “Welcome to the party, pal.”
I've noticed Duck Duck Go censoring and manipulating search results for a long time now on a host of topics. They are finally admitting it openly.
A Gab internet search engine can't launch soon enough.
>> She must see big $$ in her future
Both CNN and MSNBC are chasing her. The former to replace Cuomo and the latter Maddow for the 9 PM slot.
>> A Gab internet search engine can't launch soon enough.
Oh for the days of Altavista…
I knew their days were numbered as a service for cognoscenti when I heard the radio ad say "download duckduckgo today". Download WHAT? you just change your preferred search engine to them in a browser setting or enter their url directly.
n
Duck Duck Go has a search bar widget that can replace Google's on an Android phone if your muscle memory insists on tapping that portion of a screen to initiate search.
Yeah, weeeellllll, how do they pay for the ads? How do they benefit from large influx of non-technical users?
— maybe start 'being evil'.
n
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/russia-considers-temporary-ban-agricultural-products-countries-outside-eurasia
n
Re: Duckduckgo.
Well, dang. I admit it comes as a bit of a surprise, I wasn’t really paying attention.
The number of businesses willing to destroy their brand in order to virtue signal continues to amaze me.
Duck Duck Go has ads, but they don't sell placement in the search results.
IIRC, they also sell access to their API to allow searches from third party applications using their REST interface returning JSON/XML results rather than HTML.
And none of them can imagine how that all might look to a future consumer, like the doctors in support of smoking in ads.
n
Google mixes ads in with the search results and is nebulous about their ranking system as of late.
Plus, the "evil" part of Google isn't just that they sell ads. Along with Facecrack, they *are* advertising anymore, having killed off most newspapers, radio, broadcast TV networks, and basic cable, sucking all of the revenue out of the other media outlets either through the core site or YouTube.
I've always wondered if it is effective. Once "The Social Network" hit it seemed like traditional media started to die of revenue starvation.
Google won’t let another competitor become as big as they are. The founders were big fans of Warren Buffett and his teachings, one of which is to build a “moat” around your businesses.
Bias web site trigger warning…
https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/04/covid-vaccine-bombshells-you-probably-didnt-hear-about/
n
just putin it out there.
LOL called this:
Jen Psaki struggles to answer Peter Doocy’s simple question about whether or not Joe Biden owns an electric vehicle [video]
What, no?
Our lying goobermint. Sure, let's mRNA all our *vaccines* and let the mutations fall where they may.
The evil of Google goes back to very early days, when they first got caught burying pro-life anti-abortion websites and promoting abortion / Planned Parenthood regardless of what search terms and limiters were entered. The reports seem to have disappeared from the internet, but they were doing that shortly after achieving some momentum, certainly by the year 2000.
Many have forgotten that Google got its start by simply branding the Open Directory Project results, and then dumping into their search index every free database they could find.
Building an internet search is not hard. Protecting it from external abuse while keeping real results available is the hardest part. Where Google turned evil was that while they were mastering the "prevent external abuse" part, they were deliberately skewing it all toward their own political ends.
Scranton Joe famously owns a Corvette that his "poor" Chevy dealer father gave him for … law school graduation (?). The story varies, but that is probably what Psaki is more uncomfortable addressing.
A real Corvette with a non turbo V8 engine, not the atrocity that vehicle has become with the most recent revision.
"Biden Quietly Forgives Student Loans for Government Workers But Millions of Others Remain Crushed by Student Debt"
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/03/biden-quietly-forgives-student-loans-government-workers-millions-others-remain-crushed-student-debt/
"In total, the US has forgiven over $1 billion in student loans for over 471,000 individuals who are mostly government workers."
There is a message in this.
Unfortunately, Google is still the best search engine for technical results. Nothing else comes close. At least for electrical engineering.
"Amazon stock split isn't the tech giant's only important news"
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-stock-split-isnt-the-tech-giants-only-important-news-164630967.html
20 for one plus a $10 billion stock repurchase. I wonder why they are doing the repurchase.
"BREAKING: Biden Admin Denies Former World No. 1 Tennis Champ Novak Djokovic’s Access to Country Due to Vaccine Status — But Opened Border to 2 Million Unvaccinated Illegal Aliens in Last Year"
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/03/breaking-biden-admin-denies-former-world-no-1-tennis-champ-novak-djokovics-access-country-due-vaccine-status-opened-border-2-million-unvaccinated-illegal-aliens-last-year/
He should just walk across the border with the other two million illegals.
"2020 Census Undercounted U.S. Population by Nearly 19 Million"
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/2020-census-undercounted-us-population-by-nearly-19-million/ar-AAUTt94
"The 2020 census undercounted the country’s population by 18.8 million people, the Census Bureau said on Thursday, acknowledging that the count had underrepresented Black, Latino and Indigenous residents.
At the same time, the census overcounted the number of white and Asian residents, the bureau said.
Robert L. Santos, the bureau’s director, said that despite the omissions, the results were consistent with recent censuses."
Uh, this sounds like a lie to me. There is an agenda here.
Hat tip to:
https://www.drudgereport.com/
Google added PageRank, which really was novel at the time.
The company also had a Legend Of story, the Legend of Sergey and Larry, which lent itself to VC pitches at the time and, in turn, became good fodder for the financial press.
Of course, the most famous of the era is The Legend of Jeff Bezos, Family Man, Drives A Honda, Wears The Same Shirt To Work Every Day. They didn't necessarily have to be true origin tales, but that's what makes a good Legend Of story.
And MacKenzie drove the Bronco …
Google added PageRank, which really was novel at the time.
If PageRank is the reverse indexing system, yes. It ranked your site based on how many sites linked to you. Too bad they dropped it a decade ago.
They also put in the MapReduce system for efficiently spreading jobs across millions of computers. That was truly an amazing feat.
Jimmy Hoffa? 😉
https://apnews.com/e9627f7f52fd733bcd19db9db2e7dbfc
Distributing to lots of cheap computers of varying availability and bypassing failing nodes was the real accomplishment.
For the longest time they ran PIII 500 machines IIRC. Custom motherboards, however, since Intel had a serious case of rectal cranial insertion when it came to forced obsolescence and memory capacity in their chipsets for about a decade.
Today's new episode of "Picard" has what I assume is an ad-libbed "Supertroopers" reference.
What's next? Scott Pigrim's drummer chugging syrup?
I am curious as to why John Delancie as Q drops names of “Star Trek” episodes where the title of the episode was not in the dialogue of the script. I can kinda sorta buy “In a Mirror, Darkly”, but “Yesterday’s Enterprise”?
Distributing to lots of cheap computers of varying availability and bypassing failing nodes was the real accomplishment.
For the longest time they ran PIII 500 machines IIRC. Custom motherboards, however, since Intel had a serious case of rectal cranial insertion when it came to forced obsolescence and memory capacity in their chipsets for about a decade.
That custom motherboard that Gigabyte ??? built for Google had a battery plugged right into the motherboard so they could take five minute power outages without losing a instruction. Just another innovation.
Quentin Tarantino is a big fan of … Alan Dean Foster
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JtnUNBgG-g
Hat tip to … Alan Dean Foster 1 December 2021 update:
https://www.alandeanfoster.com/version2.0/updates.htm
"I was unaware of this until more than one reader happened to mention it. On his show, Stephen Colbert interviews Quentin Tarantino."
"It appears they are both fans of a very surprised writer:"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JtnUNBgG-g
Foster was the king as Tarantino correctly points out, but Foster was also in the news last year for fighting Disney over unpaid royalties for the "Star Wars" novelization, which created an even stronger association for the book genre with his name.
I have Tarantino's novelization for "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" in my Kindle backlog.
Tarantino was trying to land a deal for a "Star Trek" movie with the new "Kelvin" cast, for which Alan Dean Foster also does novelizations. The deal fell through, but I wonder who would have handled the book chores. Collaboration?
@Nick – You're slipping on keeping up with the Daily Mail scoops that the American media won't touch. Cisneros has become a huge political celebrity in and around San Antonio since forcing the runoff.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10586625/AOC-backed-congressional-hopeful-Jessica-Cisneros-affair-high-school-teacher.html
Defeating Cuellar in a runoff probably wouldn’t mean much immediately since the House is likely to fall under Republican control, but it makes deal making tougher if Pelosi has to get something done before January … like vote on a replacement VP.
“Say, Henry, we know we threw you under the bus, but could you do the party one more favor …”
Mind your grammar!
https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/police-searching-missing-woman-with-noticeable-limp/E4OZ4VMZ2FGH5C26BWPZIRHWQQ/
>> Jen Psaki struggles to answer Peter Doocy’s simple question about whether or not Joe Biden owns an electric vehicle [video]
Quoting pSaki: "…Presidents of the United States, current, and when they are no longer, typically are not doing a lot of driving."
First Jen, the word you were looking for was "former," and second, I'm pretty sure we could get him the EV of his choice if he would immediately put himself into the 'former' category. Maybe a nice shiny red Model S Plaid.
And the question was if plugs owned one, not is he tooling around Delaware.
Thanks a lot plugsy McDooshNozzle:
Biden administration to extend federal mask mandate
Will it ever end?
Something is deeply, dangerously wrong with US biological research overseas
As Sarah A. Hoyt says: Heads on pikes!
I wonder if the LameStreamMedia will ever say "ENOUGH!" and hold plugs' feet to the fire. "The buck stops here!" Not!
November 9, 2022.
"Red October "This business will get out of control…""
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZuMe5RvxPQ
Highly prophetic. And best military movie ever.
Hat tip to:
https://raconteurreport.blogspot.com/2022/03/farewell-and-adieu-you-fair-spanish.html
BTW, Putin’s girlfriend and their four kids are in Switzerland. Just something to think about.
It pains me to write this, but Alec Baldwin was the best Jack Ryan.
Blink and you'll miss her, but Gates McFadden appears briefly as Caroline Ryan.
"So, what am I doing to prepare for what's coming?"
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2022/03/so-what-am-i-doing-to-prepare-for-whats.html
"I've written a lot in recent weeks about how the emergency that a lot of preppers talk about is no longer remote – it's already here, staring us in the face. Food and other commodities are in short supply and skyrocketing in price, and there doesn't look to be any short-term solution to the problem."
A year and a month ago I would have said that we had enough fuel to last our lifetimes here in the USA. Now I am not so sure. The Koof and Biden have done a tremendous amount of damage to our oil and natural gas industries. A great many oil and natural gas workers have said screw it and retired.
Many oil and natural gas companies are looking at the current prices and thinking "will crude go back to $50/barrel when this is over ?". Therefore they are not willing to invest their so-called profits in their infrastructures and new wells. Instead, they are going to pay down their bank loans since they have not made a profit in the last five years and their bankers have been calling.
Made it to Orange TX. Still a lot of construction in the area. Traveling through Louisiana I noticed the roads in that state are still in poor shape. Lots of bouncing, some significant thumps, and overall a poor traveling experience. That 20 mile long bridge over the swamp, no trucks in the left lane, generally ignored. Caused traffic backups.
Nephew wanted to go to Beaumont for dinner and to shop at a mall that is showing signs of demise. I had forgotten the speed limit on I-10 as 75 mph, generally used as a suggestion. Three lanes and in some instances three trucks across, one in each lane, slowing traffic.
Yeh, I know trucks are vital, drivers need to work. However there should be a law that no trucks are allowed in the left lane unless specifically allowed. And enforce the crap out of the law. For a truck to get in an extra 20 miles in their allowed 11 hour a day while causing traffic jams makes no sense. Taking 20 miles to pass another truck indicates both drivers are anal orifices.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/03/prosecutors-drop-charges-far-left-security-guard-matthew-dolloff-shooting-death-trump-supporter-denver/
-one of the first killers, but not the last during the BLM riots
n
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/03/prosecutors-drop-charges-far-left-security-guard-matthew-dolloff-shooting-death-trump-supporter-denver/
-one of the first killers, but not the last during the BLM riots
n
Don't bring a can of bear spray to a gun fight.
Today I miss my dog, and I miss my dad. Must be the birthday thing poking at my subconscious.
n
The media and DA hounded Rittenhouse for a year. This guy, not so much.