Slightly cooler. Slightly less moist? Might be. Yesterday was fairly nice but did get hot in the afternoon. I expect more of the same today. Small changes over the next few weeks until suddenly it’s Fall again.
I got a few things done. Nothing like the list I’d hoped to do. Picked up stuff, mostly for the BOL, and dropped it at the shop. Amazing how quickly a space can fill up with the contents of two storage units, some stuff from a third, and stuff from home. I really need to get the fuse for the electrical service, and get the A/C running so I can spend some time organizing and getting rid of stuff over there.
But that’s for future me. Today I’ll do some office stuff- I’ve got a bunch of mail to send, and then head to my client’s house. I’ll remote in and see if I can see anything wrong, but I’m betting I need eyes on the problem. Sometimes it’s much faster and easier to look in person.
Then I’ll do some of that list here… if I can. It gets longer every day, and my motivation flags. I’ve got y’all to keep me honest though.
Stack, fix, improve, and do what’s needful.
nick
Do any of you watch videos on Amazon Prime? I tried last night, for the first time in a couple years. Everything I started to watch had several minutes of unskippable ads to start and one movie had a note that it would be interrupted “periodically” with ads. This is not what I remember from before, when I watched a fair amount of movies and anime on AmPrime while using the exercise bike and such. What exactly are we paying for, if not ad-free viewing? Pretty well disrupted my workout plans, since I was already tired and irritated (from being woken before 0400 several mornings in a row).
Presumably, Amazon continually experiments to see how many ads their customers will put up with, without dropping the service or tying up the complaint line.
Realistically, we’re not going to drop Prime. My wife wants it so she can get unlimited returns because she’s perpetually dissatisfied with what she’s ordered. Surely none of you married men have ever seen such a thing, riiiiight?
Prime video changed their TOS a while back. The ads are annoying . I’ve had to relearn the skill of using the mute button on the remote.
For working out I use SiriusXM old time radio dramas or 40s music.
Like sex change surgeries for kids.
Yes. we try to be legal with “Clarkson’s Farm”.
It isn’t about the ads themselves as much as the repetition.
Ironically, Land Rover was the big sponsor of the latest season of “Clarkson’s Farm”.
At least, the ads we saw.
Linux and development tools sold with Hookers and Steaks marketing killed the commercial Unix providers.
Windows simply made the commodity hardware readily available.
This is the project with the tortured acronym Kernigan mentioned in the video in the response to the question about Rust.
https://www.darpa.mil/research/programs/translating-all-c-to-rust
What an asinine concept. I’m sure big grants are involved.
I was wrong about the ‘slightly less moist’ part. It’s 74F and 99%RH.
Up and moving. Not sure where my next box of tea is hiding, so it might be coffee first this morning. FWIW, the plan to use tea first and delay the coffee seems to help with the afternoon crash.
n
I learned something new today.
If one has suffered a bad episode of motion sickness, it shows up 48 hours later in one’s bloodwork with values that mimic having suffered a heart attack. Something about the byproducts of intense muscular effort (dry heaves…)
Apparently my GP got quite the shock yesterday evening. Fortunately, the lab tech was working late, and could verify using other values that there was no attack.
The Doc was interested to hear it came from seasickness…
Today’s TPS* Report: At least one of the pullets is now a hen. There’ve been more eggs than usual in the past week, including two brown eggs in one day. (One of the older hens lays brown eggs, one white.) Unfortunately, one of those two eggs was broken. I don’t know for sure but I suspect that one of the younger birds stepped on it. Hur-dur, me chicken. Me brain smaller than peanut. Unfortunately, the broken egg dissolved the paint under it, so I need to take the bottom trays out and repaint. I need a day which is warm enough for long enough for the paint to completely dry before the birds go back in, and on which I don’t have too much else going on. The weather should be good for the next several days but I’m going to be out running around. Well, I’ll figure something out.
My wife has been trying to train the new birds to follow her, like from the run to the garden or from the side bushes back into the run. Success is, shall we say, limited, much lower than with the older birds two years ago. The Child says that this breed is not known for being intelligent. That’s an impressive statement: they’re known to be dimwitted even for chickens. However, it matches what I’d observed myself, like sometimes not being able to figure out how to get out of the run even when the door is open.
* Thrilling Poultry Status
My guilty please is the Alien franchise. I have been watching the new HULU series Alien: Earth. Last nights episode (they dribble out one a week), I became quite frustrated. I would get to see some of the show (I swear only 5 minutes), then be subjected to 3.5 minutes of non skippable commercials. It drove me nuts. Thank gawd I’m not paying to watch…. wait, uh I am. Unacceptable.
I believe that for about $3 a month *extra* Amazon will allow you to skip the ads.
Satanic levels of greed, but that’s the world corporations are building.
Wasn’t ADA supposed to be the replacement for C, back in the day?
Just another .gov boondoggle.
*Thrilling Poultry Status
aka
Urban Chicken Chronicles
Had to formally report my neighbor last night to Animal Control for his dogs’ (2x) nuisance barking for the last 6+ months.
Two hours straight last night, non-stop, just like most days.
I tried talking to him about it, but it is “Dogs bark. They are inside my fence line”.
Then there was cursing and swearing.
A bit concerned about retaliation, but it has become unbearable.
People are nuts.
@edh,
Two things you can try. If the dogs are in a particular spot against the fence, pee in a cup and pour it over the fence in that area. You’ll be “claiming” that area and they will probably move somewhere else. My rear, cattycorner neighbor’s dog would get stuck in the common corner and bark all night. The “claiming” trick worked.
The other thing is an ultrasonic anti bark device. You can blast them yourself with a hand held version, or put the outdoor version near the fence.
https://www.amazon.com/PetSafe-Outdoor-Ultrasonic-Deterrent-Collar/dp/B000UZNLGA?tag=ttgnet-20 seems to work.
I’ve got a couple of different handheld ones and my dog HATES them.
n
Ada was an attempt at standardization across DoD projects to cut costs of development and maintenance.
C was around, but every vendor had their own compiler and standard library, which didnt always offer portability like GCC does now.
GCC didn’t start rolling until the early 90s, and the GNU project lacked a kernel until Linux.
It’s bad when even the charities are pulling out.
n
@Nick
Thanks for the advice. They are inside a 2nd chain link fence (no sound attenuation) so the odor thing won’t work.
The ultrasonic device sounds promising.
But, since the complaint has been made Animal Control will send out two officers to issue a citation today or tomorrow. Hopefully that will be enough to solve the issue.
They will also visit me, supposedly, probably to judge if I am the unreasonable crazy guy on the corner…
My team inherited a 1.5 million lines of code project in 1987. We took over maintenance from the original developers, and part of the DoD contract was that new components wold be in Ada, and the rest would be ported from the original Fortran, VAX BASIC, and assembler code to Ada. On an “as possible” basis.
So we brought in a trainer and a dozen of us were trained in Ada. Those of us with OS kernel training recognized immediately that Ada was both a language and a simulated OS framework, layered inefficiently on top of the existing OS. It tried to do what VMS was already doing, but in a clumsy, awkward way. Supposedly, this OS modeling made Ada portable between all the different operating systems and all the hardware frameworks.
My boss has the distinction of being in a meeting, years later, with the Admiral who forced Ada on the DoD, and telling him Ada was a complete failure at its intended goal. As one of my MS CS profs put it: “Ada was a silver bullet to solve the problems with code development. It was an attempt to use a tool to solve a human problem. There are no silver bullets.”
This! Commercials are annoying enough without having to see the same two commercials at every commercial interruption. This is the worst problem with commercials on streaming services. They clearly lack advertisers.
Um, FOUR was suspicious. SEVEN is just nutz.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/german-elections-thrown-immense-chaos-after-wave-afd-deaths-rises-seven
n
re Prime Video, if there’s anything I want to watch enough to be worth the effort, I’ll torrent a copy and watch it without ads.
re Ada, it was well intentioned and had a few good ideas but in practice it was a mess, with bad compilers and a bad runtime. It was a combination of “design by committee” and “before its time”. But most significantly, as lpdbw said, it was a technical solution to a human problem.
See also: generating a program from the requirements document. Nice idea but it will never turn end users’ vague, contradictory, unworkable desires into a working, non-trivial program.
re dogs, what about putting diluted ammonia, or your own urine, in a super soaker and nailing them from your yard? With luck a visit from Animal Control will end the problem. That’s not likely.
re the mysterious AfD deaths, my understanding is that each of the politicians had information that could lead to the arrest and conviction of Hillary Clinton.
So, a Democrat initiative. Solution: throw more money at it.
Me, too. I like how the lore is expanding. Timothy Olyphant is creepy AF. I love it.
If you like Predators, watch “Killer of Killers” to see how that lore is expanded.
Ada grants built a lot of CS and Computer Engineering programs across the country in the 80s. The downside is that graduates emerged from those programs with skills only useful at DoD contractors unless, like GTE, the employer ran remedial C training.
“information that could lead to the arrest and conviction of Hillary Clinton.”
Don’t sleep in the same place two nights in a row, and don’t let your cell phone, car or your toothbrush out of your sight. Buy your own beer and liquor, and only drink once from a container when you open it.
The C suites think that’s what the AI monkey trick will finally provide after nearly 50 years of waiting.
Where I currently work, everything is fed into the AI, including emails and meeting transcripts.
Wasn’t ADA supposed to be the replacement for C, back in the day?
Just another .gov boondoggle.
ADA was supposed to be the replacement for Fortran and Cobol. But then ADA itself got replaced with C and C++. My buddy’s team was writing their Fighter jet simulator in C++ and then translating to ADA for the final code turn in back in the early 2000s.
I cannot imagine writing any real time system in C++ or Java, etc. Any real time system cannot allocate and free memory, that is just too difficult for real time. Just imagine doing a memory garbage collection or a heap collection while trying to land a plane or process a radar image of an approaching fighter at Mach 2.
When we got the first DirecTV DVR that was not based on Tivo, I found out from a friend that the entire DVR operating system was written in Java. You could tell when it ran out of memory as it would do a panic garbage collection for about 20 seconds. Then it would process all of the button pushes that you had been angrily pushing. You would end up somewhere in some program that you had never heard of because it was total crap.
Linux and development tools sold with Hookers and Steaks marketing killed the commercial Unix providers.
Windows simply made the commodity hardware readily available.
True in the 1990s and 2000s. But the Unix boxen in the late 1980s were actually mainframe replacements for compute limited programs like ours. Then Microsoft came out with Windows NT and killed those off.
We had Apollo Domain, HP UX, IBM RS/6000, DecWindows, Sun, and one more that I can not remember at the moment, workstations all over our shop. About 30 of the little monsters at one point. The costs were $15,000 to $75,000 each. It was a pipe dream that the big companies would buy these expensive workstations that ran a nerd language (Unix) for each of their engineers. We had X Windows running on all of them but it did not have any apps. And they all had token ring or ethernet. Our shop was a zoo as we tried to figure what was the best Unix box to support. And then Windows NT killed it all off when Windows 2000 came out.
The funniest thing was that every secretary and manager in our shop had a PC on their desk while we were arguing about the Unix boxen. The answer was there right in front of us and we did not realize it until the middle 1990s after we had spent tens of millions of dollars writing software for the Unix boxen. And then we did not have the money to port the Unix based software to Windows so it became abandonware. It was so funny that I wanted to cry when I realized the waste of time and money.
I do not have fresh water at my house today. The idiots installing AT&T fiber internet cable in our neighborhood have managed to hit our natural gas pipeline and our water feed pipes. Apparently the natural gas pipeline hit was quite amazing but I missed it.
Now our ditches are full of fresh water from the water pipeline hits. You gotta love it.
I am going to install Starlink at my house like my office building.
TiVo is a lot of Tcl code with event driven I/O.
Java can still leak memory even with garbage collection. It is really easy to do with the sockets API in particular.
“Bitcoin mine pushed this tiny Texas town too far—now they’re fighting back”
https://www.chron.com/news/article/hood-county-residents-take-bitcoin-incorporation-21027335.php
“Imagine sleeping on an airport runaway every night while the jet engines rumble, but the plane never takes off. Or maybe it’s more akin to standing at the edge of Niagara Falls for hours on repeat.”
“Dozens of residents just a heartbeat away from the constant hum of a Bitcoin mine say this is their reality.”
“MARA Holdings, also known as Marathon, operates the mine in an unincorporated area of Hood County – just one of a wave of cryptocurrency mines that set up shop in Texas in recent years.”
“Since Marathon acquired its Granbury data center in early 2024, residents have rallied for safeguards to protect their health and livelihoods.”
Uggh.
>>https://www.chron.com/culture/article/southwest-secondary-barrier-21026625.php
Access was behind a “Press and Hold” captcha … which wouldn’t complete for me even after several tries.
First time I’ve seen one of these so maybe I wasn’t ‘doing it correctly?’
No trouble bypassing it using archive.is
“EPA Fires Employees Who Signed Dissent Letter”
https://www.chemicalprocessing.com/environmental-protection/news/55313761/epa-fires-employees-who-signed-dissent-letter
“The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Aug. 29 terminated five employees and issued removal notices for four others who signed a declaration of dissent, according to Stand Up for Science, a nonprofit formed in February by a group of scientists concerned about political interference at the agency. Several employees were reprimanded and allowed to return to work, while others remain on administrative leave through mid-September, the organization said.”
“The nonprofit said the decision follows weeks of escalating conflict after 139 EPA workers were placed on leave July 3 for signing a petition criticizing Administrator Lee Zeldin’s leadership. On Aug. 8, EPA union contracts were terminated, leaving employees without standard labor protections, Stand Up for Science said.”
Actions have consequences.
Hopefully the EPA union will take the employees out on strike.
In fact, government employees should not be allowed to have unions.
“E-BAR: An Assistive Device Redefining Elderly Care”
https://www.asme.org/topics-resources/content/e-bar-an-assistive-device-redefining-elderly-care
“Understanding the risks and concerns faced by the elderly population is at the heart of a newly developed assistive robot from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The robot, called the Elderly Bodily Assistance Robot or “E-BAR,” has been designed to stabilize a person as they navigate precarious situations and catch them gently if they fall – much like a human would.”
Looks gawky and expensive. And tricky for brain limited elders.
Looks like it is made from 80/20 extruded aluminum. A prototype that will never see the light of day.
Yup, yup, and yup.
C++ and Java library objects have a lot going on behind the scenes.
The Benevolent Dictator does not allow C++ in the kernel. I’m actually surprised about Rust, but he probably had to bend on that one under pressure from the big corporate benefactors.
Linux put the real time kernel patches into the mainstream release at some point last year. Activating the capaibility requires a kernel rebuild from source, but every release now has the code.
We used the real time Linux kernel patches with C++ application level code at the tolling company to track/bill vehicles and had 99.95% reliability.
Of course, that wouldn’t be nearly good enough for military or healthcare applications.
Or self driving vehicles using similar optical tracking systems.
Cough.
Jerbs, son. Gotta have them jerbs.
And, sure, once the illegal immigrant -er- undocumented tradesman labor finishes building the data center the number of permanent jerbs might be a few dozen, but they’re jerbs.
“Boom, or impending bust?”
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2025/09/boom-or-impending-bust.html
“Ted Gioia is worried about the state of the economy, and the mixed signals from higher levels that are conflicting with data “on the ground”.”
Bust. Too many people are getting money from the feddies, some mostly legitimately like Social Security and Medicare. Others, many illegals and welfare moms, are getting welfare and Medicaid. The payments are approaching $3 trillion per year and the feddies are going broke in a hurry.
Was it Ben Franklin who said that that Republics / Democracies do well until the citizens figure out how to vote themselves money out of the national treasury ?
Trump is hoping on growing the USA out of this problem. Me, I doubt it.
IMHO, I see Trump policies and actions are causing almost all of the problems. Despite what he says or claims.
In fact, most of his actions seem to follow the philosophy of “If you tell people lies often enough, many will start to believe you.” And – “Don’t bother me with the facts, my mind is made up.”
Oh, totally. The US economy was booming until January of this year.
Oh, totally. The US economy was booming until January of this year.
Not here in the South. The oil patch has been barely hanging in there since 2010 or so. The building of the 23 LNG plants at an average cost of almost $10 billion each has kept things going somewhat.
But things have gotten slightly worse since Trump turned off the spigots of cash from the feddies and messed with the continuous flow of Chinese crap into Walmart.
Judging by the downvotes and Lynn’s comment, I’d say that some people’s sarcasm detectors need calibration.
The continuous flow of Chinese crap into Amazon warehouses was the bigger problem.
Walmart and Home Depot have buyers who know what they are importing to stock the store shelves.
The chinese flood of crep onto amazon, ebay, other person to person platforms, and their own platforms has contributed to the ‘enshitification of everything’ as someone put it. Dealing with the fraud (lies about specs, the miniature or too small items sold as full size,) and the general lack of quality creates a friction in peoples’ lives. It’s part and parcel to the transition from a high trust to a low trust society that is being forced on us by massive influx of low trust people, be they illegals or H1-Bs, or grad students.
The cancer comes from within too, with the elevation of the baser aspects of black culture, and the glorification of the 7 deadly sins.
Structures that supported western civilization and the march of progress have been attacked from every angle since WWI with progressivism leading the way for all the other ‘isms’. Ironic that progress and progressivism are so antithetical.
————–
WRT trump. Just had a conversation that he’s done more, not necessarily succeeded, but done more in the first 100+ days than just about anyone I can remember. Hillarity crashed out of her mandate to fix healthcare and never touched it again in 100 days. Point being, it feels like years, but it’s only been months. 3 ½ years to go, then Vance for 8…
—————
It was still 88F at 8pm, so it’s taking the heat a bit longer to get established now, but it’s lingering longer…
——-
time for bed.
n
WRT trump. Just had a conversation that he’s done more, not necessarily succeeded, but done more in the first 100+ days than just about anyone I can remember. Hillarity crashed out of her mandate to fix healthcare and never touched it again in 100 days. Point being, it feels like years, but it’s only been months. 3 ½ years to go, then Vance for 8…
It has only been eight months but it feels like years…
Judging by the downvotes and Lynn’s comment, I’d say that some people’s sarcasm detectors need calibration.
Sorry, I am worn out by the crazy this year. My sarcasm detector has given up. It never has worked very well though.
The chinese flood of crep onto amazon, ebay, other person to person platforms, and their own platforms has contributed to the ‘enshitification of everything’ as someone put it. Dealing with the fraud (lies about specs, the miniature or too small items sold as full size,) and the general lack of quality creates a friction in peoples’ lives. It’s part and parcel to the transition from a high trust to a low trust society that is being forced on us by massive influx of low trust people, be they illegals or H1-Bs, or grad students.
You know, the Chinese flood of crap started with the bad capacitors. And then it spread to everything that they could supplant in our society of good parts and tools that we used to build awesome stuff.
Lots of time out errors tonight, I’ll get with tech support in the morning if it continues. Until then, just keep hitting reload.
n
And Ctrl A / Ctrl C before you submit a comment,,,
How much again were the one-way tickets from Wuhan to Cali??
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/covid-wave-washes-over-california-100000071.html
Another day in Munich.
Yesterday we went to the zoo with the two children. It is a nice zoo. We spent almost $100.00 on entrance fees, snacks and some lunch. Leaving the zoo we bought a couple of stuffed animals for the two kids and some postcards, another $100.00.
I had to be careful and not do something that the kids mother would think was bribing, spoiling, or otherwise trying to sway the kids that we are better than their parents. A fine line to walk indeed as we are not in their biological chain anywhere. The kids do treat us like grandparents, which we are not, but it is a good feeling.
Today we will probably spend time at the house, may be take a short walk to a large park. There is a river running through the park where the river comes out from under a bridge, encounters a disturbance in the flow, natural or manmade I don’t know, and it creates a standing wave. People surf this wave.
Here is a video. Watch for several seconds where the video morphs into slow motion.
https://www.raymondthompsonphotography.com/Surfing.mov
At some point in the past someone died there surfing. The cord that attaches the person to the board got tangled on something and the person drowned before people could get her out of the water. The officials considered shutting the place down but the uproar voided that decision. Risks are risks, known, so not the city’s problem.
The Eisbachwelle in the English Garden.
https://youtu.be/SlTFogbnWS4
It was indeed closed to surfers following the tragic death, pending investigation of the cause, but it was reopened at the end of June 2025. The inquiry seems to have concluded it was a tragic, but freak, accident.
Don’t attempt it without a surfboard!
“Family” doesn’t require blood or marriage to be real.
Absolutely.
Sometimes called “family of the heart” or “family of choice”.
n
Very much true. We do not want to be considered as intrusive upon their biological family or be viewed as trying to insert ourselves in roles that are already taken.
Having been given away by my parents, and placed in the care of an abusive aunt and uncle, family can also sometimes be people with whom family ties do not exist. My father basically abandoned his biological family for another. Last time I saw my father was in 1973, next time was when he was starting the process of becoming worm food.
My mother was not much better as she had some issues that children conflicted. Later events seemed to confirm that she only kept in contact so she could have financial support when she aged. Her plans did not work as I quickly rejected her requests for money. I also reduced the contact to phone calls and no more trips to California or funding her visits to TN for the last 10 years of her life.
I did not mourn the loss of my father, mother, aunt or uncle. One of them, universally hated by the family, was met with “good riddance” when they passed.
One of our exchange students calls me “daddy” and I call her my daughter. I very much like her. She said when she got married I was walking her down the aisle. I quickly rejected that idea and said both I and her father could do the deed, but most certainly not me alone. She still has contact with her father and I would feel really awkward if he was not involved.