Hot and humid in central Florida, followed by hot and humid in Houston Tx. Probably. It was hot and humid in Orlando except when it was raining. The overcast helped too, but when the sun poked through, boy howdy it got hot. I’ve been wearing my lightweight boonie hat from Columbia to shade my head and keep the sun off my neck, and it helps alot.
Spent the day at Universal Resorts Orlando which apparently is what they call the properties here. Universal Studios, Citywalk, and Universal Islands of Adventure. It’s not actually very big, either in total, or for each park area. Citywalk is a public area of restaurants, shopping, and nightlife, while the others are classic theme parks. Well, Citywalk is a semi-public area anyway. They do search you and restrict you while you are there.
Did I mention that their parks use the same facial recognition hardware that the TSA does? The implementation was not complete yet, unlike Epic, so we did still need to have a printed ticket to scan for the lockers, and to move from IOA to US. Printed because there are times when your phone is locked up, in a locker that can only be opened by scanning your park ticket.
We at least walked through most of the various “lands” but spent most of our time in Potter world. See yesterday’s comments for more details.
It was expensive, tiring, and even the kids will be glad to be home. Got to see mom and sibling, spend time with my wife and kids, and see some fun attractions. I’ll be glad to be home too.
Stacking up the good times,
nick
Thanks for the reports, Nick. Safe journey home.
I will admit, it all sounds very much unlike anything I would want to do. However, I do have a ten-year-old nephew and an invitation from W1 to visit Disney Paris, so it might be in my future.
Telecoms. Back at base. The POTS copper connection has been out for about two weeks, since (surprise!) works in the street outside. Fortunately, we don’t rely on that line for internet or telework.
Today, the Telco technician finally appeared and admitted that the problem is on their side of the demarcation. Now they are sending a team to repair the break.
Not too bad so far. Only two clueless support line drones, and one other technician who simply didn’t show, but nevertheless marked the support ticket as “resolved”.
Had I not been teleworking anyway, I would have spent two work days at home waiting on them. Grr. Will now be calling Telco accounts and demanding a month off the bill.
I had to decode mostly AI-generated C++ enough to interface with C and request a few ‘extern “C”’ modifiers on function implementations from the original group.
In theory, one function call should set up a thread running a DBus server providing data to external processes.
In theory.
DBus. Fancy Lad Unix sockets. Hot Skillz!
@denis:
I agree, theme parks of the size Nick described are not to my taste, especially with fast, heavy-g rides (I won’t say rollercoasters). Living history-style is a different matter, and much preferred. Watching a craftsman make/fix an object, by hand, is fascinating.
As far as connectivity is concerned, I recently suffered a week of internet outage, which my ISP claims was due to a fibre cut. It took them a week to find and fix the problem, which required the replacement of 500 metres of multi-core fibre cable. In 2 attempts. I didn’t notice, not even when they finally fixed it – I’d been running a 4G connection throughout the outage. That 4G connection costs me an extra £35 a month, but it’s also useful for out-and-about connectivity. Diversity (some kinds of) FTW!
We don’t have POTS service, since the fibre went in 18 months ago. This is not a problem, cellphones work fine, and the landline was a spam call magnet, despite being TPS-registered (read: Do-Not-Call)
Talking of which, I need to visit Heathrow Airport to watch aircraft taking off and landing via ADS-B beaconing at 1090MHz. I can do it from home, but there’s a hill between me and LHR, so I lose visibility of anything below about 500 feet on approach in westerly operations, landing on RWY 27L and 27R. I don’t see planes taking off, either. I want to see!!!
G.
With Gay Days officially starting today (?) combined with actor Jonathan Joss getting killed a few days ago in what his husband claims was a hate crime incident here in Texas, security is going to be extra tight this week at gay interest venues in Orlando.
The Pulse Nightclub still stands as a kind of shrine.
Plus International Mall, Universal’s public areas, and Disney Springs inherited the Downtown Orlando gang problems when Disney put the knife to the city’s real nightlife ~ 30 years ago.
Our copper line has been out for nearly a week, probably due to weather.
The tech doesn’t want to go into the yard with the box without explicit permission because the homeowner is X-er female who seems to have come out on the short end of a bitter divorce.
The last time we had an outage and I accompanied the tech to take a look at the box, the owner came out of the house with a gun in her hand tucked into the kangaroo pocket of her hoodie. Apparently, I look like the ex husband.
No one answers the door this week. The owner is either not home or something happened that we probably don’t want to know about.
I’m the last one on the street with copper. We use it for fax and my Vanguard account security is tied to a voice call on the landline number.
The IRA and a big chunk of VTSMX is in that account so I don’t mess around with a phone number managed by an unregulated entity.
My rejected Masters thesis involved ADS-B.
At the time, we lived outside Portland, just upriver from the airport on the WA Side of the valley.
The “planespotting” was excellent in the valley, and the university sat on choice real estate, a former dairy farm on one of the tallest points in the county, which would have made for great tracking with the right antenna on the Ettus 1000 MHz range hardware.
I still have all of the gear, but I stopped carrying it in my laptop bag to avoid security hassles. Now that I think about it, however, I should have taken the gear to Palm Springs a couple of months ago.
The hotel where we stayed was just a few blocks from the airport.
For those of you unfamiliar with Joss’ work, he was most well known for voicing John Redcorn on “King of the Hill”.
Another voice from that series who has either passed or been recast in the reboot for political reasons.
I’m dreading Disney “King of the Hill”.
Agreed. Skansen in Stockholm was my favourite so far. https://skansen.se/en/ Knife-makers, glass-blowers, bakers, carpenters, shipwrights. Fantastic. Also älg (moose, elk, alces alces) and wolverines.
The Black Forest open-air museum is excellent. https://www.vogtsbauernhof.de/en
If I get a chance, I will visit Colonial Williamsburg, just to see if they are still hand-making rifles. https://youtu.be/X_O1-chxAdk
Planespotting. Enjoy!
The “Mound” beside Dublin Airport is legendary. https://maps.app.goo.gl/voeJpNt2VrdXGiCx7
I live less than 15km from a major airport, under one of the landing approach lanes, I can plane-spot from the comfort of the back garden. When W1 and I were still frequent flyers for work, we would always go for a window seat on the starboard side for the homeward leg, just to admire our home from the air en passant. Haven’t done that for a while…
Copper and fibre. The incumbent Telco installed fibre in the street and up to, but not into, our house about a year ago. They are pushing hard to get us to agree a hook-up to the glass so they can (a) recoup the installation investment and (b) get rid of the unreliable, high-maintenance old copper network. Unfortunately for them, we have, and are very happy with, cable internet and phone from one of their competitors. From Telco, we have only the one POTS line for technical reasons of compatibility with some old hardware. Repairing our broken old-tech copper line will probably cost them a fortune, as it appears they will now have to dig for it. Fortunately, there is still a legal “minimum service” obligation here on the incumbent to provide a POTS connection.
They are in fact pushing so hard regarding fibre that the customer support drone to whom I spoke yesterday about our line outage first tried to get me to agree to a fibre hook-up. I explicitly said “no”. (Call recorded for quality purposes? It is to laugh.) Nevertheless, I had an email in the inbox this morning giving me an appointment date for a fibre installation! Obviously from a “no-reply” email address. Now I can get back to calling the support line to cancel that “appointment” and to demand compensation for the protracted POTS outage, since at least 23 May.
I dunno, there’s nothing like writing a good old Fortran arithmetic go-to to give that feel of a job well done.
Gotos wreak havoc with branch prediction on a modern CPU.
GNU C has the capability to build an array of labels, providing something similar to the arithmetic goto in Fortran, but I don’t believe Microsoft includes it in their compiler.
My theory is that Microsoft relies heavily on Coverity scans for all of their code, and getting a goto past that tool is tough unless the code is very tight and local variables limited.
Up and moving, mostly caffienated. Kids are finally up.
WRT the little knife, I thought it was a gerber leaf, but that search turns up nothing. It’s part of their mini line. One blade, metal frame and scales, thin, short, fits in an altoids tin the long way with a bit to spare. I usually keep a leatherman mini in there too, but didn’t want to lose it if caught. I’ll look when I get home. The LST mini LOOKS like the knife, but is too big.
We’re on a one hour count down til leaving for the airport now.
I’m hoping mid morning isn’t crazy at MCO.
I’ll have more later, and maybe even a recap.
n
Fortran (specifically WATFOR) was my first programming language in college, about 1973..
It’s been so many years. I fogot about the GOTO syntax. Thanks for the reminider.
Last time I used Fortran was 1988.
My son (rising senior in Aerospace Engineering) is starting to work with a professor on a research project. He’ll do it this summer and all of next year. The professor told him to start getting familiar with Linux. I told the boy to ask which distros, so I could help him out. Professor came back with Fedora (no problem) and Ubuntu (ugh). I’m going to walk him through setting up vm’s on his laptop soon. I got him a Precision for school, so perfect for this task.
The professor also said they will be using Fortran.
Ugh. I was so glad I have Clear the last time at MCO. Crazy airport.
Fedora.
If you can still return the Precision, get a ThinkPad.
We fly through TPA when we go to Orlando.
The “Spanx” airside, C, is relatively new and built with the TSA in mind. Plus the most popular airport restaurants are out there, including the last Goody Goody in Tampa, so TSA is a little more relaxed with the airport offering dining passes to the airside.
D will open in a few years, but that will for international flights
The downside to TPA is the drive. OTOH, La Teresita is less than 10 minutes from the rental car facility.
The most snarled piece of code I ever saw was the 300 lines or so of innermost subroutine of Fortran in an aerodynamic analysis code called, appropriately, kernel. No comments. Probably written in Fortran IV or F66 originally, though we were using a later compiler.
Multiple loops, arithmetic goto’s, computed goto’s, etc., etc..
I wasn’t tasked to check it out, but out of curiousity I ran RATFOR and a couple of other code unwrappers and prettifiers against it, and they all choked horribly.
I suspect a bug, but never got a chance to prove it.
The code was 20yo and worked, and it was mission critical, so no-one wanted or was allowed to mess with it.
Apple had some gnarly Perl code in their development tools when the first C APIs hit for the iPhone. We puzzled over a bug in one script for a week until Apple finally patched that version of XCode.
Steve Jobs was famously against allowing third party C development on the iPhone and only reluctantly released the tools in late 2008
C on the iPhone was a wreck until Apple released the 3 GS with enough memory to cover Windows developers tendencies to abuse the stack and ignore MVC philosophy.
Sitting in the United lounge. Food is fantastic. Walked thru check in, tsa pre, and the tram. Lounge is filling up, but the airport was empty when we arrived.
Mostly business travelers. Mid week travel rocks.
N
One other aspect of the line wait time discussion we were having yesterday, is that they want to sell the fast pass alternative to skip the lines. They would like everybody to pay to agreements. So there must be some inconvenience.
‐——-
Headed to the gate. Homeward bound
N
What they want to sell is the annual payment.
The TSA would be over tomorrow if we really wanted it to be over.
People turned into weenies after 9/11. Covid reinforced the national weeniedom.
Take off your shoes, and line up for your jab containing God knows what.
Oops. I read that in a hurry, and it parsed as “… maybe even a crap.”
Hope springs eternal. For everything else, there is Andrews’ Liver Salts.
I dunno, there’s nothing like writing a good old Fortran arithmetic go-to to give that feel of a job well done.
I have always been sad that the “COME FROM” statement was never implemented in Fortran.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMEFROM
My son (rising senior in Aerospace Engineering) is starting to work with a professor on a research project. He’ll do it this summer and all of next year. The professor told him to start getting familiar with Linux. I told the boy to ask which distros, so I could help him out. Professor came back with Fedora (no problem) and Ubuntu (ugh). I’m going to walk him through setting up vm’s on his laptop soon. I got him a Precision for school, so perfect for this task.
The professor also said they will be using Fortran.
Today’s Fortran is not like yesterday’s Fortran. Free format input, Data Structures disguised as configured data types, Modules, etc. All implemented in a very clumsy grafted on syntax. No thanks, I will take C++ which has all those things and many more.
Fortran (specifically WATFOR) was my first programming language in college, about 1973..
It’s been so many years. I fogot about the GOTO syntax. Thanks for the reminider.
Last time I used Fortran was 1988.
I started using Fortran in 1975 at the tender age of 14. I started using Basic in 1972 at the tender age of 12 when I was playing with the Lunar Lander Basic code on the Univac 1108.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Lander_(video_game_genre)
The last time I used Fortran was yesterday. I will be using Fortran again today.
I learned yesterday that I started my 800,000+ line Fortran to C++ project three years ago. I found several common blocks on the C++ side that were out of date.
Pearls Before Swine: Siri
https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2025/06/04
Oh yeah, that is the intermediate phase of AI when it starts to sass you.
1973 for me as a HS senior. I think it was an IBM 360. A packaging plant that ran our card decks.
In other news, I turned 70 today. Time really flys. I tried retiring from MrsAtoz’s company last June, but she keeps pulling me back in.
Happy Birthday!
“Into the Light (Out of the Dark, 2)” by David Weber and Chris Kennedy
https://www.amazon.com/Into-Light-Out-Dark-2/dp/0765366924?tag=ttgnet-20/
Book number two of a three book series of an alien invasion science fiction series. I reread the well printed and well bound MMPB published by Tor in 2021. I just bought the third book in the series and will be reading it soon for the first time as the second book ends on a cliffhanger.
I’ve got vampires in my alien invasion science fiction book ! Prince Vlad Draculya, aka Vald the Impaler, lives ! Or some variant of living as he has been composed of nanobots since the middle 1400s. He does not drink blood but he did kill thousands of Turkish muslim invaders into his beloved eastern Europe in the 1400s. And his nanobots are solar powered so he does not eat and is virtually immortal.
The first book in the series detailed an invasion by the Shongairi in which they used multiple kinetic weapons from orbit on every city on Earth of 100,000+ people and all military bases. Half of the human population of Earth died in a matter of minutes. Due to the fact that the Shongairi space ships could only attain six times the speed of light, their understanding of Earth technology was very outdated and they did not know that we had progressed from an agrarian society into a very industrialized society.
As the first Shongairi troop ships were landing on the Earth, they were destroyed by F-22 stealth fighter jets. As soon as the F-22 jets landed at their hidden airfields, those were also destroyed using kinetic weapons. After the Shongairi troops rampaged through the Earth population remnants and killed half of the survivors from the initial attack, the vampires appeared out of Eastern Europe. The vampires were virtually indestructible and rode back up on the outside of their landers to the Shongairi space ships in Earth orbit. They then boarded the space ships and proceed to kill all the Shongairi invaders in orbit.
Now the horribly damaged human population on Earth has to rebuild, both the population and the facilities. But they have an advantage, the now empty Shongairi space ships and several Galactic Hegemony neural educators. Vlad Dracula has taken one of the interstellar space ships with a crew of several hundred and is headed 200+ light years to the Shongairi home planet to pay back some of the damage that they did to Earth. And one of the few remaining state governors of the USA has become the USA President and is planning on creating a one world government to fight the Galactic Hegemony.
David Weber has an excellent website at:
http://www.davidweber.net/
Chris Kennedy has a website at:
https://chriskennedypublishing.com
My rating: 5 out of 5 stars (reread so 5 stars now)
Amazon rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars (2,907 reviews)
Lynn
In other news, I turned 70 today. Time really flys. I tried retiring from MrsAtoz’s company last June, but she keeps pulling me back in.
Happy Birthday !
Family is the worst. I told my wife that I was thinking about retiring when I turn 65 in a few weeks and she told me that we would talk about retirement when I turn 67. My father heartily agreed with my wife and said that I would be bored in retirement. The real problem is that I generate money for both of them so they are biased.
Happy birthday and many happy returns, Mr A to Z! Time for the wife and daughters to spoil you!!!
In other news, I turned 70 today. Time really flys. I tried retiring from MrsAtoz’s company last June, but she keeps pulling me back in.
Happy Birthday, youngster!
“The housing market as a bellwether for retirement”
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2025/06/the-housing-market-as-bellwether-for.html
“It looks like the double whammy of inflation on house prices, plus much higher mortgage rates, is hitting the property market very hard.”
“There’s a total of $698 billion worth of homes for sale in the U.S., up 20.3% from a year ago and the highest dollar amount ever.”
“Another Redfin analysis found that there are nearly 500,000 more home sellers than buyers in today’s housing market. The fact that so many homes are being listed without buyers out there to purchase them, along with continually rising prices, explains why there are 12 figures worth of unsold inventory sitting on the market.”
I have noticed this. This is the recipe for stagflation.
One of my bond funds did some scary things last week which made me wonder how many derivative insurance arrangements backing so-called “stable value” funds paid off.
A lot of paper wealth, including home equity, is going bye bye soon.
My wife makes noise about leaving the VA, but I subsidized her in private practice, even unemployed, and I’m not eager to return to those days.
If I were an MD looking to leave corporate medicine (VA is close enough), but I didn’t want to commit to specific private practice, I’d consider contacting all the concierge docs in the area and offering my service as locum tenens. Even concierge docs need vacations and CME.
After I typed that, I did a little google and discovered there’s a placement service for that.
Here we go again:
Migrants sent to notorious El Salvador prison must get a chance to challenge their deportation, judge rules
Thank you, Old School Marm Roberts, for sitting on your azz. tRump must ignore this. Judge Lurch has no power to do this. If this doosh and the other judges CAN do this, there is no USA and no Constitution. Remember the Dumbocrats squawking about “we got fighter jets and nukes“ when plugs The Last was POTUS? Guess who has them now? Enforce your ruling, Lurch. I can hear the cries of Constitutional Crisis already.
We get at least a half dozen calls for locum positions a week on the house line. Finding someone to take a few weeks in Austin is not a problem. The calls all end up being for jobs somewhere in WA or OR.
I guess they figured if my wife was naive enough to willingly go there once, she’d do it again.
The last call for WA/OR was for Grants Pass.
Dutch Bros.!
Other than Natasha Bedingfield at The Britt on July 6, there’s nothing in the Northwest that makes me want to spend the Summer up there.
https://britt.org/events/natasha-bedingfield/
My wife makes noise about leaving the VA, but I subsidized her in private practice, even unemployed, and I’m not eager to return to those days.
My cardiologist group of doctors just got bought by a Venture Capitalist firm. They just hired six more cardiologists with the VC money.
There is a lot of money chasing deals out there.
“Hakeem Jeffries makes worrying threat against ICE agents as protesters interfere with operations”
https://www.theblaze.com/news/hakeem-jeffries-makes-worrying-threat-against-ice-agents-as-protesters-interfere-with-operations
That is very close to being arrested for threats to dox all of the ICE officers.
Home. Some turbulence on the way out of MCO after sitting for 40 mins, baking on the runway, then turbulence on the way into IAH, but not that much really. Some rain pouring down in Orlando, and a bit in Houston. Just enough to wet the bags, really.
Stopped to pick up the dog, so the whole pack is together again.
Wife’s apple watch says were were doing more than 20K steps per day this week. I’m fine, and even my feet are better, but she’s wrecked. My back hurts, but that’s normal.
House and everything look fine. Wet, but fine.
More later but now, I need some dinner.
n
Money has nowhere to go.
Private equity in medicine is dicey. Doctors aren’t nearly the problem as much as staff stupidity.
I half joke that I would want the power to fire staff if my wife went private again, but, beyond the subsidy out of my pocket, private practice puts all of my non-401(k)/IRA investments at risk.
Apparently some people just got online yesterday.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-14779827/disney-world-fans-boycott-theme-park-closing-tom-sawyer-island.html
There are a lot of good reasons to boycott but this ain’t one…
n
Semi-literate “journalism” for the win!
Who the (bleep) is Lightning McQueen? Oh.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_McQueen
Seems like a fair trade. /sarc
Draining that river will be complicated. The banks in some parts are extremely unstable, most notoriously in the vicinity of The Haunted Mansion.
The “elevator” room in Florida does not actually move due to the high water table. The Otis branded threshhold plate is part of the illusion.
Iger will leave quite a mess for his successor and the new owners to fix.
“Petabyte-Class E2 SSDs Poised to Disrupt Warm Data Storage”
https://www.storagereview.com/news/e2-ssd-form-factor?mc_cid=4168d1ce08
“Once reserved primarily for archival use, large-scale data lakes are now asked to support increasingly active workloads. New AI applications, analytics pipelines, and emerging digital services are driving up the “temperature” of previously considered cold data. The result is a growing middle ground, where data is accessed too frequently for HDDs to handle efficiently, but not hot enough to warrant the cost of performance SSDs. E2 is a new flash form factor to address this emerging “warm” storage tier. It is designed to bridge the gap between high-capacity hard drives and traditional enterprise SSDs, offering a more practical balance of performance, density, and cost.”
A freaking petabyte hard drive in SSD format !
I took the boat ride this time and the amount of land occupied by TS island is crazy. It has to be the most underused piece of the whole park, even more than the lone smoker’s bench along the railroad on the walkway from Barnstormer to Space Mountain.
I’m a bit surprised that they still have Autopia or the Speedway, when Disneyland replaced it years ago. Why not steal that? It was fun to do the ride with the kids this trip though.
I also don’t think they will drain the Rivers, as that rendering shows a big river around one edge.
Oh, and Big Thunder Mountain RR was closed for reno while we were there. It’s not clear on the rendering, but if they connect the circle so you can do Big Thunder and then continue on around to Cars, and then Toonland, it would help. Big Thunder is at the end of a path, and you have to backtrack to get back to the other attractions… very bad flow.
n
“I have always been sad that the “COME FROM” statement was never implemented in Fortran.”
It is implemented in FORTRAN MV, the control language for the multi-verse. Recursion is not recommended.
Behind Big Thunder is a wetlands preserve protected by state law.
Neither DeSantis nor his most likely successors are going to cut a deal with Iger or D’Amaro.
I’m just about done with book five of the Welcome to the Multiverse series. It’s another LitRPG series where for reasons people get sucked into a situation that is much like being inside a role playing game. It’s not a bad series, although one of the books was mostly about “grinding” as it’s known in the gaming community, which makes the book a bit of a grind to read.
I’m interested and will finish out the series. If you like gaming, you might like LitRPG.
————–
I think I’m headed to bed. It’s been a long week.
n
Autopia is still at Disneyland. Sponsored by Honda.
The Tomorrowland Speedway isn’t going anywhere. You answered your own question as to why.
My rejected Masters thesis involved ADS-B.
I’ve been a “feeder” since 2018. Certainly is an amazing concept and has been forked into several other projects, shipping etc..
I have set up shipping/AIS, but there is a few hills between my location and the coast so reception isn’t great.. I need raise the antenna.. a lot. 😀
In other news, I turned 70 today.
Congrats.. I hit that magical number in April.. Still coming to terms with it.
Congrats to all reaching some birthday. Remember, age is just a number. Condition is more important.