Whoohoo, supposed to be another few days of clear. At some point, we’ll be worried about it being too dry, but for now, it’s glorious. There were eventually a few puffy clouds in the sky, and some variable breezes, but it was mostly blue sky and moderate temps. Moar plz.
I slept in a bit, then did some work for my client. After that and some auction stuff, I finally got out of the house into the great weather. I headed to the shop to continue breaking down the “environmental monitoring stations” into scrap, salvage, and “take it to the next hamfest” piles. If I wait until afternoon, I can stand in front of my roll up door, with the truck backed in as a workbench, and be out in the weather but still in the shade. It’s nice.
I did finish the breakdown. Harvested some good parts for the hamfest, my own use, and to sell on ebay. I ended up with a box of “high quality” boards too. That means they have gold, lots of gold, on them. Gold pins, gold ground planes, gold plated connectors. When you build for .gov contracts, you literally gold plate it. To be fair, it’s radiation monitors and some other stuff which might be pretty important, and it’s in an enclosure that will let air in. Gold doesn’t corrode and conducts really well.
Modern electronics still gold plate stuff but they use super thin plating, and lesser alloys of gold. These boards are the good stuff. Rich color, heavy plating. Radios, healthcare, and commercial telcom and networking still get the good stuff. Recyclers know this and pay better for older boards and modern telcom boards.
I’ll also harvest the pins and gold plated connectors. There are a lot of pins because each of the half dozen modules connected to a backplane. I filled a gallon bucket with the multiconnectors and now I need to pull the pins from the blocks and snip them to just the gold plated part. I’ll put the pins in a jar. That will take some time, and I’ll probably do it at my desk at night while watching youtube.
I loaded everything on the truck, then threw a bunch of catalytic converters on top. I’ll try to move those today too. Should be a good payday at the scrap yard.
I’ve also got one pickup. I finally won a blacksmith’s post vise. Wanted one for years, and two were in auctions last week. Sometimes it goes in spurts or clumps like that. Long term desire is to set up a forge and do a little blacksmithing. Used to be, every farm had a forge and someone who knew how to use it for simple stuff. I’ve bid on a couple of farm forges, but they don’t come up very often, and they are very desirable.
Who knows if I’ll ever get a forge set up, but I’ll work on collecting the stuff just in case. I have a lot of projects and plans like that.
Stack some stuff that you can DO STUFF with.
nick
Monday. Good morning!
The daylight savings gremlins made me get up earlier than my body clock this morning. Grr. It was sunny, now it is looking threatening. Pathetic fallacy, much?
Back to work after my holidays. Hundreds of emails through which to wade. Joy.
Lucky you. Well wear! Do you feel like posting me the other one? (Only half joking, the freight would be prohibitive, no doubt.) I have been looking for one for ages.
I saw a new semi-dystopian McDonalds four years ago in Arkansas. One cashier, but you could still see people working in the kitchen.
The McDonalds near Animal Kingdom on the Disney property is always a glimpse of the future. Three years ago, when we stopped, the only people working there were cleaning tables in between running food out from the kitchen.
Corporate store, completely rebuilt during the pandemic, and an important part of hurricane response logistics in Florida.
The only people we saw working there.
I’m sure there were others.
Maybe.
I wonder if they will have repurposed sex robots when we stop next month.
@denis, both sold for only $75USD plus 25% tax and fees. Crazy low price. One was the same auction I got the lathe and welding machine, the other was on the far northwest side of town. I got the “win” notification while actively bidding on the other, so I almost ended up with two. Dropped out just in time.
—-
wow, everyone is selling sterling objects in the auctions. I haven’t seen this many plates, candlesticks, and serving dishes ever.
—
64F at 6:40am.
I’m drinking one cup of coffee and going back to bed for an hour. Late night, fitful sleep. I think I was just very sore. I’m certainly stiff and sore this morning.
n
Teaching all week, every day this week. Friday evening, as a kind of capstone, I get to lead a politically fraught meeting. I’m normally pretty good at handling meetings efficiently, but a few of the people involved suffer from terminal cases of “main character syndrome” and just don’t know when to shut up.
I am looking forward to Saturday…
Didn’t the EU actually decide to drop the time-change? They’ve just failed to implement it?
Every year, I see surveys that the vast majority of the population wants to stop. It’s only a question of what time we settle on. Yet, somehow, politicians just cannot actually get up the never to make the change.
I think they want it to stop because it’s the only thing they have ever known and they have no direct experience of WHY it was implemented.
It’s DARK on the bus stop for your kid waiting for school. It’s dark coming home from work.
I lived in AZ where we never changed, and it was a pain keeping track of everyone else.
n
Bring an hourglass which lasts 3 minutes, or whatever you think appropriate.
If that won’t work because the same person starts babbling on every point, tell them that each person has a total of five minutes to speak. Once they’ve used their time, they are not allowed to talk any more.
If there’s a problem with constant interruptions, bring a “speaking token”, anything from a stick to a teddy bear. Other than the chair (you), no one can talk if they are not holding the token.
If none of that works because the people won’t follow the rules, announce in advance that the meeting will be terminated immediately with no resolutions at all upon the third violation, and the violators’ names will be disseminated as the reason that nothing was accomplished.
And if even that won’t work, bring a hammer and bash in the face of the first offender. The rest will fall in line quickly and you’ll have a productive meeting.
It’s becoming clear why SteveF works from home…
n
Except for the last, those are decent techniques for handling meetings, assuming a moderate level of maturity and self control of the participants. If they are all proper adults, the techniques are not needed. If a sizable fraction of the participants are functionally children or subhumans, well, that’s what the hammer is for.
Relevant to something briefly discussed here a few days ago: Greater America
Yeah, I do know the tricks, or enough of them. Normally, when I take over meetings, we are done in half the time, and yet everyone feels like they got their words in.
That’s with reasonable people. In this group, I have:
The other 30 or so people are all ok, but those four…well, it will be a fun evening.
Brad, I have the solution for you: Bring an assistant to the meeting. When one of the problematic individuals starts talking and won’t take the hint to stop, the assistant walks right up to them and (your choice) leans into their face and starts screaming at top volume or sprays Liquid Ass ™ into their mouth.
You brought back Gravatars. ‘Nuff said, hero.
I inspired my Sweet Summer PaPa. I love you, Dad!
I can’t wait for the American Canal in Panama.
I’ve known a person or two like that. I can still recall the despair I felt when it would start.
I got yelled at once for simply getting up, excusing myself, and walking out.
But what were they gonna do, make me sit through another meeting that guy?
Some context is necessary, and institutional knowledge is often lost. HOWEVER. It should be brief and relevant.
I’m glad I don’t do meetings anymore. That’s one thing I don’t miss.
n
Hmm, I’m sure everyone was thinking “stroke”.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-15690719/NASA-astronaut-medical-crisis-space-evacuation.html
n
If the public is paying by the gram to boost you ass into space, your expectation of privacy should be about nil and codified as such in your contract.
This little incident—no fault imputed to the astronaut—cost millions of dollars and will cost more as it is investigated. If medical “privacy” is going to be used to keep things under wraps then let’s just bounce him out of NASA and not worry about what happened or what future effects may be expected. We’ve flown thousands of astronaut-days and there is no reason to believe it’s flight related at all. Not worth spending more money.
I wonder what KitKat bars are going for in the alleys of Albania today?
How to sell gyro’s for $20 each:
https://greekreporter.com/2026/03/30/e17-souvlaki-high-stakes-welcome-uss-gerald-ford/
—
California prices, almost.
“No Kings” in a nutshell:
EPIC, (Nay, LEGENDARY) Post Takes Every No Kings Rally Mouth-Breathing, Chest-Thumping Protester APART
Congress grifters suck dead bunnies.
Brought the chickens to the metal run in the yard. I had a plastic food container in my hand, which caused most of them to trot energetically after me. Half followed me into the run (an almost feline following me ahead of me) and then stood in the plastic dish that I was going to put their treat into. -sigh- Got them out of the way and dumped in the leftovers, a highly desirable mix of meat and vegetables, and they started gobbling. (There wasn’t enough of the leftovers for a meal for me but just the right amount for some staaaaarving chickens.)
One of the other birds saw this and wanted her share but couldn’t figure out how to get into the run. I helped her.
Brown Hen, Grey Head, and the last young bird didn’t even notice because they were pecking at ticks or whatever. Once I got them to the door of the run and they noticed the ring of butts surrounding something, they immediately realized what was going on and ran up to crowd in and get their share.
Chickens are decent entertainment, at least if your standards are low enough.
Wraps cost about that much at The Kebab Shop just across the freeway from work.
California chain out of San Diego.
Plus, the Warrior class has a completely different concept of “cheap” than civilians.
“Dilbert Owl Strip Hilarious Conclusion”
https://www.reddit.com/r/dilbert/comments/1s7d1zk/dilbert_owl_strip_hilarious_conclusion/
Yes, both hilarious and offensive ! A twofer.
“Deviled Eggs”
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglszf38gWUM6DTuVlBdLEFmxS3xhxovBs7wYW1oGFkJCVY-SH4g44rLJuJ_g4fZpvYdheH9zJAB4wKuF3ftjtU52xgpvPY2cHwadtg-F0qk5L3_ltEraf6hLqwI1V5cKPyNKP1BPEzU_m2PAFFYz53O2nLYxzLuRuOn3i0guuNhMab3vgvRydnsDfTdog/s600/Meme%20-%20deviled%20eggs.png
Hat tip to:
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2026/03/memes-that-made-me-laugh-305.html
“Russian Roulette Salad Dressing”
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwwMR-sZgXTvbqH3E83S4-lJYcEnI5XuDj2Dc6GgMruyFGycRSDJKs52VTDkdgF41zT2tmNMmiJWrkf23EhdHVhjK_eq1YtPAjac9uuU3fMniUA4ovm9KXEPu4omWJ1uHRQ-x4zLZ55iF-6YgvIcyZgz073Fa530NgNv11rGH8Rq3LvxSRy9IS0TYBeNc/s750/Meme%20-%20pressurized%20salad%20dressing.png
Hat tip to:
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2026/03/memes-that-made-me-laugh-305.html
BC: Business Opportunity
https://www.gocomics.com/bc/2026/03/30
Yup, I have known a few people like this.
“One of Texas’ tallest and most harrowing bridges prepares to reopen”
https://www.chron.com/news/article/rainbow-bridge-texas-reopen-22159657.php
“It’s been closed since March 2025.”
Man that looks steep.
Crude Oil for May delivery is up to $104 per US Barrel.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CL%3DF/
“Chess, Police, Cutting Ties”
https://areaocho.com/chess-police-cutting-ties/
“Donald Trump has garnered a reputation for being a fool that doesn’t understand politics. I think that opinion is accurate, as it pertained to his first term. He was too trusting and took people at their word. That doesn’t work in DC. Out politicians are simply not moral or ethical people- and I’m talking about BOTH parties here.”
“However, I think that has changed. He is giving people what they expect to see and is playing them for the self interested crooks that they are.”
“He wanted NATO to pay for their own defense. There was no way to get that to happen while being nice. For too long, the US has been buying quasi-friendship by throwing barrels of money around. This is how Europe could afford free heathcare and other social programs (well, that and gas costing more than $20 per gallon, thanks to taxation).”
“Instead of the status quo of, “Won’t you please stop taking our money?” he threatened to invade Greenland. He clearly never intended to do so, or it would have happened. Ask Venezuela how that works. Now, though, NATO is so worried about Trump’s invasion, they are once again providing for their own protection.”
I wonder what Trump’s exit strategy is ? He and his family will be hounded by the dumbrocrats for the rest of their lives.
“Teaching all week, every day this week. Friday evening, as a kind of capstone, I get to lead a politically fraught meeting. I’m normally pretty good at handling meetings efficiently, but a few of the people involved suffer from terminal cases of “main character syndrome” and just don’t know when to shut up.”
I don’t do meetings. “Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable…About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business (J-B Lencioni Series)” by Patrick M. Lencioni
https://www.amazon.com/Death-Meeting-Leadership-Solving-Business/dp/0787968056?tag=ttgnet-20
“C++26 is done! — Trip report: March 2026 ISO C++ standards meeting (London Croydon, UK)”
https://herbsutter.com/2026/03/29/c26-is-done-trip-report-march-2026-iso-c-standards-meeting-london-croydon-uk/
“Reflection is by far the biggest upgrade for C++ development that we’ve shipped since the invention of templates. For details, see my June 2025 trip report and my September 2025 CppCon keynote: “Reflection: C++’s decade-defining rocket engine.” From the talk abstract:”
“C++26 has important memory safety improvements that you get just by recompiling your existing C++ code with no changes. The improvements come in two major ways.”
“No more undefined behavior (UB) for reading uninitialized local variables. This whole category of potential vulnerabilities disappears in C++26, just by recompiling your code as C++26. For more details, see my March 2025 trip report.”
“In C++26, we also have language contracts: preconditions and postconditions on function declarations and a language-supported assertion statement, all of which are infinitely better than C’s assert macro.”
“std::execution is what I call “C++’s async model”: It provides a unified framework to express and control concurrency and parallelism. For details, see my July 2024 trip report. It also happens to have some important safety properties because it makes it easier to write programs that use structured (rigorously lifetime-nested) concurrency and parallelism to be data-race-free by construction. That’s a big deal.”
And we still use Visual C++ 2015 because it supports back to Windows XP.
Bjarne needs to retire. Instead, he’s inflicting himself on the students of another institution of higher learning.
TAMU needed 12 years to figure out that Stroustrup wasn’t an educator. I wonder how long it will take Columbia.
Mar-a-Lago. Florida will have Republicans in charge of all three levels of Government for at least another eight years, and most likely beyond.
Mar-a-Lago. Florida will have Republicans in charge of all three levels of Government for at least another eight years, and most likely beyond.
After Trump is President, if he is in the USA, they will drag him into corrupt deep blue strongholds like NYC for the rest of his life for false and bogus charges.
5% grade, which is steep, but not as bad as that photo would suggest.
Buy a Caribbean island and call it the People’s Democratic Republic of Donald. No extradition to nations which wish to persecute/prosecute The Donald.
XP came out in the ought’s, EOL was 2019 … even Apple doesn’t support an OS after 5 years.
Unless it is a huge chunk of your customer base gently tell them to get their act together and move on.
And Win10/11 are so much better than WinXP/7 </sarc>
I was sitting on the front deck today. Soaking up some sun and feeling the UVs. Needed to set my beer down so swapped it to the right hand and put it on the glass top table.
Which is covered with pollen. Mostly oak, I think. I just washed the table a couple of days ago.
Anyway. I wiped up some pollen and rubbed it on my thigh. Feels like talcum powder.
I wonder what came first? Pollen or chalk dust?
No, but Lynn has to work with what the industry uses out there after all.
Supporting multiple versions of compilers has to be an (expensive) PITA.
OK, I think that I could live here outside Bryan, Texas at 5792 Andert Rd, Bryan, TX 77808.
7/5/6 with 6/4/2 in the 4,114 ft2 main house, on 4.07 acres for $1,400,000. Plus 2,000 ft2 barn.
https://www.har.com/homedetail/5792-andert-rd-bryan-tx-77808/13482555?lid=10570740
7.7 miles to HEB, 8.4 miles to Chikfila and Walmart, 10.5 miles to Sams Club.
@lynn, that does look nice. A batting cage in the garage. Bougie as hell!
——-
Turns out, there are some rules now about selling catalytic converters to the scrapyard. You have to have a receipt, even for new in the box. Unless you are a licensed auto recycler, then you’re golden. And aftermarket cans are smaller and thus worth less money.
I need to find 11 invoice. I wonder if there is a way to search inside pdf’s while in a directory. I could put all the invoices in one folder, then search…
Otherwise, I’m not getting my money back. Waited too long.
I did get another $128 for the other scrap, and I haven’t sold any of the boards or gold stuff.
And I picked up my blacksmith’s vise. Dang it’s heavy, and looks hand forged too.
Time to make some dinner. Pork chops on the grill, I think.
n
@nick
Couple chunks of 2×4 and some cheap electrical parts: Gear Head lamp made from Genuine Catalytic Converter from 2020 Mustang
No, but Lynn has to work with what the industry uses out there after all.
Supporting multiple versions of compilers has to be an (expensive) PITA.
A few of my users still run Windows XP, the industrial version, on very expensive process equipment.
What is going to be expensive is that I will be including both 32 bit and 64 bit versions of my calculation engine in version 17 of my software. My calculation engine is currently 771,399 lines of Fortran and 50,000 lines of C++, all will be converted to C++ in version 17 if my plans go correctly.
Why both 32 bit and 64 bit ? Because my calculation engine is currently a huge Win32 DLL that people can include in their custom software or Microsoft Excel.
Win11 is decent. I mean, it’s shitty in its own special way. But not much worse than going from XP to Win7.
Because of the constantly updating and rebooting all on its own self I don’t think Win11 is stable. The nagging to log in to a MS account is real annoying. Looking at what the Pihole blocks is just insane.
Then the smart guys broke networking. I don’t have passwords on my machines for network shares. Never have, no idea where it set it up.
Kiwi had sat for a few months turned off. I turned it on and LO!!! it sees the Desktop of both Emu and Moa. So, yeah, I didn’t fat finger and break something.
Pfffttt… I made sure I had a decent back up of Kiwi and installed Mint. . Bought a Pi 3b whatever and installed PiCorePlayer. Moa is shut down. Music plays. Mint isn’t perfect.
But looking at the traffic on the Pihole? Much less.
Mint has oddities. To me. But it’s an entirely different OS.
After Windows XP, WHQL became mandatory, first in 64 bit Vista and then in both the 32 and 64 bit versions of Windows 7.
A lot of vendors didn’t want to bother with the time or the expense to get their drivers certified. I imagine a lot of process instrumentation hardware was suddenly orphaned.
was suddenly orphaned.
Only if they didn’t just keep running XP. I’ve got my box to run the vinyl cutter. I’d bet most control PCs were dedicated to just the one task anyway. My wife still carries a 3 ½ ” floppy drive because she occasionally runs into lighting control or building control systems that require it. Some of those control systems were REALLY freaking expensive, and just never get replaced. There is money for new carpet, or paint, but rarely money for something that is just doing its job. Hotels are particularly bad about this.
n
The Sunshine Skyway bridge at the mouth of Tampa Bay is 4%. That is friggin’ scary in bad weather.
The old bridge was 5%. When it fell, the driver of this car hit the brakes when he saw the lights on the Greyhound bus in front of him suddenly disappear.
https://www.wusf.org/show/florida-matters/2015-05-05/florida-matters-sunshine-skyway-bridge-disaster-35-years-later
The lighting system at the Nickelodeon TV studios at Universal Orlando ran on 3.5″ floppies. They probably still have the control system even though Nickelodeon is long gone.
“President Trump’s Ballroom Is Cover for the Biggest AI Data Center in the World”
https://jdrucker.substack.com/p/president-trumps-ballroom-is-cover
“FDR did it. GWB did it. Now DJT is doing it and this is the most consequential White House move in decades.”
I knew it, the new big ballroom is just a cover for the real project.
Hat tip to:
https://thelibertydaily.com/
Biggest? I don’t know about that, but a data center is a possibility.
The ballroom is badly needed. IIRC, the planning went back to the Obama years.
Anything they tell me I should be concerned about gets an automatic downgrade in my “circle of give a shite.”
n
Sometimes I forget. The conditioning is very strong.
n
In my experience, which is limited but not non-existent, if .gov was gonna build a big AI center, they’d do it in a business park in Maryland.
Or in a 10 story deep hole in the middle of a cornfield in Wisconsin.
After all, we’re talking about a system that had a contractor build a shaker table big enough to simulate combat conditions for the freaking Bradley fighting vehicle, and then after a year or two, gave the testing contract to a DIFFERENT contractor. Do you have any idea how big the concrete block such a thing has to be attached to is? And it’s under a roof, in the middle of nowhere MN. All the construction, including digging the REALLY BIG HOLE took place inside a building, iirc. When that thing was running, it still sounded like a freight train was in the next room, and I don’t think I was anywhere near the actual shaker table.
They’d do it somewhere that was used previously for something and had the power and water already there, so no one would see the new infrastructure going to the building.
I’ve been in a few facilities that were built out of that cold war version of the concrete block that has a shiny, enameled side facing in to make the walls. Usually it’s a tan color, but in one place it was a horrible light green… the blocks with a rounded edge so that outside corners are not sharp…
They just keep getting used and re-used.
Just plain old manufacturing is crazy enough. I worked on a project for Caterpillar, and they had something like 7-9 acres under roof at that plant where our project was installing, and I think it was all currently unused. There is a LOT of excess capacity out there.
n
The last time I went to see my ophthalmologist, in 2018 or so, the doc had a machine running XP that couldn’t be updated, because the software for one the optical scanning things wouldn’t run on anything newer.
In the early to mid ’90s I tried to get my employer to move to linux for our control pc. Stand alone, only connected to our proprietary hardware, really just providing a GUI to control our hardware. Operators would connect XP boxes to the internet, check email, play games, d/l all kinds of sketchy shite…
Now with modern windows needing to connect all the time, constant updates, reboots, spyware, you’d have to be insane to run anything critical on it, especially if all the other cruft is considered. No need for 90% of the crap bundled with the OS.
They did have windows embedded, which kept most of that to a minimum. A major lighting control board manufacturer used it for years. There are 10s of thousands of those boards still running. The most popular current board for running moving lights can trace its heritage back to the Atari 800.
Kid’s highschool uses a board built on win embedded. I’ve got one sitting in my foyer waiting to sell on ebay right this minute, but I’m kinda holding it in reserve to be the hero if kid’s school board pukes…
n
Time for bed.
n
Now with modern windows needing to connect all the time, constant updates, reboots, spyware, you’d have to be insane to run anything critical on it, especially if all the other cruft is considered. No need for 90% of the crap bundled with the OS.
They did have windows embedded, which kept most of that to a minimum. A major lighting control board manufacturer used it for years. There are 10s of thousands of those boards still running. The most popular current board for running moving lights can trace its heritage back to the Atari 800.
All of the ATMs with color screens are running Windows 7 Embedded. Before that, the ATMs ran a version of OS/2 with DBA on text only monoscreens. My uncle was the chief support person at IBM.