Cool to start, but warming later. And damp. Should be sunny though if the trend continues. I can’t be bothered to look, even though I know millions of dollars and thousands of man hours were spent to make a guess. I can guess for less, and be right about as often.
Spent the morning yesterday doing auction stuff. Even though I’m buying less, I’m still looking at them. Sometimes stuff like the image stabilized binos pops up. Some newer thermal or night vision gear would be great…
Spent the afternoon doing a pickup and thrifting. I need to find a new auction to sell for me, and to move a bunch of stuff. I’ve also got some craigslist stuff to list, and I’m thinking about FB Marketplace. I don’t want to set up a borg account, nor to I want to feed that beast, but it looks like that is where the buyers are. I just wonder if they are any less flaky than the CL buyers.
Today I’ve got some catching up to do on domestic bliss. One local pickup appointment and one closer to Lynn, in the early afternoon. I’ve got to do some more moving from the storage unit and the shop, but I’m waiting for my shelf parts to come in. Have to have someplace to put the stuff. I need to stay close to home for after school taxi duties, so I’ll probably cook dinner too.
The list is long. But the journey of 10000 starts with a single step.
Prepping is like that. Just get started, and then keep plugging away. It’s interesting watching Commander Zero start the BOL phase of his prepping. I’ve been reading him for years, and he’s about as squared away as anyone can be, but the BOL stuff is new to him and I’m sure he’s feeling a bunch of different things as he gets outside his routine and comfort zone. New stuff can be scary and nerve wracking, but it’s also exciting. And learning what you don’t know, and didn’t know you don’t know, is always an eye opener.
Stack. It gives you options and resilience.
nick
Thanks to Swalwell, California is facing the possibility of a Republican Governor for the first time since Pete Wilson.
The Dems may let him go to country club prison, but the big players will skate on any exposure.
But I’ll bet you didn’t have a crew of highly skilled, hard working H1-Bs handling the security. They’re doing the work that Americans not only won’t do but can’t do!
I haven’t checked Redmond’s implementation of srand()/rand() recently, but continued use of that algorithm due to internal politics is sufficient proof that the company isn’t serious about security.
Even Apple offers arc4random() built into the standard system libraries these days. Granted, their OS above the application layer is mostly cribbed from *BSD flavors but the function is available.
Real Republican, not the guy who said “Screw your freedoms”.
Watch “The Smartest Guys In The Room” and pay attention at the end.
Tuesday. Too late for good morning (starting to feel peckish for lunch…), so hello!
Every now and then, Nick’s similes make me chortle. This was last night:
I think the previous one was:
He really should write a blog, or something…
The Zukerdroid actively funds the Dems antics using money generated from the Facecrack grift.
Make no mistake that he is actively writing checks this year.
He’s probably involved in the bill covered by today’s Tyler Durden cowardice.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/california-lawmakers-introduce-stop-nick-shirley-act
Fresher females with non-thesis CS Masters degrees from mid-tier US state-universities who pay lip service to wanting to be “full stack” developers even though they have no idea what that means.
A long time friend sent an email last night stating that he’s glad his career is almost over given the latest industry trends, specifically AI.
Yeah, I know the feeling, but I subsidized the private practice of medicine at my house up until 2019, even unemployed, and I have a lot of lost time to make up before the Monkey Trick collapses.
71F and the sun hasn’t risen yet. Quite.
Lions are poked in their dens. And are they thankful? No, they are not.
Lunch bag is ready.
And as soon as the kids are out the door, I’m back in bed. Was up to 3am, and don’t have an appointment until this afternoon. Turns out, one appointment is for Thursday, so I only have the one in Sugar Land.
I better eat something though.
n
TurboTax does not have the 1041 tax form needed for the estate. At least it was not available about four years ago when the MIL died. The calculations had to be done by hand and entered by hand. I used the PDF and filled in some of the blocks. True to IRS form, some of the blocks would not allow manual entry. I don’t know about H&R Block.
I’ve consulted (ie, “butts in seats staff augmentation”) in a number of government offices, mostly NY state agencies. Most or all of the state employees around my age, say born in the late 1950s to late 1960s, demonstrated indifference to or contempt for the members of the public who were unable to use the public-facing web applications for their intended purpose, whether getting a permit for an overweight truck or registering a firearm under Scumbag Cuomo’s SAFEACT. In one casesthis was because the app supported only one specific (old and insecure) version of Internet Explorer. In another, the application was not going to be available by the statutory deadline because of the incompetence of the (90% Indian) development team. When I pointed out that gun owners in NYS would not be able to register their firearms online and that the state police were not accepting paper forms and that the gun owners would therefore be in violation with no remedy, the project manager said “Fuck ‘em.” (I wish to point out that I did not intentionally go to work on the SAFEACT web application. I had signed a contract to work on a different app and then was put on this project. When I realized I couldn’t get out of it without crippling financial impact, I planned to sabotage the project. Turns out it wasn’t needed. Subcontinent incompetence and dishonesty did it for me.)
Older state employees might be scumbags who held the public in contempt but there was a decent chance that they meant well and worked hard to help people get things done and get on with their lives.
It’s to make life easier for the NSA and CIA and Mossad and Chinese spies to harvest your stuff. Because you might be having “thought crimes” and said something that hurt someone’s feelings.
I guess scanning GMail and whatever my phone saves to Google isn’t enough.
The legacy American Management Systems bank software still targeted IE 6 running the Sun Java NSPR plug in when I left CGI in 2018.
In theory, only bank employees running on a VPN used the interface, but that is “in theory”.
@Geoff:
That’s the one! Thanks!!
But they got the shuttle home? Hmmm. I must be conflating it with another book then, where it is stripped and left as a pole sitter.
Greag Bear … David Brin …. it’s on the tip of my cortex …
Luckily we now have Claude Code doing the work H1B’s won’t (or can’t) do…
A beautiful morning, calm & blue skies, should be a nice day.
The latest comet probably would’ve been visible this morning, but the clouds & winds when I went to bed meant I didn’t bother to try and get up and see it before dawn.
No residual pain from my crown redo. Fang cleaning on Wed.
The A/C guys are on the way. Lucky for them, the cold front hit. It is 51ºF so they get a comfortable install. It will probably hit the high 70s or low 80s this afternoon. They should be done well before noon.
I recall that there was a thesis going around a while back that government employees that were hired in the 30s were college grads (from back in the days when that meant something) and couldn’t get a good private sector job during the depression.
They were grateful to have the job, overqualified, and hard workers. By the late 40s in early 50s they were the supervisors in Public Works and government everywhere. So the various civil services obtained a reputation for efficiency and honesty that they had not had before.
The degenerate successors are now losing that, but oublic service unions arevprotecting them.
I haven’t had a job yet (including the military) that I used any of the stuff I learned at Uni. Today’s military requires a commissioned officer have a 4-year degree (warrant officers get by with a 2-year). You also need a degree to be a military pilot, 4 vs 2, for commissioned and warrant.
I think you may be conflating different concepts: Information, Knowledge, Skills, and Habits, and summarizing them as “stuff”.
Pre-Vietnam War, the Soviet financed takeover of colleges hadn’t gained enough ground to weaken the institutions. It was still mostly White, mostly Male, and mostly teaching the benefits of Western Civ.
To get any degree meant to be immersed in a system that was intrinsically pro-West. The tangible skills, like Math and Science and Engineering were obvious. The less tangible meant you’d study History and Literature from a pro-Western perspective.
The advantage of this education was useful skills, and even more useful broad perspectives.
Today it’s totally different. You can graduate college without ever hearing of Homer, Aristotle, Plato, Thales, Archimedes, Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Volta, Galvani… The list goes on.
I got my BS in Computer Science in 1976 with an emphasis in Math. In my 45 year IT career, much of it very technical, I can count on the fingers of one hand how many times I used advanced Math professionally.
But the skills and rewards gained solving problems and understanding concepts were invaluable.
I can agree with your current valuation of a college degree in the current anti-West universities. I disagree that it has to be as valueless as it has become.
I agree, you get out of it what you put in. Learning and learning how to learn is good.
When I entered the Army, the “High School to Flight School” program still existed. I met many fine warrant officer pilots who went through that. Then the Army told them “you need to get at least a two year degree”. Why, “because we say so MAGGOT!”
And today’s universities are for lifetime employment of liberals. I laugh every time I hear someone crying about their $200,000 college debt. Then serve up my latte.
Once again, lpdbw has beaten me to it and said it better than I would have. I would complain about how he’s keeping me down with the racist system of oppression, but I think that the real issue is that I hit the internet while waiting for a remote computer to do something while lpdbw is a retired man of leisure. Unfair, I say! Oppression! I need a safe space!
I’ve directly used only a fraction of the facts I learned in my EE degree – since graduation, I’ve never had to calculate the doping of a silicon wafer to make an NPN transistor – but the general EE knowledge was useful on several jobs and contracts. More importantly, the mindset of becoming an engineer has been used on every job and in many aspects of personal life as well, planning and structuring and examining trade-offs and cost-benefit ratios and looking for failure points.
My MS has been more directly useful on the job, but that was a Software Engineering program intended for working developers and project managers who already had several years of experience. Monmouth College (now University), around 1990. Tom Wheeler and others did a good job of setting it up. I have no idea if their MS-SE program is still any good; I imagine that the people who were running it have died long since.
Yer gonna give me a big head. Cut that out.