Silicon Valley Redneck

Fusion cuisine, cultural appropriation, or just leftovers?

"Chicken fried Spanish rice"

... Yeah, it was OK.  Mostly it was something to do with some leftovers.

Unsolicited UI advice

One more unto the topic of User Interfaces, dear friends, once more....

OK, maybe twice more; this post is a twofer.

Those noisy froggies in the swamp?  I decided to get a measurement.  Installed a couple of sound level measuring apps on my phone.  Both show the swamp noise being 75 to 80 dBA close up.  Probably more if I took a chair out there, sat down, and waited for the nearby critters to start back up (they get real quiet when something moves near them).

And!  Both apps have reset buttons, for clearing the peak reading.  All well and good, except that touching the button causes a "sound" spike at the microphone.  Hey, guys?  Maybe consider having a delay between button press and resuming acquisition?

 

The second topic: I bought a pair of Midland X-Talker FRS walkie-talkies for communication around the yard.  Nice feature set and all that, including built-in weather radio, but... there's that big "SCAN" button.  One brief and possibly inadvertent press of that, and the radio commences scanning for channels with activity on them.  There's no warning that this is happening (unless you're looking at the display, which is unlikely in such a situation), and no correspondingly easy way to return to the channel you had set.  For a "family" radio system, this is Bad.  There really ought to be a configuration option to lock out the scan function and keep the radio tuned to the family's settings.  Or a molly-guard over the button.  Something.

For that matter, it'd be nice to have a kids-n-seniors walkie-talkie, with most of the controls hidden - maybe configured over a USB connection?  Anyway, something with On/Off/Volume, CALL, and push-to-talk and not much else accessible to the assigned user, but fully compatible with the FRS system and configurable by the owner.  Configure it for the family settings, hand it over to Junior or Grandma, and don't worry about the channel getting inadvertently changed, etc.

 

Update:  The whole concept of automated phone calls for legitimate purposes is a giant UI fail in itself.  I just got a call, on my phone, for my father, from one of his insurance companies.  "Is this your father, yes or no?"  Er... hang on a moment.  I'm not him, but he's nearby.  Actually, you need to talk to Joy.  (None of these is an acceptable response.)  As I was heading off in search of the family, the robot told me a number to call back, which I didn't write down, because I was standing up and also I hadn't been primed to grab a pencil and paper.  The bot only said it once, apparently on the assumption that I'm an answering machine.

Yeah, I know the assumption nowadays is that everyone has a unique phone number, and that there's no longer any such thing as a shared family phone number.  This is a bad assumption, and we've had trouble with it on multiple occasions.

Guess it's not spring yet.

The next week of rain has vanished from the forecast, apparently blown off course by this chill North wind.

Cool (currently 43°F), breezy, and overcast.  Supposed to be sunny and warmer the next several days, assuming the forecast is to be believed.

Could be the pond really won't fill up this year... which would be good news, as I want to address the drainage issues, and we'd really like to get somebody out here this summer (or maybe late spring, conditions permitting) to clear the trees out of the bottom, dig it deeper, adjust the contours, add a clay barrier, and generally transform it from a seasonal swamp into a proper year-round pond (which apparently it used to be, years ago).  Then we see about adding fish!

If the pond doesn't get close to overflowing, I can leave the drainage issues until the guys with the real earth-moving equipment are here.

It's too cold and dim for going out to the barn and working on the tractor today, besides which my arm is still being troublesome, but I guess this might be a good day for marking the corners of the new garden patch, down in the Annex.  Snow stakes, mallet, tape measure, large carpenter's square (or perhaps a lensatic compass?), and maybe a spool of Dixon string Mason line.  Once it's staked and strung, I guess I'll mark the string lines with orange chalk powder (on order; supposed to arrive tomorrow, I think), remove the actual stakes and strings, and have at the enclosed region with the tiller.

Update:  While it's well above the swampy zone, the lower portion of the area I'd shaved last week is kinda squishy.  Maybe I'd better move the whole thing several feet uphill, which means (after things dry out a bit) shaving another few feet on the uphill side.  The plan is to have a 40-by-60-foot planting area, with a fence around it, and a couple of feet of buffer zone outside the fence (kept mowed short, if nothing else).

Still need to come up with a plan and materials for a gate, and order a bunch of weed barrier fabric.

History, dude.

Spotted here:

“Hypergolics have been used all the way back to the Apollo era and before,” said Steven Son, Purdue’s Alfred J. McAllister Professor of Mechanical Engineering,

Ah, "before."  Yeah, I guess the run-up to WWII was a bit before the Apollo era, wasn't it?  LMDDGTFY.

"Apollo", from "a-", meaning without, and "pollo", meaning chicken.</chubbyemu>

Morning weather update

Lots of gusty wind around midnight.

As of 0355, the rain gauge has logged 1.16" since midnight, and it looks like there's a bunch more on the way.

Well, the frogs will be happy.  And the low-lying areas of the Annex will be getting swampier and swampier.  Project for summer: do something about drainage.  Now I'm thinking a couple of small seasonal ponds might be called for.

Update: As of 0745, we've had 1.70" of rain since midnight.  There's quite a lot of water in the bottom of the pond.  The low-lying regions of the Annex are looking very swampy indeed (the garden patch remaining safely above the flood zone).  The drainage ditch across the neighbors' lawn, under the driveway, across the other neighbors' lawn, and down to the roadside ditch is flowing vigorously; thanks to the late-summer shovel work, the water is staying within the ditch here, and not (so far!) overflowing across the driveway.  The other bit of shovel work is keeping the low area of the driveway from flooding badly, at the cost of a channel eroding across the grass.

And, the frogs are partying like it's spring break.

Update 2:

To get at least some of the spring break effect:

Ribbit.

Oh, look.  It's raining again.  And getting windy.  This seems a good morning for remaining indoors.

Update 3:  This may not be summer rain, nor even, technically speaking, spring rain, but I'll just leave these here:

and

Update 4:  Total rain for the day, midnight to evening, was 1.82".  Supposed to be dry tomorrow, until late at night, but the ground is too soggy for most gardening activities.  Some dry spell soon, I may need to do some lawn-mowing; things are starting to grow already.

Weather, or not.

Last forecast I'd seen for today: lots of rain, lots of wind, temperature maybe getting into the mid-60s.

Weather around sunrise: calm and very foggy indeed.  Could barely see where I was going.

Weather around lunchtime: sunny, lots of wind, mid-70s.  Very froggy across the road; slightly froggy in the back yard (not much water in our swamp at this point, so the li'l froggies aren't partying much).

It'd be a grand day for outdoor activities, but my right arm is still kinda iffy.  Actually... just this much typing is making my hand cramp up.  Guess I'll go sit on the lawn with a book.  (Probably one without wind-sensitive paper pages.)

(There's plenty of outdoors stuff in need of doing that ought not to set off the arm, but the tractor still awaits its 50-hour maintenance, and I don't want to approach that without a complete set of fully-functioning appendages.)

Today's major deluge now seems to be scheduled for tomorrow morning.  We shall see.

Yeesh. Ya try to make an obtuse joke...

I was about to convey my confusion about the scandal involving an odalisque being spotted on stage at CPAC.

So... just to confirm... I DuckDuckWent "odalisque" to confirm my recollection that it meant a painting of a reclining nude, or something to that effect, which I believe was the common meaning in Western usage a few years ago.

Seems that meaning has been purged from the Newspeak dictionary; it now means a female slave or a concubine, with a usage example claiming that it's an image depicting the subjugation of a black woman.  (Funny how just about all the subjects of the paintings that turn up in an image search are of the white persuasion.)

(Digging out an old paper dictionary, I find that this isn't strictly a new thing; said dictionary doesn't mention the art meaning either.  No room on the page for the term, as it were, of art?  Or nudes were too naughty for inclusion, even by reference?)

Interestingly, Wikipedia doesn't include the art definition either... but the page is festooned with examples of the artistic form.

How quickly one's perspective can shift!

We had a family outing yesterday, all buttoned up in the car, to the edge of Knoxville.

Even the edge of the "big" city was daunting.  Guess I've become a hick from the sticks.

Mind you, I've always been a hick from the 'burbs when it comes to actual big cities; I find crowds, densely-packed tall concrete buildings, and urban density in general to be disorienting and intimidating.  Sensory overload, can't see the horizon, lack of cues for big-picture spatial orientation... nopity nope nope.

But the area we ventured into?  A year ago, that was normal-type territory for me, though unfamiliar in detail.  And it's not like Knoxville is even a real big city.

Afterthought:  Looking out my office window?  Greater metropolitan downtown Boyds Creek is looking a lot more crowded than it did a year ago.  Yes, there has been some construction... well, quite a lot, but not much of it visible from here.  Mostly, my perceptions have changed.  To think that, back in Sunnyvale, the nearest neighbor's house was 15 feet from my office window, not 400 feet.

How ya gonna put 'em back in Paree, after they've seen the farm?  (OK, so farming for a living would be a bunch of Not Fun.  Living in the countryside and farming for a hobby beats living amid the crowds.  I suspect a lot of the recent telecommuters will choose to remain as tele as they can manage, once the current excuse goes away.  And maybe they'll develop rural attitudes.  Does Bill the Gates really think people will flock to his MS^® SmartCities™?)

A cautionary tale for users of the Signal app

I'm not sure exactly how the "[one of your contacts] is on Signal!" notification scheme works, but I'm guessing it involves phone numbers in your contacts list.  Which, if not maintained....

A couple of days ago, I got one of these notifications, naming an old friend from Silicon Valley with whom I've kept in touch via e-mail over the years.  She'd left Silicon Valley several years ago, for family reasons, but once in a while will return briefly.

Anyway, the notification having popped up, I said hi... and got someone who didn't seem much like the friend in question launching into a tale of woe about being a political prisoner in Mountain View, about to be put in jail, looking for local contacts, and by the way there's this guy who runs a crypto hedge fund and I should totally get in touch with him to help keep my friend out of jail.

Er.  Last I heard, which was around Christmas, said friend was still in Southeast Asia.  So, had things developed really suddenly?  My Signal correspondent claims not to have been out of the U.S. since 2008.  My actual friend, contacted via e-mail at a known-good address, says she hasn't been in the U.S. since a quick visit in early 2019.

So.  I still have a couple of stale phone numbers (cell and landline) for that friend in my contact info.  Presumably one of them has been reassigned, and the person whose number it now is installed the Signal app.  Signal then notified me, because the number is in my contacts list.  When I said hi, Signal apparently conveyed my name, not just my number.

This is... interesting.  It shows the importance of maintaining your contacts list in exactly the same way that voter registration lists aren't.  And I suspect it means Signal is keeping copies of all users' contact lists on its server, For Your Convenience; being on the company server, they can be handily subpoenaed (or just voluntarily handed over to the Authorities) in the event Signal is accused of being a conduit for sedition.

('Course, if you're using an Android phone, Google already has a copy of your contact list, plus detailed records of where your phone has been.)

A fine spring afternoon

Sunny, mid-60s, minimal wind.  This would have been a much better time for that mowing I did yesterday!

There is, of course, no end to outdoors stuff I should be doing.  Unfortunately, my right arm is still acting up.  Even this little bit of typing is setting it off, so I'd better wrap up quickly.

Got a week or so of rain in the forecast, so not much outdoors.  I'll have to do indoors stuff that doesn't involve overmuch use of keyboards, mice, and such.

And maybe there'll be a day for doing tractor maintenance (not too wet, wind preferably from the North or thereabouts and not too much of it, and arm being cooperative).

Stupid suburbanite trick #172

Mowing paths through an old hayfield on a windy day.

Especially when the field in question wasn't actually harvested last time, just mowed.  So there's a lot of uncollected hay just lying around being piles of dry grass clippings.

Mower operates as designed, chopping old and new grass alike into little bits and spewing them forth from the discharge chute.

Wind catches the dry bits, and... well, particles in my hair, particles in my eyes, particles up my nose, particles down my shirt... an emergency shower and a change of clothes were called for.

From the Unexpectedly! files

Seems Fry's Electronics has gone under.  (Via Insty.)

Fry's would have been one of those things I missed about Silicon Valley, except that it had been circling the drain for a great many years.  It was still a place to buy emergency replacements for power supplies, monitors, and such, but even for those it had gone sadly downhill.

Back in the day, now... I remember when the first one opened, in Sunnyvale - Oakmead Parkway, at Lawrence, I think it was.  The Commodore Amiga was a thing, or perhaps I'm thinking of the Atari ST.  One of those.  Anyway, they carried a diversity of personal computers, back in the days before Wintel took over.  And they carried lots of prototyping components!  I got my NS16032 parts kit there, and a content-addressable-memory chip, and sundry other exotica.

(Am I showing my age?)

Eventually, though, the stores (plural by then) were increasingly filled with ordinary consumer electronics, major appliances, office supplies, generic toys, and other non-geek stuff, crowding out most of the cool specialty items.

A commenter at Insty links to this, which seems largely right for a certain era.

So, let's see now.  Things I miss about Silicon Valley.  Trade shows (died of the Pestilence just after I left; now virtual, which is no fun, but it's no-fun I could have from anywhere with a 'Net connection).  Fry's (but not so much since a decade or so before I left).  The electronics-surplus stores, like Halted Specialties and Anchor Electronics (Anchor still seems to be in business, but Halted, as such, is now defunct).  Asian supermarkets like 99 Ranch (yeah, still miss that one; the Asian population around here is kinda sparse).  Various industrial suppliers (most of which had either gone out of business or moved out of the area in the past decade or so), but maybe I can find replacements around here, once we're out and exploring the area.  Maybe a few other things, which may or may not still exist.

Slightly productive yesterday

Well, the weather was nice - sunny, lower 60s in the afternoon, trees budding, frogs chirping.  A little windy, though.

So, what could I usefully do outdoors while either wearing a wrist brace or avoiding the sort of things that set the wrist off?  Oh, and wearing sandals, because putting boots on is problematic with my heel bandaged.

Grab a shovel and head down to the Annex.  Pick a spot on the proposed victory garden plateau, and commence digging.

The hayfield roots and the soil below are somewhat resistant to digging, but I got more'n a foot down without hitting clay.  Looks like a nice thick layer of brown silt loam, and no rocks that I noticed.  Yup, good place for a garden!

So, after I get the scheduled maintenance done on the tractor (change engine oil & filter, change both hydraulic-fluid filters, grease everything, inspect a few things) and the coming rainy time passes, I guess I'll hook up the tiller (and do spring maintenance on it), head down there, and make a first pass at tilling a good-sized garden patch.

Meanwhile, I fired up the mower (which was a mite sluggish, being wakened from its hibernation), gave the approximate target area (plus a path leading to it) a haircut, then made a first attempt at mowing the thick clumps of grass along the fenceline.  I suppose today I'll take the mower out again, clean its air filter, and mow the grass around the perimeter nice and short.

Rideshare. Subway. Villain from The Incredibles.

Or something like it.  My right wrist is decidedly unhappy of late.  Using the mouse, or even the keyboard, makes it worse, never mind using the reciprocating saw at awkward angles.

I had this sort of thing once before, a few years ago.  Didn't last all that long, but it was decidedly inconvenient.

Today, the wrist, per se, isn't in so much pain, but I keep having hand and forearm cramps.

I think I'd better cut way back on my computer time this week.  It's a good week for getting out in the yard... if only most of the stuff I should be doing in the yard didn't also involve using my right hand in ways that set it off.

(A wrist brace helps avoid setting off the pain, but also prevents getting work done.  Such is life.)

Anyway, probably light posting this week.  And maybe light reading, too.  Reading time may be the out-on-the-lawn-with-a-book type.

Sunday morning music can become an adventure

So I'd ordered this CD...

Backstory, short form: a week or so back, Alma Boykin had a blog post regarding the Uffington Horse, and referenced the eponymous song by the eponymous band, whose existence I'd somehow managed to forget... though the song (but not the performance) seemed remarkably familiar, and very Heather Alexander indeed.

Okay, so that band was an early-noughties thing; the Enchantment CD is from 2004.  Before Heather went off to dance in the circle, like; not from back in the audio-cassette era.  How do I not have a copy?  I ordered a copy via Amazon, for delivery February 26th or so, assuming that this would cause a still-in-the-wrapper copy to appear by magic among my misfiled office clutter.

Well, it arrived yesterday, having apparently been somehow expedited by the Great Central Freeze.  This morning, hm.  No actual CD player handy.  Stick it in a DVD-RW drive plugged into the old workstation.  Select "Play Audio CD with Amarok."  Amarok commences playing some .mov file, while scanning tracks, and re-scanning, and re-scanning... in short, Amarok ran Amok, causing the computer's entire UI to become wedged.

OK, so reboot.  Try again, sans Amarok.  Open the CD with the file manager: aha!  It has a bunch of computer-oriented content, in addition to the audio tracks.  Try using grip to pull the audio tracks?  Hm, no grip; it seems to have disappeared from this (old) version of Debian (library issue?), assuming it was there to begin with, however-many years ago.  How about k3b?  Sure enough finds the audio tracks, but CDDB lookup doesn't appear to be working.

Oh, well.  Try playing the audio tracks with vlc: that works.  I definitely hadn't heard this CD before, though many of the songs are familiar from Heather's solo gigs back in the day.

Another day, I'll rip the audio tracks to MP3 so they can go on my lawn-mowing playlist.