Silicon Valley Redneck

The light at the end of the tunnel...

... may be an oncoming train.

Taking a nigh-mid-December look at various pending work (and don't even get me started on the status of Operation Bug Out):

There's this small project for a client that seems like it's been dragging on for quite some time, delayed on the client side by various factors related to its being a background-priority thing.  Been in "the prototype hardware will be along next week" mode for three or four months.  Looking back at the archives, it seems to have started just about two years ago.  Hey, don't look at me; my original plan called for me to create a partial prototype, incorporating mostly the new and unproven stuff, which would have taken maybe two months from start to assembled hardware in hand, including a no-rush PCB fab cycle.

Then there's another project that was supposed to have gone to beta test this past spring; it just went to beta last month.  Or, really, alpha-plus; it's not a true beta, but at least it's being exposed to a slightly different group of testers.  I was just nudged to implement some safety features that were sort of inherent to the design all along, but I hadn't enabled them in the firmware yet.  And I need to merge and update all the design documentation for a review.

And a rush job referred to my attention a few weeks ago?  Well!  Seems the client bid on it based on a sparse preliminary spec, and, the contract having been signed, well, as Duane Elms put it:

First, twenty-one new features that we somehow must add in
Then, thirty-seven changes show up, much to our chagrin;
And this thing's just inadequate, and that thing's just plain wrong
And, by the way, your schedule's about three months too long.

So, yeah: it starts out behind schedule and over budget; the final(?) feature list introduces some serious complications.  Apparently there's some renegotiation going on.

Just to make things even more wonderful, it seems that the IT department at one client site didn't wait for the year-end break to make surprise changes; Monday afternoon brought the discovery that (as near as we could tell, the IT department having taken off early) outbound connections to a fairly important, if infrequently used, TCP port were blocked.  Also, ping and traceroute weren't functional, so perhaps most ICMP was also blocked, though that might not have been new, given that I was probably the first one in quite some time to try to use those... to diagnose the inability to connect to a server using the aforementioned TCP port.

Oh, well.  I've got documentation to merge and update.  And I need to come up with a realistic estimate for implementing [feature] in a particular FPGA, which kind of depends on whether an existing core is a good fit both technically and legally.  And there's gift shopping to be done... eek!

Big Tesla news?

Dunno what the news is, but the streets around the Tesla Warehouse on Kato Road in Fremont are packed with car transporters.

Couple of views of one sidestreet (others had even more trucks, never mind Kato itself):

Evacuating the inventory before the missiles arrive?  (For arbitrarily metaphorical values of "missiles".)

Didn't see this one coming. Nope. Not at all.

I'd been noticing all the Company Buses around here lately (notably Google Buses), shuttling employees hither and yon so there's no need for them to have transportation of their own, and pondering The Future....

And, yup.  Sure enough, Google is proposing a housing development in Mountain View.  Also "communal retail space", whatever that may be.

In The Future, so long as you work for The Company, you will live in subsidized Company housing, ride "free" Company transportation, and owe your soul to the Company store.  Should you cease to be employed for any reason, such as ever having expressed an opinion contrary to the Received Doctrine of the Week, you'll be out on the sidewalk with no assets and no mobility (and also blacklisted).

Yes, the megacorps loves them some serfs to toil in their cubicle fields.

Makes sense, but wrong

Twice in the last day or so, on two different sites, I've seen links to dw.com accompanied by references to Deutsche Welt.

Which, yes, sounds reasonable.  Except that I could have sworn it was Deutsche Welle.  As in fact it is.  Hasn't, apparently, been renamed in the last few months or anything.

Dangerous occupations

Spotted on Gab:

Now, the intended point was that men do most of the dangerous work... well, yeah.

But something else stands out.  Note what's at #19: cops.

Note that they're in 19th place.  In an occupation roughly half as dangerous as farming.  Less than 10% as dangerous as logging.

But they totally need special legal status because their work is so dangerous.

(By the way, beware of the comments on Gab; the site remains infested with antisemitic trolls who are as obsessed with Jews as Democrats are with Trump.)

I'm actually kind of suspicious of #3, aircraft pilots.  Is that statistic conflating professional pilots with recreational pilots?  Is it including military pilots?  What exactly went into that number?

Bring me the whisky, Mother; I'm feeling frisky, Mother

Embarrassing inflatable sheep incident!

In, yes, Scotland.  Where else?

Funny thing: when I look up the song, it seems just about everyone spells "whisky" with an e, which marks them as either 'Murrican or Irish, no?

That's the California bureaucracy for ya

So I made the pilgrimage to the DMV this morning, sans appointment.  Got there at 0730, half an hour before opening time, and finished about, I guess, 0835... at which point there was no line outdoors.  Seems this was one of the less-crowded days.

The actual front-line workers were helpful and (I assume this changes later in the day as they reach burnout) even friendly and reasonably cheerful.  But upper management, if by their works we may know them?

... Keeping in mind that the upper management in question is not necessarily within the DMV, but may very well include high-level decision-makers both elected and not....

Well, for a start, there's the 3- to 4-month lead time for appointments.  Which makes the whole notion of appointments kind of pointless.

Then, there's the system for tracking people who've lined up at the door.  Forms get filled out on line (if you show up not having done this yet, you get pulled out of line, sent to, I guess, a room with computers in it, and then re-inserted into your old spot in the line).  But then there's a tracking form that gets filled out by hand with some checkboxes, your name and phone number, and the magic number from the on-line form-fillery.  Then there's a line for the take-a-number station, where a clerk writes a number on the form, after which you can sit down and wait to be called.  Which... surely there's a better way to handle this.

It seems that the rules for evidence of residency are changing, again, on the 12^th.  I don't know what's driving this; maybe it's a federal thing.

And the biggie: I often complain that Our Betters have decreed that the local population shall triple, without the bother of upgrading the infrastructure.  Well!  The DMV has actually lost offices in the past (mumble) years.  Used to be, there was an office in Mountain View; that's now gone.  And it's not like the closed offices are being replaced by newer, bigger, more modern, more conveniently located offices; the ones that remain are, as far as I can see, old long-established ones.  So capacity has actually decreased as demand has increased.

Guess somebody wasn't paying attention

Camille Paglia at Spectator:

I had high hopes for Kamala Harris, but she missed a huge opportunity to play a moderating, statesmanlike role

SNORFL!

Sorry, but ya lost me right there.  Harris?  Moderating?  Statesmanlike?

Maybe that's the image being conveyed over there to the far side of the continent, but anyone who's been paying attention to California politics the past several years knows that Harris is, at best, a power-mad, hard-core authoritarian.

The article is worth reading, but that bit right near the beginning shows a big disconnect in perception of one of the high-profile politicians.

Actually: go read.  Much of it is relevant.

Strange cat behavior

I got a new shipment of oregano yesterday.

Now Huckleberry keeps attacking the padded envelope wherein it arrived.

Well, I guess some cats like the smell of various herbs and spices.  Southmoon sometimes tries to eat my hand if it smells of curry or goulash; I guess Huckleberry can shred an envelope that smells of oregano.

But maybe I'd better take it away, lest he swallow any of the fragments.  I think those things are indigestible by design.

They sure don't make it easy.

So... if I want a REAL ID compliant driver's license in California?

I need various things, including a utility bill (have), my original Social Security card (have; it says NOT FOR IDENTIFICATION, but whatever), and a third thing (actually, the first on the list), which basically is either a passport (don't have; it's my protection against being sent overseas on business) or a certified copy of my birth certificate.

Birth certificate... I should be able to run down to the county offices and fetch one, right?

Nope.  Has to be obtained from the state's records department.  Fill out a form, have the ferschlugginer thing notarized fer Pete's sake, send it in, and wait a few smegging weeks.  (Apparently it's possible to get one without the notarized form, but it's Not Valid Identification.)

The thing in my father's safe deposit box turns out to be a Notification of Birth Registration, which is not the same thing and apparently not acceptable.

So, basically, I needed to start this process the very moment the DMV sent me a renewal notice with the REAL ID requirements notice.  A month or so earlier, if I wanted to make an appointment at the DMV office before the deadline.

There used to be an official certified copy of my birth certificate around somewhere.  I know, because I had to present it to the DMV when I first got my driver's license.  But I don't know where it ended up.  And the DMV doesn't remember that it was a requirement back then and that I must therefore have presented one.

So I guess I'll need to go stand in line to get a new, not-actual-identification license.  And maybe I should get that birth certificate ordered for later, on the assumption that the Tennessee DMV will want to see it.

(Yeah, all the important people who make the decisions have passports, so they can go hobnob with their transnational ruling-class friends, and they just can't imagine anyone not having one.)

BELIEF!

Funny, this.  There's this belief that's been around for many a year now:

Anthropogenic global warming causes earthquakes!

Which reflects a serious discomprehension of the science involved.  But now it's morphed!  The latest hotness is:

The destruction of Sarah Palin's home is divine retribution for her unbelief!

Which, er... what, again?  Yes, there were people making this assertion over the weekend.  From those people who so ardently Believe! in Science!... so long as it supports the dogma their cult leaders are pushing this week.  Which actual science just about never does nowadays, so their version of Science! is a tightly-bounded system managed by a self-appointed priesthood, emitting facts but being highly selective about admitting them.  (See also: biology, the latest interpretations of which put old Trofim Denisovich to shame.)

Christmas tree

Yeah, that obligatory seasonal living-room greenery.  Joy kinda insisted.

My parents had, these past many years, an artificial tree, which was OK (and consistent from year to year, and probably cheaper in the long run), except that the pre-installed lights had started failing, and series-connected incandescent bulbs are a right pain in the maintenance.  And, since we were expecting to be moved by now, it went away in the summer garage-clearing operation.

So this year we've ended up with a modest-sized tabletop live tree, suitable for planting outdoors come the new year.  Doesn't require major rearrangement of the furniture.

Perhaps in future years (which is to say, post-move), we'll get a new 15-gallon tree each year, stick it in some manner of ornamental containment indoors for the required time, and then relocate it to the retirement grove, assuming we end up living somewhere with room for a herd of feral evergreens to roam.

... Which leads me to a gadget (not necessarily product) idea, expanding on that thing Humball was working on back in the day.  Which in turn reminds me that I really ought to make connections with Zaman again before I disappear.

Additional:  No, it doesn't have a Vorlon on top.  Nor is it decorated with silicon wafers and write rings.

Such a cheesy logo

Seems there's a new company called "Cheddar" that does, um, something or other, I suppose.  Something in keeping with having a name that's a common word and doesn't in any way suggest what the business might be.  They sponsored Sam O'Nella's latest video.

Anyway: have a look at their logo.  A wedge of cheese: how cute.

Also, not very Cheddar.  More Swiss.

So, a name that has nothing to do with the business, and a logo that doesn't match the type of cheese.  How very dot-com.

Another vendor capability upgrade

Gadzooks!

I hadn't been checking on OSH Park lately.  Turns out they haven't been standing still.

Via Evil Mad Scientist, it turns out that the Purple PCB folks now do flex circuits, albeit not purple ones.  Pricing ($15/in²) is quite appealing for prototype jobs once you take the tooling charge ($0) into account.

Also, they now support plated slots.  Officially, like.  I need to review their capabilities and see what else is new and exciting.

On living in a simulation

Discussing the notion is all the rage this week (here, for example).  What if the Universe as we know it is really just a giant instance of The Sims, and we're actually constructs living inside a video game?

Elon Musk sez:

There’s a billion-to-one chance we’re living in base reality

Which is of course utter nonsense; the odds are exactly incalculable, in that we have no information whatsoever on which to base an estimate.

Could we, though?  Somehow derive information, that is?

Maybe there's some cache-latency hack that'll let us smuggle information in from another simulation, or even from whatever platform our Universe is running on!  We should totally look for it!

---

The inhabitants of reality H7GPV_ZJ7VO_RSN8I have discovered the Meltdown vulnerability.

Oh, bother.  Have they leaked the knowledge to any of the other realities yet?

No.

Well, go ahead and wipe H7GPV_ZJ7VO_RSN8I and re-install.  Maybe set the fine-structure constant to a nice round 144 this time.  And be sure to apply all of this æon's security patches.