Silicon Valley Redneck

Life remains eventful.

Currently winding down (I hope) from my father's recent medical adventure, a hematoma inside the skull that put him in the hospital for a few days and a nursing/rehab facility for a further week and a half.  (Recollection is fuzzy about whether it was subdural or epidural.  Have to see if the on-line medical records clarify this.)

He's home now, and getting settled back in.  The cats are trying to remember who he is after all this time.

There's still followup stuff to be done.  There's always followup stuff.  Medical followups, ongoing physical and occupational therapy, etc., etc.

 

Not findable on the 'Net: an article I encountered many years ago, most likely republished in a book, regarding an experiment in treatment of spinal subdural hematoma with ferret's ear.  If memory serves, herbs and a teapot were involved, and, at the end of the procedure, the patient was his old self again, i.e., suffering from spinal subdural hematoma.  Oh, well: watch this instead.

Spam filter criteria

Are often strange criteria indeed, and can sometimes be rather suspect.

Currently, I'm getting a couple of once-in-a-while conservative-ish e-mail newsletter thingies from the goodbye-National-Review, WaffleWordNeverTrump WaffleWordTrueCon crowd.  And, for some reason, Mozilla Thunderbird often tosses these messages in the spam can.

Go figure.

Hadn't heard of this'n before

Saw some promotion for "Singles Day".

Er... would that be four singles, 1 1 1 1?

Yes, it would.

Apparently it's a Chinese thing.  Not having been a party to that particular war, China has neither a two-minute silence at 1100 nor a blowout shopping day, so apparently there was need of something else to do.

And, on the domestic front: how come there are Black Friday sales this weekend when it hasn't even been Thanksgiving yet?  Maybe the Canadians can hold Black Friday early, but don't us Yanks need to wait until near the end of November?

Another bad idea

Spotted here:

There should be a law that children of terrorists who share their parents' worldview are barred from holding public office, especially the role of the chief law enforcement officer.

I think that's related to "corruption of blood", and, no, there shouldn't be a law.

Voters, on the other hand, might give some thought to not voting for a candidate who holds such a worldview.  But fat chance getting San Francisco voters to pay attention to such fiddly details.

Random suggestion

Hospitals are very disorienting places, especially for those confined to a bed for a few days.

There's invariably a TV / video monitor placed where the patient can watch, I dunno, CNN or the Hallmark Channel or whatever it is bedridden patients are supposed to watch.

Why dost thou not... have a default display that shows, in large text, something along the lines of:

IT IS SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2019.

YOU ARE IN STANFORD HOSPITAL.

Perhaps even adding, on a per-station basis, personalized reminders, e.g.:

YOU HAVE BEEN HERE FOR 4 DAYS.

Might help the inmates keep track of time and place, no?

Ciaramella! Ciaramella! Ciaramella!

Funny thing... how is it that so many Highly Qualified Professional Journalists, who so loudly proclaim that their First Amendment rights are in peril if the Orange Man speaks ill of them...

... are firmly convinced that:

1. It is illegal for them to name the so-called "whistleblower", and
2. It is right and proper that this should be illegal?

Er, wait.  What if the name that's making the rounds is a decoy?  What if his name is actually "H*stur"?

Additional:  Anyone who speaks the Name must be stoned.

And:  Anyone remember the Plame Name Blame Game?  Wonder who'll go to prison for being insufficiently cooperative with a bogus investigation this time.

More:  There's a lot out there on the Plame business... most of it in support of the Narrative, and utterly disconnected from reality.  This has been typical of "news" coverage for, well, probably as long as there have been newspapers.

Meanwhile, at The Duplex

As I've often considered doing, Eno prepares to use an air horn on the Windows Technical Department.

Additional suggestions are offered in the comment section.  This leads me to a thought....

Have a prepared recording of computer-failure disaster sounds.  Maybe a clip from some sci-fi or action-adventure movie.  Pretend to follow the instructions right up to some critical juncture, then unleash chaos.  Preferably something involving destruct sequence initiated or perhaps failsafe system triggered; retaliatory strike launching in 90 seconds.

Afterthought:  The next-few-minutes followup needs a sufficiently smart answering machine that can pick up on the first ring when called from an unrecognized number, play a custom greeting, then hang up: Beep-Boop-Beep!  We're sorry, the number you are calling is subject to emergency restrictions.  Thank you for using AT&T. (Click.)

Another brain malfunction

Somehow, when I see this:

Old Foursquare check-in from a NYC bar called ‘Epstein’s’ is making Brian Stelter’s mentions ‘unreadable’

I think: Epstein's Bar?  Sounds viral.

Confoozed

A "charge nurse" is constant current, and a "float nurse" is constant voltage, right?

Or am I all mixed up again?

Folk wisdom

Noted here:

My grandfather saved some wood ashes from his fireplace to sprinkle around his tomato plants in the garden. He claimed it brought more blooms, thus more tomatoes during the growing season.

An entirely plausible claim; I call your attention to the etymology of "potash", and the role of K in NPK fertilizer.

Strange expression: "OK Boomer"

Huh.  I thought the denizens of OK were called Sooners?

But I guess Boomers settled there even sooner than the actual Sooners.  Which would make the youngest of them, what, 140 years old now, assuming he was an infant at the time?

So I suppose the term could apply to Okies who are 140 years old or so, or by extension to anyone who seems like an exceptionally old Okie...?

Kids these days.  You can never really tell what they're talking about.

What's wrong with this picture?

Spotted here:

Cute concept: check.

Muzzle discipline: check.

Trigger discipline: check.

Loader safety: RED ALERT!

... Yeah, been reading tractor manuals and watching safety videos.  This is solidly in "don't do that" territory, unless there's something other than the hydraulics keeping that loader raised.  Most of the time, you get away with it... but only most of the time.

Update:  As Rob points out in the comments, it's not, realistically, a big risk, on a one-time basis.  The likelihood of a catastrophic failure at any given moment is pretty darn small; you just don't want to make a habit of hanging around under loader buckets.

And we all do some risky stuff from time to time.  Like crossing the street, or trying to make friends with a barking German Shepherd.

Of warped minds and the little bears' room

Today's Bizarro reminds me of an idea I won't be using:

Back when we were real-estate shopping, and before we chose the particular place we did, I had this notion that my work area would likely be in a semifinished walk-out basement, in a foresty region.

And I had the notion of putting up signage for the restroom and the litter box, designating them for PRIMATES and FELIDS with suitable iconography (and, for the latter, a sign announcing that Employees must lick paws before returning to work).

Then the exit nearest the woods would obviously need a sign for URSIDS.

And, on that note, it's time to sign off and face the day (while resisting the temptations of whatever goblin chow may remain in the box by the front door - yeah, I wasn't here to answer the door yesterday evening; got back somewhat before the end of trick-or-treat hours, and crashed).

Nothing new here.

Reported at El Reg: MacOS Catalina stops Twitter desktop app from accepting B, L, M, R, and T in passwords.

Back in the day....

I remember the Apple I.  The local Byte Shop had one on display.  There was a BASIC interpreter that you could load from audio cassette, and code away to your little heart's content as long as you didn't do anything foolish that would corrupt the interpreter, in which case you'd have to do a hard reset and start over from "load from audio cassette."

Interestingly, the "anything foolish" category included using certain letters as variable names.  Like, about half the alphabet.  Including, if memory serves, "I".  So the second-most-obvious program to try, after "hello world", would crash the system.

Nice to see that Apple is keeping up the tradition of shipping buggy software with alphabet issues.

(And I don't remember whether the BASIC interpreter in question was actually a Microsoft product.  Wikipedia is uninformative on the subject.  I don't think Microsoft BASIC on cassette for the Apple came along until the Apple II.)

Busy.

Got bloggable material, but it's not ready*.

Tied up with family matters today.

It's always something.

* For example: some photos I took recently, with the good camera.  I haven't developed the memory card yet.  Why should I develop it now?  It still has 1,536 exposures left on it!