Silicon Valley Redneck

Omitted to post a Monday update

Monday was also busy.

On Sunday, I'd asked a neighbor if he could recommend someone to fix the back fence.  Oh, and also to do some basic landscaping (remove weeds, put down mulch, that sort of thing).  Turns out he can do that, bringing in a helper as needed.

So, Monday afternoon we were off to Home Despot, with his truck and my credit card, to pick through the fence lumber for decent posts and boards and also procure fasteners and fence-post mix.

Six freaking hundred pounds of fence-post mix.  And I-don't-know-how-many-hundred pounds of lumber.  We got it all loaded onto the carts (two of the big sturdy carts), though checkout, out to the parking lot, off the carts and loaded onto the truck.  The helper showed up early in the unloading process, so we had additional help lugging all the stuff from my driveway into the back yard.

Oof.

Tuesday afternoon, as the trash haulers were on their second truckload, the helper reappeared and set about removing the old fence.  When we left, he was just about finished with that process; we don't know what state of construction of the new fence we'll find today.

Looks like we'll be getting the place on the market next week, putting the first open house the first weekend of November.  Should look rather more presentable by then.

... This reminds me: we pulled up and threw away the old perimeter drip hoses yesterday.  I should cap the corresponding valves, just in case the watering control box loses its mind and opens them.

Geography, anyone?

It's been alleged that there are Bangladeshis in the current caravan of "Honduran refugees" headed for Texas.

CNN has a reporter on the scene playing "spot the Middle-Easterner" and not finding anyone.

Er.  Middle east?  Bangladesh?  Is there a disconnect here?

And would the reporter even recognize if people were speaking Bengali?

Busy Tuesday

Just had the trash haulers over; the patio is now free of junk, and the house is practically empty.  Still got some stuff in the garage and sheds.  Like the Bridgeport.  Still gotta get rid of the Bridgeport.

 

Did some updating of contact information today, including Eternal Emperor.  Their form is interesting.  Main thing I want to do is delete my evening phone number, leaving just the cell number.  Trouble is, it can't be done.  I deleted all the digits from the "evening phone" fields on the form... leaving those fields blank... which apparently is a special case meaning "no change from previous setting."

So I composed an informative and correctly-punctuated message to the record-keeping department...

... Which I then had to edit, because the message form only allows letters, numbers, spaces, newlines, and select punctuation, not including quotation marks (apostrophe's* are OK), asterisks, nor semicolons.  Er.  If you're trying to defend your database against Bobby Tables, your DBMS really ought to provide a function to enquotify a string such that it won't cause trouble and will read back as the original text.  Besides which, " is generally a safe character; it's ' you have to watch out for...

... Anyway, so I sent the message, and got a response to the effect that the requested change had been made, but the same number is still there for "evening phone."  Which seems to imply that it can't be done nohows.  Maybe I'll just change the evening number to be the same as my cell number...?

 

And, I made an appointment for the Prius to get its 250K mile service and its first ever brake job, and to have a suspicious noise investigated.  That's on Thursday.  I'm thinking of declaring a Day of Work on Thursday, and doing productive stuff for a client for a change.

 

Just to make life extra interesting, part of the above was typed while reaching under Huckleberry, who was being very obtrusive and blocking my view of the keyboard, thereby playing havoc with my accelerated-hunt-and-peck typing.  Maybe he's trying to force me to learn touch typing, after all these years.

 

* Obligatory greengrocer's apostrophe included at no extra charge.

I feel a great disruption in the Web.

Various sites out there are Just Not Right this weekend.  And not all in the same way.

First thing I saw was an expired-certificate warning.  Which appeared to be a legitimate warning, as the certificate displayed had indeed expired quote some time ago - leaving me with the question of why, if that's the certificate currently being served up for that site, Chrome 69 wasn't warning me and Chrome 70 is.

Then there's another site with a certificate warning.  That certificate belongs to another site entirely.  And the site doesn't render correctly; it's like stylesheets and.or JavaScript aren't being loaded.

And a couple more: certificate warnings (various problems with the certs in question), and the site comes up as a not-here-yet page - Apache default page, or a "contact the webmaster" page.

What the actual...?

Hokay.  Let's try a different browser.  Brave 0.25.2: same.  Firefox 52.9.0: same.

And I don't think these are all on the same hosting service, either.  They're certainly not all on the same server.

Don't see anything about it on El Reg nor Slashdot.  Maybe some local weirdness with DNS?  But how would that cause this...?

Huh.  Boot up a VM (oops; I did an apt-get upgrade on my earlier-this-year Mint VM yesterday, and today KDE doesn't work right), run Firefox, look up one of the b0rked sites: it's there.  Try it again on the physical workstation: Apache test page.

Er.  Did the most recent apt-get upgrade on the workstation mess up some important library?  Guess I'd better save-as-draft, reboot, and re-examine the situation.

One reboot later (and the reboot took far longer than it should have, suggesting something weird in the system configuration): not much change.  Switching to a different user gets the same results, so it's not something messed up in my home-directory hierarchy.  The Mint VM does start up KDE properly, though.  Aaand...

Huh.  If I open my blog, and click certain links in the blogroll, I get the same errors on the VM.  If I yahoo (that being the default search engine in Firefox in Mint) the destinations, and click on the same dang URL from the search results, I get the normal site.  If I copy the URL from my blogroll and paste it into the location bar, I get FUBAR.

Now here's a funny: if I paste (for example) https://esr.ibiblio.org/ into the location bar, I get the certificate error and the garbled site.  If I change it to HTTP://esr.ibiblio.org/, I get the proper site.  Ah... but it's actually using HTTP, not HTTPS, so no certificate and no security.  And... hello!  All of the offending blogroll items are in my list as HTTP, not HTTPS.  Hovering over the link, as presented in Chrome, shows HTTPS.

Looking at the source for my main page, I see that... all the links in my blogroll have been transformed, willy-nilly, into HTTPS, regardless of what I had in the original list.

Thanks, Typepad.  Thanks a smegging bunch-a-rooney.

Update: Oh, this gets even more fun!  Looking at the published post, I saw that the HTTP in the second version of the ibiblio URL above was appearing as https.  Had I neglected to delete the 's'?  OK, fix that... and Typepad changes the haich-tee-tee-pee right back to https.  In plain text, not an actual link.  Evil!  Changing it to upper-case avoids this... for now.  Note how I spelled it out, back there: Typepad apparently does not allow having that actual four-lowercase-character string in text, and will automatically change it, regardless of context.

And, AHA!  Looks like if I change the protocol name from the forbidden lower-case word to HTTP in the TypeList, the affected entries in the blogroll don't get munged.  Yet.  Off to do that now.

Gotta keep current with the vendors.

So I got to thinking: the Chinese prototype PCB fab houses are really amazingly cheap, enabling creation of prototypes that otherwise Just Wouldn't Happen.  On-shore, OSH Park does a good job of this, too, within its limits.

But, for some designs for certain clients, PCB fab can't happen offshore (because Reasons), and OSH Park's pretty gold-plated finish is not allowed (because different Reasons).  Which, mostly, leads back to Sierra Circuits: quick turn, high quality, but awfully pricey.  (Good, cheap, quick: you know how that goes.)

I check pricing on a medium-sized (for the category in question) board, going for 6 layers, fairly small feature sizes, and a 5-day turn.  And, surprise!  It's below the 4-layer pricing of a couple of years ago.  Not by any stretch of the imagination cheap, mind you, and far more than Seeed or JLC would charge, but entirely manageable if I were building prototypes for a client with the expectation of being reimbursed.

The idea of getting the test hardware done quick is looking like a more plausible business feature for next year and those that follow.  Especially if I upgrade my SMT assembly capabilities, as I intend to do once I have proper lab space.

(I have a sporadic reputation for pulling rabbits out of my hat.  Taking a (simple) product from suggestion to component selection to schematic to PCB layout to out-to-fab in an hour, for example.  Or slipping out of a meeting where a mechanical apparatus was being discussed, and returning with a preliminary implementation before the meeting was over.  I should work on doing that sort of thing more consistently.)

Getting the lesson exactly backward

Lefty activist woman adopts the manner of a fictional powerful white man, As Seen On TV.

Finds that people react to her as if she were a powerful white man.

Concludes that it's all about race and sex.

Er... hello?  Didn't you just demonstrate that it's about behavioral cues, and not at all about sex?  And maybe it's not about race either?  (Hint: it's not about race.  Pretending that behavior is a proxy for race and then insisting that behavior must be ignored is a recipe for disaster, at multiple scales.)

In which Douglas Adams explains the Khashoggi situation

From HHGttG:

The history of warfare is similarly subdivided, although here the phases are Retribution, Anticipation, and Diplomacy. Thus:

Retribution: I'm going to kill you because you killed my brother.
Anticipation: I'm going to kill you because I killed your brother.
Diplomacy: I'm going to kill my brother and then kill you on the pretext that your brother did it.

Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iran are all well versed in the art of Diplomacy.  The arrest of various high-level Saudi Foreign Intelligence officials could mean that they plotted to kill Khashoggi for reasons of their own, possibly somehow furthering a plot against MBS.  It could also mean that MBS ordered Khashoggi killed, and then used the murder as a pretext for the arrests.  Or it could mean something else entirely.

When it comes to intrigue, our politicians are pikers.

Thursday randomness

I had an early-morning post all composed and ready to go... and clicked "Publish" only to find that U-Verse had decided to disconnect from the 'Net, so I got an error message and, eventually, a router status page.  And I hadn't saved the content.  So now, in the evening....

Much going on, but most of it falls under the "no blogging personal stuff" rule, so that won't be appearing here.  In not-too-personal stuff:

I missed Arm TechCon entirely this year.  Had originally been planning to go on Wednesday, in preparation for which I'd worked out a plan for getting to a light rail station and taking the #902 to the convention center.  I'd even bought a fare card.  But, the lingering crud from my end-of-summer cold was still messing up my ears, and I really didn't want to be in a crowd with my ears being intermittent and non-symmetric.  Today would have been the other opportunity, but, while my ears are somewhat better, I woke up with a bit of a sore throat, so spending a few hours talking to people seemed a bad idea.

 

House-emptying continues; I'm down to a couple of boxes worth of things to sort, a bunch of stuff to dispose of (most of it gets dealt with by a trash-hauling company early next week), and... the Bridgeport.  Apparently old milling machines aren't selling around here at any price.  Which is kind of alarming, really.

Consider the demographic of used-Bridgeport buyers: guys (almost all of them of the male persuasion, yes) who have the Engineer nature, a modest equipment budget, space to set up a workshop, and time to indulge in some creativity.  That is to say, the ones who set about inventing things in their garages.  Apparently this isn't a thing in the Bay Area anymore.

Oh, well: on morning walkies, I happened to be talking to someone who has a friend who just bought a huge lathe and is trying to figure out how to power the beast.  I passed along my card, just in case he needs a milling machine (with matching rotary phase converter, so's it can be run off a household dryer outlet).

Accomplished yesterday: removed the remains of the old lighting system in the side shed, and installed a replacement system using a cheap SLA battery (instead of a car battery that I used in the original because it would no longer start the Jeep) and a half-dozen 12V, 3W LED panels (instead of a string of little fluorescent fixtures and a little inverter that wasn't too reliable about starting up).  Also, ran both wall furnaces for a while, burning out most of the dust (going after them with the air hose had helped a lot, but there was still quite a hot-dust smell).

Yet to be done, apart from the obvious: figure out how to disassemble the old (and exceedingly heavy) NCR cash register that came with the house, all those years ago, to the point that I can inspect the cash drawer for bullion coins, banknotes, gilt-edged share certificates for Great Swamp & Southern Railway, or anything else the previous owners may have left in there.  Also, (now that the computers are out of there) I need to turn the electricity off and replace various outlets and switches and the patio light.  Just to make everything proper.

 

A ToasterCo prototype (of a new subsystem) that's been in the works since, er, well, I first checked in the preliminary firmware for the thing in December of 2016, is supposedly being built at last.  At least I'm not the one who's been holding up the parade.  I keep suggesting that letting me do the development (not for delivery to customers) prototypes using my own vendors would get hardware in hand a lot faster.

Another ToasterCo project (that just started recently) is in slow-motion mode; I guess I should look for ways to make it happen (short of buying my own copy of Altium, that is).

 

Additionally random:  Seems there's some foofaraw about "Mansize" Kleenices.  Brings to mind a silly question making the rounds many years ago: "Why are women's handkerchiefs so tiny?  Their noses are not much smaller."

 

Update:  Might just take another look at the Altium thing.  Not the full-blown, "if you have to ask, you can't afford it" product, but CircuitStudio, which is now marked down to $500 for those switching from EAGLE.  And I am still using EAGLE at this point, not yet having made the transition to DipTrace.  This comes back to the question of how well the current CircuitStudio exchanges files with the current Altium Designer, as used by ToasterCo.  Which... if I find myself with some time for such things, I might just sign up for a 30-day eval license (or whatever it is) and have a go at some file-swapping.  If it works, well, $500 (plus however much learning time is required) isn't that much for something that could help bring in a significant amount of revenue-type work; even one rather small project, and I'd come out ahead.

"Simple" isn't.

Headline at HuffPo, adapted all over the 'net:

Simple Debate Question Stumps Ted Cruz Into 6 Seconds Of Painful Silence

Simple, eh?  And what was the question?

Tell us something you’ve done in the last year that has nothing to do with politics that would give Texans insight to who you are as a person.

And, gawrsh!  Cruz had to think about it!  For six whole endless seconds!

And just how simple is that question?  Well... it's a variation on "Who are you?".  Which is a simple question, I guess, if you're a simple person.

Of all the things Alpho has been accused of, being simple is not one of them.

Now, if he'd been given the questions ahead of time, that'd be different.  But not giving a glib, off-the-cuff answer to an unexpected question is hardly a bad quality in someone who's applying for a position in which a certain amount of thoughtfulness is called for.

Curious genetics

Orrin Hatch has announced the results of his DNA test:

1/1032 T-Rex
The rest: other dinosaurs

Er.  1032?  Wait a minute...

Prime Factors of 1032 = 2³ x 3 x 43

Having a factor of 3 in genetics is strange enough, but a factor of 43?

Whatever did those dinosaurs get up to?

(One might also try expressing it as a sum of negative powers of two, I suppose, starting with 2^-11.  Hmm, 1/2048 + 1/4096 + 1/8192 + 1/16384 + a whole bunch more less-significant bits, methinks.  Well, it's just a little less than 1/1024, so that's to be expected.  Many T-rexes at varying layers of the woodpile, apparently.  At least this doesn't require an ancestor with 43 genetic parents.)

Update:  Taking the latter explanation to be correct, we may run a simple little script to look for the number of T-Rexes in each generation of Hatch's ancestry, starting 11 generations back and stopping at some reasonable point:

(11) 1/2048
(12) 1/4096
(13) 1/8192
(14) 1/16384
(15) 1/32768
(16) 1/65536
(17) 1/131072
(18) 0/262144
(19) 0/524288
(20) 0/1048576
(21) 0/2097152
(22) 0/4194304
(23) 0/8388608
(24) 0/16777216
(25) 1/33554432
(26) 1/67108864
(27) 1/134217728
(28) 1/268435456
(29) 1/536870912
(30) 1/1073741824
(31) 1/2147483648
(32) 0/4294967296
(33) 0/8589934592
(34) 0/17179869184
(35) 0/34359738368
(36) 0/68719476736
(37) 0/137438953472
(38) 0/274877906944
(39) 1/549755813888
(40) 1/1099511627776
(41) 1/2199023255552
(42) 1/4398046511104
(43) 1/8796093022208
(44) 1/17592186044416
(45) 1/35184372088832
(46) 0/70368744177664
(47) 0/140737488355328
(48) 0/281474976710656
(49) 0/562949953421312
(50) 0/1125899906842624
(51) 0/2251799813685248
(52) 0/4503599627370496
(53) 1/9007199254740992
(54) 1/18014398509481984
(55) 1/36028797018963968
(56) 1/72057594037927936
(57) 1/144115188075855872
(58) 1/288230376151711744

Total = 1/1032.0000000000018

Note, however, that there could be more than one at any of the further removes, e.g., instead of 1/2048 + 1/4096, it could be 0/2048 + 3/4096 - that is, it could be that three of his 12^th-generation ancestors were of the T-Rex persuasion, rather than one 11^th and one 12^th.

Or maybe his great-grandpappy was the product of a really wild dinosaur orgy.  Possibly involving a Petri dish and recombinant DNA.  Anyone seen the Silurians lately?

How many Saudi assassins does it take...

Neo points out some issues with the Khashoggi story as we've been hearing it.

It seems (from what's currently visible) to be another of those none-of-this-makes-sense things.

We're hearing juicy details about his most abominable murder, though actual evidence seems to be rather lacking.

I guess the Turkish government is at least offering proof that he was murdered, in the form of surveillance footage showing him not leaving the embassy.  Well, showing the door, and a lack of him emerging therefrom.  That's conclusive, isn't it?

Maybe, before making radical foreign-policy changes, we should wait for someone to find the body and do a DNA test, to make sure he's really most sincerely dead, and not just 1/1024 dead.

As the feller sang:

I will not assume my enemy is dead
I will not assume my enemy is dead
'Til his corpse I have located
And autopsy validated
I will not assume my enemy is dead.

Hm.  And, given that the current head poobah in Saudi Arabia is perhaps not on the best terms with some other factions within his family and the government?  Entirely possible that, even if a killing did happen, he didn't order it, nor even mutter something about a turbulent priest.  Coulda been another faction, out to make trouble.  If there was a murder, but it wasn't in the embassy?  Could even have been the Turks, out to make trouble.

So, lots and lots of insufficient data, and a lot of what we do have is likely false.

Update, 19 Oct:  Now the Saudis are saying he's dead, but giving a rather wild explanation.  Like, he somehow got into a fight with the entire leadership of Saudi Foreign Intelligence and got accidentally killed, and then it was all covered up until just now.  Or something.  Maybe next week we'll get the Iranian version of the story, with a claim that the police have film of Saudi officials actually nailing Khashoggi's head to the floor.

But it does sound like he's actually dead, and as the result of actions by Saudi officials.  Which an awful lot of people were taking as established fact in advance of evidence, these past few days.

Awright, this is getting silly.

So I went looking for a cheap Cortex M0 microcontroller from a familiar vendor....

And found something in a 14-lead SOIC, with 8K of flash (probably adequate for the project at hand), 4K of RAM (a great plenty, if I don't get silly), two serial ports (each selectable as UART, I²C, SPI, etc.), zippy-fast 12-bit ADC, and of course a 32-bit processor buzzing along at 48 MHz.

For 97¢ in onesies.  Oh, and it looks like it has an on-chip oscillator, so no need to use two of the pins for a crystal.

Dunno if it's suitable for this project; I probably want something with, if nothing else, more pins, and probably more flash so I don't have to spend a bunch of hours trying to save a buck each on a low-production gizmo.  Applying some more realistic filters, I'm looking at probably north of a buck-fifty.  In onesies.  (Then I need to look at datasheets for details on PWM capability, precision of on-board analog reference, and suchlike fiddly details.)

When the passives cost more than the 32-bit MCU, you know you're not in the 1980s anymore.

Git off my lawn!

Seen at El Reg:

A Veblen good is a luxury item where demand increases the more expensive* it is. A dumb terminal such as a tablet is now a commodity good sold in supermarkets. Sales follow a conventional demand curve, and manufacturers count on selling lots cheaply. Amazon sells a colour tablet for £49.

Er.

An Android tablet - sorry, a ChromeOS tablet, whatever -  is now a dumb terminal?  Must be some new definition of Dumb™.  Why, back in my day....

(Hey, that last has many more verses than I remembered.  Also: obligatory Frank Hayes reference.)

Unfortunate lexical conventions

While still being unproductive this afternoon, I happened across this.

Which got me looking at Go again, as maybe a programming language suitable for one thing or another.

And, looking at the syntax, I see this:

When the input is broken into tokens, a semicolon is automatically inserted into the token stream immediately after a line's final token if that token is

• an identifier
• an integer, floating-point, imaginary, rune, or string literal
• one of the keywords break, continue, fallthrough, or return
• one of the operators and punctuation ++, --, ), ], or }

Hm.  Now, here's a thing (which annoys some other C programmers no end).  When I'm writing a long expression with a lot of terms in C or Verilog, I like to write it thusly (simplified contrived example):

foo = 0
    || !(inputs & INP_INTLK_OK)
    || (readings.vin < VIN_MIN)
    || (readings.hs_temp > 77)
    ;

The handy thing about this is: I can linewise comment out any term that seems to be not doing the right thing, or that needs to be removed while I'm debugging something else, and it doesn't break the syntax nor affect any of the other terms.  Or #if out one or more lines, likewise (in some cases, this is appropriate for production code that needs to apply partially different tests on different models of gadget).

With Go's handy, user-friendly, automatic-implied-semicolon rule, this doesn't work; there has to be a dangling operator at the end of the line.  (And it sounds like just wrapping the whole expression in parentheses would result in a syntax error instead of suppressing semicolon-implication).

Oh, well.  Ruby doesn't really allow my preferred form either.

Um.  Looks like no preprocessor / conditional compilation.  Not good for code that's basically shared among sub-projects (or sub-architectures) but needs to be a little different for each.  The C preprocessor has its flaws, but it's very useful in a lot of situations.  (No, you can't just use regular conditional expressions and optimization; the not-used code might reference undefined variables and such, causing compilation errors.)

But at least Go kept C's nice selection of assignment operators.  Saves, sometimes, a mess of typing and opportunity for error.

Won't you bring back, won't you bring back,

Papa Murphy's Pizza...

Used to be one in Midtown Palo Alto.  It's been gone for a few years now, I guess.

There was one in Sunnyvale, on El Camino.  Closed, apparently for renovations, earlier this year.  Google Maps showed it being open now.  Joy stopped by in search of an easy dinner: nope.  It's now something else entirely.

Murphy's is still in business, apparently, but the nearest one (as the crow flies) is in Fremont.  Which is not at all convenient anywhere close to dinner time.

Sure are a lot of things disappearing.  Orchard Supply is going out of business entirely; I guess there's still an Ace Hardware somewhere in downtown Palo Alto (the local hardware store in the Midtown area having folded a couple of years ago), but basic hardware stores are getting mighty sparse around the interim digs.  (No, Restoration Hardware doesn't count.  Not at all.)  And the quirky little novelty shops pretty much vanished over a decade back.

Being really useless this week

Lingering cold symptoms, especially the cough, which doesn't seem to be getting much better.  And the cough tends to keep me awake at night.

Then there's a slight case of ear crud, which I'm hoping won't develop into a repeat of the Great Omnibus Ear Infection of 1999.  (I don't remember whether that followed on from a cold or was a standalone thing.)  The current low-grade crud leaves me disoriented a lot, especially combined with lack of sleep.

So, lack of posting is mostly the result of lethargy, not of being busy with productive stuff.  On the other hand, if I were feeling better, I'd be busy with productive stuff; there's plenty that needs doing.

'Twas a busy Sunday

Did a bunch more house-cleaning.  Well... I did some more packing and hauling away; Joy did a lot of pulling up old flooring, removing shelves, and so on.

Used the air hose to chase an astonishing population of dust bunnies out of the wall furnaces.  Also, as of Saturday, the second furnace is once again operational (just needed a new thermocouple).  Sometime this week, I'll open all windows and doors, turn off the smoke detectors, and turn both furnaces up to full blast for a while, to burn out the remaining dust.  (Probably after all dust-creating activity is completed.)

And!  Courtesy of Craigslist, I finished the day with a lighter garage and a heavier wallet.  Still a couple of things to sell off yet, but there's definite progress on the garage-emptying front.

Seems various fire departments had a busy day, too.  A bit past noon, I stepped outside to the smell of burning vegetation, a wrong-colored sky, and dim, reddish sunlight.  Wildfires to the north and south, as it turns out;  I don't know which was the source of this particular particulate pall.

Whoooo....

Made a nice pot of chicken curry this evening.

I used about the usual amount of the usual curry powder (making it moderately spicy by my standards; fairly mild if you're Indian, over-the-top fierce if you're North Dakotan), plus a generous dollop of ginger, because why not?

I finished eating half an hour ago, and I'm still sweating profusely.  Must be the ginger.  Cleared out my sinuses real good, too, if only temporarily.

And now Southmoon wants to gnaw on my hand.  She does seem to like a hint of curry (well, she is part Siamese).  And goulash (go figure).

Afterthought:  Maybe curry smells like Cloister the Student, god of the Cat People?

Saturday morning randomness

A strange perspective!  Spotted here, Jim Acosta sez:

More bashing the press by those in power. First Amendment getting you down Stew?

"Those in power"?  The "Stew" to whom he was responding appears to be nobody in particular.  Acosta has a prominent and privileged platform.  But apparently any random who criticizes him must be in a position of power.

 

Possible interpretation!  One of those accusing Kavanaugh of perjury over his claim that "boofing" refers to flatulence (as opposed, apparently, to the blue falconry* so self-evidently** prevalent in Catholic prep schools) pointed to a yearbook remark:

Have you boofed yet?

And proclaimed that this clearly shows that boofing meant something that not everybody did, because the question

Have you farted yet?

Simply makes no sense.

Unless, y'know... it was maybe addressed to a classmate who denied ever farting?  Just a thought.

At least there weren't any references to extinct fat-nosed chickens.

 

That's all for now.  Off to the drugstore to whistle at girls buy some stuff for the crud.

 

* In the literal sense, figuratively speaking.  Or did I mean blue featherosity?

**Self-evident: no evidence required nor offered.

In hyperlocal news:

We now have confirmation that the house next door was indeed bought (at a suspiciously low price) by an investor; it's now being renovated, presumably to be resold at a considerable markup.

Which is probably good news.  If it had sold at that price to an actual end-user, it would mark a significant drop in the local housing market.

I gotta get over this lingering-cold-and-stuff crud, and get back to work on getting my place ready to sell.  (Joy's been busy clearing out clutter, tearing up the old carpet, and removing carpet fasteners and such from the underlying hardwood, but there's also quite a bit of stuff I still need to do personally.)