Silicon Valley Redneck

Sign of the times?

Stores putting in locked cabinets for items requiring enhanced security.

The Walmart in Mountain View now keeps frickin' deodorant under lock and key.  Also shaving stuff, etc.

Funny, they don't seem to need to do that in Knoxville.

Eek.

It's nearly April.

I need to (among many other things) get busy poking numbers into TurbotAx.

And I have the disconcerting feeling that my father's taxes may end up getting done Cathy-style.  (I suppose I could be looking up the many instances of the tax gag in the actual comic strip and linking to a few of those, but I'm in a rush this morning.)

Stupid judicial tricks

Seen here, via Insty: the Ninth Circus rules that the doctrine of "qualified immunity" means that cops can't be sued for allegedly stealing cash while executing a search warrant.

Logic:

the two men “did not have a clearly established Fourth or Fourteenth Amendment right to be free from the theft of property seized pursuant to a warrant.”

Excuse me?  Whatever happened to the Fifth Amendment right not to be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law?

Yeah, I know.  That clause has been declared inconvenient, because if taken at face value it forbids the current manifestation of civil asset forfeiture - unless you buy the argument that "we're not depriving a possibly-innocent person of his property, we're depriving possibly-guilty property of its owner."

Does this lens

Make my nose look big?

Orange Man hates HEMP!

See executive order.  HEMP is mentioned.

Giggle of the morning.

Currently making the rounds: ZOMG that id10t Mike Lee talked nonsense about the Green Nude Eel!!  And used he used lame posters as props!!!!

Of course, he knew perfectly well that his presentation was nonsense.  Hilarious, artful nonsense.  Which puts it at least two up on the Green Leap Forward.

Skip the analysis and have a watch (full-length official version):

If this was Tuesday...

... I hate to think what Monday was like around here.

Woke up a bit after 0300, still being somewhat on Knoxville time but having gotten to bed way late last night.  Said good morning to the cats, and let them out to the garage.  Ambled into the Interim Office to peruse the 'Net.

After a while came a great crashing noise.  Next-door neighbor moving something heavy around early, or Huckleberry up to some deviltry?  Check garage: nothing obviously amiss, at least not of sufficient magnitude to account for the noise.  Hm.

Eventually have breakfast: a big pancake made from just-add-water mix, water, and an egg (using the bagged mix because there's, obviously, no usable milk in the house, and adding the egg just because).

Then, what the heck, off walkies.  Walk up to vintage Prius, push button on keyfob, get half-hearted semi-klunk from the door lock.  Try again: nothing.  Door remains locked.  Presumably the 12V auxiliary battery is dead.

Oh, and that noise earlier?  Was a big branch of the street tree in the neighbor's yard coming down.  In his driveway.  Blocking it quite thoroughly (good thing he's retired), and touching (not obviously damaging) his daily driver.

Look around for the car battery charger: 'tis nowhere to be found.  Foo.  Borrow Joy's car to drive to the hiking grounds and a quick shopping run.

Back again.  Apply voltmeter: battery is pining for the fjords.  Ponder battery chargement.  Decide to try a redneck - well, silicon valley redneck - approach.  Drag a bench power supply out to the car, set for a bit over 12V and no current, connect to the battery terminals, turn on, crank up the current....

I can feed it about 1 Amp, which gets 4.8V or so.  More current, and the voltage bounces around, with clicking sounds.  Leave it on 1 Amp for a while; the voltage fails to increase.  Clearly, the battery is not charging, and this particular power supply does not possess suitable characteristics for the task at hand.

Ponder some more.  Try the same thing again, only using a Xantrex XFR 60-20.  Note that plugging this particular power supply into an ungrounded extension cord while standing barefoot on damp concrete seems inadvisable.  Set voltage to 12; start cranking up the current.  This, too, goes into bouncy-bouncy mode at bit over 1 Amp.  If I persist in turning up the current, the clicking sounds get louder, and eventually turn into the horn beeping... like the alarm is trying to go off, but can't quite draw enough current.

Growf.  Did the alarm get triggered and not shut off, and that's what flattened the battery?  Anyway, pushing buttons on the keyfob while this nonsense is going on seems ineffectual.

Well, maybe I should try a real battery charger.  The one in the garage still hasn't appeared.  Borrow Joy's car again, and off to the one remaining car-parts place anywhere vaguely nearby.  Procure one-each rather overpriced computerized battery charger / tender.

Hook it up; it complains that the battery is sulfated, and doesn't seem to be doing anything useful.  So....

Find a more-or-less suitable wrench, and disconnect the ground lead.  Connect the charger directly to the battery terminals.  Still says sulfated.  Leave it for a while.

Unplug the charger and apply the voltmeter: a bit over 12V.  Hey, maybe it's working?  Start the charger up again: now it says it's a bit over half charged.  Leave it a while longer, until it shows maybe 65% charged.

Disconnect the charger, put the ground lead back on: alarm.  BEEP!  BEEP!  BEEP!  Push the unlock button on the keyfob: presto!  Alarm goes silent, and door lock makes unlocking sound.

Tighten up the nut on the ground lead.  Try to start the engine: YES!  It starts, and runs, and... oops, runs very rough for a moment... but then returns to normal.

Button everything back up.  Set the clock.  (I don't have any presets on the radio, and for all I know this replacement radio may have nonvolatile storage for such things.)  Note that the gas gauge is showing one bar, blinking.  I don't remember it being low when In parked it... is this a side-effect of the power cycle?

Drive to a nearby gas station.  Note that the gauge goes from one bar to two early in the trip.  Put in about half a tank worth; gauge goes to n-1 bars.  Return to base; along the way, the gauge goes to full.  Which seems to indicate that it's quite pessimistic after a reboot.

Anyway.  Assuming it's still working tomorrow, a new aux battery goes on the at-next-service list, along with that brake job.

Then there's dinner to be fixed.  Hmm.  Not feeling inspired.  Have chicken thigh meat (boneless, skinless), leeks, baby carrots, sugar snap peas, and whatever long-shelf-life stuff is handy.  Take one large pan; put some water in it; add a bit of salt, some avocado oil, balsamic vinegar, tarragon, thyme, the chicken thighs, the leeks (chopped) and the baby carrots (quartered).  Cover and simmer for, I dunno, maybe 45 minutes?  Then uncover, turn the heat up, stir while the excess water boils off, and serve.  Comes out tasty.

And now, in what should be my after-dinner unwinding time, I need to address a new issue sent by ToasterCo.  'Tis a fair simple question, but one that requires re-acquaintance with the details of some Verilog code from four years past.

Also:  Joy's car has its TPMS light on.  I got out the bicycle pump and a tire gauge and pumped the one low tire up to spec, but the light remained on.  My father's car also has its TPMS light on.  My car is old enough not to have a TPMS light in the first place (there being no great need to monitor the pressure in the logs).

Back.

Yeah, been away for two weeks.  In Tennessee, again.  This time... well, just the very brief version now, 'cause there's much else to be done today.

This was, of course, the view from the porch, down the driveway, of the one we ended up not buying.

This is the view from the porch, down the driveway, of the one we're currently negotiating.

And the second photo here is the storm-swollen French Broad River at Mutton Hollow landing, about 5 minutes from the one currently in negotiation.

We're hoping to have all sorted out within a week, and some proper news to report.  It's complicated.

Additional:  On the flight back, the TSA apparently searched my checked suitcase in great detail and repacked it.  Only novel thing was a couple of sample ceramic floor tiles.  They got suspicious of the two big square objects, opened the case, and then had to rummage through my toilet kit to see if my toothpaste was actually ceramic tile activating cream?  (No, I don't know what a ceramic tile does once it's activated, but I assume it's something terroristic.)

Curiously, we'd all been mysteriously put on pre-check status for the return flight.  Or at least the boarding passes said pre-check on them, and the guy checking IDs against boarding passes routed us to the "keep your shoes on and leave your laptop in the bag" line.

But... but...

Think back, if you will, to last fall's great Senate circus.

Remember how Brett Kavanaugh definitely committed perjury by insisting that the "boof" references in his yearbook were not at all about the one and only possible meaning put forth by some Senator or other?

Well, nobody tell this Aussie candy company.

Somehow, I think neither the definitive meaning nor the perjurious one is intended here.

It appears that some people...

... Are worse plumbers than I am.  Which is saying something.

But at least the infamous 5/32 inch Bungalow Paneling hasn't put in an appearance.

Explanation, as usual, to follow.  When I get around to it.

My headache shall be your headache!  Or your hilarity.  Whatever.

We're attempting to read ahead in the saga so's not to be taken totally by surprise when Njal's many enemies show up.  You, however, shall be kept in the dark for the nonce.

Update:  Some figurative bungalow paneling turns out to be a better product than we'd feared.  Literal bungalow paneling remains absent.

Disclaimer:  I used to drive an AMC.  But it wasn't a Gremlin!

Not exactly a whatziss (2)

Explanations (for this and the previous one) probably Tuesdayish.

Search engine pessimization

Seems that, nowadays, all the search engines favor dynamic new content.  Sites that get updated many times daily.  Blogs, like.

Which is kind of a problem if you're trying to look up eternal verities.  Try to find, e.g., a math treatise that hasn't been updated since 1923 because it bloody well doesn't need updating, and chances are you'll get a lot of unrelated noise that involves vaguely similar keywords.

Oh, yes.  And the "vaguely similar keywords" thing doesn't help any, either.  Not that many years ago, the default was exact match of all keywords.  Now, there's an excellent chance that the first several results will be missing one or more of your keywords, and some of the others may be significantly mangled to match fashionable searches and/or frequently-updated sites.

All of which favors trendy chatter over solid information.  And that's before intentional sabotage, e.g., Google's recent memory-holing of Patrick Moore as a co-founder of Greenpeace.

"My God, it's full of beers!"

Mysterious big white monolith appears in Nebraska!

(Via El Reg, where, inexplicably, the word "monolith" has yet to appear in the comments.)

Ruminating on my inner cow

Is how I spent yesterday evening.

The prime rib was offered in two sizes: 12 oz and 16 oz.

I went for the 12 oz, which was a quite excessive lump of meat.  I didn't manage to finish it... and was still overstuffed.  And to think some people finish off the 16 oz and then have dessert...?

Mostly recovered this morning.  Gotta find some opportunity for exercise.

Poorly-chosen example

So there's this vid, explaining why most baking happens at Regulo 4, er, 350°F.

One of the visual examples is a pizza.

Pizza at 350?  Noooo!

Pizza requires volcano heat.  Regulo 11, at least.

Yeesh.

Magnetoreception

Is purportedly an actual thing in (some) humans.  See also here.

Which, yeah.  When I was a kid, I always had a pretty good sense of north.  Not so much any more, but who knows - maybe it'll return after this year's lifestyle reboot?

Iowahawk strikes again

Alas, he's abandoned his blog for Twitter, but even there he manages to produce treasures.  Like this thread.  Sample:

Trump is a poor person's ideal of a rich person, Beto is a rich person's ideal of a poor person

laid off coal miner: if I win the lottery Ima get me a big gold mansion with strippers and eat steak
Silicon Valley CEO: if only I could quit this job and ride around the country with a dog finding myself in one of those pickup truck thingies

Quote of the morning so far

Spotted here:

There are many ways to be a woman. There are many ways to be a man. Maybe, in certain edge cases, someone's internal sense of self really doesn't fit the outer equipment. But not everyone who's ever chafed at a social expectation for his or her sex is trans. Insisting otherwise is confusing our kids.

Just so.  There's this thing called "sexual identity disorder", which is wildly overbroad, basically sweeping in anyone who doesn't conform perfectly to old-fashioned gender stereotypes.  In the past year or so, loony activists have started defining "transgender" to include anyone with the slightest sign of SID... and insisting that drastic medical intervention is required in such cases.

Which is nuts.  It's no help to the fraction of a percent of the population with actual gender dysphoria, nor to the significant percentage diagnosable with SID (most of whom are perfectly normal, for some value of "normal").

People are people, no two alike.  Trying to assign them to little boxes, and then to alter the bits that don't quite fit is, well, Procrustean.

Don't be That Guy.

Dichotomy is invalid.

Silly little poll thingie, spotted here:

Er.  How about "strongly yes" and "strongly no", simultaneously?

Actually: the reason given for "yes" lines up with the stated question.  The reason given for "no" does not.  Encouraging people to improve themselves is inherently dangerous, not a reason for something not being dangerous.

Ergo: dangerous, yes, but for good reasons as well as bad.  How about that?

Gonna be one complicated spring.

You've heard of the farmer-fox-goose-grain puzzle?

Logistics between now and summer are looking more like farmer-fox-goose-grain-lizard-Spock.

Oh, well.  Tasks for this week are at least somewhat clear.