Silicon Valley Redneck

Ah, taxation.

I just noticed that Tennessee has an "unauthorized substances tax."

Back in the day... I remember when the ol' Form 1040 had a line for "illegal income."  I sometimes pondered reporting 37¢ on that line, just for giggles.  (Yes, I was having to use the long form, even back then.  My finances have always been complicated, whether I had money or not.)

Addendum:  Reading the fine print, I see that there are only rates set for various sorts of recreational pharmaceuticals, and not for other sorts of unauthorized substances.  (I guess for some of those you're supposed to get a tax stamp from BATFE, or DOE, or something.  But then they'd be authorized substances, wouldn't they?  Hey, my favorite recreational chemicals are for external use only.)

Auto-antonym

"No bail."

Can mean either "held without bail" (traditional), or "released without bail" (new).

So the casual reader won't know whether the policy is "tough on crime; lock 'em all up" or "fuhgeddaboudit; just turn 'em all loose."

Confusing headline of the morning

EXPLOSIVE RICE MEMO DECLASSIFIED

Er.  Explosive rice?  Nitrostarch, or what?

Eep?

Here's the local 10-day forecast as of 0327 o'clock in the AM this morning:

Wait... not only has the rain been extended beyond this week, but what happened to a week from Wednesday?  Division by zero?  Zombie apocalypse?  Sparkling manslaughter bees?  Alien invasion?  Lucifer's Hammer (but I thought that fell on a Tuesdae)?

Maybe that's the Internet's way of telling me to go back to bed.

Update:  Looks like Segfault Wednesday has been updated to regular ol' thunderstorms.  Today... well...

The forecast was for thunderstorms starting around 4-ish, and for not very much wind all day.  In reality, the first torrential downpour hit, I guess, noonish - when, had my arm been in working order (I kinda overdid it over the weekend; relocating a bunch of 7-foot-long, 4-inch-diameter poles was maybe not the best choice of activities, but it needed doing), I likely would have been out gardening.  And, while the average wind in any given hour hasn't been much, some of the rainy patches bring some fierce wind with them.

Oh, well.  The gaps in the afternoon rain sufficed for me to haul the garbage down to the curb (yes, we've signed up for a curbside collection service) and fetch the mail.  Most exciting thing for me in the mailbox was a bottle of brush-killer concentrate, which I don't think I'll be using this week.

Bonus:  Just composed an e-mail.  The random .sig generator come up with this fortune:

The Killer Ducks are coming!!!

"Newer edition"

Methinks the algorithm be lacking:

Perchance Amazon's algorithm has become confused by exposure to R. W. Wood's classic, How to Tell the Birds From the Flowers.

WaffleWords sans Twitter

I don't have a Twitter account, and don't particularly want one, but here I couldn't resist.

Seems a currently trendy WaffleWord is: #LockdownIn5Words.

So:

Forget it, Jake.  It's Calvinball.

A little earlier...

Scenes from Before Cow:

This is the kind of stuff I confront when I set forth to fetch the morning paper.  At least this area doesn't (as far as I know) include habitat for zombies, barrow-wights, and such, but you just never know when the fog might be hiding a vicious pack of rabbits, a feral Black Angus, or an invisible dwarf.

Bête noire

It's a beast.  It's black.  And it's munching on our weeds, dagnabbit!

I presume it belongs on the yonder side of that there fence.  I've notified the owner of the herd next door.

After I took this picture, the critter wandered into the beside-the-pond area, which currently contains abundant pokeweed, which as I understand it is not something livestock ought to be eating.

Maybe I should keep an eye on the victory garden, which contains things livestock should definitely not be eating, on account of we're planning on eating them (also, some of the things growing out there are toxic to many species - onions, for example).

Update:  Neighbor says that's one of their two crazy cows; also, a tree fell and crunched the fence.  So, cow wandered through gap in fence, no surprise there.  Cow-wranglers tried to motivate her to return by menacing her calf, whereupon (if I got the story right) the crazy cow jumped over an intact part of the fence.

Anyway, she's back on the proper side of the fence now, and they're fixing the fence to keep the cattle where they belong.  Also, apparently the boutique beef business isn't all that profitable nowadays.  Someday, when the Pestilence is past, we'll have to make introductions properly.

A fine sunny day spent glued to my desk

Yesterday, that was.  Much bashing my head against the FPGA thing - well, a lot of the time was spent setting up for (rather limited) testing.

One thing I'd forgotten these past many months was just how long it takes to compile the FPGA code (not a terribly big FPGA, nor especially crowded, but getting somewhere close on the timing constraints turns out to be a challenge).  Waiting for the process to complete takes a chunk out of the day... and when there are several builds a day, for tweaking stuff, productivity does rather fall off.

Which kind of points to the next workstation having all the CPU the budget will stand.  Also probably 32GB of RAM, especially given that a lot of stuff (notably the venerable Xilinx toolchain) will have to run in virtual machines owing to library issues and whatnot.

And... maybe I'll want to rethink the storage scheme.  The past decade and more, most of my "home directory"-type files have lived on the file server, vis NFS over gigabit Ethernet; this comes in handy if, e.g., I need to bounce back and forth between desk and workbench and have access to the same project files.  But maybe now I really want to move at least some of that (starting with the Subversion working copies, where compilations and such tend to happen) back onto the workstation, on a high-performance SSD, and share the directories on the workstation with the lab computer, etc., while also making some sort of arrangement for backing them up*.  This implies getting a bigger SSD for the workstation than I'd been figuring on, but what the heck.  And: got to consider the implications for projects involving various sorts of IDEs that insist on storing absolute paths (symlinks for compatibility may be involved).

Ah, well.  Stuff for the next rainy day, perhaps.  Today, an early grocery pickup, then more FPGA stuff (turns out the spec for the new feature changed while I wasn't looking) and probably some light gardening.

* With the reasonably capable Internet connection here, I might even look into some cloud-based backup scheme, in addition to keeping a daily mirror and rotating snapshots on a local fireproof hard drive.  Long term, I figure on having redundant file servers in basement and barn, but that's looking like a next-year thing.

Questionable logic: the Blue Peacock Atomic Chicken

I'd heard of this before, but was reminded by this video.

Part of the Blue Peacock story is that, in order to keep the emplaced bomb's electronics from getting too cold to operate, it was proposed that a live chicken be placed within the bomb's burial capsule with a week's supply of food and water.

Er... that would be 1957-vintage electronics, presumably powered up, right?  What would the heat dissipation have been?  Like, how many chicken-power?  Wouldn't simply adding a bit more insulation have kept the electronics package nice and cozy?

It may not have been a 2004 April Fool's joke... but I'll give pretty good odds that it was a joke in 1957.

A minor point, here.

Been seeing clickbaity headlines about how Pestilence diagnoses have been spiking in rural areas of flyover states, generally with overtones of stupid science-denying rural hicks get what's comin' to them.

Well!

Here in Tennessee, there was indeed a big spike when the state started testing all the inmates in prisons; more'n half of them tested positive, with nearly all being asymptomatic.  And those prisons are in, yup, rural areas.

So, not at all a case of hicks in low-population-density settings spreading the crud; rather, the crud is spreading (surprise!) in high-population-density indoor settings.

And how many enlightened states released large numbers of prisoners without testing them, hmmmm?

Is this a morning which I see before me?

According to the clock, yes.  Also, it's somewhat light outside.

Dim, overcast, somewhat drizzly.  A fine day for poking at the ToasterCo FPGA thing.

Alas, I was up way too late last night, on account of cross-timezone Family Business, and more-or-less-sleeping from 2300 to 0400 is just not enough, nohows.

Back to bed.  Maybe I can wake up properly and be productive before the techies back in Silicon Valley are at work.

Some suspension of disbelief required

Headline:

After six new cases, Wuhan plans to test all 11 million residents for coronavirus

That seems a bit of an extreme reaction to six cases.  They really have that many test kits available?  From a reputable vendor, like Central Placebo Ltd.?

And... wait a minute. All 11 million?  I thought 5 million of them had scattered before the city was quarantined.  Have they all been rounded up?

Imperial overreach, again

News a few days back, from the realm of Darth Noisome, was that His Imperiousness had decreed that elections would henceforth be entirely vote-by-mail, or at least that everyone would receive an absentee ballot, ask for it or not (and, apparently, including inactive voters, possibly deceased voters, and so on - probably including us, though we (hooray!) don't live there anymore).

There's a cute little detail, though: California doesn't have a unitary executive.  This kind of came to public attention some years ago when, during one of the countless budget crises, Arnie tried to give orders to the Treasurer, who, being an independently-elected official in his own right, declined to do as the Governator demanded.

Well, guess what?  Last I heard, elections in California are the responsibility of the Secretary of State, an independently-elected official who doesn't take orders from the Governor.

This could get really interesting.  A massively unreliable election by order of someone with no authority to give such an order?  What could possibly go wrong?

Seriously unclear on the concept

Rantlet brought on by this idiocy: the Social Distancing Picnic Blanket.  (Via.)

Then there's Darth Noisome graciously allowing boating... but only solo boating; no more than one person per boat.

See, when your family has been cooped up indoors together for weeks, once you're finally allowed back outdoors, it is vitally important that members of the household maintain six feet of separation from one another at all times when in public, until they're safely back indoors at home and can resume puppy-piling on the sofa.  Because Reasons.

It's not about public health; it's about public morals.  And every aspect of your life must be arranged to make life easier for the Mental Hygiene Police.

A glorious sunny Sunday

Supposed to remain sunny most of the week, too.

The morning was a mite chilly, but it looks like the plants survived.  Now it's getting warm, and a breeze is picking up.

Alas, I need to avoid the distractions this afternoon and focus on that FPGA thing.  More gardening tomorrow.

Got various supplies ordered, for gardening, grilling, suspending the kayak from the rafters in the barn, and whatnot.  Taking inventory and surveying the situation, I realized I'm going to need more weed-barrier fabric to surround the planting strips; mowing the grass adjacent to the strips won't be practical (even with suitable fence planning) once the squash vines get to spreading.  So, new plan is to set mower to "scalp", butcher the areas around the planting strips, and cover with weed barrier.

Based on a little bit of further research, I'm now favoring an AMD CPU (Ryzen 5 or maybe 7) for the next workstation; while I don't think hyperthreading gains me much, the AMD family can run its memory bus faster than the Core i5, and if I can't get quad-channel memory architecture I can settle for a faster bus.  And... maybe even the latest-greatest X570-based motherboard, though it's looking like those are a bit bleeding-edge in terms of shipping with a usable BIOS, so maybe I want something not so new.  Haven't evaluated video cards yet, but probably a fairly basic recent-generation NVIDIA-based card will do all I need, even if I eventually get that 4K monitor I've been wanting.  Still not at decision time; maybe next weekend when it's supposed to be raining again.

Ah, well.  Time to detach myself from the Internets and dive into the FPGA issue.  If I can get it sorted out quickly, there'll be time for gardening!

Update:  Got the FPGA thing addressed, I think.  During a couple of gardening breaks, I got some more seeds stuck in little pots in the basement, and attempted an outdoors project that didn't go all that well.  There are a bunch of bushy little trees, see, that have way too much near-ground-level growth, making it difficult to mow around them.  I set off to deal with this - it turns out that some of the excess growth is unrelated trees, which adds to the amount of removal called for.  Anyway, two problems turned up.  Firstly, wielding the big pruning lopper involves the same sort of forces that damaged my left elbow, so ouch.  Secondly, it's gotten windy enough that cut-off minor tree limbs don't stay in the cart; they try to scamper off downwind. Oh, well.  I got a little done, and it's not really an urgent project.

Update 2:  Just noticed a maybe-decisive difference between the Intel and AMD offerings.  The Core i5 (9th/10th gen) supports up to 16 PCIe lanes; the Ryzen 5/7 (3x00X) supports 20.  So, if you're trying to use an add-on graphics card (typically PCIe x16) at full bandwidth plus some other add-on card?  If I'm understanding this correctly, Intel is out of the running.  Not that I really expect to be giving the bus interface to the graphics card that much of a workout, besides which most i5 users will do fine with the on-chip graphics, but it seems like a strong consideration for some people, maybe including me.  Um... a high-performance NVMe SSD uses 4 PCIe lanes, doesn't it?

(This also points to the Micro-ATX form factor making a lot of sense, if neither popular CPU family is designed to deal with a bunch of expansion slots.)

Hmph.  Gotta do more research on CPUs, motherboard chipsets, specific motherboards, and PCIe system architecture in general.

Sunny!

And supposed to stay that way most of the week.

Time for gardening!  Though sometime this weekend I need to find the focus to address that FPGA issue.  Yesterday, what with the rain, ought to have been the day for that, but between distractions and lack of sleep it didn't happen.

Today... I think I'll augment a pallet for parking the tiller (swapping the tiller for the box blade and re-scraping he driveway can wait for another day), cut some 1x2 sticks into little tent poles to hold up the next stretch of row cover, and do some planting.  Also, haul the old charcoal grill over from the barn and grill something for dinner!

Shelving for the lab is supposed to be arriving Wednesday-ish (during the dry weather, yay), though I'm not sure when I'll be able to install it.  Pesky arm is having new symptoms which I hope are related to healing.

"More commonly"

Spotted here:

... the Giant Asian Hornet, known more commonly as the murder hornet ...

Hello?  I've heard of Giant Asian Hornets for decades.  First time I heard them called murder hornets was this month.

"They're most commonly known by this sensationalist, fearmongering new name that we've been using almost exclusively ever since we made it up last week!"

Travel records

Google just sent me a reminder that it knows where I went in April.

I took a look

It has some very... interesting... interpretations of my phone's movements.

One day, for example, has a whole bunch of segments clustered around home, but some of them extending beyond the property line and in some cases across the road.  The interpretation is a mixture of driving (rather slowly, e.g., 1.3 miles in 22 minutes by Google's reckoning) and walking.

I think a lot of it was lawn mowing, none of which extended beyond the property line.

Didn't get the Work done today that I'd intended, but...

Some fiddly tasks have been filtering in from ToasterCo, which apparently now meets Darth Noisome's criteria for being an essential business, or maybe the fed.gov has overridden the State's determination.  Anyway, at least some of the people there are back at work now, and there's an FPGA issue that I was supposed to be sorting through, but that requires a couple of hours of concentration and that wasn't a day for being able to concentrate while sitting at my desk.

At least I did get the materials all organized for staring at another day.  Maybe tomorrow.  Supposed to rain most of tomorrow.

Things I did get done?  I mean, aside from fixing yesterday's networking mystery by turning it off and back on?

Out to the gas station, long before the day-o, under a big ol' full Moon, for 14.2 gallons of Baptist gas for the mowers and tiller.  Yes, that included a couple of 5-gallon steel cans; I decided I could handle them (and was right, barely).

Then a bit of rearranging of stuff in the barn, including some sliding around of things to heavy for me to be lifting just now.  There's now a decent-sized clear area!

Then some pondering of that FPGA stuff, unproductively.

Then, well, it being a fine afternoon, I got out for a goodly dose of the ol' transdermal vitamin D by way of mowing some areas of the front yard that had somehow gotten significantly overgrown in the past week or so.  (I really need to be dosing up on radiation attenuator before spending bunches of time outdoors in the afternoon.)

And now 'tis time to fix dinner.  Maybe there'll be enough time after dinner to do some planting.  Er.  Except that there's a chance of frost Saturday morning, so perhaps planting sprouts out when I don't expect to have time to put a cover over them is not a good plan.  Planting Saturday, I guess.