Silicon Valley Redneck

A suggestion to makers of major appliances

If your product is a large electrical device that basically gets put in one place and left there...

... And your installation instructions specifically say do not use an extension cord...

... Maybe consider equipping it with a decent-length cord in the first place?  I mean, how man pennies do you save by using a cord that'll barely reach a typically-located outlet even with optimal placement?

Yeah, the freezer arrived this morning - yay!  I unpacked it, and scooted it over to the intended location, only to find that there was no way the cord would reach the outlet without some significant rearrangement of the existing stuff.

So now Joy is out there rearranging, being as how most of the stuff in that area is hers.  Then I want to leave the new freezer sitting with its door open for a few hours, to air out.  Then we plug it in, and see if it gets properly cold.

And, assuming all's well, we should be stocking it over the next few weeks.

Update:  Freezer is in place in a corner, not exactly as planned but close enough, and chilling down nicely.  I need to look for some bins for organizing stuff on the shelves.

Update 2:  Speaking of freezers and the contents thereof, howzabout frozen stir-fry veggie blends without the broccoli?  Not everyone likes broccoli, ya know.

Busy and distractful times

Spent quite a chunk of today mowing various grass that, if left unmown much longer, would have become unmanageable.  Can't have the footpaths reverting to hayfield.  Sometime soon, I need to deal with the rest of the front lawn, plus the strips bracketing the driveway.

And, one of the ToasterCo projects has become semi-active again, at least to the point where I need to spend some time on it, if only answering questions and making suggestions.

Add in the ongoing Feline Medical Situation, and things are quite chaotic enough without looking outside the fence.

Oh, and we're supposed to be getting the freezer tomorrow - yay!  Today's phonebot informed me that it's coming between 0900 and 1300.

Idiom!

As seen here, Chuck Schumer tweeted thusly:

If Postmaster General DeJoy doesn’t testify before Congress next week as Speaker Pelosi and I have requested, he should be stamped, returned to sender, and removed from his position.

"... stamped, returned to sender..."

Um.

The expression is: stamped "RETURN TO SENDER".  Different phrase, different meaning.

Does Chuckles not know this?  Did he dictate the tweet to someone who doesn't know it?  To something that doesn't know it?

Yeesh.

Soggy out there this morning.

Much rain, lightning alerts, and a Helvetica flood advisory.  Sorry, an Areal flood advisory.  At least it's not Comic Sans.

This does seem like an Indoors Day.  Maybe I'll actually get around to re-wiring all the things under my desk.

I'm developing a suspicion that my fancy electronic rain gauge may currently be reading low.  For a while, it wasn't reading at all; turned out it wasn't a bug, but that the funnel had somehow come loose and blown off.  Maybe this time it has wasps nesting in it; I'll have to check on that, some dry day (and, if in fact it's clogged with bugs, maybe put fine stainless screens over both openings).

Too much rain in a short time, and I'll have to swap the box blade back onto the tractor, oh funsies.  Been meaning to order some cement to mix into the gravel at selected gully-prone areas as part of a near-future driveway re-scraping, just to slow the erosion a bit.

Update:  Yeah, the driveway got badly eroded again.  Maybe before I re-scrape the gravel, I should see if there's some reasonable way to re-contour the gullies a little so the runoff gets diverted someplace less damaging.

Update 2:  That rain gauge is definitely wonky.  Been creeping up all day (Monday), now (mid-evening) having reached 0.14 inch for the day... and as far as I noticed, the total rain for the day was zero, except for maybe some in the couple of hours after midnight and a fair bit of fog in the morning.  There was some for this morning.  I wonder if some of Saturday's under-measured rain got trapped, and is slowly dribbling through?  Anyway, gotta drag the ladder out there, dismount the thing, and have a look-see.  Then re-mount it, find north again, and maybe while I'm at it add some supplemental pole-bracing.

Friday the 13th come on the 14th this month.

Veterinary emergency.  Waiting for the nearby vet to open.

Looks to be a much busier day than planned.

Update:  Circulatory problem, not something caused by eating bugs.  Being treated at the vet and kept there overnight.

Clarification to the update:  The cat, that is.  Not me.

Update 2:  Word as of Saturday morning is that the vet wants to keep her for observation over the weekend.  Apparently this particular problem has about a 10% survival rate, but she doesn't have a particularly bad case, and her brother has already survived the same thing, only worse, twice now, so she'll likely be OK.

Dunno what's up with FedEx now.

We've had some packages show up this week, but....

One box from Wally World supposedly got on the truck in Nashville on Sunday and hasn't been heard from since.

Four identical (to each other, not to the aforementioned box) boxes from Home Depot supposedly got on a truck in Ellenwood, GA, yesterday... ah.  Information has been updated.  The shipment was in Ellenwood yesterday, and all day the status was "arriving today by end of day", but apparently it didn't actually get on the truck until this morning, at 0649.  And, delivery date shows as "PENDING."  Well, I hope it arrives at a non-rainy time.  It's much-needed sturdy shelving for organizing some of the Stuff in the basement.

Which reminds me: I was going to shop for some slightly smaller sturdy shelving for one corner of the barn.  Wire shelves seem best for the application, but I need to check the weight rating, as I'll be storing some heavy stuff there.  (Also, I guess I should weigh some of the things that belong on the shelves, just to make sure.)

Anyway: having shipments mysteriously go into limbo seems kinda Not Normal.  I wonder what's going on.  It's not like these are both coming from the same depot or anything.

Update:  Unmarked FedEx van dropped off two of the shelving units midday Friday.  Third one is expected today-eventually; fourth ran into a Complication in Knoxville, apparently, and is now expected Monday.  The final package from Walmart, the one with the chili and dish detergent, hasn't had its status updated since Sunday night, when it was loaded onto a truck in Nashville, made the jump to hyperspace, and hasn't been heard from since.

Update 2, Sunday evening:  Three of the four shelving units have now arrived; the remaining one is, I think, supposed to turn up tomorrow.  Other FedEx deliveries have been turning up on schedule or early.  But... that one remaining Walmart box seems to have gone completely into limbo in Nashville, and it status hasn't been updated since early last Sunday morning.

Cat, cat, cat, cat, caterpillar

Late this morning, four out of five cats were gathered in one part of the living room.

Turns out they'd cornered a fat little caterpillar of some sort.  Looks like the sort of garden pest that lives in soil and eats roots; I have no idea what it was doing in the living room.  Apart from crawling along the floor, that is.

In other Cat___ news, I finally got around to taking the boxes (plural) of Cat 6 cable (as well as a bunch of connectors and related tools and whatnot) out of the mouse closet and moving them to the spot in the basement where, when we're finally able to resume home-improvement projects, I hope to have a bunch of cables terminate - many Ethernet, one cable-company coax, and one electrical supply.  This frees up space in the mouse closet for other stuff that, in the long run, actually belongs there.

Elsewhere... well, I'd figured on getting some stuff done outdoors and in the barn today, but the cool morning weather didn't materialize, and just before noon we're already seeing 83°F (and 77% humidity).  Maybe I'll crank up the A/C and swap out the KVM switch under my desk for one that speaks HDMI (and then the existing VGA-type switch can be relegated to lab use).

Oop!  Noon o'clock straight up, and the cats, having gotten bored with the caterpillar, have now traded it in* on a cricket.  Those aren't supposed to be indoors either.

* Afterthought:  Either that, or it metamorphosed remarkably quickly.  And also changed species, since I don't believe cricket larvæ look anything like caterpiggles.

Gradually, then suddenly

The New Yorker died this year.  Suddenly.  It went from a recognizable magazine at the beginning of the year to wall-to-wall wokeness the past few issues.

But it also happened gradually, didn't it?  The content had evolved, over the years, from the accustomed upper-class-NYC-centric articles and cartoons to increasing levels of Progressive propaganda masquerading as real articles.  In a long march through the institutions kind of way.  There was that subtle shift, moving the Overton window little by little, while still having enough of the old style of content to retain readers, as the old writers and editors retired and were replaced by the activist generation.

And now?  The latest issue is all about people with this perspective:

... lecturing the benighted heathens of that featureless wasteland out there on the subject of Racism.

Oh, it's not all that.  Some of it is general Orange Man Bad and obligatory denunciations of our uncouth tyrant.  And there's the likewise obligatory praise of WinXi JinPooh; pay no attention to the concentration camps, boxcars, and arrests of journalists.

And:  Remember what the full-page ads used to be like?  Glossy, stylish plugs for the sort of luxury goods that appealed to the magazine's target demographic?  Now it's just activist groups advertising there.  It's not like any company with an actual product to sell would want to pay big bucks to advertise in a glossy, meticulously-edited version of the Daily Worker.

This'll make an interesting contrast

So, Joe 'Handsy" Biden has chosen his VP candidate - well, in the sense that a pop star "chooses" her boyfriend; the decision was made in his name - anyway, it's official now: Kamala "Heil" Harris.

As it was a dozen years ago, few expect the old geezer to survive his first term, assuming he's elected.  Though in this case, the geezer in question is pretty clearly mentally incompetent even before the election, not that he was ever much in the brain department.

Cast your mind back, if you will, to the announcement of Sarah "Wink" Palin as VP candidate.  Remember the Democrats' reaction?

Pure misogyny.  Team Obama was blindsided, and had no idea who she was - this was a colossal failure of opposition research; her name had been bounced around for weeks, in a wouldn't it be cool if, but, naw, not gonna happen sort of way - so, in the absence of any substantive dirt to fling, misogyny was all they had.

And the misogyny continued throughout the campaign and beyond, eventually being supplemented by class snobbery - she has a degree from some cow college, and her family is trailer trash!  Not much on issues, per se, apart from attacking her for dumb stuff Tina Fey said on SNL.  (Oh, and that bridge to nowhere the airport.)

Let's see what happens this year.  Harris already has a very high profile, and, given the corner into which the Biden campaign had already painted itself, was near the top of everyone's list.  Team Trump has plenty of specifics about her history and previously-stated positions on issues, so we should be seeing attacks based on those.

And watch the response!  Expect any attack on Harris's politics to be denounced as misogynistic and racist, no matter what - probably by the same people who parroted the actually misogynistic attacks on Palin.

Really, now... Harris is an appalling choice, especially for this year.  Want criminal-justice reform?  Look at her record: as California AG, she supported prosecutorial misconduct that in a halfway-just world would have had the prosecutors rotting in prison.  Want a return to Constitutional norms?  When she was still in the primary, she was basically promising to rule by decree.

The coming days, and months, will be Interesting.  Even by 2020 standards.

Update:  The memo has gone out.  The Party sets the Rules, and the Rules preclude criticism of the Chosen One.

Guardians

Things watch over me:

(Most of the currently-organized office books are in the other bookcase.  Most of the overall book accumulation remains in storage.  He who dies with the most books wins!)

Update:  Huckleberry's place has been taken by Duchess, the 'Sno Leopard.

(Yes, Great Cthulhu has moved.  Huckleberry knocked him down shortly after I took the first picture, and I returned him to a more stable position.)

Ugh.

Bunch of stuff I was planning to do today.

But... sinus crud, plus both ears being gummed up.  Relatedly, not enough sleep last night.

Balance impaired; judgment likely also impaired.  Many of the planned activities are looking like Bad Ideas.

I'm suspecting that my Sunday mowing activity should have involved a schnoz guard of some sort; I think I inhaled rather a lot of dust and plant fragments.

Beer fridge is in place and operating.

Time to lay in a supply of solder paste, various grades of threadlocker, assorted epoxy, cyanoacrylate*, thermally conductive adhesive, and whatever other stuff I'll be needing in the lab that doesn't keep well at garage temperature.

(Had to throw out various adhesives that hadn't survived the travel and storage.  Solder paste currently on hand may not be in such great condition either.)

* Fool spelling checker has never heard of this stuff, and suggests cyanobacteria.  Not the same thing.

Ah, the things one needs

I find myself wanting a modest assortment of nail polish, in a variety of bright, cartoonish colors.  Red, green, blue, yellow, that sort of thing.  The old-fashioned air-drying sort, and it should dry to a thin film.  Opacity would be nice, too.

For color-coding things.  Never you mind what kind of things.  Just things.  Also for securing trimpots and such.

In normal times, I'd just head down to the local drugstore or Walmart.  As it is, I end up looking on-line, and finding a lot of (1) very expensive, (2) mud colors, (3) thick gels, (4) UV curing, (5) 31-flavors assortments, and various combinations.

I ended up ordering a modest-sized bright-shiny-colors assortment from Amazon.  Shipping looks to be horribly slow (I didn't want to pay big bucks for expedited shipping).  Well, I don't think I need the stuff right away.  Besides, there should be a small assortment around here... somewhere... in one of the boxes.

Ya learn something new every day

On this occasion, it was another way to get in trouble with a tractor.

I was out playing Tonka toys with the loader again, with the box blade hanging off the back to serve as ballast.  (It's about time to swap it for the tiller, to confront some nasty tough clay, but I haven't done that yet.  After lunch.)

After some digging around the ramp area and then taking a scoop from the far end of the trench, I backed up and came to a sudden stop.  Eh?

Oh.  The rear blade on the box scraper was hitting a high spot in the ramp.  Probably just rode over it on the way down, what with the way I had it angled from the most recent driveway work.  Anyway, that tractor was not backing out, there was no way to extricate it going forward, and there was no room to turn it around.

So, back to the barn to fetch a lever wherewith to crank the top link 'round and 'round, shortening it up to raise the back of the box scraper and make that blade clear the bump.  (I really should come up with a lever that's just short enough to carry around in the toolbox on the tractor - not the glove box that came with it, but a modest-sized toolbox - about the longest that'll fit in the space without fouling anything, but still a little too short for some tools that belong in it.)

Yeah, it worked.  Then I turned the tractor around and gave the ramp a couple of scrapes to reduce the high spots.  Next, well: I'd thought the rains might have softened the nasty clay, but they hadn't much.  Having no dynamite handy, I guess I'll use the tiller to break it up.  The fangs on the box blade can deal with such clay, but they can't reach the area where they're needed, because Geometry.  A toothbar for the loader bucket would probably help, but I don't have one at this point.  So, tiller.

Update:  I got the box scraper off (a considerable struggle when working on an uneven surface), and the tiller on (slightly less of a struggle, and connecting the driveline is almost easy now that the tiller has been used a bit and it's easy to turn by hand when supported above the ground).  Then... well... yes, it is in fact possible to apply the tiller to the nasty hard clay, much further back than the box scraper's fangs can reach.  But it doesn't have as much effect as one might wish.  I did manage to get the area in question at least reasonably cleaned up, but I think that, in the absence of some proper soil tenderizer, I've found the stopping point for that part of the project.  Time to go sideways (another planning failure; going sideways early would have been easier and safer).

And, another lesson.  Excavation planning is important.  I ended up moving several buckets of dirt back into a low spot to create a level area where the tractor can sit while the loader (or tiller) engages the work area; this should also prevent getting stuck.

Bonus:  Getting a good-quality tiller with a slip clutch rather than a shear bolt was definitely the right move, much as I may complain about pre-season maintenance on the slip clutch.  That clay turns out to have some largish (though crumbly) rocks in it, so a tiller with a shear bolt would likely have needed its bolt replaced a few times.

So much tinfoil, Beirut edition

The Israelis did it!  And it was a tactical nuke!

Er, no.  Are we to believe that the Israelis set fire to the warehouse, waited until there'd been a medium-sized explosion and a bunch of small ones, and then hit the conflagration with a missile?  Or they didn't start the fire, but as long as the building was on fire they used a missile on it anyway?  Either way, it makes no sense.

Also, that final explosion was way too big for a deliverable conventional warhead*, so....

No, it wasn't a tac nuke.  Definitely a chemical explosion, from the look of it - or rather, if I'm seeing things correctly in one of the vids, several chemical explosions very close together, consistent with either a munitions dump or just a warehouse full of piles of explosive material.  (A nuke blast does happen in multiple stages, but on a sub-millisecond time scale, and everything prior to the fission reaction is tiny by comparison, so you wouldn't see the ripple-boom effect.)

So what was it?  I believe the official story to be at least partly true: there was a huge amount of blasting-grade prilled ammonium nitrate stored in that warehouse.

Now, contrary to what many Internet windbags will tell you, ammonium nitrate is not fiddly, sensitive, dangerous stuff.  It's nigh-impossible to get an explosion out of it under ordinary conditions; as a blasting agent, it's combined with fuel oil at point of use to sensitize it and increase the yield, and even then it takes not just a blasting cap but a sizable booster charge to set it off reliably.

But... if it's contaminated with any sort of combustible material, including soot from a nearby fire... if it's stored in sufficiently huge heaps and slowly roasted... it is possible for a shipload of the stuff to detonate, with city-flattening results.

So, just having a shipload of ammonium nitrate stored in a flammable warehouse, and the warehouse being accidentally ignited, is a plausible explanation.  If Hezbollah was also storing large quantities of real explosives in that building, or had been dabbling in sensitized ammonium nitrate products?  Bonus danger, but not necessary to explain the observed effects.

Now, as to why there was a confiscated shipload of ammonium nitrate warehoused for years in close proximity to a civilian population?  I think we can assume official incompetence to be a significant factor; some have hinted at various forms of corruption also being involved.

Update:  Excellent vid here explaining how this fits the profile of an accidental explosion of improperly stored ammonium nitrate set off by a fire.

 

* Making reasonable assumptions about available delivery systems.  We're talking on the order of 2 million kilograms of payload, here.  Which... nope.  Not even with a suborbital Falcon Heavy, if I'm reading the specs right.  Using an S-IC as a tactical ballistic missile?  I don't think so.  And the launch would have been really hard to hide.

On my desk Monday

Will it hop?  Can I chase it?

(Sorry, but the hop didn't happen until Tuesday, by which time she wasn't watching.)

A li'l reminder, here.

Amendment XIV
Section 1.
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Seems that an awful lot of public officials in various States are in fact denying equal protection, in a variety of ways.  The recent proposal in Seattle to restrict prosecution of participants in particular, named protests is especially blatant, in that it's right there in writing and not just an unwritten directive.

Looks like we really need to dust off some of those Reconstruction-era civil-rights laws, from the time when certain local officials had a pattern of looking the other way when certain people committed crimes against certain other people.

(Hmmm.  Google Chrome's spelling checker doesn't recognize "immunities" as a real word.  Such a dwindling vocabulary.)

It's not just history.

Apparently, Baldrick is now teaching Education.

Seems that Our Betters Who Control The Curriculum have determined that two beans plus two beans is not four beans but merely some beans, number indeterminate, or possibly giraffe.  Because basic arithmetic is a social construct (like basic anatomy), and a tool of white supremacy.

Hey, ya know what?  If you teach all the not-white people that arithmetic doesn't matter... only white people will be able to do arithmetic, and, whaddaya know, they'll reign supreme.  Whereas if you teach everybody to use these universal tools that work exactly the same for everyone, you erode that white (or Asian, or Jewish) advantage.

Update:

, and don't you dare question my lived experience.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

Has anyone under fifty been exposed to history in school?  Like, at all?

Seems the latest belief is that the Nazis were the onliest ones ever to use chicken-on-a-beach-ball iconography, so when Donny Junior used some sort of eagle-on-a-circle on a web site it must have been a Fascist thing and not related to, say, the seal that appears in front of Nancy Pelosi, or perhaps the KAOS logo.*

The 1619 Project's blatant attempt to rewrite history is the end stage, not the beginning.  Most of the true history has already been erased, little by little over the decades; it merely remains to substitute a new history that better serves the interests of Big Brother.

And, yes, making people ashamed of their nation's history and culture does serve the interests of Big Brother, much better than would a sense of pride in long-established institutions; see also the push to discredit the Constitution and replace it with unfettered one-party rule.

Oh, and if we're talking about borrowing symbols from the Wrong People?  Look up the history of the phrase Social Justice.

* Every fire department in the known Universe is also Fascist, because they display the Firefighter's Cross, which somewhat resembles the Maltese Cross (14^th c.), which somewhat resembles the Iron Cross (1813), which, while originating with the Kingdom of Prussia, was also used by Imperial Germany and later by Nazi Germany.  Fun bonus fact: Kaiser Wilhelm II was a Progressive!

So I went to order a small dingus

Direct from the manufacturer.  Checkout invokes the Stripe popup for payment.

Stripe conveniently has my card on file, and just needs to send me a text for verification.  Except...

The card on file is outdated.  Like, my bank replaced it a year or so back with a new card with a new number.  There doesn't seem to be any provision for entering a different card number.

(By the way, guys?  A lot of different business use Stripe.  'Twould be really nice if the popup allowed for selecting among multiple saved cards, as well as replacing the one on file and adding a new one.  Some of us like to use different cards for different types of purchases.  Business vs. personal, for example.  Maybe I'm supposed to use separate e-mail addresses?  But sometimes I buy business stuff and personal stuff from the same vendor.)

So anyway.  Click on the "go ahead and pay" button, knowing that it won't work.  Card declined, well, yeah.  Click on the finish-and-pay button again.  Get the prefilled Stripe popup.  Try "Log out"; get a fill-it-in version of the form.  Fill in a current credit card number; that too is declined, but this time I get a message from my bank, maybe because the second card I tries was the replacement for the first, so it looks suspicious.  Tell 'em it was indeed me, then try the transaction yet again, and finally success is attained.

Now to see how long it takes for the dingus to show up.  I'd been wanting to order one from a discount reseller, but they're showing them as back-ordered and overdue, so I decided to go straight to the source and pay full retail plus shipping.