Silicon Valley Redneck

Critter sighting on Zoom

The cat filter on my office isn't very effective when the cats are already on this side of it.

Southmoon decided to participate in a Zoom call.

If she's going to do that, she really should learn to announce that she's not a lawyer.

Critter sighting

Something went bounding across the back lawn - looked like a skunk, except that, as near as I could tell, it was all black except for a white mark on its head.

Can the skunk change its stripes?  Did Pepe LePew have an accident with a can of paint?

(Apparently this is within the range of color variations for the common striped skunk, so I guess it's not some totally unfamiliar beastie.)

Update:  Also sighted today, carpenter bees.  Great.  Time to load up a sprayer with boric acid, to defend against boric (so to speak) bees.

Terminology ought to exist, but I'm not finding it

So, there's this pattern.  It's noticeable in person, and even more so on a weather-radar map.  The wind usually blows out of the Southwest, and lines of rain come marching up out of the Southwest, sometimes raining on this particular hilltop.  Zoom way out on the map, and the whole wind-coming-out-of-the-Southwest-sometimes-carrying-storms thing becomes really conspicuous.

People have been living in these parts for a very long time, so surely there's a name for this great big prevailing air current and pattern of weather, no?

I can't seem to find the right search terms.  I can find information on trade winds (which this ain't one of), and on global weather patterns in a very general sense (and here I am, not knowing a Hadley cell from a Pockels cell).  Wikipedia has a list of local winds, including North America, but it doesn't include anything around here.

Yet another thing that ought to be readily findable on the Internet, but isn't.

And speaking of batteries...

Early this morning, like before sunrise, I noted that my weather station wasn't reporting.

Once it got a bit of sunlight, it resumed reporting.  This seemed to suggest that its battery was dead.

So, lug a ladder out there.  Balance precariously on said ladder while changing out the AA cells that are supposed to run the thing at night.  The old ones aren't all that badly discharged, but whatever.

An hour or so later, note that the display has gone blank again.  Then it comes back.  Growf.

Does the radio signal not propagate through fog, or am I going to have to climb back up there with a wrench, dismount the thing, and do some diagnosis?

Update:  Now it's evening, the rain has begun, and the rain gauge isn't registering.  Guess I have to go back out there sometime tomorrow-afternoonish and inspect the funnel.  It was working a few days ago!

Update 2:  Looks like it is working; just didn't have enough rain yet to register yesterday afternoon.

Update 3:  Rain is registering, but the reading is way low.  After the rain stops, I guess it's back up the ladder to inspect the funnel for cloggage.  Probably bird poop.

Wait. Do I have enough tinfoil?

Couple days back I mentioned the Palmer Raids?

I just realized that they happened as the 1918 pandemic was winding down.

What was that about history rhyming?

Definition of the day

Cornèd beef: beef from cattle having horns (Latin cornū, horn).

As opposed to pollèd beef, which comes from hornless cattle, natch.

Time change is confusing

Huckleberry thinks if springing forward once is good, doing it repeatedly must be better.

Alarm cat is now on some weird time zone in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, or possibly South America, and thinks I should be woken up at 0200.

YouTube vid brings back old memories

Hot off the press from Veritasium: The Ridiculous Way We Used To Calculate Pi.

Start with an inscribed hexagon, then double the number of sides, and repeat, improving the approximation at each step.  Yeah, that rings a bell.

Back in high school... no, this wasn't in pre-Newtonian times; I'm not that old... we were taught the inscribed-hexagon thing, in passing, as a bit of history and philosophy.

But, I had access to a computer, of sorts - the mighty HP 3000!  With a selection of programming languages, and a buggy OS that got unbelievably bogged down under a wide variety of conditions.  We had a few KSR33s (and one ASR33) wired up to it for student access.  I smelled a challenge!

I figured out an algorithm for doing the hexagon-splitting thing, and proceeded to implement it in the available languages: SPL/3000, BASIC, FORTRAN, and... did we have COBOL on that thing?  I think I did a COBOL version.  The results were interesting, enlightening, and cautionary.

While the programs, in the various languages, were mathematically equivalent in principle, the actual execution was very much not.  I quickly saw the limitations of single-precision floating-point arithmetic, and the effects of how, exactly, the compilers (or interpreter, in the case of BASIC) translated my code - I think order of evaluation may have been the key factor.  The best converged as predicted for many iterations, giving quite a good approximation before gradually wandering astray due to limited precision.  The worst, well.  If memory serves, it converged for about three iterations, and then diverged wildly.

This is something I remember every time someone makes a bold prediction based on a highly iterative computer model.  Even assuming that the model is mathematically correct, and that it correctly models the intended real-world phenomenon, the execution may be wonky due to the imprecise representation of numbers in an actual computer.

Car-part funsies

Maybe I'd mentioned that the replacement aux (12V) battery the dealership put in the Venerable Prius last summer seemed to be not so fresh, and maybe I'd try to find a really new one?

Well.  After some looking around on line, I ordered one from CARiD, back in January.  A few days later, I got a delay notification.  A few days after that, another delay notification.

A week or so back, I went back to their Web site and clicked on the "request status" button.

Today, I got a notification.  The manufacturing facility has discontinued the item, and also the item has been reported as hazardous and can't be shipped.

(Duh?  It's a flippin' car battery.  Always has been subject to shipping restrictions.  And yet, somehow, when I bought (from Amazon, if memory serves) the new aux battery for the Newer Prius, there was no problem having it delivered via UPS.)

So... grrrr.  Guess I'll look around, again, for an alternative source for the arcane little battery.  Meanwhile, I've ordered a little solar-powered battery tender so's I can keep the existing battery topped up while the car is idle.  Maybe when we get properly into Spring I'll try calling around to Toyota dealership parts departments and see if anyone has a known-fresh battery to sell me, if by then I haven't found a source that can ship me one.

Some suspicions are independent of political alignment

Long about the end of January, amid the Reichstag Fire references, mentions of our very own domestic COINTELPRO started cropping up.

As well they might!

Here's right-winger Streiff.

And, from old Wobbly/Anarchist Leslie Fish, three posts so far: 1, 2, 3.

Really: with all these "clandestine" organizations being so highly visible, does anyone believe they're not thoroughly infiltrated?  If you hang out with old radicals, you'll hear plenty of stories of organizations being infiltrated by provocateurs bent on turning political discussion groups into criminal conspiracies.  Heck, Get Smart made fun of this way-back-when, with an episode centered around a KAOS cell made up entirely of infiltrators from various intelligence agencies.

(Then there are the inherently self-infiltrating groups, like Oath Keepers; cops are kind of their target demographic.  "Let's openly recruit cops for a revolutionary group!"  Yeah, if it's actually meant to be a dangerous insurrectionist organization, the organizers must be really, amazingly, mind-bogglingly stupid.)

Yeah, the FBI has been political since before it was the FBI, and cooking up vast revolutionary plots so it can foil them is nothing new.  That image you have of the totally professional, non-political FBI?  Carefully cultivated through, e.g., a close relationship with Hollywood.

J. Edgar Hoover may be dead, but his institution lives on.  And... just a thought...

Know how it always seems like prominent public figures are being somehow blackmailed?  That effect that QAnon tries to explain by way of a vast network of child molesters, or whatever it is?

Lyndon B. Johnson famously remarked, "I never trust a man till I've got his pecker in my pocket."  By which he is commonly believed to have meant, "I need to have incriminating information on everyone who matters."  Think ol' J. Edgar might have had a role in providing such information?

Manufacturing insurrections and blackmailing politicians for over a century now.  Think that's gonna change?

First pass tilling is done!

Yeah, I got the slip clutch springs retightened to spec (much easier with the gage than trying to use a ruler or caliper in that tight space), and made a first pass over roughly 50x100 feet of non-flooded silt loam, down in the Annex.

I'll give it a second pass in about a week, after the grass and weeds start trying to grow back.  In the meantime, I'll sprinkle it with fertilizer and order a bunch of weed barrier fabric.

Comes time to put down the weed barrier, I figure I'll mark off about a 40x60 foot area destined to be fenced, and have a modest-width unplanted weed-barrier zone outside that, probably with chicken wire under the weed barrier to discourage burrowing varmints.

Rinsing off the tiller afterward took a lot longer than the actual tilling operation, and it's not like I got it actually clean; there's still a lot of grass & dirt under there.  At some point, I guess I should clean it properly... which will involve a lot of contortions.

It occurs to me that I'll also want to run the tiller over the meadow area northwest of the pond - probably a deep pass, then a shallow pass, then a generous sprinkling of grass seed, and see what grows back.  It's currently populated by various grasses, but the ground is disconcertingly lumpy, making it hard to mow.  (I should do likewise with last year's garden patch, after removing stakes and the weed-barrier boundary.)

Afterthought:  The slip clutch did its thing several times during the process, and I noticed a few rocks brought to the surface.  I suppose I could stroll through the area and gather up the rocks; they're not exactly needed in the planting zone.

Pond attracts waterfowl!

Or maybe it's the frogs.  Something brought in a great blue heron a bit over a week back:

Today's pair of mallards, on the other hand, presumably showed up for the pond itself rather than for the frogs:

When we get around to converting the little seasonal puddle into a real pond, I guess we should include some duck nesting habitat in the landscaping plan.

Human proofreaders are still needed.

And what's more, human proofreaders with understanding of the origins and meanings of phrases.

Spotted in a book excerpt here:

Spencer has tech that’s held together with bailing wire and duct tape.

"Bailing wire"?  You don't bail with wire.  You bail with a bucket.  OK, so maybe you can post bail by wire transfer in some jurisdictions*, but that's a contrived justification for a popular wrong phrase.

Baling wire is canonically used to tie up bales of, e.g., hay.  It's also used for all manner of quick-and-dirty repairs and general kludgery.

Robot spelling checkers do not grok this.  Your average urban university graduate has probably never encountered baling wire, nor even been exposed to the concept (but probably knows exactly the approved manner in which to express gtst pronouns).  Publishers need not just human proofreaders but a diversity thereof.  Maybe even an eclecticism of 'em.

 

* This is not  legal advice.  I am neither lawyer nor banker.  For legal or financial advice, you'd do better consulting a small Earth cat.

I think I see what's going on here...

Ever read Harry Turtledove's The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump?

If so, this will look alarmingly familiar.  An outbreak of Huitzilopochtlism in Angels City, forsooth!

And I suspect the congenital apsychia has been going on for some time, unnoticed.

A little progress

Well, I got the springs on the tiller's slip clutch loosened up, lowered it so the tines were resting on the floor, and then cranked the drive shaft around a few times with a pry bar (easier to observe than the official method of reconnecting it to the PTO, keeping the tines off the floor, marking relative positions of clutch input and output, spinning it up, and hoping inertia causes the clutch to slip).

And, with that bit of exertion and contortionism, my back and legs say that's it for today.  Not gonna go around and re-tighten everything.  Maybe tomorrow, though it'll likely be raining; if the wind isn't blowing the rain in through the barn door (which I need to have open for light), I can work in there.

First, though, I think I'll make a special gage* for checking the spring lengths.  I believe the factory spec is 1.14" (and, since I didn't write down another number in the manual, factory spec is presumably what I measured last time).  That number, a bit of scrap aluminum, and the Sherline, and a gage ought to be easy.

Now it's time to get horizontal with a book.  The back is doing better than yesterday, and some stretchy exercises seem to be helping, but some old-fashioned rest is also called for.

* Not in the Newspeak dictionary.  Seems academic grammarians have declared it obsolete... without consulting engineers, geologists, machinists, etc.

A half-unexpected finding

Some years back, my then-doctor recommended that I take a daily low-dose aspirin.

A few years later, he informed me that the official position on daily aspirin had shifted from "strongly recommended" to "neutral."  So, when the bottle was used up, I didn't restock.

Last year, with dire tales of a new Pestilence that sometimes caused flurries of tiny blood clots, I figured maybe I should resume taking the aspirin.  Hey, it's cheap, and in the low-dose-daily form it's pretty darn safe for most of us.

Surprise!  An Israeli study shows that daily baby aspirin does indeed have a protective effect.

Actual surprise: it seems to protect against infections, not just against blood clots.  That's... very unexpected.  (Does this imply that NSAID use might make vaccination less effective?  Or more effective?)

Cyber-housekeeping

Is another thing I Gotta Get Around To.

When I migrated my web and mail servers (not including this blog, which is of course hosted elsewhere) from my old DSL* connection to Linode, I ran into some issue, now dimly remembered, with the combination of name-based virtual hosting and the feature (mkm_itk/prefork?) used to make scripts run under their owners' user IDs.  I never did sort that out.  Now as I think of it... I don't need to do that, do I?  When I first set up the ancestor of the server, 2001-ish, I included the multi-user web server (using the dreaded SUEXEC, back then, under FreeBSD) because I had a particular get-rich-slow scheme in mind; said scheme is now long obsolete, and I don't anticipate hosting anyone else's content on that server, so there's no need to support the security scheme I was anticipating back then.

So, someday, I need to revisit the problem, simplify one thing or another, and definitely get name-based hosting (with SSL support) working as it ought.

I also notice that I never got around to configuring my second domain properly; it's still pointing at my old IP address that went with the DSL line back in Sunnyvale, on which nobody is currently running a web server.  Gotta fix the DNS records.

And, I still need to move into the new workstation and retire this'n.  The new one can run the latest and greatest software; this is running outdated Linux, with outdated libraries, and has a significant amount of configuration rot after years of updates.  (Yeah, the new one also has to run various VMs, including an old version of Linux to support some no-longer-maintained development software.)

Then, too, I should probably check the web content into Subversion so's I can work on a local copy, test with a local Apache instance, and update the content on the live server from the repository when the time comes.

None of this is happening today.  Maybe next week, if it's as rainy as the forecast suggests.

Update:  Well, what with my back being troublesome, I ended up working on the web server configuration instead of machinery maintenance.  Turns out I had several issues, which I think are now sorted.  Various wrong paths, inappropriate file permissions, etc.  Looks like it's now running in pretty much the configuration I wanted back in the day, when name-based hosting with multiple UIDs and per-domain SSL just wasn't possible.

Not that I have everything configured, let alone any meaningful content, but at least it's not broken.

Now... nope, not gonna mess with the slip clutch.  Time to lie down with a book.  Maybe in the morning I'll deal with the slip clutch, and have enough time to make a first pass over the New Victory Garden before the rain arrives.

* A technology forgotten in Newspeak.

Argh.

Lower back trouble.

Been developing for a couple of days already; I'm sure wrestling with the tiller yesterday didn't help any, though it didn't seem to be a problem at the time.

Got about a day and a half for doing outdoors stuff before a week of rainy days arrives.  And dealing with the slip clutch on the tiller may be problematic.

Oh, this again.

Amazon persists in sending largish parcels via USPS.  Usually, that's not a problem, except for that one time I confusedly ordered something like 360 pounds of kitty litter all in one go.

But, it seems, there's a new parcel driver, who is of the opinion that all parcels should fit in the mailbox.  Today's Amazon Day shipment wasn't terribly heavy, but decidedly would not fit in the mailbox, and I got a note saying it'll have to be picked up.  Great.

Yesterday, a parcel that wouldn't fit in the box arrived via USPS, no problem.  Got dropped off outside the garage door, as usual.  Today, no go.

Well, that's two jobs half-done.

Tractor maintenance: Got the engine oil and filter changed, plus some fiddly minor stuff.  As others have noted, the first oil change takes longer than it should, owing to the thick layer of paint applied at the factory right over the doggone drain plugs (plural, there are two).  So, one-size-larger socket, excessive force, and then time spent chipping away at the paint so the bolt'll take the right size socket next time.

I'm leaving the hydraulic filters for tomorrow, but I know where they are and which is which.

So there's one half-done task, and I was getting a bit tired of crawling around on the barn floor.  There was another little thing, wasn't there?  Oh, yes: the previous owners left a backpack sprayer in the barn, partly filled with some sort of ick.  If it can be cleaned up, and it still works, it should be just the thing for hosing down the newly-cleared areas with brush killer once the brush starts growing again.

Off to the driveway with it, as whatever is in there is presumably better dumped on a gravel driveway than on a lawn or into a septic system, drainage ditch, or whatever.  Get it kinda-sorta cleaned up... and it does indeed function.  Leave it sitting around mostly-filled with clean water, in hopes of removing whatever remains crusted on the inside.  (Not that it needs to be super-clean, being as how I figure to use it for herbicide.)  And that process kinda messed up my back, though it's recovering now.

Update, Wednesday:  Sprayer is sufficiently cleaned up to be used when the time comes, probably in a week or two.  The tractor....

Well, I changed the two hydraulic filters, using a separate, clean oil pan that I'd bought specifically for catching hydraulic fluid that didn't need to be changed yet.  About half a gallon escaped while I was changing the suction filter; I guess this is about typical.

Changing the suction filter is a royal pain; it's almost like it's supposed to be done with the wheel removed, which was very much not on today's agenda, but I did eventually manage to get a wrench on the old one and loosen it sufficiently.  And, naturally, that's the one that has to be changed quickly at the 50-hour mark, lest all the oil drain forth.

The escaped oil was pretty yucky, so I ended up replacing it with clean stuff.  Gotta put Super UDT2 on the Messicks shopping list.  Probably a 5-gallon pail, plus a pail pump from somewhere.

A cheap yoga mat is a good thing to keep in the barn.  I'd bought it for home-handyman stuff, but it's also useful for tractor maintenance!

Then, around to the side of the barn to pick up the tiller.  Having a proper level spot for the implements would make things ever so much easier, but I did manage to get it connected without injuring myself.

Still need to deal with the slip clutch on the tiller, and make sure all the grease points are dealt with.  I don't think I'll get around to using the tractor today, but I should at least get it back in service.

Oh... and there's definitely some leakage from the hydraulic coupler* for the loader, so I need to park the loader, detach it from the tractor to get access to the coupler, disconnect, clean up (assuming the problem is some stray particle interfering with a seal), and put it back together.

One more thing: my shirt got greasy.  Funny how that works.  Guess I'd better put some extra-strength grease remover on it once I finish with the dirty stuff for the day.

Shopping list, shopping list... I need to dig up a detailed parts diagram and order spares of a lot of fiddly things (seals, drain plug washers, and suchlike).

Update 2:  Everything done (I think) except the dang slip clutch, which I'll see about doing tomorrow morning.  It's much too time-consuming to address in what remains of today.  Did the grease points, and the loader/coupler thing, before running short on time.  I haven't confirmed that the leak is entirely fixed, but it seems to have been quite a slow leak to begin with.

* No longer a word in Newspeak, it seems.