Silicon Valley Redneck

Another delivery-status confusion

Not so long ago, Monday I guess, FedEx announced that a signature-required package would be arriving here today on, if memory serves, something like the usual delivery schedule, i.e., early morning to early afternoon.

Here's what they show now:

Scheduled delivery:
Wednesday, June 30, 2021 by end of day

OK, then.  Today, eventually.  The regular delivery (with a box from Wally World) showed up around 0930, but I suppose they can send a second truck.

What's the detailed tracking info show?

Wednesday, June 30, 2021
8:09 AM		LENEXA, KS	Arrived at FedEx location
Tuesday, June 29, 2021
7:54 PM		LENEXA, KS	Departed FedEx location
4:12 PM		LENEXA, KS	Arrived at FedEx location
2:22 AM		LENEXA, KS	Arrived at FedEx location
Monday, June 28, 2021
9:40 PM		COLUMBIA, MO	Left FedEx origin facility
6:46 PM		COLUMBIA, MO	Arrived at FedEx location
4:17 PM			Shipment information sent to FedEx
4:04 PM		COLUMBIA, MO	Picked up

Er.  Arrived twice, then departed, then arrived again.

I hope it arrives today.  Got errands to run tomorrow morning (ahead of an approaching storm), and I don't really want to blow them off so's I can stay here and sign for a package.  Staying close to the house today isn't exactly convenient either; there's stuff I need to be doing out around the yard.

... Meanwhile, an Amazon package (via USPS) that was scheduled for yesterday seems to have gone into hyperspace - Amazon says it's on its way but running late, but the tracking information is almost perfectly uninformative.

Update:  It's getting into evening now, and status on both shipments remains as it was this morning.  I don't think the package-requiring-signature will be arriving before the end of today.

And, tomorrow morning's intended errands have been preempted; there's another errand I gotta run instead, leaving Joy to sign for the package if it shows up while I'm out.  Looks like... Tuesday is probably the morning for what would have been tomorrow's outing.  Maybe Saturday, but more likely Tuesday.

Update 2:  Here it is Thursday morning, and FedEx is now saying that the package will be arriving by the end of today; the tracking information, meanwhile, shows it having progressed all the way from Lenexa to Dodge City, but not yet having gotten out of Dodge.

Status of the errant Amazon package, meanwhile, remains perfectly uninformative.  Like, it shows as "shipped" and then "delayed", but maybe it hasn't actually been handed off to the USPS yet?

Update 3:  As of 0935 Thursday, it's still in Kansas; latest forecast is for delivery Friday.

Update 4:  As of 0435 Friday, it's supposed to be arriving between 0910 and 1310 today.  Yay!  But tracking now says:

Friday, July 2, 2021
3:33 AM		LENEXA, KS	Arrived at FedEx location
12:27 AM		DODGE CITY, KS	Departed FedEx location
Thursday, July 1, 2021
8:27 AM		DODGE CITY, KS	In transit
8:26 AM		DODGE CITY, KS	Arrived at FedEx location
5:20 AM		DODGE CITY, KS	At local FedEx facility
Wednesday, June 30, 2021
10:18 PM		LENEXA, KS	Departed FedEx location
8:09 AM		LENEXA, KS	Arrived at FedEx location
Tuesday, June 29, 2021
7:54 PM		LENEXA, KS	Departed FedEx location
4:12 PM		LENEXA, KS	Arrived at FedEx location
2:22 AM		LENEXA, KS	Arrived at FedEx location
Monday, June 28, 2021
9:40 PM		COLUMBIA, MO	Left FedEx origin facility
6:46 PM		COLUMBIA, MO	Arrived at FedEx location
4:17 PM			Shipment information sent to FedEx
4:04 PM		COLUMBIA, MO	Picked up

I will not buy this record; it is scratched.

Meanwhile, the aforementioned Amazon shipment still shows Delivery Delay, with the last update having been Tuesday morning.  Did some rascal abscond with my garden-hose disconnects, pressure-washer soap, and metric Zerk fittings?  Is the package hiding in the bushes outside a post office somewhere?

Update 5:  As of Saturday morning, delivery is scheduled for Monday, and the package has escaped the loop and made its was to Nashville and thence to Knoxville.

I suspect some sort of BGP error, whereby the Lenexa facility's routing table became corrupted and indicated that Tennessee was west of Kansas until either the false entry expired or someone cycled power.

And, the Amazon shipment's status remains unchanged since Tuesday.  I think it got lost without actually having been handed off to the USPS.

Update 6:  As of early Saturday afternoon, the FedEx package is here.  If it also arrives Monday, I'm gonna be seriously confoozed.

More'n one way to use magnets...

I randomly encountered this vid on YouTube: The Jerry Miculek Magnetic Buffer System.

From context, I surmised (correctly, as it turns out) that the "buffer" in question is the weight that slides back and forth, with a spring pushing it forward and the bolt carrier pushing it toward the rear, within the stock tube of an AR-15-pattern rifle.

So, what's with the magnet?

Watching the vid, it makes sense: he's using two opposed magnets at the back end of the buffer weight to provide a smooth stop & rebound when the buffer bottoms out against the back end of the tube.  Apparently this is a thing.  And, given that it is of concern, that's a darn clever way to address it.

My first thought on seeing the title was that he was using a magnetic buffer to get dynamic braking relative to the aluminum tube (it is aluminum, right?) and dissipate some recoil energy by way of heating up the tube.  Which... I'm not sure if that would be a good thing or not.  But, given that the braking would be a function of speed, it might actually be a useful effect.  How much it would heat up the tube is another question.  (Yeah, I could probably math it out to some first approximation, but I'd have to do a bunch of research first, and did I mention I'm lazy?)

Lesser-known dystopia: Cygnus Alpha

As seen in the third episode of Blake's 7.

The Terran Federation disposes of its troublemakers by transporting them for life to a prison colony of sorts on the barely-habitable planet Cygnus Alpha.  Once dumped, they're no longer the Federation's problem, and what becomes of them is of no concern.

New arrivals are (keep in mind, I last watched this several years ago) greeted by members of the cult that runs the colony, ruled over by a hereditary cult leader who bears a suspicious resemblance to Richard IV.  They're informed that, among other things, anyone who's set foot on the planet is infected with a deadly disease and needs regular doses of a life-saving medication doled out by the cult leader.  Anyone who leaves will surely die of the terrible disease.

Conveniently for the protagonists, it turns out that the lethality of the disease is greatly exaggerated and the medication is a placebo.

Did I say dystopia?  A matter of perspective, isn't it?  For a cult leader, that's more of a utopia.  Better to reign in Hell, and all that.

Not that this has anything whatsoever to do with current affairs.  Oh, no.  How could you imagine such a thing?

Ah, measurements.

There's an obscure unit of measurement, the barn-megaparsec, used mainly for very long skinny volumes.

Short, flat volumes are another matter.

Joy wants to get the concrete front porch epoxied.  It's more expensive than one would think.  Hey, I'm playing with this UV-curing resin goop; how 'bout if I dump some of that on the porch and let the sunshine do its thing?

Lessee, now.  Measure, measure, guesstimate, calculate... the porch is roughly 25 m², times maybe a 5 mm thickness, that's... 125000 cm³, right?  125 freakin' liters, at around $35/liter for the cheap resin, and I'd probably want to use a better grade and blend in some of the really pricey super-resilient stuff?

So, we'd be looking at $4400 or so just for the resin.  Not the cheap approach.  Even if we only went with a 3 mm coating, which would barely cover the roughness in the existing surface.

I suppose I should look at the price of actual concrete coatings, but I'm developing a suspicion that the price for having it done professionally isn't that far out of line.

Hey, at least I didn't end up with units of acre-feet....

Pressure washer is here.

The one promised for this coming Friday?  Once it shipped, FedEx was initially showing it as expected to arrive yesterday... then indeterminate... then on a delivery truck for tomorrow... then it showed up today.  Go figure.

Anyway, I got it unboxed and assembled, oil and gas added, water supply hooked up, supply line purged, engine ON, fuel ON, choke ON, pull cord once, engine starts right up, pause for a few seconds, choke OFF, and give 'er a try.

Yeah, quite an impressive spray.  Fair bit of recoil, too.  I didn't have anything handy near that spot in the lawn that actually needed cleaning, but I did confirm that it starts, runs, and sprays.

Got some appropriate soap on order to try the suds feature for a bit of car washing (and maybe for washing some concrete and whatnot, too).

Sometime pretty soon, I expect to be using the tiller again.  Then I'll be wanting to use the pressure washer.

Pondering a Venn diagram

Set A: the visible members of the global ruling class.

Set B: the sort of people who'd join a Cthulhu cult if all their friends were doing it.

Any bets on the overlap?

Update:  All the Lovely People will play follow-the-herd right off the cliff rather than express an unapproved opinion.

Newspeak dictionary alert!  For all the perfectly valid English words the spelling checker complains about... it doesn't blink at Cthulhu.

Itchy afternoon

The mower being back in operation, I got around to mowing some paths where the tractor doesn't go.

Since the tractor doesn't go there, these paths hadn't been mown in quite some time.  The grass was tall.  As were the blackberry vines, thistles, etc.

I got well and truly covered with plant detritus, some of it rather irritating.  An afternoon shower was called for.

At least we don't have Australian vegetation back there....

 

Digression:  What sort of evolutionary advantage does a plant gain from a feature that inflicts delayed irritation on a critter that touches it?  Seems like yer average herbivore wouldn't make the connection between pain now and having wandered through a particular sort of plant an hour or a day ago.  (This applies more to poison oak than to the likes of stinging nettles.)

Yet another failure of business communications

So it's coming up on Independence Day, we're in Tennessee, and we have a big front lawn.

Illuminations are in order!

There are many tents around Seymour, festooned with flags and surrounded by "Fireworks!" signs.

What they don't have is signs indicating when they're open.  I was down there this morning, and couldn't tell whether I was an hour early or a day early.

The corporate web sites ain't exactly helpful in this regard.

Yeah, there are also the year-round fireworks stores, which might even have business hours posted, but we're still trying to avoid going into buildings as much as possible.

Update:  Turns out I was an hour or so early.  Went back around 1030, and the big tent in the Kroger parking lot was open.

... Where I come from, the legal fireworks don't go on sale until the thirty-fifth of never....

Anyway.  Came home with a fairly large family variety pack, heavy on aerial effects, a decent-sized finale pack, and a fair mess o' firecrackers, without totally busting the budget.  (Maybe by this time next year I'll get around to building the long-awaited carriage for the quarter-scale six-pounder, and we can have some artillery support.)

This appears to be Thursday.

Big disruption in the middle of the day: the HVAC guys showed up, ahead of schedule.  Took a while to check everything out, but the Northwest unit is recharged and back in operation, and the Southeast unit is confirmed to be operating normally, with a full charge of refrigerant.

I tried sharpening one of the old mower blades using a special mower-blade-sharpening abrasive wheel in a power drill.  Does Not Work.  I can see how it'd work on a blade with a straight edge, but on the wonky curvy blades, no.  Guess I'll try again with a bench grinder eventually.  Maybe I can come up with the right search terms to find instructions; my first few attempts found nothing relevant.

Started organizing spares into a storage bin: belts, oil filters, blades... need to put spare filters for the tractor in that bin, and ponder getting spare fuel filters and spark plugs for the gas-powered yard equipment.

Speaking of gas-powered, I decided it was past time we had a pressure washer (apart from anything else, there's moss growing on the North side of the truck).  Home Despot has various options.  First two in popularity are a Ryobi and, for some extra bucks, a Ryobi with a Honda engine.  Prices look OK.  Reviews are mostly favorable, but, hm.  Truly horrible reviews are concentrated in the last few months.  Maybe no?  Try sorting by best rating.  High-rated model at a sensible price is sold under the Westinghouse brand, and I seem to recall looking up this model before and thinking it sounded like a reasonable deal.  They can deliver a Ryobi day-after-tomorrow, but for the Westinghouse I might have to wait until, gasp, next Friday.  I think I can live with that.  Once it gets here, I can give the tiller a good cleaning (a hose-end sprayer just does not get the job done), and maybe even wash some vehicles.

There's stuff I should be doing out in the yard, but I think Joy wants to put Sumatra through the wringer again.  ISIRTA, put Ringer's into Sumatra again.

Update:  Sumatra has recovered enough to put up resistance to being poked with a needle.  First try, before dinner, he just was not going to hold still.  As long as he had the harness & leash on, Joy decided to try taking him for a little walk around the back lawn.  This got him motivated.  For the first time since the current episode started (Memorial Day afternoon), he's acting like he's interested in life again.  Oh, and we did eventually manage to get some subcutaneous fluids into him, after dinner.  We'll probably take him back to the vet on Monday for a followup and maybe a check on his kidneys.

Product listings on Amazon can be misleading.

So, those mower blades I'd ordered from a cheap-but-slow seller on Amazon?

Arrived today, faster than the pricier-but-faster ones I'd ordered shortly thereafter.

And the Amazon listing... well, it looked like a listing for a blade.  The photo looked like a picture of a blade.  The price was substantially less than half the going price for a pair of blades.  So I ordered two.

What I got was two pairs of blades.  At less than the going price for one pair.  Not gonna complain about that one, nope.  Looks like I'm going to have two spare sets in the parts bin (three, if I can resharpen the originals).  Spares are good.

Got a new pair swapped in, but didn't get the deck re-mounted yet because it's hot & humid out there, and besides it's time to figure out what's for dinner.  Probably something involving leftover chicken, pasta, artichoke hearts, maybe mushrooms, and some sauce.

Update:  They are indeed the correct blades, looking exactly as wrong as the originals only without the blunted and notched edges.  And, it's amazing how much better that machine cuts with decently sharp blades.

Li'l punctuation problem, here.

Who updated the stylebook to decree that compound adjectives only get one hyphen?

Seriously.  I've been noticing, on and off, for several years now that three-or-more-word compound adjectives are written with only the first hyphen (e.g., three-or more word compound adjectives).  This goes against both logic and such references as I can find in a quick DuckDuckGo.

Today's egregious example: "anti-police brutality organizer."  This parses as "one who organizes brutality against police."

OK, so that's very likely a true meaning, but I'm fairly certain it wasn't the intended meaning.  At least, not overtly.

An alternative explanation...

I'd mostly-forgotten this study, but just saw it linked again.

Political conservatives are happier than liberals. We proposed that this happiness gap is accounted for by specific attitude and personality differences associated with positive adjustment and mental health. In contrast, a predominant social psychological explanation of the gap is that conservatives, who are described as fearful, defensive, and low in self-esteem, will rationalize away social inequalities in order to justify the status quo (system justification). In four studies, conservatives expressed greater personal agency (e.g., personal control, responsibility), more positive outlook (e.g., optimism, self-worth), more transcendent moral beliefs (e.g., greater religiosity, greater moral clarity, less tolerance of transgressions), and a generalized belief in fairness, and these differences accounted for the happiness gap. These patterns are consistent with the positive adjustment explanation

Then there's the bleeding obvious: in contrast to the classical-liberal (today known as "Conservative") ideals of Life, Liberty, and the Purſuit of Happineſs, Progressive ideology centers around Death, Oppreſsion, and the Purſuit of Miſery.

If you purſue miſery, expect to be miſerable.

(Huh.  The ſpelling checker doeſn't complain about my uſe of the long s.)

Where are the corporate graybeards?

One might think that corporations, especially those that deal with a disproportionately elderly customer base, might have a graybeard or two on hand to challenge the assumptions of the younger generation.

One particularly irksome assumption: a phone number makes a good unique identifier.

Yeah... among the younger generation, at least one cellphone per person might be the norm.  But 'twasn't that long ago that one land-line number per household was the rule, and personal phones very much the exception.

I had two automated calls from CVS in as many days, informing me of status updates.  Except that I think the second one was probably for my father, who doesn't have his own phone (he used to, but wasn't answering it), so when he needs to give a phone number, he uses mine.

At least they let us both have the same phone number in our respective customer records; it'd be really annoying to get "that number is already in our system" when trying to set up an account.  And you just know that's coming, and that databeese will become cluttered with old numbers that have been re-issued to new phone owners but haven't been purged from other systems.  Oh, and also cluttered with fake numbers given out by people who need to put a phone number on some form or other and don't want to use their own; I think at least two people have been doing that with the number that happens to be mine.

I guess there are only so many TLAs.

Spotted in an e-mail from the Eye of Tripoli:

Three Chips in One: The History of the BCD Integrated Circuit

That's some fairly old history.  Early 74xx TTL, amirite?

Subhed:

STMicroelectronics’ super-integrated silicon-gate process—used to combine bipolar, CMOS, and DMOS technologies—is now an IEEE Milestone

Oh.  Not Binary-Coded Decimal.  No decade counters, 1-of-10 decoders (with nor without NIXIE-driver outputs), and so on.

Regarding meta-beliefs

Twitchy captured some commentary based on the premise that no one actually believes woke ideology.

Quite some time ago, I realized that a lot of the stuff I fervently believed back in my college days, I didn't actually believe.  I merely believed that I believed it.  Meta-belief, if you will.

Sir Pterry kinda-sorta captured this in Small Gods, in which nobody of any consequence believed in the Great God Om, but a heck of a lot of people believed in the Omnian Church.  But meta-belief is actually on another level from that; the Omnian Church, its Quisition in particular, was an omnipresent threat, while the things I used to believe that I believed were just kind of floating around there, unchallenged, as things that everybody believed (or at least professed belief in), because (in the absence of contrary knowledge) they were just obvious.  Besides, those beliefs were shared by all smart people, so those who believed otherwise must be Untermenschen.

Maybe the world needs more, I dunno, call 'em secular Jesuits... people who challenge unthinking belief with logic and observation, provoking crises of faith.  Beliefs that stand up to logic might be reinforced, while those with no rational basis might be weakened.

Wait, wasn't that supposed to be the role of the Press, back before the Press became part of the Quisition?

Hmmm, maybe another correlation here

Interesting article here about the Pestilence and the gut microbiome at the Irritable Bowel Times, er, International Business Times.

Seems a healthy microbiome has protective effects, or maybe a faulty microbiome increases vulnerability.

I'll just hazard a guess here that old people in nursing homes may well have damaged gut microbiomes, from antibiotic use if nothing else.

Landscape malfunction owie

So I stepped off the back deck onto the inviting back lawn....

Oops.  Apparently the last mowing resulted in something very prickly being chewed up and scattered into the immediate vicinity of the deck, where it dried out and became hard and crunchy.  Might have been blackberry vines, or a thistle, or something else.

Several thorns in my paw.  I removed most of 'em, but I think there's at least one still lurking.

Website breakage

So I try to create an on-line account at CVS....

It has Criteria for what constitutes an acceptable password.  The third of these is that the password must not be one's username nor an easily-recognizable word.

No matter what gibberish I try to use, it insists that I'm not meeting that third criterion.

... Oh, great.  So I try from Firefox instead of Chrome.  The first password I'd tried earlier now works.  I make it through the second page of signup stuff (which doesn't deal gracefully with autofill, nor with Firefox's idea of phone number formats), and get:

We can't process your request right now. Please try again later.

Real helpful, guys.  Also, the "Create an account" button is now inactive, so, what, do I have to start over from the beginning? (Ah.  Revisiting one or more of the green-checked fields causes it to re-evaluate status and bring back the button.  But it still won't process the request.)

Oh, and Google?  It'd sometimes be real helpful if Chrome's password manager allowed adding a password without having to log into the site in question.  Mozilla Foundation?  Same goes for Firefox.

Update:  I tried again, using Firefox on my laptop, and managed to get signed up.  That done, I can sign on from Chrome on the workstation.

Weather's a-comin'.

When there's a big enough gust of wind to be clearly audible in my office at 0930, something's likely up.

Half an hour later, wind is 10 MPH or so, plus gusts, coming from the Southwest.

Still no rain showing on the radar, but I'm starting to believe it's on the way.

Update:  Various rain had been passing to the West.  Then, around 1830ish, we started getting rain here.  Around 1930ish, it's quite heavy.

And, the rain gauge ain't registering.  Gotta take a ladder out there, after the storm passes, and unclog the thing again.  And maybe I should add some sort of anti-perching features.

Mixed Monday morning

Air conditioning for the end of the house that includes the master bedroom and my office didn't seem to be working last night.  Air was circulating, but not getting cool.  I turned the AC off (leaving circulation on, as the AC for the other end of the house is working).  Turning it back on this morning, I find that the fan on the outside unit runs as expected, which rules out the four failure modes previously encountered, and probably all the ones I might be able to fix.  Probably have to get an HVAC guy out here to check the refrigerant, etc.

When I emerged from the bedroom and headed for the kitchen, I found Sumatra atop the most inaccessible kitchen cabinet, up above the double oven.  He must be feeling a fair bit better.  He'a since returned to the bedroom closet.

And, tying in with the air-conditioning thing, my metabolism is still wonky, and running hot.  Ugh.

Update:  Got a non-emergency HVAC tech coming out Thursday, by which time the rain should have come and gone.