Silicon Valley Redneck

Optics: Vlad vs. Volod

Been seeing some photos of Putin and Zelensky lately.  Presumably carefully-staged official photo ops.

Zelensky: all kitted up in body armor and helmet, preparing to stand alongside his countrymen in defense of the homeland.

Putin: wearing his usual suit, hunched over one end of a looooooong conference table in a big fancy* conference room, with a handful of his closest associates seated around the far end.

Kinda different images, what?

 

* Looks like Putin shares, in general terms, Trump's taste when it comes to conference-room decor.

Some people don't read the product description

Was just shopping for a hand pump for dispensing hydraulic oil out of a 5-gallon pail.

What looks to be the best deal on Amazon at the moment had a few horrible reviews, which mainly seemed to involve using it for inappropriate materials.

It's pretty clear from the description that it's meant for the sort of lubricants that get dispensed out of 5-gallon pails, which is to say, the oily, industrial sort.  Not the sort of lubricants that only get pumped out of 5-gallon pails if one is in a very specific industry.  And definitely not hand sanitizer, pancake batter, etc.

Anyway, pump is on order.  Now I need to get a Messick's order together, including a 5-gallon pail of the approved hydraulic oil for the tractor (plus at least one set of hydraulic-oil filters, another engine oil filter, and whatever other maintenance items seem prudent).

"All I want is peace!"

And now the song you've all been waiting for:

Other propaganda

1: The Pestilence totally originated at that wet market!  This is supposedly based on a study of its spread in December of 2019.  Which... kinda misses its spread before December; wasn't there pretty good evidence of its presence in the human population at least as far back as October, and possibly September, of 2019?

2: Contested elections are a threat to Our Democracy^®!  This has actually been a thing for a couple of decades at least, but it's really out in the open now.  I keep seeing fundraising announcements proclaiming that having a Republican candidate on some ballot or other constitutes a Right-Wing Power Grab™, and there's this persistent effort to declare Republican politicians "insurrectionists" and bar them from holding office.  Because nothing says popular support like trying to keep the opposition party off the ballot.

Cool tech, but...

Creality is coming out with a new 3D scanner:

Which... yeah, I can certainly think of uses for such a thing.  Productive uses.

But, details.

It looks like there's a huge amount of manual cleanup involved, which might exceed the effort involved in measuring the object by hand and recreating it in CAD.

Also, importing the scan into any CAD package with which I'm familiar, in editable form, would be a challenge at best.

And the thing I want to digitize right at the moment wouldn't fit on that little turntable worth anything.  (A small area of the hood of the tractor, if you must know.  I want to create a 3D-printed mounting bracket that magnets onto the hood and holds a roll-axis inclinometer.  I think I need to cobble together a dingus for measuring the curvature.)  Come to think of it, there are several complex shapes from which I'd like to create 3D models, and most of them are too big for the turntable - and then there remains the problem of turning the scan into a usable CAD object that could, e.g., be subtracted from a rectangular solid.

So, passing on that Kickstarter this time around.

Also propaganda

Aside from the mindless assertions that Trump, the Republicans, and Fox News are all siding with Putin....

There's actual Russian propaganda turning up in various places.  Not just warning against direct U.S. involvement in the war, questioning the narrative, impugning the motives of the warmongers, and suchlike reasonable arguments, oh no.  I've been seeing medium-length rants asserting that the Russian invasion was totally justified, that Ukraine is ruled by a U.S. puppet government hated by its people, that the U.S. and NATO are entirely to blame, and so on.

It's a little more sophisticated than those Russian Facebook ads back in 2016, but it's still bloody obvious.  And it follows a familiar template, complete with unsubstantiated fill-in-the-blank assertions of American meddling in [place] back in [year] resulting in [politician] heading up the puppet government that... hmmm... somehow our puppets seldom seem to do our bidding.  Anyway, it seems that Ukraine is ruled by an American-run cabal of Jewish neo-Nazis, so it's all our fault if Putin is compelled to nuke Tegucigalpa.

... Hey, has anyone tried getting Putin drunk and checking his neck for a one-eyed tentacle-spider thing?

Update:  I'm having more than a little suspicion that the "CIA puppet Jewish Nazi" thing is official Russian government propaganda... along with, more obviously, the justification for annexing the Sudetenland Donetsk and Luhansk.  Also... Putin seems to be mixing and matching the concepts of "ethnostate" and "empire" in an alarmingly familiar way.

Rain, rain...

Now over five inches in the past week.  The pond is filling up with both water and ducks.

We're supposed to be coming up on a dry week, during which I can maybe get some outdoors stuff done.

Meanwhile in Europe

It appears that Tsar Vladimir's short victorious war may be developing into a total clusterfark.

Not only are the Ukrainians - imagine that! - fighting back, and their top politicians taking up arms and staying instead of taking up suitcases of cash and fleeing, but it seems that some of the other former colonies of the Russian Empire are joining in.  Against the Russian invasion, that is.

And there are reports of Ukrainian forces taking the fight to Mother Russia, or at least to Russian Federation territory.  Like the feller said: inconceivable!

That, and the Russians having honked off several otherwise-unconcerned powers with attacks on neutral shipping that didn't even have time to get out of the way... yeah.  The whole thing is looking like a massive outbreak of stupid, especially with reports of Russian vehicles being stranded on the roads because nobody bothered planning a fuel supply for them.

Oh, and maybe after this adventure Ukraine won't want to join NATO after all.  Maybe the former Russian vassal states will start their own organization.

First-world problems...

Wally World seems to have forgotten how to pack canned goods for shipment.

Canned stuff had been arriving in good order the past year or so, after a bad start back in 2020, but today's heavy box featured a flat of canned chicken set on edge, such that one of the cans had ruptured.  Big job cleaning up the surviving cans and everything else in that box.

Ah, well.  Looks like the Pestilence maybe be receding in this area to the point where we'll actually be going into stores again.  We'll be able to restock on things like garlic-herb butter!  And I need to make a few garden-center / ag-supply runs with the truck: gotta buy fertilizer - maybe a three-year supply, just in case - and some shrubs for establishing duck habitat beside the pond, and various soil amendments, and approximately a zillion tomato cages, and....

And maybe we'll finally get around to chickens this spring.  Means building an enclosure, and building or buying a henhouse of some sort.  Somehow, I don't think I'll be pursuing my pre-Pestilence idea of an ornate Slavic-style henhouse on R. Crumb-style people feet.

Maybe someone did turn on that Alien Stupid Ray?

Aside from the widespread outbreak of mass psychosis, which has been developing for several years now... maybe there's a physical mechanism to explain an outbreak of plain stupidity?

Little Marco and others are starting to look at Putin's recent behavior and say something ain't right with that boy.  Like, he's acting crazy and stupid, instead of rational, smart, and evil.  Some are suggesting that Long Coof can cause madness and stupidity.

And then I think: blood clots.  If the first observed distinctive symptom of SARS-CoV-2 infection was bilateral pneumonia - bilateral because the damage was happening from the blood side - and that happens because the genetically-engineered spike protein causes blood clots and vascular damage, well...

Vascular damage and blood clots will affect the lungs, yes.  And the kidneys.  And, can we think of another kinda important organ that might get damaged by that sort of thing?  Can we, indeed, think?

And, assuming the damage is caused by the spike protein, can we think of some other way for people to get exposed to the spike protein other than by infection?

Hm.  Bad Orange Man had the Coof sometime in 2020, no?  And also got his spike-protein supplement before it was available to the general public?  So maybe the madness and stupidity people have attributed to him ever since he put that (R) after his name became real sometime around the end of his term?

Are we living through The Day The Earth Stood Stupid, in slow motion?

Propaganda

Made the mistake, again, of making a quick scan of Metafarce this morning.

Lots of "REEEE!  Trump, the Republicans, and Fox news are supporting PUTIN!"  No evidence, of course, just the mindlessly-parroted assertion.  Coming, inevitably, from the purportedly Smart People.

Translated: "There's a war on!  Anyone who doesn't fully and unquestioningly support Our Supreme Leader in all things is a TRAITOR!"

I'd give pretty good odds that Putin's actual supporters are saying the same damn thing, only in Russian, and about any Russian factions that don't fully support Putin.  Because that's what a dictator's propagandists say, and that's one leading reason that dictators need wars.

Busy morning

Various household stuff piled up, plus...

We've had 4.5" of rain in the last few days; just getting a break now.  Joy noticed that the water damage she'd observed on the 19^th inst. had gotten a lot worse.  So, she called the roofers and made it sound urgent (last time I'd called them, there hadn't been signs of leakage), and they got a crew out quickly to fix the obvious damage, look over that part of the roof, and reinforce spots that were looking questionable.

I suggested that, while a whole new roof (to color-coordinate with whatever Joy picks for re-painting the house and barn) was likely a couple of years off, we might just get that one part reshungle properly - I think that's the section that was done by the original owner's teenage son, and it's where pretty near all the damage has been happening.

And, that dock for the pond?  Apparently the gating item on that is concrete.  The one concrete company in this area is backlogged by several weeks, as is the next-nearest one a couple of counties away.  Seems the bottleneck is trucks, or perhaps drivers for the trucks; there's concrete aplenty, but only so much delivery capacity.  The contractor is looking into buying a used concrete truck - which, if there's a shortage of drivers, shouldn't be all that difficult.

War is war by other means.

Wait, what?

Yeah, that's what I meant.

The new war in Europe offers glorious new possibilities for the ongoing war on the middle class (bourgeoisie / Kulaks).

For decades, there's been an ever-escalating push to destroy the wealth, opportunities, and upward mobility of the common folk.  The pretext has generally been some sort of environmental concerns, but then there have been various financial crises, and Social Justice, and the Pestilence, and the so-called insurrection, and...

... and now there's a war.  The masses have always been willing to make sacrifices in wartime, right?  And if Oceania is at war with Eastasia Eurasia, never mind both of them at once, we should all (with the possible exception of our exalted leaders) expect to give up the comforts and freedoms to which we've become so decadently accustomed.  I mean, temporarily.  Just for the duration of the Permanent State of Emergency.

(Could it escalate?  Like, go beyond being just a convenient little war Over There and really get out of hand?  Well... yeah.  The post-WWII world order depended on at least some of the Great Power leadership being Lawful - Good or Evil, it doesn't really matter, but Lawful.  It's become abundantly clear that current Western leadership is somewhere on the Chaotic Evil - Incompetent Stupid spectrum, so we've been depending on Tsar Vladimir and Winnie the Pooh being Lawful Evil.  It appears that Vlad may have flipped to Chaotic Evil, and Pooh Bear may be getting a little too tempted by that hunny jar.  This could lead to a comprehensive New World Disorder.)

Addendum:  Think it's not a war on the middle class?  Take a look at the value of your retirement fund.  Watch the number of nominal dollars drop.  Watch the value of each dollar drop as ever more dollars are conjured out of thin air to compete for the decreasing supply of goods and services.  Try to make any plans for the coming years... or weeks... or hours.  Try to identify the news that will affect financial markets... or that is affecting them today... or that affected them last week.

The immiseration of the proletariat proceeds apace.  And remember: ya can't build it back better if it ain't been burned down yet!

Afterthoughts:  There are other factors destroying the middle class.  For example, thanks to the student loan system making it ever so easy to borrow vast amount of money to cover the bloated cost of an increasingly worthless (or worse-than-worthless) university degree, the current generation of the middle class is now the indentured class.  Add to that the widespread (and largely illegal) importation of less-expensively-educated foreign workers to keep down wages in the middle-class trades (engineering, medicine, and so on), and you can figure that the middle class as we knew it has been well and truly squashed for at least a couple of decades now, at least in the areas dominated by global corporatism.

And: I hadn't just assumed that Tsar Vladimir was Lawful Evil; I'd also assumed that, as world leaders go, he was reasonably smart.  Now he's seeming remarkably stupid.  Did the aliens just turn on the stupid ray?

Mighty wet last night.

Brings the total for the past... three?... days up to three inches.

Good: the level in the pond has risen by several inches.

Bad: the level in the pond has risen by several inches before we've managed to get a dock built.  (Labor shortages, material shortages, construction workers working their tails off the past many months....)

Good?: the stain on the ceiling doesn't seem to have gotten any worse, so maybe that was related to the combination of heavy rain and outrageously high wind from the southwest?

In general: the low-lying area at the bottom of the Annex is now swampy, and the drainage ditch is overflowing onto neighbors' lawns.  (It was overflowing onto our driveway earlier, but that's now drained and the path is clear for deliveries.)  The New Victory Garden has puddles all over, so all that nice deep tilled soil must be well and truly saturated.

How rainy was it?  I intercepted this li'l guy trying to sneak into the garage for shelter:

(Is he giving me the toe in this picture?  Sure looks like it.)

Honk?

So... that convoy down here in Canada's Underpants?  The one that's supposed to get rolling today, all shiny and chrome, well ahead of the schedule various grassroots organizers had been discussing a couple of weeks back?

Seems there's quite a lot about it that doesn't add up.

Yeah, some of that does sound remarkably like it's being run by Bugs masquerading as Humans but not quite speaking the language and not at all comprehending the concepts.

Remember the wise words of Admiral Ackbar!

Is my tin foil thick enough?  There's already talk of opposition to our upcoming war with Russia being treason.  Would a transport workers' strike be labeled as support for Russia?  What will supporters of the convoy be charged with... or imprisoned indefinitely without formal charges for?

Update:  It appears that there are at least two sets of "leaders" talking to the press, using different names for the convoy and stating different plans and goals.  There may be an actual legitimate convoy in there, plus a set of false-flag spokescritters for the domestic press to interview for scary quotes that sound exactly like a left-wing activist's idea of what a right-wing activist would say.

Rah.

It seems that Tsar Vladimir has gone utterly mad, and Jar-Jar's unique brand of diplomacy has not had the desired effect.

Or maybe it was the desired effect?  Anyway,

Ow.

Lower-back situation is Not Good this morning.

Sitting in my office chair makes it worse, though I don't realize that it's worse until I stand up.

Maybe I'd better curl up in bed with a book.  Or straighten out in bed with a book.  And, from time to time, do some stretchy exercises.

Workstation b0rkage update

So!

If I boot in recovery mode, then continue booting, the GUI comes up with a generic VGA-type driver instead of the NVIDIA driver.  This works, for sufficiently 640x480 values of "works" (resolution was probably a bit higher than that, but far from 2560x1440).  It does get the WiFi talking, and I can do package management.

Turns out I had an older version of the NVIDIA driver package installed, and it hadn't automatically updated to the current version.  (I should really check my package selections.)  Installing the highest-numbered version and rebooting got things back to normal.

So... maybe I will go with Kubuntu, leaving the vestigial Debian partition (put there to make the bootloader configuration work) for emergency jiggery-pokery.  Not doing the migration this week, despite the indoors-type weather; there's much else I need to be doing.

Update to the update:  Now I remember... there's a long-term support release (22.04, Jammy Jellyfish) due out April 21^st-ish.  I probably don't want to move all my work over for real until then.  LTS releases are good.  LTS releases are boring... or at least they should be.

20220222

Or 02/22/22, whatever.

 

Morning report: thundery out there.  Indoors, I'm glad I was lazy about migrating work over to the new workstation, because...

I looks like Kubuntu ain't gonna work for me.

Not only did it fail to configure the bootloader correctly (back when I set it up, I had to install vanilla Debian first, then Kubuntu, and then fiddle with the bootloader configuration), but the last update seems to have broken it rather comprehensively.

I guess I hadn't gotten around to rebooting after the last apt upgrade, and yesterday evening dmesg was filled with warnings about the NVIDIA kernel module being out of sync, to the point where I didn't have a chance to see the messages I was interested in, so this morning I rebooted.

Oops.

It hangs.

It was giving some messages related to the NVIDIA driver (which might have been harmless), then a cluster of FS-Cache: Duplicate cookie detected and related messages, then just sitting there.

Booting in recovery mode, enabling networking, and launching a root shell... well, it could ping a local machine via Ethernet (where the NFS mounts live), but DNS wasn't working (Internet connection via WiFi), so I couldn't do another apt upgrade to see if that'd solve the problem.

...Oh.  The WiFi isn't going to be connected unless the GUI is up, is it?  Argh.  Gotta refresh my memory on how to connect WiFi from the command line.

Anyway, using the root shell to comment out all the NFS entries in /etc/fstab made the duplicate cookie messages go away, but didn't resolve the hang.

Maybe I'll try connecting the WiFi from the command line after breakfast, doing another update, and seeing what happens.  But it does appear that Kubuntu is having Issues.  (Also, the "previous version" boot option is broken; it can't find the corresponding kernel.  This does not inspire confidence.)

 

In world news, the Canadian Parliament voted to give Supreme Chancellor Darth-Darth Binks emergency powers.

And, word is that when The Honkening (U.S. Edition) gets underway, there'll be inspection checkpoints set up along the route to check every last fiddly detail of the trucks for absolute compliance with every regulation, repeatedly... and that any passenger cars in proximity to the convoy may be stopped on some pretext or other.  First Amendment, Fourth Amendment, don't bother us with hokey philosophies and ancient documents!

 

Update:  Frank and Ernest would like to remind us that this is also Twosday.

(((My Dear) Aunt) Sally)

Happy Precedence Day!

Remember: if it weren't for precedence, we'd be stuck using lots of infernal stupid parentheses!