Silicon Valley Redneck

E-mail strangeness

Is there an echo in here, or is it just me?

The past few days, I've been getting multiple copies of e-mails from various apparently-unrelated sources, from small specialty businesses up to Tektronix.

Are they all using the same mailing-list software, or the same e-mail distribution service, and there's some new bug in the software?  (Or, wait.  Some of it's from lists.  Some of it is order status updates, addressed specifically and only to me.)

Or is it something my server is doing wrong, that results in the sending server thinking that a message was temporarily rejected when in fact it was accepted?

I glance at the server log in search of enlightenment, and find the log to be unusable due to zillions of entries reporting failed logins; apparently the 'net is once again infested with very persistent bots trying random account names and passwords on random mail servers.

Restarting the mail server doesn't seem to have affected it.

I suppose one of these days I could turn off the SMTP server for a few hours when I'm not expecting any urgent messages; maybe the hackbots would go away for a while.  (Doing this once in a while can also reduce spam, as the spam servers tend to mark destinations as dead if there's no response, while legitimate servers will hold the messages, retrying occasionally, for quite some time.)

Well, that was a night.

Very windy indeed.

Sometime during the night, the weather radio once again did its Squawk of Doom, once again without explanation.

Around 0205, the lights started flickering, then they went out.

There were rather a lot of outdoor lights on around the neighborhood, but maybe some of those are on battery backup?

After a while, I checked the KUB outage map; it showed a bunch of outages, but none in our area.  When I checked our status, specifically, it couldn't retrieve the data.  Standing in the garage doorway with a flashlight, I couldn't see obvious damage to the power line coming up to the house, but I could only see a little of it.

Around 0255 I reported the outage to KUB.  AT 0311, the lights came back on.

Hm.  I wonder if inability to retrieve status wasn't a database thing but a communication node being out, so status actually wasn't available?

Sometime around 0430 the rain started.  It sounds like there's rain hitting the window, but the rain gauge isn't showing anything yet.  Still quite windy.

The weather map shows little rain in the Wears Valley area, but some heavy rain on the way.

Various news stations are still showing the fire as "over 1000 acres and 0% contained" as of 2030 yesterday; no word yet on how much it grew during the overnight wind.

KUB is still showing rather a lot of areas without power.

Last time I poked my nose outdoors (around 0230), it was quite smokey as well as exceedingly windy.

Update:  Fire status as of 0935 was 3000 acres, 0% contained.  KUB has most of the outages fixed, but is still scrambling.  The rain gauge is showing 0.08", which isn't exactly going to extinguish a forest fire.  But at least the humidity is significantly up.

Update 2:  Here it is noon hour, and the wind is picking up again.  I don't recall that being in the forecast from a few hours ago!  Now we're looking at a seriously windy afternoon, kinda calming down in time for tomorrow.

Ah, well.  "Out like a lion", as the saying goes.  Or have I got that wrong?

BOOOOOOOOOOP!

Second one of the day, just now.

First one: the weather radio.  Amber Alert at the opposite corner of the state, again?  Nope; by the time I got there, 'twas just displaying "TEST".  As in, This has been a test of the emergency broadcast system.  This was only a test.  In the event of an actual nuclear attack, you would now be dead.

Second one: my phone.  Brush fire in Wears Valley!  Evacuate, evacuate, evacuate!  Except that we're not exactly close to Wears Valley, and (checks map and weather) not really downwind, so we're probably safe.

The fire is just about due South of here, and I don't see a smoke plume, but it might be camouflaged against the general overcast.

Wears Valley does seem to get more'n its share of fires, doesn't it?

Update:  third alert, midafternoon.  There came a series of tones, apparently from the weather radio, but by the time I got there it was quiet and had no information, indicator lights, nor anything else to inform us what was amiss.

Update 2:  an hour later, yet another.  Tones, no other indication... unless the tones are maybe coming from something other than the weather radio?  Maybe Joy's old phone is listening to all manner of alerts?

Update 3: getting well into evening, and the weather radio keeps going off without explanation.  The wind has shifted, now coming from the Southeast, and the smoke is getting quite noticeable.  News says 250 acres and 0% contained, but that was the status a couple of hours ago.  A fire and smoke map shows the plume still missing us by a considerable distance, so this is just the edge we're getting.

Weather forecast currently shows maybe-helpful amounts of rain starting 0400-ish, with sprinkles and unhelpful lightning starting a couple of hours earlier.  And wind.  Lots of wind.

It's not a California-big fire, but it's big, and destined to get a bunch bigger the next few hours.

Really weird early-morning dream

Time:  Right around now.

Place:  Jumping around several places, none of which I recognize but all of which seemed to make sense in the dream.

Plot: My old consulting-company boss was alive again.  He had some broken lump of cast iron in need of mending.  Maybe it had fallen off his truck's engine?  It wasn't clear how it was supposed to re-attach to wherever it belonged, but the lump was definitely in two pieces, with maybe another fracture getting started.  Anyway, I dug out my flux-core welder (which is totally the right tool for the job, isn't it?) and set about rounding up a welding helmet, gloves, and so forth.

That cast iron was kinda strange.  Like, maybe it was actually sandstone?  Or a biscuit?

Anyway, I'd just managed to get the ground clamp connected  and a little welding started (so it must have been something conductive after all, and not a biscuit) when I woke up.

No, I don't know what brought that on.  Maybe driving past a scrapyard yesterday?  I didn't make cast-iron biscuits for dinner....

Upper respiratory crud

Bleah.

I don't think it's DOUBLE SECRET OMEGACRON </reverb>, though.

Probably related, in some obscure way, to a couple of days of snorting grass clippings (and whatever else was mixed with the grass).

Maybe I should break out the steroid nasal spray.  (This is your nose.  This is your nose on steroids.  Er... maybe not?)

Ah, well.  Running through the "order this stuff soon!" list.  Just put in an order for a battery-powered pole saw that converts to a Lithuanian saw power scythe - there's an alternative "hedge trimmer" business end that's basically an adjustable sickle-bar mower on a stick, which is very much something I've been wanting, on and off, the past couple of years and which will surely be useful for trimming tall vegetation around the edge of the pond, as well as elsewhere.

So, that billionaire tax...

Aside from being a direct federal wealth tax and thus expressly unconstitutional - well, big deal; most of what the feds have been doing these past several decades is unconstitutional - there are some fiddly details.

Like, who's a billionaire?  You might be!  You'll have to account for all your assets - bank accounts, home, car, baseball-card collection, stash of gold coins, stash of weed - in order to establish that the tax doesn't apply to you.  There's no such word as "obvious" in tax accounting, Marigold!

And you're a billionaire if your household assets are valued at $100 million.  Which, last I checked, was less than a billion, but who's counting?  Anyway, with inflation, by 2027 your mint-condition Super Friends #1 comic book will put you halfway there, but so would a bag of halfway-decent coffee beans in your pantry.

Just to make life more interesting, consider how assets will be valued.  Think it'll be honestly-estimated market value?  Or will things the State disapproves of be valued higher?  Will your beat-up 1996 Subaru be assigned a value of $250 million, and taxed accordingly?  Will shares in companies with low ESG scores be valued far above market price, to factor in "social costs"?

Then, too, consider how some taxes are collected.  You may need to apply for permission to pay the billionaire tax, or to pay the tax on certain types of assets.  If the State, in its infinite justice, does not see fit to grant you a taxpayer's license, you can be imprisoned (technically, for tax evasion) for attempting to pay - or, rather, for having the assets without having been granted permission to pay the tax, but the attempt to pay is what gets you caught.

Am I paranoid?  Obviously.  But the real question remains: am I paranoid enough?

Oh, crud. It's not fully spring yet.

That frost I was worried about yesterday morning?

Didn't happen.  The plants were fine.

This morning, on the other hand... outdoor thermometer is currently showing 27°F.  Oops.

Maybe, instead of mowing those patches of hayfield yesterday, I should have been rigging a mini-greenhouse over the planter.  Didn't check the weather forecast!  And it wasn't all that windy, so a planter cover would have been fine.

Once it gets light out there, I'll see if the plants survived.

Update:  The strawberry and oregano plants seem fine; tomato and basil, not so much.  I'll see if those perk back up; elsewise, I'll buy some replacements on the morrow (and take appropriate protective measures).

My years-ago plan called for a fairly large greenhouse, but that hasn't happened so far, and there isn't really a good place to put one here.

Update 2:  Strawberry plants, fine.  Oregano, fine.  Tomato and basil plants, very much not fine; gotta replace those.

I did some tilling, and tried applying the lawn roller to one tilled area.  Little problem: the pressure applied by the roller (properly full of water) is less than the pressure of the mower's wheels, or indeed of my booted feet.  I guess it's intended for leveling somewhat firm soil rather than soft, deeply-tilled soil.  Multiple passes resulted in kind of a hard surface with deep tire tracks remaining in it.

Oh, well: that was the small area, so I went over it with a rake and now it should be more or less plantable (when the wind cooperates).  That patch gets seeded with clover, and later with sunflowers.

Maybe what I need to do is add a tow bar to the tiller, so's I can drag the roller along directly behind the tiller.  Little details... the roller isn't quite wide enough for that trick, and attempting to turn that parade around at the end of a row could get Interesting, especially when there's limited space for turning around.

Random retro-tech thought

This morning's vid during breakfast:

Which does bring back memories; my primary computer back in college was a more modern version of that, built around a 6809 CPU.  Someday, when I have a bunch of time on my hands and some uncluttered workbench space, I'll have to dig that out and make a vid about it.  It bridged the 6502 and 68000 eras....

Anyway.  This got me thinking of the various MC68xx peripheral chips of the era, and a question that had arisen back around maybe 2010-ish: someone who was making highly-specialized industrial equipment had been using the MC68488 HP-IB controller, which had gotten to be in short supply, and was looking for alternatives.  (I think he ended up redesigning his controller entirely.)

A reasonable solution might have been to re-implement the 68488 functions in a small FPGA, or even a CPLD; for a drop-in replacement, this would have to go on a little board with a 40-pin DIP footprint, presumably including level shifters and a voltage regulator so's a modern 3.3V programmable logic device could plug into a 5V system.

Now, my fuzzy little morning brain having been tickled, I'm thinking that a modern MCU would quite capable of bit-banging both the HP-IB signals and the 6800 system bus, though maybe not both at the same time.  But!  This might be something that an RP2040 could handle, what with the two CPU cores and the PIO features.  I think the PIO could handle HP-IB; could it also do a 6800 bus slave?

... Not that I think anyone is really looking for a drop-in replacement for that particular chip just at the moment, so this is kind of a solution in search of a problem, but it's one of those interesting ponderments.

... the miller is idle, his mill to repair

Been out in the barn, doing some spring maintenance.

No, not maintaining springs.  Neither the sproingy kind nor the trickly kind.  Doing off-season stuff that I ought to have done during the winter, but for the lack of heat and light in the barn that time of year.

Change oil in lawnmower.  (I really ought to be doing that at least twice a year, even if I am running full-synthetic; gotta mark my calendar for early July, and stock up on oil filters).

Grease everything that needs greasing on the tractor, mainly on the loader.

Realize that the grease gun needs (1) a battery swap, as the one that's been on it since forever is down to one bar, and (2) some cleaning of the nozzle, 'cause it's not sealing consistently to the Zerks.

Check the oil in the mini-tiller (its cup runneth over), and make sure it still starts (yes).

Guess I should also take inventory of the various sorts of oil, and see what I ought to be stocking up on.  Already laid in a multi-year supply of the special hydraulic fluid for the tractor, but it might just be prudent to have at least a couple of years' worth of the various grades of engine oil, bar and chain oil, gearbox oil, and so on.

And... maybe I should let another neighbor or two know that I'll be doing my Tiller Fairy bit soon, just in case they need patches of lawn turned into victory gardens.

Song reference in title:

(I'm more familiar with the Clam Chowder version, but that's not on YouTube.)

Update:  Maintenance having been performed, I proceeded to take the mower out for a spin, dealing with a couple of areas that were getting urgent and also an area that looks like potential garden expansion; I'm thinking that maybe I want to turn another half-acre or so of old hayfield into fallow fields, tilled, smoothed out, planted with clover and perhaps other soil-enhancing ground cover, and rather closer to being ready for farming next year should the need arise.  The first step in this is keeping it mowed short for a while, to discourage tall vegetation.

Now I'm all covered in grass clippings, as well as being somewhat oily.

A sudden case of tinfoil

Idly wondering to what extent Russia will be affected by the coming global famine, I had a stray thought.

What if something has gone terribly wrong with Russian agriculture in the past year, and Putin thought he could seize all that lovely Ukrainian farmland, with minimal trouble, ahead of planting season?

 

Semi-unrelatedly: isn't it funny how the global famine, which has been proclaimed imminent at least since the 60s due to overpopulation, fertilizers, pesticides, the coming ice age, global warming, and emergent crop pests, is suddenly coming to pass largely as a result of "green" policies that make modern farming untenable?  (Suddenly there's no fertilizer, Diesel and pesticide costs are through the roof, everything downstream of fossil fuels is in short supply, etc.)

Another plague of clickbait vids

Lately turning up in my YouTube suggestions: many shortish vids from unfamiliar channels with "News" in the names, with clickbaity titles relating to Ukrainian victories and Russian disarray.

The actual content doesn't come close to substantiating the title.  And... trying to remember, but I think the last one I clicked on was just video clips and text, with no voice - hence no accent to provide a clue as to the origin*.

I'm pretty sure these aren't Ukrainian propaganda, which tends to be much better done.  My suspicion is Asian clickbait farms, seeing a new opportunity and jumping on it.

And of course YouTube promotes this stuff.  The Google Empire lives on clickbait, especially if it's seedy.

* Sometimes such clues can be misleading.  There's one YouTuber whose profile puts him in Central Europe but who has more of a Thermian accent.  He never shows his face; maybe he is a Thermian?

Update:  Just looked over one of the Ukraine-clickbait channels.  It's been around for several years... but the vids for quite some time, prior to a month ago, all seem to be soccer-related, with clickbaity titles in German.  I have the impression that the name of the channel was changed at the same time as the topic, but don't feel like investigating further.

Manichaeism on display...

... in the comics-page comment section!

Today's topic: mustard or ketchup on a hot dog?

The Mustardite contingent is out in force, appealing to authority and denouncing the Ketchupite heretics.

As for me, well, I intensely dislike the taste of mustard (and of pickles, for that matter).  I favor taco sauce on hot dogs, but, should that not be handy, I'll settle for BBQ sauce (not the kind with mustard, thank you very much) or even ketchup.

Mayo on grilled meat products remains an Abomination unto Nuggan.

Corruption detail

Another little reminder:

Our corrupt politicians and oligarchs aren't in cahoots with Putin, personally.  They're in cahoots with the corrupt Russian oligarchs, a group which overlaps significantly with the corrupt Ukrainian oligarchs.

Putin's little adventure is turning out to be ruinously expensive for the oligarchs, and therefore must be stopped - but there's no hurry; it can be exploited in the meantime.

... It's also, of course, ruinously expensive for ordinary Ukrainians and for a fair number of ordinary Russians.  The hasty and ill-considered Western economic sanctions against Russia, and Putin's hasty and ill-considered responses, will prove ruinous for significant parts of the Western economy as well as for Russia and for every Russian business with any sort of international connections for the foreseeable future; capital flight is a real thing, and there's no magic "restore trust" reset button.

A viral ponderment

Imagine if you will....

In normal times, we're exposed many times a year to the various nuisance-grade upper respiratory viruses, any of which can cause the syndrome we know as the common cold.  Typically, we'll develop symptoms a time or two every year.

In normal times, children are routinely exposed to respiratory syncytial virus, catch it once at some random time early in life, and develop immunity.

Last year, there was a huge outbreak of RSV as children who, though a year of isolation, hadn't been exposed, were all exposed to it at the same time, causing a year's worth of cases to happen all at once.

Now, let's ponder.  What would happen if a large test group of people were to be kept safe from the common cold for two years, while the smaller control group had something like the normal amount of exposure?  Two years on, when the test group was again exposed, would they develop more severe symptoms due to their immune systems having partially forgotten about such viruses, to the new strains having two years' worth of drift instead of just one, or some combination?

So if you come down with some unusually nasty upper respiratory crud this year, you don't have any distinctive symptoms of the Coof, you test negative for SARS-CoV-2, and you hadn't even had a cold for two years... maybe it's DOUBLE SECRET OMEGACRON </reverb>, or maybe you and the common cold had grown apart and now need to make acquaintance again.

Parody may not quite be prophecy

I was dimly recalling the stated premise of a parody trailer from several years ago.  Mosquito, 'twas called; a parody, of course, of Firefly.

The backstory given involved... ah, here's where I misremembered.  As stated, it involved the U.S. and China nuking each other into oblivion, and the main surviving powers being Canada and Ukraine.

I thought I remembered the surviving powers being China and Ukraine, which this week would seem eerily prophetic.  (Also, it's no longer necessary for anyone to nuke the U.S.; the country is busily tearing itself down.)

Oh, weather.

Supposed to get exceedingly windy tomorrow afternoon and evening.

And... in the wee hours of Sunday morning, there's frost in the forecast.

Hmph.

Guess I should (sometime tomorrow) move the small pots up close to the house, maybe even on the back deck.

And the great big raised planter?  That should get covered with something, but not until late Saturday evening when the wind dies down, because trying to deal with a fabric cover in 20+ MPH wind is not my idea of fun, nor indeed my idea of something that'll work.

Or I suppose I could test the hypothesis that the tractor is capable of carrying that planter in its current state, and try to put it somewhere more sheltered....

Ladders. Why'd it have to be ladders?

So last time we had a fierce wind, a couple of days back, I looked at the problematic area of the roof and saw one shingle flapping rather badly.

No problem, right?  It's right near the edge, so I don't need to go up on the actual roof.  I should be able to reach it while standing on a ladder, and squirt some adhesive under it.

Fetch the Little Giant ladder from the garage.  Determine that, no matter how I configure it, it ain't long enough.  Hm.

Wait.  There's another ladder of that sort in the barn.  Is that the bigger one?  Indeed it is.  Lug that one out to the trouble spot.  In straight configuration, it's plenty long enough... but.  I could rest it on the gutter, but I don't think so.  Or, I could try to prop the end on that little bit of exposed wood beneath the gutter, and, er.  Not only is it unreasonably difficult to maneuver this long, heavy ladder with any semblance of precision, but if the bottom end were to slip on the grass just a little, the top would come off its perch, which seems a bad idea.

So, not doing that little project today.  I need to ponder the situation.  Supposed to be quite windy tomorrow, but with the wind mainly coming from the West, which won't cause problems with that particular shingle.

There's a lot of other outdoors stuff I was thinking of doing, but not in cold weather with gusty wind and clouds blowing in.

Could this be a Multipolar Escobar Gambit?

Seems ol' Zombie Joe Brainsniff, attempting to give a speech in English, let slip that he's maybe planning to visit Ukrainian refugees in Poland.

Well.

If Putin is using the invasion to rid himself of inconvenient high-ranking officers, allowing them to have glorious deaths in battle... are Joe's handlers planning the same for him?  Send him somewhere that he can be killed by the Russians (who are clearly in league with the Bad Orange Man!!!!!), getting him out of the way and (bonus!) giving Jar-Jar the excuse to kick off both global thermonuclear war and a domestic purge?

And perhaps (assuming the world doesn't suddenly get radioactive) China will see an opportunity to send its excess male population westward*, into Russian territory, led by inconvenient officers?  (I don't know how much sense this makes, but the suggestion has been making the rounds the last few days, given the signs of Russian weakness and the risks of going after Taiwan.)

Methinks actual coulrocracy would be much preferable to what the major powers have now.  Is it time to give professional comedians (Zelensky, Beppe Grillo, who else?) a turn?  Could they do any worse than the oh-so-serious permanent ruling caste?

* Maybe more north than west, but conceptually westward.

Looking for meaning in all the wrong places

There seem to be a lot of people looking at the glyphs adorning Russian vehicles and trying to assign meaning to them.

Like... the ones on view are V, O, and Z.  It's Zelensky's initials!  В О З, yeah, that's it!  Why Putin's vehicles are marked with Zelensky's initials (one initial per vehicle) is left as an exercise for those who have better tinfoil than I.

Personally, I think the Z glyph is the mark of Зорро.  The other two must be his cousins.

... And I'm just waiting for someone to come up with evidence that Zelensky was personally involved in the notorious Лафюр-Азов battalion.

A quick note on the propaganda war

On that front, the Ukrainians are knocking it out of the park.

West-facing propaganda: one might think that the Ukrainians have an advantage by virtue of access to the Western propaganda apparatus, but... well, that given them an advantage in distribution, but not so much in production.  Our own propagandists, you see, are entirely out of touch with Western values, while the Ukrainian propagandists remember what Western Civ is supposed to be about.  The Russians, meanwhile, seem to be sticking to a formula that's always worked on the Western Left, but now it mostly seems to be working on the more unclear-on-the-concept members of the Right - probably because of the preëmptive anti-Russian propaganda campaign that's been going on since 2016.

East-facing propaganda: the Ukrainians are demonstrating the value of treating POWs well, regardless of treaty obligations.  If unmotivated enemy conscripts think they'll fare better as prisoners than as soldiers, they may be less inclined to fight.  And as word gets back behind enemy lines - that'd be the "Here, use my phone; call your mommy and tell her you're OK" thing - I'm guessing that the effect on enemy attitudes could get dramatic after a while.

As far as what's actually going on?  It sounds like the Russians are, maybe, losing faster than the Ukrainians, and it's not like they have a path to any meaningful sort of victory.  Making a desert and calling it peace ain't much of a win, and conquering/destroying a few cities and then trying to rule over a countryside full of angry people with modern weapons also seems to lack a certain winningness.

Semi-relatedly:  How come the President of Ukraine can give a short, focused, to-the-point speech in English and the current President of the United States can't?  (Not that what he's asking for is likely to have much effect on Russia, but encouraging Westerners to express support for Western Civ seems like a good idea in general.)