Silicon Valley Redneck

Hello? Hello? Is this thing on?

I haven't been dead the past couple of days.  Kinda busy, yes, but not dead.

Typepad, on the other hand... seems it was more or less down all weekend, except for a little while on Saturday afternoon that happened to be the time I had something to post.

Got another round of toaster stuff to work on now, in addition to domestic stuff, so blogging will be sparse even if the service remains up.

I thought there was other stuff I meant to write about, but now it's gone in one head and out the other.  Oh, well.

On the home front:

All posts for the pier are now in place, aligned*, and set in concrete.

Upper and lower fields have had another pass with the tiller.

I didn't go over the fields with seeder & roller yet, because I got plenty aches & pains from slinging bags of concrete mix around, pouring the stuff into holes, etc.

Winding down now, and waiting for the naproxen to kick in.

 

* For wooden values of aligned.  Wood ain't metal, and cloth ain't even wood, as I learned many years ago when trying to hold close tolerances in non-precision materials.  The posts are aligned well enough for macroscopic wood construction; the following steps have sloppy enough tolerances to allow for some misalignment, and installation of final decking is meant to make it all look right.

They take football serious 'round these parts.

Hardly any signs of activity in the neighborhood all afternoon; I guess everyone is indoors.

As it gets into evening, the jet fighter in loud mode is back.

Apparently there's a big football game today, and there are two F-35s providing air support for the home team.

Yeah, things have come a long way since Bullwinkle's playbook consisted of Confederate battle plans....

Keeping up with the names of lawn-care apparatus

There's this mechanism traditionally called a "dethatcher".

A few years ago, I had the idea that the name should be updated from "deThatcher" to "disMay", for obvious reasons.

But what would it be called now?  A "disTrussed"?  An "antiTrussed"?

Eh.  Maybe just leave it at disMay, figuring Truss wasn't in office long enough to count.

Slow start.

Plan for the day: get up early, do usual morning stuff, address some ToasterCo issues, have lunch, then spend the afternoon working on the pier project.

How it's going: got up early, did a subset of usual morning stuff, fell asleep at my desk, returned to bed, woke up close to lunchtime, had lunch, now I gotta get stuff ready for the pier work.  I hope there'll be a couple of hours for toaster work during the afternoon.  (Joy really wants to be sure we at least have the posts in place before we get into the next rainy season and the water starts rising.)

... Ugh.  Better go check out the long hose, and see if I need to do any mending to get enough sections deployed to reach the places where we'll be putting in that quick-setting fencepost concrete.

Update 1:  Enough hose is OK; mending the damaged segment(s) can wait.  I'd planned on turning a half-dozen 1x3s into temporary beams for setting up the posts, but two of them were excessively hockey-stick shaped; four will suffice, I guess.  Posts are in holes.  Next up: start lining the posts up (vertical, and with sides aligned) and setting them in concrete.  Now, break time.

Update 2:  We now have four of the dozen poles set in concrete.  As expected, the first was a pain, the second was less so, and, thanks to the miracle of bolting boards alongside for alignment, the next two were almost easy.  I expect subsequent pairs to go fairly smoothly.

Once they're all done, we'll need another nocturnal session with the laser level to mark the estimated water level on all the posts in preparation for installing the structure.

Update 3:  Post setting is now 2/3 done.  Between the long work afternoon and the early sunset, grill time got to be rather compressed, but dinner did in fact happen as dark was falling.

Stuff for early tomorrow:  change straw in coop, and clean & refill the waterer.  I'm thinking a bigger waterer might be in order (and maybe one with some thermally insulating properties).

Why are there no baby telephone poles?

Well, when a mommy telephone pole and a daddy telephone pole....

No, not literally baby telephone poles.  What I want is a couple of pressure-treated round poles, around 3-4" diameter by 10' long.  Like telephone poles, only smaller.

And I want them for utility-pole purposes: I want to run a low-voltage landscape lighting power cable from the house to the chicken pen, and I don't want to put it underground until after we have some re-grading work done in that area (to improve drainage near the house), which at this point ain't happenin' until next Spring.  So, up overhead, strung between poles.

But it's looking like I have a choice between 2x4s and steel posts intended for chain-link fence, unless I can scare up the proper posts somewhere I haven't looked yet.

I suppose I could always affix an anchor to the wall of the house, and strap a stick to one of the T-posts holding up the pen fence.

Well, that was a day.

Early morning: pretty much usual, except for being slightly more unpredictable, so I don't manage to run morning errands until after an early lunch.

Later morning: depart 1115ish for what I'd anticipated being an 0900 errand.  Into town... not technically a town, but more than a crossroads... and find the physical branch of my local bank, 'cause I've got a physical check to deposit.

Arrive at bank.  Two clerks, no customers, no waiting!  Sign and hand over check and deposit slip, including a less-cash, because we really ought to have a few more small green pieces of paper around the house.  First clerk tries to process the transaction.  Computer problem.  Fiddles with the computer and tries again: nope.  Hands the paperwork to the second clerk.

Second clerk can't accomplish anything either.  Sounds like maybe a server problem?  First clerk calls another branch: down for them too.

Oh, well.  I'm not in a great hurry.  I wait around for a while, as the clerks make various calls trying to determine what's going on and how long until it's likely to be fixed.

Very late morning: it's getting to be past 1145, and I suddenly realize that it's Thursday, and I'm supposed to be on a conference call at noon.  Eep!  Well, I don't actually need to be at my desk for it... except that at my desk is where the meeting ID is.

Hastily update the deposit slip to reflect depositing the full amount, and leave everything there to be processed when the bank can process transactions again.  Jump in truck; head for home at maximum prudent speed (being passed, at one point with a double yellow line, by a red sports car whose owner apparently wants to drive 70 MPH in a 45 zone).  Arrive 1206, hasten to desk, look up numbers, and call in.

The manager is on the call, but neither of the client's engineers is on.  I don't have anything to report, so we chat about random stuff for a while and eventually conclude that the other engineers aren't going to be joining us.

My e-mail contains a notification that the deposit has happened.

A little general catching up, and then it's time to go play in the dirt.  Confirm that the portable generator still runs, and lug it out to the edge of the pond.  Figure out how to install a chisel in the jackhammer, and lug that down to the pond.  Also carry down an extension cord and sundry other stuff.

The jackhammer proves unwieldy, especially when working at the bottom of a hole, but it makes short work of rocks and doesn't fry the generator.  I find it necessary to remove the fore-grip, as that impairs reaching the bottoms of holes (maybe I should have tried to get an extra-long chisel).

Joy and I spent a fair chunk of the afternoon out there with jackhammer, regular hammer & chisel, shovel, manual post-hole digger, and gas-powered auger, and by the time we declared victory we had all dozen holes near enough done.

Oooh... I hurt all over.

Oh, and while we were out there, there was a jet fighter swooshing around in loud mode.  Maybe there's an airshow coming up?  I'm pretty sure it wasn't the Google Air Force way out here.

Creak... groan... I think maybe I can build up some muscles doing this stuff.

Time to check for eggs, fix dinner, and unwind.

Random morning ponderment

So, these mRNA-based maybe-vaccines....

They hijack cells and reprogram them to produce an alien protein, in the expectation that the subject's immune system will produce antibodies to said protein and thus be prepared to deal with an actual infection.  All sounds nice and logical.

But.

The immune system isn't just about antibodies, is it?  What happens when leukocytes encounter cells that have been reprogrammed to produce an alien protein?  Do they attack them as alien cells?  Can the leukocytes themselves end up reprogrammed, triggering a further response?

Surely someone with relevant expertise has examined this... surely?

Coming of age in Western Civ. (or not)

Via the Adaptive Curmudgeon, I find this gem at The Map is Mostly Water*.

Kids learn best when they get to do stuff, and can see the use of what they're learning?  Who'd a' thunk it?

Yeah... I mostly learn by doing.  This caused much friction when I resumed college after a break; I'd already done much of the stuff I was supposed to be learning, by alternative methods that were, in practical terms, much superior to what was being taught.  Something to do with The Approved Methods being fashionable with academics for reasons entirely unrelated to efficiency of effort or of results.

Even in my day, opportunities for Doing Stuff during one's school years were limited.  Now, with so much emphasis on keeping the kids busy with compulsory stuff every moment of every day (including mandatory "volunteer" projects, because you can't get into a good school without your social credits earned through political activism masquerading as community service), there can be no room for applied learning.  And then there's the indoctrination crowding out the basics; Johnny may not be able to read, but he's a whiz at identity politics!

Pretty much everything important in life, I learned outside of school.  Technology, literature, history, music... yeah, some of that was available (even compulsory) in school, but mainly in off-putting forms.  I guess I'm an atypical learner, but... is there such a thing as the typical learner toward whom formal schooling is geared, or does the great big edumacation machine miss everyone?

(I did very badly indeed in high school shop class.  Many years later, I got motivated and started playing with machine tools - things I wouldn't have been allowed near in school, even if the school had them.)

 

* And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be
  A map they could all understand.

Border troubles, hmmm.

Latest rumor is that Russia is planning to import large numbers of third-world denizens* into Kaliningrad, and create a refugee crisis at the Polish border.

Probably also the Lithuanian border, but the rumor I saw came out of Poland and didn't address Lithuania.

Heck, somebody's been importing Haitians into Mexico and pointing them at the border; they sure didn't walk there from home.  Maybe Russia is just imitating the WEF, or whoever's behind these improbable migrations.

* Presumably favoring the ones their homelands would just as soon be rid of.

Cough, cough, sniffle, sneeze

Y'know, there might just be circumstances under which wearing a mask outdoors while alone might not be grounds for mockery.

Like, just as a purely hypothetical possibility, tilling a dry dusty field on a dry dusty day.

Cough.

Confoozling company name

So I bought a round black thing with a round red center marking.

Brand name T-fal.

Not to be confused with another purveyor of round black things, K-tel.

Aw... frying pan, licorice pizza, what's the difference?

(Off to fry some 45 RPM eggs.)

Some phrases grab the attention.

Noted here:

Sunak is also the third Prime Minister the U.K. has had in seven weeks.

You went full Italy, man.  Never go full Italy.

Sometimes, one is ahead of one's time.

I have a history of having one cool idea or another, not having time and/or resources to do anything about it, and finding a year or so later that IBM (or some other megacorp) had the same idea and ran with it.

Well... back in the mid-1980s, I invented an isometric mouse (brand name would have been Isomouse, had it become a product - and, no, not the sort of mouse one would weigh on a Bioquest Isoscale).  I built a couple of iterations of a 2-axis, 3-button proof-of-concept mouse, which worked decently well, but getting it into production with the manufacturing of the day, and without vast resources, just wasn't happening - besides which, there wasn't yet any sort of standard interface for mice, and on MS-DOS the mouse driver was (IIRC) responsible for drawing the cursor, which involved low-level access to the video buffer of whatever model of graphics card was installed.  Still, I made one compatible with an existing mouse with an existing driver - Logitech, maybe? - and it was my primary mouse for a few years.

Anyway, it didn't happen - but the basic design (multi-axis force sensing, with negligible movement), apart from saving desk space and not being susceptible to cat-hair cloggage, lent itself to additional axes - I had a kind of sketched-out concept for a 6-axis version (X, Y, Z, translation along and rotation about each).

Well.  Looks like somebody name of 3Dconnexion has a 6-axis mouseoid dingus in production now.  Haven't looked into how it works, but I'm guessing it's something like my 1980s gadget - though given the appearance of the thing, it's presumably doing a lot less of the math in mechanical structures and analog circuitry, and more in firmware - presumably it includes an MCU with a lot more crunchpower than the little 68705 (?) that I was using.

Rumor has it that...

... there's more than one facility in the U.S. currently doing gain-of-function research on notoriously deadly pathogens.

Which we've been assured is definitely not happening, nope, it'd be illegal, all that stuff has been outsourced to other countries' biological warfare research establishments by way of quasi-private cutouts.

Funny how the WEF's pet radicals don't seem to be protesting this stuff.  Protesting against food production, sure.  Protesting against the next neo-Pestilence, very nope.

It's that season again.

Duck season?

Rabbit season?

No!  It's humidifier season!

Yesterday afternoon, at peak temperature in the mid-60s, the outdoor humidity was around 30%.  Indoor humidity, with the heat on, doesn't bear thinking about.

And, yes: much respiratory irritation.

"The Resistance"

Here's a little clue...

If you're promoting the agenda of the party in power;

If Corporate America proudly flies your banner;

If your movement is supported by upwards of 90% of the billionaires;

If you have immunity from prosecution, while those who oppose you are vigorously prosecuted for the most minor offenses;

If you and your buddies are invited to the White House to pose for pictures with the President;

Then what, exactly, are you resisting?

Taking a break from drilling

This afternoon was for scraping.  Back and forth over a fairly large portion of the garden, trying to collect as much of the old vegetation as possible, along with as little dirt as possible.

I think I really need to get a toothbar (Piranha-type) for the loader bucket, for clearing vegetation.  Also, a 3-point landscape rake would be a good thing.

Anyway, I did make some progress.  Now I need to remove stakes, trellises, and tomato cages from the remaining area, and scrape that part.  And scoop up the scraped plants and dump them on the compost pile.  Then till.

On the drilling front, a cheapish electrical jackhammer is supposed to be arriving tomorrow.  That should break up the rocks real good.  I looked for 3-foot-long rock chisels at Home Depot, but didn't find anything remotely fitting the description.  Maybe I should have been looking in a mining-supply store instead of a home-improvement store?

Farm update:  Three eggs.  I guess another chicken has come on line... though all three are just about the same color (lightish tan, vaguely red of FDE).

Almost rhymes with "rocket hop"

Ongoing posthole-diggery is ongoing.  And slow going.

Keep having to stop for rocks.

I'm thinking maybe I should buy a low-end electric jackhammer.  There'll surely be ongoing uses for such a thing.  Or maybe a hammer drill, or rotary hammer, or some such...?  More research.  I need something for breaking up rocks (net especially strong ones) down at the bottom of a hole, so a tool with some reach.

We're not all that close to Rocky Top, but there are some very rocky areas indeed within a stone's throw of here (at least, if one uses a catapult), and every attempt to disturb the soil is a reminder that this ain't the best farmland in the world.  At least there's enough silt loam between the rocks that it is possible to grow corn here.

Not to be confused with:

Confoozling subject line

From the Computer History Museum:

NOVA Computers v. Crime

I figured, well, history.  Something about police departments using Data General minicomputers back in the 70s?

Nope.  Turns out it's a PBS NOVA program about the current use of computers in law enforcement.