Silicon Valley Redneck

Some storm, indeed.

Even as an old, worn-out storm it's plenty wet; nearer the Gulf, it looks like it's still really intense.

We had somewhat over an inch of rain overnight, and the forecast calls for another inch today.

Oh, and the status of those two parcels is uncertain.  They now (0400) show as "awaiting delivery scan" (as of just past midnight), which usually means "delivered, but the driver didn't scan the barcodes", but one of them shows an expected delivery date of tomorrow and the other shows unknown.  Guess I'll take a look around once it gets light out there.

Update:  I think the electronic rain gauge has gotten b0rked.  The reading hasn't changed in at least half an hour, and I've been hearing a lot of rain during that time.  Communication is still working - the wind reading is updating - so I suppose a chunk of bird poop must have washed into the funnel again.

Update 2:  Long about 0830 came a little red car zipping up the driveway; thence emerged a guy bearing the two wayward parcels.

"It's flu season!"  "It's Amazon season!"

Update 3:  When I did get around to checking the funnel on the rain gauge, it was clear.  I don't know if there was some temporary obstruction, or if the rain was just more noise than water.

More cyberhiccups

Got a message this afternoon from LinkedIn, informing me that one of my contacts had posted a message about a layoff.

Which seemed odd... didn't she already post that, earlier this year?

Clicky linky.  LinkedIn no worky.

Try again later.  And, yup.  Post was from a month or so back.

Earlier today, I got an e-mail from a company welcoming me as a new customer... which is strange, since I've been buying from them for years now.

A couple of hours later, another e-mail apologizing for the first e-mail.

Hypothesis: those vital workers recently laid off from Tw*tter are promptly finding employment elsewhere, and applying their awesome coding and sysadmin skills  in their new positions.

Busy day.

Hither and yon, and out in the yard.

Dock is complete, aside from the last bit of waterproofing and the ramp to connect it to the lawn.  Pic maybe tomorrow.

Currently keeping an eye on the driveway, this dark and stormy evening; USPS is supposedly bringing a couple of parcels (one of them originally scheduled for Sunday... I think Amazon botched the handoff for Sunday, and then maybe there wasn't space on the delivery vehicle Monday).  Anyway, I'm hoping to spot the delivery vehicle and receive the packages in a dry state*.

Almost half an inch of rain so far, and there looks to be a bunch more on the way.  Apparently areas upwind have been really getting hit by this storm.

 

* We don't have those anymore, do we?  Not even Utah?

All tarred out.

Er.  My legs are tired.  The dock's legs are tarred.

And none of them feathered, sorry.

Been smearing sticky black roofing goo on the posts, specifically the part that's expected to be below the water line under normal conditions.

I have some sticky clear roofing goo on order, for the part between normal high water and flood level.  I expect we'll get that done before the pond actually starts filling up for the Winter.

This roofing goo is in addition to the wood sealer and the factory pressure-treatery.  We're going for three layers of please-don't-rot.

And we still need to put the rest of the decking on - probably tomorrow afternoon.  And I need to work up the materials list for the ramp at the lawn end, and get stuff ordered.  (That involves more 12' lumber, so I'm not bringing it home myself.)

Afterthought:  Forgot to mention chicken feather siding (Prairie Home Companion).  Which is another thing we're not doing.  Probably.

Products get stupidized.

Looking on Amazon for a counter-top (or, rather, dresser-top) gadget to put lots of negative ions into the air, thereby (one hopes) encouraging dust, cat dander, and the like to precipitate expeditiously.

Seems they don't exist anymore.  There are HEPA filter machines that include ionizers, yes, but those need constant filter changes.  And...

The category that looks right at first glance?

Proudly proclaims, right there in the description, that it spews ozone into the air.  Yeah, that sounds like a good idea.

Weren't all the old ionizers carefully designed not to produce ozone?  Have we reverted to 19^th-Century quackery, and this is now fine?

Speaking of Christmas decorations

Not doing any outdoors stuff this year.  Again.  Been too much else going on... but there's always next year*.

Dusting off an Idea from a few years back.  Make little controller boards to handle those WS2812B (or whatever) addressable RGB LED strips.

The strips can be had for around $1/foot, without too much looking.  A controller & power supply board to handle, say, three daisy-chained strips of 5 meters each (so, 15 meters, or a bit under 50 feet), wouldn't be much trouble.  We have a lot of linear feet of roof edge....

The original plan called for communicating with the controller boards via RS-485, which would mean stringing extra wires around.  Superimposing a signal on the 12V (or 24V) landscape-light power might be an option.  But now... well, ESP32 chips have gotten cheap - like, cheaper (and, currently, much more available) than the ATmega328 I originally had in mind - and they speak WiFi and Bluetooth.

So, sometime-before-next-Fall, maybe determine just how much of the roof edge we want to illuminate, procure the LED strips, figure out how they'll be mounted, design some controller boards, and so on.  And landscape power cable, and landscape power supplies, and....

Afterthought:  Now I'm wondering about a tiny scripting language that could run on an ESP32.  If all else fails, there's always some sort of tiny LISP.  (Or FORTH, for that matter.)  Surely there are various options out there, just waiting to be incorporated.

Update:

There are indeed embeddable scripting languages, including something Ruby-like that seems plausible at first glance.  Also several flavors of LISP/Scheme, and, yes, FORTH.  And Lua, which has been on my "ought to check it out" list for years now.

And, 5V power requirement for a WS2812B at full white (i.e., RGB all at maximum power) turns out to be 60mA, which sounds fine until you multiply by a 150-position strip (5m, low density) and get 9 freakin' Amps.  Well, for holiday lighting I wouldn't expect to have all the lights on at once, very much of the time, and certainly not all white.  So, maybe a 4 Amp budget per 5 meters, or 12 Amps per 3-strip daisy chain.  Sounds like power distribution is better done at 24V than at 12V!

A random thought: during the off season, the lights could be controlled by the home security system as sort of an "I see you out there!" feature.  Works best with multiple motion sensors and/or a vision system.

 

* If some dangerous clown doesn't go and melt it.

Wind, suddenly.

Forecast, as of early morning, was for a warm and sunny afternoon, but with a lot of wind.

Here it is 0950, and the wind has started already.  Went from near-nothing to 15+ MPH gusts.  Forecast says up to 25 MPH this afternoon.

Maybe I'll do indoors stuff.

Update:  A big, dark cloud passed to the West of us, 1030ish.  No rain, but plenty menacing.  Wind is increasing.  Joy wants to go forth and tar the pilings this afternoon; maybe we'll have a go at that.  Maybe.  Well, the goo ought to be viscous enough not to blow around.  Might be an issue with flying leaves getting stuck to it, tho'.

Strange sound off in the distance.

I first noticed it yesterday, and it's still there this morning.

A deep whooshing, vaguely suggestive of a big honkin' jet engine a fair way off.

At one point yesterday it was sounding rather like a bunch of race engines going around in circles.  Well, there is a motor speedway off vaguely in that direction.  But I don't think they have races on Sunday morning.  (Checks: nope, but they did have an event Friday/Saturday.)  Also, that's 6500 Smoots from here, and I've never heard racing sounds from that direction before.

And this morning it's much more whooshing than droning.

So, um.

Maybe somebody in the next subdivision over has some really high-powered lawn inflatables for Christmas?

Strange products

Amazon thinks I need a gravity feeder.

Doesn't gravity pretty much look after itself?  I mean, unless you have a pet mini black hole that requires constant feeding to make up for losses to Hawking radiation.  Or you're trying to fatten up a negasphere.

The world, meanwhile, could surely use a levity feeder.

Another thing about the Tw*tter layoffs

While some negative-clue members of the hive mind rant on and on about how the value of a company is in the workers, and the new Chief Twit is destroying the value of the company....

Some people who are more aware of reality have been pointing out that there seem to have been a lot of non-productive employees (many of whom didn't by any reasonable standard deserve the title of "worker"), and he's been getting rid of dead weight.

But, it goes beyond that.  In today's corporate culture, some employees have strongly negative value: they prevent work from being done.  And I'm not just referring to Mordac, Preventer of Information Services.  Anyone involved in boosting the ESG score, for example, is going to have a negative effect on productivity.  And anyone who drags the engineers into struggle sessions is not only keeping them from their jobs but giving them a strong incentive to go elsewhere or just drop out.

The idea that head count, per se, is value is popular with Marxists, managers, unions, and bean counters, but it's fundamentally wrong.  It's marginally applicable on a plantation worked by unskilled and unmotivated* labor, but even in that situation some workers are worth more than others.  Start looking at medieval peasants, and there's differentiation by skillset as well as innate ability.  Fast forward to today, and a tech-oriented endeavor, and there are huge differences in value among workers... depending, of course, on what exactly you're trying to accomplish.  (Hiring me to do calligraphy would be counterproductive.)

Treating people as widgets is wrong practically as well as morally.  People are not interchangeable, and never have been.

 

* Where there's a whip there's a will!

Marketing season is in full swing

Some detail from EEVblog.

Yeah, those things suddenly being aggressively marketed on the U-Toobz are every bit as legit as one might expect.

The fancy expensive Japanese knives are indeed knives, but nothing to do with Japan and are actually just cheapies in a fancy presentation case.

And the Scots titles are, if anything, less valid than my mail-order doctorate in Aztec cuisine from Fergle University.  It's right up there with the International Star Registry (or the International Tsar Registry - become a boyar today!) in terms of selling fancy certificates with no legal significance whatsoever, with the addition of an entirely fictional story about actually owning a square foot of Scotland and thereby gaining a title of nobility.

Hey, if you want a bogus certificate, you could at least go for one that's honest about its bogosity.  Pull the wool over your own eyes!

When order tracking goes awry

Got a notification from Walmart, late last night, that a laggard package from my latest order had been delivered early in the afternoon.

Which... hm.  I didn't notice the package.  Have to look for it, once there's some light out there.

But wait!  The contents of that package... didn't that arrive already?  Like, a few days ago?  I'll have to check, later.

And, just to make life even more confusing, there was a second message from Walmart, informing me that the very same item had just shipped and should be arriving a week from Monday.

Computers.  Can't live with 'em.

Update:

1. The item was delivered on the 23^rd.
2. It was not delivered yesterday.
3. I'm therefore assuming that it won't be delivered a week from tomorrow either.

(It's a household consumable, so having it arrive three times would just have us oversupplied by a few months, but I only paid for one, so having multiples show up would be a headache.  Last time that happened, I called the vendor (an industrial supplier) to sort it out, and somehow ended up with an open account in my personal name, in complete defiance of the vendor's policy.)

Trying to Gab Tw*tter

Yup.

Remember what happened to Gab in the early days?  It was in competition with the established platform, only without the political censorship, and This Was Unacceptable.  So The Powers That Be got it cut off from payment processing services, hosting services, and Internet infrastructure services.

And, somehow, this wasn't a violation of antitrust laws, nor a conspiracy in restraint of trade, nor any sort of deviation from the other norms of commerce.

This week?  Tw*ter itself, being now a privately-held fiefdom of Delos D. Harriman, is relaxing the political censorship*... and the usual suspects are pushing to get its app removed from the two main smartphone app stores.  Which I'm sure is totally fine from a legal standpoint, right?

Seems like the guy with his own personal space program might be able to afford more lawyers than the froggy dude, but whatever.

The suggestion making the rounds is that, should Prune and The Giggler remove the app from their stores, D.D. should just get into the phone business.  Which...

Yeah, could work.  The hardware is basically tech Lego; with a Musky budget and the sort of talent he can hire, making a Really Good Phone wouldn't be much of a challenge.  A large part of Android is open-source, so there's a starting point.  Open-source Android products can run (all / most of?) the apps, but don't have access to The Store, nor to Giggler-proprietary bundleware (and data services?).

So, the obvious challenges would be:

• Coming up with a new set of distinctive - and good! - bundleware;
• Setting up a new app store for the new phones/tablets/whatever to use;
• Persuading the developers of existing apps to offer them in the new store.

That last one might get interesting; I don't know what manner of anticompetitive language may be buried in the develop & app store click-though agreements.  Again, lawyers will surely be required.

Also interesting: the prospect of an Android app store managed by a company that's not in the privacy-violation business.

 

* While aggressively cracking down on kiddy-diddler content, an area that somehow managed to evade the previous management.  This is provoking even more outrage.

TGIBF

No, not hitting the stores today.

After a breakfast of warmed-over pumpkin pie and fried kielbasa, I think I need a nap.  It's drizzly outdoors anyway.

This afternoon, various manual labor.  Time to mothball the tiller (which process includes pulling lots of stuff out of its teeth), clean up the tractor, move the water-sealed decking lumber from the garage (where it's been drying) to the back deck (to acclimate for a day or so), and maybe deal with a selection of long-neglected chores.

, toes

I'm sorry, I'll read that again: comatose.

Up much too early this morning, no nap, then way too much chicken, a fair amount of sweet potato, and a good bit of pumpkin pie.

And it was standard dessert-type pie this time.  Joy wanted normal pie, not my breakfast-type pie with reduced sugar and extra eggs.

Well, it does look like a mostly non-rainy next couple of days, so I should find opportunities to burn off some of the extra calories.

(Breakfast tomorrow: probably sweet-potato pancakes.  There's half a small sweet potato left over, so why not?)

A fine, warm, mostly sunny Thanksgiving!

This is proper Fall weather.  None of that "barely above freezing all day" stuff.

Got a pumpkin pie in the oven, and a chicken soaking up herbs & spices for roasting after the pie is done.

Hm.  I meant to cook up some manner of rice-based stuffing.  Guess I should be doing that now.

Back to the kitchen!

Pleasant weather, for now.

Barely below freezing this morning (I didn't even bother with socks when I went to let the chickens out), and in the low 60s now.

I think I'll change into shorts for the rest of the day.

Last I checked, there was a fair bit of rain expected Friday and Saturday.  Guess I'd better get some outdoors chores done.  Like changing the straw in the chicken coop - needs doing soon, and best not done in rain nor wind.

Ah, the fallibility of AI!

There's this concept I've had for some years now... didn't put it into practice when building the chicken coop, because workshop facilities remain constrained and I was mostly working with scrounged materials.

I think I've mentioned it before: the Henhouse of Bubba Yaga, an ornate Slavic dacha (with a poultry theme to it) standing on human feet.  Or maybe on R. Crumb feet.

Maybe I can get an AI to generate concept art?  Head for Craiyon and try a couple of prompts.

"slavic dacha with human feet" gets grotesque feet, with nothing particularly Slavic about them nor any sign of a dacha.

"slavic dacha for chickens" gets slightly weird chicken coops, again with no suggestion of a Slavic dacha.

It must recognize "dacha" as being house-related, since it did come up with housing for chickens.  But it completely ignored it with regard to the feet.

Oh, well.  So much for laziness.

Paper ballots are not the answer.

Over on Tw*tter, I've seen an occasional assertion that paper ballots make for secure elections.

Nope.

They're necessary, but not sufficient.

Many states with paper ballots also have policies that undermine security - 100% vote by mail, legal ballot harvesting, and so on.

Widespread absentee voting, even using paper ballots, loses any assurance that the ballots are being cast by the assigned voters, as well as enabling coercion and vote-selling.

And it seems that some areas using paper ballots manage to lose track of the number of ballots printed, issued, returned, and counted: a complete clown show, disregarding the most basic rules of accounting, chain of custody, etc.

Paper ballots are very much part of the answer, but if we want to take elections seriously and expect the public to trust the results, a massive cleanup of the system is necessary - maybe starting with the changes made hastily (and in many cases illegally) in 2020.

“If voting could change anything it would be made illegal!” - Robert S. Borden, maybe

Tuesday evening comics update

Oh, look!  dns01.uclick.com no longer fails name lookup!  Doesn't answer a ping, but at least it has an address that can be looked up.

And: Dilbert and The Far Side are back.  Gocomics, no, but the message now is 500 Internal Server Error, which is somewhat more informative than what I'd been seeing the last few days.

(The Far Side hasn't been updated since Friday, but at least it's there.)

Update:  It's now Wednesday morning, Gocomics is back, and The Far Side has been updated.  Yay!