malada

Amazing.

A 14 year old boy pulls out a pistol and shoots dead his 23 year old sister.

In retaliation his 15 year old brother shoot the 14 year old with *his* pistol.

How the frell do hormone raging teenagers get a hold of pistols?

Oh, right... the Second Amendment which promises any white guy free use of any gun for any purpose whatsoever. Except... no it doesn't. It's about having an armed militia.

I keep hearing that guns are not the problem - people are. Then why do you keep giving people guns?

The Disney animated movie "Frozen" was big when it came out. Before my father died I took him to have an MRI done and a little girl in the waiting room was singing "Let it Go". I'm a fan of animation so I knew at some point I had to see it.

Well, I got the chance and yeah, I enjoyed it. The animation was superb, the songs were fun and the story didn't follow the standard motif. There were more than one villain, more than one hero, and I caught one of the 'easter eggs' in the movie. (It's a Dick Van Dyke reference in Mary Poppins.)

And I can see why there was a movement to get Elsa a girlfriend for the second movie. Oh la la!

Work nonsense reared it's ugly head yesterday. The Big Honking Remote Video Server barfed a few months ago and ate a bunch of our files. The operators claimed to have discovered which files got
hosed and we've dealt with the most important missing files. There's still a pile of little stuff which isn't important at the moment.

Until yesterday.

Hey! Guess what! They found another file that was missing! Lucky for us I logged into my work email on my day off and discovered the notice. I was able to remotely replace the file with something close enough to keep us on the air for the moment. I don't *mind* a little extra cash for the overtime but this is annoying. First of all - they never told us there was a server failure that ate our video files. They used sneaky language to kind of avoid telling us. It wasn't until I had to replace multiple files that I demanded to know what the heck was going on. They finally coughed up a explanation and after I bothered them some more they reluctantly gave us a list of missing files.

Apparently, those chuckleheads missed at least one.

When this system of remote video servers was introduced (I was in the Room Where It happen - but my objections and those of many engineers was ignored) I strongly suggested that we have local backups. Well, the bean counters nixed that idea although I've been keeping some backups informally. I got little support from our local engineers who either couldn't be bothered or were too busy keeping us generally on the air.

We've got new engineers now and I'm hoping to get some assistance on this. I'm also hoping that some of the other missing files are stashed away on other drives that I don't have immediate access to.

As I like to say, if you want to work in broadcasting there's something *wrong* with you.

When I was a kid - into my teens and college years, my family would troop down to my parents hometown. We would have Thanksgiving at my uncle and aunt's place. There would be my mother's parents, my aunt and uncle, my four cousins, my parents and my two brothers.

There would be two tables: the Adults table and the Kids table. Usually when one reached the age of 18 you were promoted to the Adult table: a major life milestone. By the time I reached that age my older brother and cousins had filled the table and there wasn't enough for anyone else, so I never got to the Adult table.
That was okay by me... the Adults were all Squares and the Kids Were Alright.

After an early dinner: around 1 PM ish, my uncle would lie on the couch to watch The Big Game... and promptly fall asleep. If the weather wasn't too cold, rainy or snowy, us kids would head off into the woods, down to the old railroad tracks and off into the hills to visit the local rock formations. We'd normally make it back before dark but I remember several occasions when the snow was just starting to fall when we got back to the house.

They were mostly good times. Most of the older folks are gone now, my brothers I occasionally see, I've lost track of my cousins. It's just my housemate and me today, although we have some turkey and chicken, rolls, apple pie, potatoes, Stove Top Stuffing... enough for several days of over-eating.

I hope you all have a happy Thanksgiving. Peace out.

... one step backwards.

I pulled six from the garbage. All booted - if slowly. I gave away two.

When I replaced the slow hard drive in the first one, I couldn't get the disk to fit right - but it works. There are several guides to do this online and I followed the one with the least steps: remove bottom, remove four screws, wiggle out the old drive, remove connector, add new drive. The minis are built like laptops and the fit is extremely fussy.

I installed a newish OS and all went well. Then I installed Open Core Legacy patcher and updated the software to almost the newest OS. Go me! One step forward.

The second one I followed the more complex and hopefully would make it little easier to pull out the hard drive. This included removing the fan and a shroud next to it. It didn't make swapping the drives easier by much and when I went to install the fan again - I broke the fan connector on the motherboard. One step backwards. This made me very upset since I had spent a lot of time - more than an hour - carefully doing everything... for nothing. With a broken mainboard it's parts.

So if you every want to replace the hard drive on a Mac Mini - DON'T PULL THE FAN OUT.

The third one I did the four screws and wiggle and was done in fifteen minutes.

It's said that experience is based on the amount of equipment you break trying to learn things. I've learned that at least with Mac Minis - you unplug as few things as you can to replace things.

Still, since the Macs cost me nothing I'm only out the time I spent breaking... learning things.

-m

The Big Closet of Unwanted Computers is a mess with things scattered everywhere. After taking the six unwanted Lenovo Chromebooks I found another Lenovo, so I casually grabbed it and took it home.

it looks almost exactly like the S330s I rescued. Ah... except for the Windows sticker on the back.

Windows 11.

I *don't* think that was meant to be there. I'll be returning that puppy today.

And I don't think I'll be taking the big 'cheese grater' Macs. Even with handles I'm not sure I can heft them. The All-In-Ones? I'll schlep them out the door. I just can't reach most of them right now. The one I could reach had a sticker on it that said, "Bad Drive".

*side look* Is that all? I inserted a USB with a Linux boot image and *boom* up it came. It looks pretty sweet.

Work is busy with things going wrong. The problems are deeper into the system and my work depends on things going correctly in other places. So I have to sit and fret about things going south that *I can't fix*.

Frustrating.

Create bootable USB drive for installing Mac OS (High Sierra) - done!

Upgrade RAM in Mac Mini from 4 to 8 gigabytes - done!

Upgrade original hard drive in Mac Mini for a fast SSD - done!
(The online guides make it look easy - but the fit is very tight and fussy.)

Install High Sierra on SSD for a fast new(ish) Mac experience - done!

Next on the list: create Open Core install USB for installing new but officially unsupported Mac operating systems. We're going for a slightly older OS: Monterey so what I have at home will match what I have at work.

Then I will get my engineer at work to install all the programs I need for work. Working at home is going to be *much* easier afterwards.

The back rooms at work are being cleared out! Although I missed the HP laser printer (it was a big old one) and a 32 inch flat screen TV (it got broken when it landed in the bin) and I did *not* take the 8 old desktops from the Windows XP era.

Instead...

I rescued 6 Mac Minis (2011) and about a half dozen Macbook Pros (2010). After discovering *all* the Mac Mini's still booted I gave best two to a real Mac head. Yeah, he was gobsmacked.

The Macbooks... are going to need a little TLC. Maybe a *lot* of TLC. They'll all need new drives (replacing spinning rust with SSDs) and new OSes installed... but they're only officially approved up to High Sierra - 10.13. I want to try Open Core which will let me update them to Monterey - which is 12.

If they clean up nicely I'll see about donating them. They're nice laptops and very easy to use.

-m

So the Republicans have united in voting for Mike Johnson - Christian Nationalist, homophobe and election denier - as their new Speaker of the House.

He's about as good a Speaker of the House as a head of lettuce and I hope he doesn't last as long.

For me, it's become personal: because being shoved back into the closet is a short step from being shoved into the gas chamber.

-m

It's been quite awhile since I attempted a National Novel Writing Month marathon. I've done a bunch of them but the last one I didn't finish and I basically crashed and burned.

However, I have 3 candidates for this year - all three of which have been stewing in the back of my mind for a while:

"Alien Allen" (novel) - A young man wakes from a near death experience believing he's an alien soul being punished for some now mind wiped crime against the Galactic Empire. Now trapped in a human body, he has to navigate this strange world by relying on the memories still embedded in this body. But some of those memories seem to be missing or corrupted.

"I Need Not Go To The Edge" - (possible modern fantasy) Bullied and harassed teenager has something *bad* happen to him. Soon afterwards, those harassing him start to have *bad* things happen to them.

"Demon Blood" - (sword and sorcery) Life sucks for a young minor telepath and Truthseeker: she can read people's thoughts, knows when you're lying but the magic forces her to speak only the truth. Things don't get much better when she's paired with a demonologist: he summons the demons using her blood to open the Gate, then she interrogates the demons at the demonologist command. When a summoning goes haywire she nearly bleeds out - being saved by an infusion of succubus blood. She survives but now has strange and demanding appetites.

I started the last one as a non-Nano years ago but got stuck very quickly when the setting kept changing. The characters were fine but when the *geography* keeps shifting it's time to put it in the drawer for a while. It has the potential for being a trilogy although the third part is a bit shaky.

Thoughts?