malada

So... this amazing musician named Lizzo went to the Library of Congress to check out their flute collection.

Wait... they have a flute collection? How many? 1,700? Hot damn!

Then she got to rock on a crystal flute owned my James Madison? Awesome!

I now know the Library of Congress has a *huge* collection of flutes, and one of them is a *crystal* flute, and there's this black woman named Lizzo who can blow like nobody's business.

So... what's the problem?

I'll tell you what my problem is... I didn't know _any_ of that before!

Now I want to know what else do they have in there? Do they have cellos? Calling Yo-yo Ma! Oboes? (Naw, nobody cares about oboes). Guitars? Saxophones? Can we get a _band_ together?

Hot damn.

-m

PS - my profile pic is me holding a 1972 Hagstom bass guitar. I rescued it from a garage sale - rebuilt the electronics, repaired a large hole in the front and took it to a repair shop to have the neck shimmed. It doesn't play very well but I like it.

From NPR and other news sources, a shortage of CO2 may cause shortages in beer production.

Great googlie moogilies.

In seems the industrialization of beer making uses canned CO2 to give the beer its carbonation instead of using the natural CO2 from brewing. Which brings up a memory of my youth... and a beer commercial.

Schultz and Dooly were animated beer steins - one obviously German and the other Irish that were used to hawk Utica Club beer. Utica is in central New York so it was probably specific to NY state. They had a little song they'd sing:

"Brewing a brew with artificial bubbles,
those carbonated beers of today.
At Utica Club we still take the trouble
to age,
beer,
the natural way.
Utica club, U - C."

Still being made but I'm not sure the whole 'natural way' was a thing to start with.

You'll need to retool but making beer without CO2? Can be done.

-m

I've been reading about a new Conservative dating app tentatively titled 'The Right Stuff'. Even though there's already a non-conservative dating app called 'The Right Stuff'.

Ooopsie! Someone didn't do basic research!

But I thought there already was a conservative dating app... it's called 'Grindr'.

-m

From the NY Post:

"New York City public schools are expanding active shooter training to pre-K, 3-K and other early childhood programs, Department of Education officials said Wednesday."


What a stupid, sick society we have. I guess we have to teach kids how to protect themselves against armed intruders because as Texas has shown us, the police won't.

-m

Once a year, a local street has a 'street wide' garage sale. Not everyone participates but it draws a fair amount of people. This year, I brought a swag bag with me. Other people have tote bags or even little wagons to carry their loot home with them. It's a fairly long street and it took me an hour to hit all the sales.

I didn't get much: a DVD, a cute little fan, a Dell power brick and a laptop. It's a Lenovo T420s. Originally came with an i5 processor and Windows 7. The laptop was on a table that was rather delicately balanced and when I picked up the lappy to inspect it, the table tipped over dumping half of it's contents on the ground. Most embarrassing. Although the laptop had a charger with it there was a note saying that it needed a new power jack and a hard drive. A little honesty for a change! It was worth the risk at 10 dollars.

Putting my multi meter on the power plug I discovered the charger was indeed dead. I have a multi-adapter for laptops and got the battery so start charging. And it POSTs! but doesn't recognize the hard drive. I had a real time hard time breaking into the BIOS as some of the keys seemed to be funky, but figured out how to boot off a CD or a USB.

I got it to boot all the way into Xunbuntu but it seemed like there was a bunch of stuck keys and things just opened by themselves. By plugging in a USB keyboard I managed to shut the machine down gracefully.

After downloading the manual I checked for the hard drive... and discovered they removed both the hard drive and the carrier for it. So, a hard drive carrier, replacement keyboard and a cheap SSD are going on my Amazon list. The lappy is beat up but I should be able to resurrect it fairly inexpensively.

-m

So the 'blue lives matters' ammosexuals have started to target the FBI because the FBI dared to actually *enforce the law* on Donald Trump.

I've heard a lot of rumors about police departments being kind of cozy with the right wing nut jobs. Maybe this will remind law enforcement that these folks *are not your friends* and will kill you in a heartbeat if they could.

Because the laws are for other people - not them. They'll only love police if they're beating on people they don't like, you know, Muslims, Jews, Blacks, Gays.... THOSE people.

-m

Alex Jones' lawyer screwed up and gave the prosecution two years of phone messages which Alex claimed he didn't have.

Although most of the media has been showing the 'gotcha' moment when the prosecution revealed this... I'd like to see the video of when they but up one of the messages on the Big Screen and asked Mr. Jones to read it out loud.

So what else is in there Alex?

I'm going to need more popcorn.

-m

When the pandemic started there was a big push in my tech channels to get involved in Folding@Home - a distributed computing set up to run protein folding simulations. Life on earth depends on *how* proteins fold when activated and they added COVID-19 to the usual list of important projects (like finding a cure for cancer). You could download work units - have your computer work on them in the background - then upload them back up to the source. Supercomputers are nice but expensive and millions of gaming computers are sitting idle from 9-5. I downloaded and starting folding on my main system - pausing it when I needed to do other stuff my system. However, the next update had a glitch in it and it no longer functioned properly on my system.

Since I've retired my old main system I decided put it to work and check out the software again. After a few missteps on my end - my motherboard *really* needed a BIOS update - I was able to download and successful run Folding@Home.

Pro tip for all you Linux users: before downloading the software from the Folding@Home website, check your repositories first. Ubuntu has it in their repositories which is good because the Debian/Ubuntu software on the website is outdated.

Pro tip for everyone: if you're running with a stock cooler for your CPU - rip it out and install the biggest, baddest cooler you can fit in your case. Using the defaults Folding will run the CPU (and some GPUS) really really hard. I'm using an Arctic Freezer 12 and it's just barely doing the job. Although I have a 4 core 8 thread Xeon I backed it off to just run 4 threads.

I'm not running it 24/7 yet. I want to tweak things then move the system into the basement where it's cooler.

-m

... needs to be watered by the blood of school children, random blacks, trans people and now... people who come to watch 4th of July parades.

Because the tree of liberty is a thirsty vampire.

-m

My brother called me back and we talked. He's a good soul even if he is an NRA nut job.

I explained to him why I flew off the handle and he understood completely. He was rather shocked by my yelling and hanging up the phone at him... but he guessed that bringing up Fox News triggered me and wasn't terribly upset at my reaction.

Still... on some level he just doesn't get it. He's still in the 'both sides do it' phase of thinking. I know there are bad people on both sides but shit man... almost *nobody* on the liberal side of things is brandishing guns and threatening to kill people.

We're family and we've been through things. We're okay with each other and that makes me feel better.

-m