malada

Music: Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson
Lyrics: Neil Peart

There’s no bread let them eat cake
There’s no end to what they’ll take
Flaunt the fruits of noble birth
Wash the salt into the earth

But they’re marching to Bastille Day
La guillotine will claim her bloody prize
Free the dungeons of the innocent
The king will kneel, and let his kingdom rise

Bloodstained velvet, dirty lace
Naked fear on every face
See them bow their heads to die
As we would bow as they rode by

And we’re marching to Bastille Day
La guillotine will claim her bloody prize
Sing, o choirs of cacophony
The king has kneeled, to let his kingdom rise.

Lessons taught, but never learned
All around us anger burns
Guide the future by the past
Long ago the mold was cast

For they marched up to Bastille Day
La guillotine – claimed her bloody prize
Hear the echoes of the centuries
Power isn’t all that money buys

We've had a lot of heavy rain and wind lately and Thursday night a huge branch of a tree on our property line came done. No serious damage was done but the rest of the tree should be removed. I chatted with our neighbor whose land the tree sits on and I told her I'd help out with removing the trees.

The storms took down a lot of branches leading to both power and internet outages. We lost internet for about a day and a half, which put a real crimp on my working at home. I had to pack up the laptop and go into work. Work wants to open up with everybody in the building come August which depresses me. I'm hoping for some flexibility because over the past 18 months I've shown I can get the job done at home.

Besides, at home the coffee is better, the bathrooms are closer, I don't have to drive anywhere and if I want to take a nap in the middle of the day and work late, no one is going to mind.

I had a good chat with the chief engineer who's only been with us for maybe a year and half. It seems the previous engineer... and the one before him... *didn't keep track of changes*, updated *no* documentation, and generally didn't keep up with a lot of day to day maintenace. There's a lot of broken, outdated, unused equipment littering our racks that he's still piecing together. With his help we we were able to get the old video archive up and running again - both it and the computer connecting it to the system needed reboots. Windows Server 2008, yah? Although I'm sure we already had backups of a lot of the media, I wasn't sure if he had *all* our local content and it's always good to have back ups of your back ups.

-m

A few years ago I read about a possible tipping point for Florida: when the banks stop handing out 30 year mortgages. Banks are in it for the money and there's no money in houses or apartment buildings collapsing, flooding or filled with pythons. Those buildings may not *exist* 30 years down the road.

Talk about being underwater.

Hurricane season is fast approaching with a storm moving in as we speak. With Miami having flooded streets with every high tide there's not a lot of breathing room so to speak.

Although I understand those shoreline high rises are being snapped up by foreign investors looking to hide their money, there may still be an incentive to sell to the suckers while the cash is available. Still... Florida is a sand dune sitting on a sponge of limestone - they're going to run out of fresh water even before the tide laps up to their ankles.

As for the recent apartment building collapse... expect more.

-m

After I broke a cpu cooler fan during an upgrade to my main rig, I became increasingly aware of how attached I am to this computer.

For nearly eleven years this computer has seen me through thick and thin. It's been my main connection to The Cyber, Second Life, email and news. I have other rigs I've cobbled together, rescued, refurbished but this one is my daily driver. Seeing it on it's side, case open so it doesn't cook itself has been a little unnerving.

But... with little help from a file, a hacksaw, a knife and some two part epoxy, I've been able attach a fan to replace the one that's broken. The temps are within normal and my system is all buttoned up and back to normal.

In time, I know I will upgrade to a newer, faster system... but not now. It's running fine even for it's age. However, this incident does show me how emotionally connected I am to this old beast since it connects me to the wider world.

It's something to consider.

-m

Brief recap... Josh Dugger is fundy pedo who's just been nabbed for ... among other *new* things... owning child pornography. He's had a history of feeling up younger female family members in his youth. Eeeew.

From the news accounts I've been able to find (from the website Today for ... today) the feds found multiple password protected devices in his possession. That's no big deal - almost all my computers are password protected. You can tell that by the post-it notes with my password stuck on either the monitor or the case.

Hey, I own a lot of old computers. I can't remember all those passwords.

On his computer they found porno-sniffing software apparently written to detect the presence of porn on the machine. Josh's wife wanted to keep an eye on him I guess. Which suggests SHE DIDN'T TRUST HIM.

The FBI found a Linux partition on his computer. Now... it wasn't stated in the article that it was a *bootable* Linux partition but I'm guessing that it might be. This is dead easy to do since most Linux installs allow you to keep the Windows partition and operating system giving you a dual boot system. It's like two computers in one! Just don't try to run them at the same time.* Your grandmother could do this. Depending on the age of the computer, your internet speed and your install media - it would take all of 45 minutes to half an hour tops. That includes any upgrades although I'd allow another 15 minutes for the Nvidia drivers.

The problem with this is that when you turn on the PC it immediately shows a menu asking you which system you want to boot to.... a dead giveaway that you've been up to something.

On the *other hand* - if it was not a bootable Linux partition, Dugger could have been booting off a Linux boot USB or even a DVD - and just used the Linux partition to store his ill gotten goods. Again, all you need is a bootable Linux DVD or USB, create the partition and then run off the USB. When you're done - yank the USB and reboot the PC. It would boot normally into Windows so at first glance there's nothing amiss. The drive might appear smaller if you dug a little deeper but Windows can't really 'see' a Linux partition. Almost anyone could use that machine and have no idea what was on there.

Either way, I'm betting old Joshie boy would boot into Linux one way or the other - and download his smut from a TOR router - safe and invisible on his hidden partition.

Again, TOR routers merely allow you to surf (semi) anonymously. This is no big hacker feat. Download, install, surf anonymously. No hacking required. It's available in practically ever major Linux distro!

But the porn? Ah... he had to go looking for that. From the reports it was *cough* age specific.

So, no... Joshie boy is no L33t haXor... he's just a porn dog with a taste for puppies. Disgusting.

And he wants to be released to go back home to his wife and children. Yeah... no.

I hope they partition him from the rest of humanity.

-m

*that would be a Virtual Machine environment which is a whole different story

There were signs... but I ignored them.

My coffee seemed... weak, cooler than usual. My Mister Coffee is *mumble mumble* years old... perhaps it's getting close to retirement time.

Then today... I flipped the switch.. the light went on and I went to eat my breakfast. But on my return...

*dun dun duuuuuun*

NO COFFEE!

The water was still in it's tank - cold. I guess the heater failed.

DON'T PANIC!

There's my old percolator... no, takes too long and makes a whole pot... there's my porta drip... only I can't find it... then there's my French Press... no, takes too long....

WANT COFFEE NOW.

Boil water. Dump into coffee already in the coffee maker. AAAAAAHHHHHH drip coffee done manually.

I can probably manage with my French Press until I can run to the store and get a new machine.

-m

After backing up my main system, I took it outside, blew the dust out out then replaced the CPU and CPU fan/heatsink.

I removed the first gen i5 with 4 cores 4 threads to a Xeon with 4 cores 8 threads.
Then I upgraded to the latest Xubuntu.

Doing so I wiped the drive so I had a clean install... which wiped out my saved passwords. Ooops.

Took me a few minutes to find my Dreamwidth password and relog in.

The upgrade isn't really noticeable until you pile on the tabs and programs - then the experience is definitely smoother.

This also put off the need to upgrade my entire system for a little while longer.

-m

I'm often on youtube (guitar repair videos are soooo soothing) when the algorithm sends me down interesting rabbit holes.

The past few days it sent me to some videos of some rather extreme prepper types. It pays to be prepared, I'll admit (glances at her small hoard of pasta, juices and canned goods) but sometimes people go a little overboard.

The youtube channel was by a company that makes steel prefabricated underground bunkers - and they were showing off how bad their competitors were and some decommissioned commercial or military bunkers were up for sale.

Neither were handicap accessible I can tell you that.

The prefab bunkers they were looking at were fairly small - around 1500 square feet. You dig a big hole, drop the thing in then stock it. Cheap ones go for around a quarter million dollars so yeah, a rich person's game. The first thing that struck me was most of them were located 'off and gone' somewhere hours away from anything and anywhere.

Okay, isolation can be good... but in an emergency... can you get there? Or are you going to get stuck in traffic with everyone else running away?

Of course, this is one company's youtube so they like to slam their competitors... and with good reason. You drop a poorly designed and built hunk of metal into the ground and you get water leaks which leads to mold and mildew and other unhappy things. Your safe shelter will kill you... slowly.

Then there's the built in kitchen and electrical generators running on bottled propane. Ah... a sealed bunker with gas? That's a big old Nope. If there's a gas leak you're dead, if there's a gas leak and a spark you're explosively dead and open flames mean carbon dioxide and you're dead.

Ventilation intakes next to exhausts? Another big old Nope.

Your shelter has become your tomb. No amount of guns will save you.

I didn't see much about handling waste products... sewage treatment was glossed over. It won't help to have six months of food, water and large amounts of ammo if you don't have a good septic system. Having an underground shelter in places with tornadoes and other types of violent storms makes sense but if you need to drive for hours to get to your 'safe place' it doesn't.

They had water, they had food, they had guns... but I didn't see a single book.

The pandemic has shown me how we were prepared my household was for even a short term emergency. We had medical kits, flashlights and an outdoor grill to cook on - but not a lot of extra food. We're a little better now. The pandemic has also shown how interconnected we all are.

Survival *can't* be a 'rugged individual' type endeavor - societies have be built with redundancies, safe guards and back-up back-up systems.

This winter, Texas was caught with it's pants around it's legs because they failed to plan for the cold that would inevitably come. Wind turbines froze, gas lines froze, even nuclear plants had problems when their water cooling systems frozen Water pipes frozen and burst because they were located in uninsulated outside walls. Our hundred year old house has their water pipes in a pocket *inside* the house so they don't freeze. Building codes and practices are there *for a reason*. Yeah, it's 'harder' to build but you get building that last.

Even some of the preppers were caught flat footed when they had no power for their electric can openers and couldn't cook on their backyard fire pits that ran on piped natural gas. Ooops.

Planning for trouble on an individual level helps. Planning on societal levels helps *more*.

-m

With the country awash in guns... it's not surprising there's so many gun deaths.

Along with mass shootings.

And with every call to restrict the ownership and use of weapons of mass killing (you can't go hunting with an AR-15 and a hundred round drum) we get the *whining* of the 'legal gun owners' (aka entitled white men) about the 'Constitutional Rights' to wag their penis extenders around.

Well, I'm sick of it.

First of all... when guns are restricted, deaths from guns drop.

Second of all... the Second Amendment is *not* about a single person owning guns but the establishment of a *well regulated militia*. The founders had a definite fear of a national, standing army especially in peacetime. Their hack was to restrict the national army and rely on local militias that could be called up quickly.

Third of all... if you look at the blue print of the Constitution: The Federalist Papers - the use of local militias and the dangers of a standing army is spoken of in great length. The right of an individual to own firearms? I might have missed it but I didn't see *any* mention of that.

As for the NRA - I'm old enough to remember when the NRA was about gun training, gun history, gun safety and hunting safely. Me and my brother learned all about gun safety at the local police firing range. We got those cheap little medals from the NRA when we did well in target practice. That NRA is DEAD. It's all about selling, selling, selling guns and ammo - to white people.

Gods help you if you're black and armed.

-m

I think I should find a better way of announcing this: I got my second Pfizer shot Friday after dinner.

Oddly, my arm hurt a bit. It didn't with the first shot.

Saturday... Oh the body aches. It was worse than the first shot. Later in the evening I had a brief bout of the chills but that passed quickly. The body aches got worse so I couldn't fall asleep. I basically stayed up until they passed.

And this is just the vaccine. If this had been COVID I'd be in big trouble.

I'm still achy today - but yeah, I'd rather a day or two of discomfort than to be really, really sick.

So when when you go for your shot take a day or two off. Eat soup, drink ginger ale and relax as best you can.

Totally worth it.

-m