Dr. Seuss is #1 best seller in Hardback Fiction

 This from Saturday's Wall St Journal.  "Oh the Places you'll go"   I remember that Amazon was out to zap Dr. Seuss a while ago.  Looks like the good doctor is still hanging in there. 

Pluckery: My lawn against dandelions

 My majory objection to dandelions is they kill a lot of grass.  The dandelion throws out a tight circle of leaves, maybe 5 inches in diameter, thru which no blade of grass can live.  Dandelions are annuals, so when they die in the fall they leave ugly brown holes in the lawn.

   I used to deal with dandelions by just plucking them.  No herbicides, no agent orange, just bend over and pluck.  Kept my lawn green this way for years.

   Now the bee keepers and insect lovers are running TV ads claiming that dandelion blooms are the only source of food for honey bees early in the season.  They are making me feel guilty about plucking them.  So now I wait until the flower closes up and converts to the puffball seed spreading version.  Bees get their pollen and I get my green lawn. 

To mask or not to mask?

The country is facing a lot of serious problems, a surge of illegal immigrants on the southern border, corona virus, China, North Korea, pipeline shutdowns and gas lines, multi trillion dollar spending bills, and more.  So we are spending time, political capital, and TV airtime talking about masks. 

   All the masks really do is keep your sneeze or cough from spraying a cloud of tiny droplets into the air.  If you are infected with Corona virus, the sneeze of cough will spread it to others.  If you have been vaccinated you cannot spread it.  The vaccines are 99.9% effective according to numbers published on TV.  So wearing a mask after you have been vaccinated doesn’t do a thing.  However not everybody believes that and they feel better if everyone wears a mask.  So I wear a mask just to make a lot of people feel safer.   

   We really ought to stop yakking about masks and get on with the serious business.

So Hamas and Israel agreed to ceasefire

They certainly have had enough fireworks to last a long time.  Fox had a piece this morning showing just incredible damage in Gaza.  Streets piled head high with debris from bombed high rises.  I have little sympathy for Hamas.  Firing so much as a single .22 across an international border is an act of war.  Hamas fired a lot more than a .22 into Israel, it was lots of rockets.  The Israelis retaliated.  Despite all the destruction in Gaza I doubt that Hamas learned anything.  They are stuck on stupid. 

The TV is talkng about UFOs again.

 

I have seen a UFO.  It was at least 50 years ago.  I was driving north thru Franconia Notch NH. It popped into view thru the car windshield, zipped across the Notch and disappeared behind Mt. Lafayette.  It was perfectly round, about the size of the sun or the moon and shining white brightly.  It was only in view for a matter of seconds.

   Some years later I was on active duty in USAF.  I was on the flight line the night we scrambled the alert birds, nuclear armed alert birds, after a UFO that showed up on SAGE (Semi Automatic Ground Environment) radar.  We were pretty sure it was a UFO; it was going supersonic at fairly low altitude going right over Duluth.  Had it been a real solid object it would have generated a sonic boom right over town and the base switch board would have lit up with outraged calls from citizens.  We didn’t get a single call that night.  Our F106 fighters could do mach 2 which should have been enough to catch it.  The pilots didn’t catch sight of anything, either by eye or by radar. 

   Next day, checking up on things, we found that a new radar had been wired into SAGE the day before.  Checking found that some wires had been crossed, causing the data from the new radar to be 180 degrees off.  That was fixed, and we never saw another UFO on SAGE

Battery powered cars.

I am about to drive down to see my daughter in Maryland.  It’s 400 miles.  My gasoline powered 2005 Buick can make this trip on one full tank of gasoline. 

We have the lefty-greenies pushing battery powered cars for all.  I got some questions for the greenies

1. How far can I drive on one battery charge?  And how far on a three year old battery?
2. How long does it take to recharge the battery from flat?
3. How long does the battery last?  4 winters?  More?
4. How much does a replacement battery cost? Labor costs to replace?
5. If I want to buy a used battery car is there anyway to see how much battery life is left?

Quiet Diplomacy. AKA Doing Nothing

Biden is promising to do "quiet diplomacy" other wise known as doing nothing in the current Israel Hamas almost war.

Good luck to Israel

I hope they have plenty of those Iron Dome missiles.  I see Israel firing lots of them on TV .  It would be a shame if they ran out.  

Israel took out a building in Gaza that had an ABC news office.  ABC has bitched about this on TV.  Tough cookies.  Why does ABC have an office on Palestinian soil?  Plenty of places in Israel, which is safer.  The reporters can drive to Gaza to get stories, it isn't all that far. 

1619 Claims that the Revolution was fought...

To preserve slavery in America.  1619 says that King George was planning to free all the slaves in America.  This is malarkey.  The Revolution was fought over taxes.  The Boston Tea Party was about a British tax on tea.  "No taxation without representation".  Following the French and Indian Wars, the crown made several attempts to raise money in America thru taxation to pay off their war debts.  The Stamp act was one attempt.  There were others all totally unpopular in America. Attempts to negotiate with the crown were unsuccessful, leading to Lexington and Concord in 1775 and the Declaration of Independence in 1776.  There were black soldiers in the Continental Army.

Leaf day

 At last, the tree leaves are out in the Notch.  Spring is here! 

Taking care of business. Keeping the hackers out.

Colonial Pipeline has just shown us all how bad things can get for a company that doesn’t take care of its computer security.  Colonial has just admitted to paying the hacker[s] $5 mil to get their files back.  They didn’t say if they had recovered their files, the hackers may have just kept the $5 mil and split.

This is aimed at suits, those fairly clueless senior business people. 

   First off, your company has valuable information on its computers.  Information that will do you great harm if it falls into the hands of competitors.  Things like your payroll, your sales contacts, the plans, schematics, parts lists, and source code for your product[s].   If you don’t believe me, have a chat with the Colonial Pipeline people.  They will tell you.

   Know that Windows computers are totally insecure.  High school kids can break into them.  Windows is like Swiss cheese, hole of holes.  Connect a Windows computer to the public internet, and you have exposed every thing on that computer to every passing internet hacker.  You should not use Windows computers to monitor or control generators, pumps, pipelines, or anything that controls physical product.  Use Apple, use Linux, use a workstation, anything but Windows. 

   Important and confidential paperwork can be kept on Windows machines if and only if, that machine is not connected to the public internet.  Keep these machines in a locked room.  Snip off all their USB ports.  Windows computers will silently load and execute any code, malware, they find on flash drives inserted in the USB ports.  That is how we spread Stuxnet on the Iranian uranium enrichment centrifuges.  Back them up weekly to DVD disks.  Store the backup disks off site, in case of fire or flood in your office.  In 40 years in the business I never had a fire.  I did have a flood once, right in the computer room, made an awful mess. 

   Separate the stuff that makes the business run, the generators spin, the pipelines pump, the trucks get dispatched, the product to come off your production line, from your paper work.  If the hackers get to your paper work it should not shut down your business.  You ought to be able to operate with out your paper work for a few days.  Billing may be delayed a bit but you can survive that.

   Make sure every computer in the company needs a password to access.  Use strong passwords, some upper case, some lower case, some numbers, and some punctuation.  Change the passwords every 90 days.  Take care to close out the computer accounts of departing employees.  Do it on the day they leave.

Congress is coming down on the F35 program this year.

 Complaints from Congress are about large numbers of F-35s out of commission Awaiting Parts (AWP we used to call it).  One troublesome part is called the “F135 Power Module”.   I am not quire sure just what this part does, it sounds like it does something for the F35 engine driven generators.  Average time to repair an F135 power module was 207 days back in October last year.  Design goal for Mean Time to Repair was only 122 days.  Back when I was a flight line maintenance officer in USAF we could repair anything we took off the aircraft, in our on-base shops, inside of 1 or 2 days.  122 days or worse, 207 days, is ridiculous.  “We” (my people) was Avionics, radios, radars, IFF, TACAN, compass, anything electronic except gyros.  The engine shop (not my people) could overhaul an engine in 4 or 5 days.   F-35 program has 20 aircraft grounded for lack of engines. 

    They are changing out the maintenance support software from Autonomous Logistics Information System (ALIS) to a cloud based system Operational Data Integrated Network (ODIN).  Apparently both systems run on hardware on board the F35.  Dunno why they did this, you only do maintenance on the ground, the pilots don’t do maintenance while airborne.  Why add weigh by carrying stuff you don’t need to carry?  Needless to say, the changeover is slowing all sorts of things down. 

   Anyhow the US is committed to the F35 as our fighter for the future. 

 

Free up 2 Gig of disk space.

 

Piece of cake.  In Win 10 type “Disk Cleanup into the search box  on the task bar.  The heavy duty stuff only shows after you hit “Clean Up System Files”.   On my computer it took a while but it freed up a gig of disk. 

   For the next gig of disk I started Firefox and on the toolbar select “Options” Then select “Privacy and Security”.  Look at “Cookies and site data”  Firefox allows any website to store as much as it pleases on your hard drive.  I hit “Remove All” and freed up another gig of disk. 

Took it a while. One downside, this erases all the pass words to sites and you will have to type your password in to use the site.  I have all my passwords filed for me so this is not a problem.

  I don’t know why I bother.  My medium speed Dell Optiplex 990 has 1.75 TERA bytes of disk so a couple of Gig is nothing.  I suppose it has something to do with starting out programming many years ago on a DEC PDP-11 with a mighty 5 megabyte RK05 disk pack. 

Big Tech Censorship

Facebook and Twitter and probably a bunch more are censoring people that I want to hear from, Trump in particular.  Chris Wallace had a Facebook censor on Fox this afternoon.  Said censor was very firm that Facebook had every right to post who they felt like posting and censor who ever they pleased.  Kinda like a newspaper, you get to publish on the op-ed page only if the editor thinks you are good for circulation and not too offensive.  

  The best fix for this problem is to use the old Sherman Anti-Trust Act to break up the big sites.  They are clearly monopolies.  Once Facebook or Twitter is broken up into two or three piece, the pieces will have to compete with each other for advertisers and members.  One piece or the other piece will decide that giving guys like Trump access is good for business.  That’s the proper fix.  Unfortunately it won’t happen as long as Biden is president.  He and his like the solid leftwing spin that Facebook and Twitter are doing right now and will simply tell the anti-trust division at the Justice Department to lay off.  Keep things the way they are.  By now, Facebook and Twitter are so big and cover so much of the market that a new startup doesn’t have much chance of getting starting going up against them.  Trump might have the money to do a startup, he has talked about it, but that is a very long shot.

   The Facebook guy Wallace had on TV suggested that Congress might pass something like a fairness doctrine for Facebook and Twitter.  Same objection applies, Biden would veto it. 

   So until the voters vote in a solid Republican Congress and a Republican president, we are stuck with Facebook’s censorship. 

Mother's Day.

 On the top is a picture I took of Mother, Janet K. Starr, back in the winter of 56-57 at Cannon. She lived til 91. Her health kept up right to the very end when a stroke carried her off. She died back in 2010. She was a great Mom and I still miss her. She raised her three boys right, and she did a lot of raising of her six grandchildren. On bottom is the last good photo I have of her from 2009. 

Texas to East Coast pipeline shut down

 This just hit Fox TV news a few minutes ago.  It is being said that a cyber attack has caused the pipeline shutdown.  They are talking about horrible price spikes for gasoline.  As of this writing, no forecast of repair time.  Could be anything.

Some questions for the pipeline owner.  

1. Are you using Windows to control or monitor anything?

2.  Are you using the public internet or the public telephone system to control or monitor anything?  

A yes answer to either question means they are guilty of gross negligence and should be sued down to their socks.

Fox News sound is noisy

The TV was making a high pitched little chirp.  It got to the point I got up from my chair and walked around the house checking for leaky faucets dripping or a water leak somewhere.  Didn't find anything and careful listening made me decide the noise was indeed coming from the Fox sound track on TV.  Fox needs to move their studio to a quieter part of town to cut down on the emergency vehicle sirens and heavy crashing noises from the street and odd things like that chirp.  

Warren Buffet Breaks NASDAQ

 According to the Wall St Journal, the NASDAQ computer systems can only handle stock prices less than $429,496.7295 per share.  Warren Buffet's share price has climbed to $421,000, close to the limit.  With a little more good luck on Warren's part, NASDAQ will no longer be able to trade his stock.  The magic number of NASDAQ's limit is otherwise known as 2 raised to the 32nd power.  Which says the software guys chose to store stock prices as 4 byte integers back when they wrote NASDAQ's software.  Far as I am concerned a couple of hundred dollars a share is a perfectly reasonable share price.  All of my stocks are $50-100-200 a share.  So going with a 32 bit integer and a max share price of a little less than half a mil per share was, and still is, a perfectly reasonable design decision.  

The WSJ article goes on to say that NASDAQ is considering rewriting all their software to support Warren's fantastic share price.  That's Wall St weenies for you.  Me, I would tell Warren to do a stock split if he wants to continue trading on NASDAQ.

Biden on Taxes.

 

Watched Biden on TV the other day.  A lot of happy talk about taxes.  The Democrats want to pass some $4-5 TRILLION dollars of welfare spending and get away with calling it Corona virus relief.  Even the Democrats fear that just printing that much new money might crash the US currency.  Right now the US greenback is respected all over the world.  If you have greenbacks you can spend ‘em and buy stuff anywhere.  The US has never reneged on its debts.  The greenback is accepted worldwide because the Americans have plenty of stuff to sell, at reasonable prices.  But if we print too many new greenbacks, people might get the idea that since there are so many greenbacks floating around that each one is worth less.  Once that idea gets around people will stop accepting greenbacks and the US currency is crashed.  Nobody, not even Democrats, wants to risk that. So Biden was talking about this little tax hike here and that little tax hike there would be enough to raise $4-5 TRILLION.  Somehow I had trouble believing these stories.  I am thinking that raising $4-5 TRILLION of new tax revenue is going to crash the economy and raise my taxes a lot.  And I don’t make anything near the $400K tax hike floor that the Biden people keep talking about. 

Forbidding Office Political Talk caused half the employees to quit.

 Small startup Basecamp decided to curb political conversations at work.  It is not clear whether “conversations” were verbal, around the lunch table or postings on Basecamp social media.  Prior to the no political talk blowup,  Basecamp was trying to present a worker friendly workplace, shorter work weeks in the summer and paying everyone doing the same job the same money. 

   A couple of small companies, Redfin and Harmon Brothers LLC, came out supporting Black Lives Matter which has caused them some internal turbulence. 

   I don’t remember this sort of issue back when I was working.  I retired before Facebook or Twitter was invented. 

Sticking it to Rudi.

Rudi Giuliani is a distinguished American citizen.  Federal prosecutor for New York, Mayor of New York during 9-11, lawyer to the President of the United States.  I was offended to hear that the FBI had raided Giuliani’s home at 6 AM the other day.  Discourteous to say the least.  If the Feds needed information from Rudi, they should have made an appointment and asked him.  Rudi is a straight up guy; he would assist the Feds in anything legal they were trying to do.   The Feds told the papers that they had a warrant.  I wonder where they got it.  That secret FISA court that approves every request to snoop presented to it?  A real court, the kind that meets five days a week and tries cases? 

Kitchen Timer Design

Upgrading from an el cheapo $3 all plastic kitchen timer, I received, as a Christmas gift a ThermoWorks (Extra Big & Loud) kitchen timer.  Big feature of the ThermoWorks is good strong magnets that hold it to the refrigerator door.  And a good big LCD display.   Downside, it programs in seconds.  To set a ten minute time, you have to punch in One, Zero, Zero, and Zero.  It would be a lot easier to work if it programmed in minutes, so a ten minute time would punch in as One, Zero.  I never wanter to set a time in seconds in my kitchen. The other down check comes from “Loud”.  It is only loud on a good fresh battery.  With a battery strong enough to work the timer, the ring when time is up can be so faint as I cannot hear it.  I just gave it a fresh new 9 volt battery to bring the ring sound up loud enough to hear. 

Red Dawn 1984

 It's powerful.  Released while the Cold War was still on, it has Russians and Cubans invading the United States.  It was powerful enough to cause our Protestant minister preach an entire Sunday sermon against it. He felt it was too violent and too much of a war mongering flick.  Youngest son liked it.  Back in 1984 I watched it, not bad.  I rewatched it this afternoon and it brought tears to my eyes.   Powerful that flick is.  The last scene where scummy Russian colonel with a machine pistol takes  on Jedd with a ivory handled Colt six gun is cool.  Especially the last part where Jedd is carrying wounded brother Matty to safety and the Cuban officer gets the drop on them but waves them on.  I could understand every line of dialog and the camera man turned on the lights for every scene, no black on black like they do on Game of Thrones.  They don't make movies like that any more.  

Making corporations pay their fair share.

 Translation:  Tax companies more.  Biden was calling for this just tonight. We can do it, but it is gonna cost us.  The companies will have to raise their prices to pay the extra tax.  That hits all their customers.  So calling for tax hikes on companies just means that some of us, maybe all of us, have to pay the extra tax.  

Tonight I heard Biden claim that 55 companies were skating on their taxes, paying zip.  He didn't bother the name even one of these 55 companies, which makes me think those 55 companies are indeed paying taxes, despite what Biden says.  Be that as it may, if we had a company name we could check their tax returns.  If the company is really paying zip, it must be using a tax loophole.  So we close that tax loophole.  Simple enough to do, and the only good tax loophole is a dead tax loophole.  It should not take all that long to go over 55 company tax returns.  It will take longer to get the Congresscritters to vote to close the loopholes, but it could be done.  Apply enough heat and even Congresscritters will feel it.

Cooking Fish

 I bought a nice piece of North Atlantic Salmon, maybe 1 1/4 inch thick, a touch over half a pound.  I marinated it in lemon juice, perhaps 5 minutes a side.  Then a bit of olive oil on each side.  Heat the oven to 350, put the fish in a baking dish, and give it 8 minutes in the oven.  Then turn on the broiler and give it another 2 minutes a side.  Tasty.  

Problems at the Light Bulb Factory

 Out of a box of four new bulbs, three of them have failed after just a few days, say 7 to 14 days.  The third bulb died just this evening.  I am waiting for daylight so I can see what I am doing before I change it.  The four pack is marked "GE soft white" "100 w  2X Longer Life" "Uses 28% Less Energy" "uses only 72 w  1.8 year life" ""GE's Best soft white incandescent line"  and finally "Made in Hungary".

   Gotta find another light bulb supplier. 

Robocallers

 PITA.  They call me four or five times a day.  I stop what I am doing and answer the phone.  Sometimes no one is there.  Sometimes they pretend to be calling from Microsoft and try to talk me into loading a virus onto my computer.  Sometimes they claim outrageous charges are laid against my Amazon Plus card.  And lots of others scams. 

   We ought to clamp down on this PITA.

   We could start by requiring the phone companies to make caller ID spoof proof.  The telephone exchange has numbers, yours and the robocaller's.  It needs them to connect the call.  They can have the system present the correct caller’s number to caller ID, making it easier to refuse calls from strangers.

   We could press on by finding a clever lawyer to define the crime of robocalling in a way that does not collide with free speech.  And then writing a law declaring robocalling a crime and defining penalties for robocalling.  Personally I would be in favor of some cruel and unusual punishments, boiling in oil for instance.  Or burning at the stake. 

   If someone would make a clever electronic box that connected to your phone and when activated would constantly dial the robocaller's number and deliver a hard core diatribe when the number answered, I would buy one. 

 

 

How to make a decent movie. Some thing Hollywood has forgotten.

A movie needs a protagonist (protagonist, $2 word meaning hero or heroine).  Female or male protagonists work just fine.  The protagonist must be likeable; we viewers cannot get excited about a scumbag protagonist.  The protagonist needs to accomplish something and the movie needs to show him working on it, what ever it is.  We viewers need to know just what it is that the protagonist is trying to do.  Best literary example I can think of is Tolkien.  Right in chapter 2 Gandalf tells Frodo (and us) about the ring, its deadly power, the dark lord searching for it, and the need to destroy it.  From then on for the rest of the three book trilogy we know what is going on.  The protagonist has to do things; we cannot care much about a protagonist who merely serves as a punching bag thru out the movie. 

   Then the movie needs a background, Narnia, Middlearth, the Wild West, gangland Chicago, the Washington DC swamp, Sherwood Forest, the Western Front, Imperial Rome, and the Crusades, somewhere. The background needs to be convincing, with few noticeable anachronisms.  I an a history major and long time history buff and I am OK with some bending of the history to make a better movie.

    The movie should build to a climax, where the protagonist goes up against his opposing forces and/or the villain and either wins or looses.  Speaking as a viewer, I like protagonists that win, defeating their enemy. I can tolerate a protagonist who looses if I see him/her put forth truly heroic effort in the final battle. 

   Then the movie needs good actors who speak up clearly, and a good sound man, one who makes the entire dialog audible.  I am getting old, but I have no trouble hearing the TV newsies, and the entire dialog in my old favorites.  Somewhere around Charlie Wilson’s War the sound man lost it and much of the amusing dialog was inaudible.  That sound man has been messing up movies ever since.  One thing a sound man needs to know.   He must mute the score and the sound track when the actors are speaking.

   And a movie needs a good camera man.  One who puts the camera on a tripod and doesn’t wave it around in the air.  And one who turns the lights on before filming.  Black on black scenes are simply annoying to the audience.