Uniforms for Richard Sharpe TV dramas

 I have been watching my collection of the Richard Sharpe videos.  Sharpe, played by Sean Bean, is a British Army officer in the Napoleonic wars.  They have some cool shots of the redcoats, in uniform, in line or column, in action.  The red coats are really red, so red that I wonder if they could dye cloth that bright a red back in 1810 or so.  The redcoats and most of the other troops wear white pants which are nice and white and clean in most of the shots.  I gotta wonder if in real life white uniforms could stay looking that presentable after a bit of scrabbling around in the dirt.  But they look cool for the video.  And the officers get to wear gigantic hats.  I am not a real expert on period costumes so I don't know just how real the ones in the videos are, but they look cool.  

How Long Can America Keep Borrowing?

 Title of a Wall St Journal Op=Ed.  The answer is simple.  The US can keep borrowing as long as people are willing to buy T-bills.  Right now T-bills are selling briskly.  They are considered the soundest investment on the planet.  The US has an enviable record, gong back a couple of hundred years,  of never welshing on its debts.  In actual fact, we promise to repay a T-bill, with interest, after a fixed period of time, 5 years, 10 years, whatever, depends upon the specific T-bill.  We repay the T-bill owners with dollar bills, of which we can print as many as we need.  So as long as the financial community thinks US T-bills are a good investment they will keep buying them.  So long as we don't do anything really stupid to shake world wide confidence in US T-bills and US dollars, we can keep on borrowing. 

Wall St Journal discovers Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company

 TSMC we call them in the industry.  They have been around, and important for 20 years that I know of.  Biggest semiconductor fab in the world.  TSMC doesn't design chips, they accept designs from anybody with money and fabricate them.  They specialize in digital parts, 5 volt or 3.3 volt.  Should TSMC go out of production for some reason (Main land china invades Taiwan for example) there would be a semiconductor shortage world wide much worse than the shortages we are having now.  

Anyhow the Wall St Journal ran a story this week indicating vaguely how important TSMC is to the world economy.  First time the Journal has bothered to notice TSMC. 

Driving Home from Maryland

 When I got as far as Massachusetts all the electric road signs were encouraging all the citizens to get vaccinated.  Probably a better use for those signs than flashing simply "Drive Safely" messages.  I found the scenic route I took on the way down is 620 miles, the ordinary route (NJ Turnpike to Delaware Memorial bridge is 580 miles. Trip back took 12 hours, one hour of which was taken up by lunch in Brattleboro VT.  I got on Main St in Brattleboro looking for a restaurant. no luck. just two pizza and fried chicken places with no where to park.  Wound up at a snappy Japanese place on the way out of town.  I even remembered how to use chop sticks, something I have not done for 50 years.  That was yesterday.  Today I reregistered the car ($123.30, Arrgh) and picked up my cat from my sister in law.  Popped cat into the plastic cat carrier and let her cry until I got home, got the car unloaded, got her litter box cleaned and refilled, ad the doors closed.  I will keep her inside for a day to let her readjust that this place is home and not to wander too far.

More Improvements in Police Work

 We ought to go thru the law books and remove as many laws as we can.  For instance now that pot has been legalized in so many states, we should not be arresting people and putting them in jail just for simple possession of pot.  Waste of law enforcement time, waste of prison space,  and it makes the victim almost un employable.  In New York, Eric Garner died while the cops were arresting him for selling single cigarettes (loosies) on the street. That's a law that should never have been passed.  And it took a man's life. I am not a lawyer, so I don't know criminal law all that well, but I bet a lawyer could point out a bunch of other laws on the books that could be removed. 

Heavy Truck Traffic

 Drove down to Maryland to visit my daughter yesterday.  Trucks every where.  Big 18 wheelers pulling big 57 foot trailers.  It was like diving along side a freight train.  I figure a lot of 'em are delivering something, others are empties going out to pick up something.  Either way it looks like business is getting better.  

   I did not see many Detroit passenger vehicles. Lotta Toyota, lotta Honda, lotta Kia, not much from Detroit.  The pickup trucks mostly looked like company trucks or work vehicles.

Trip took me 12 hours, it usually only takes 11 hours.  I ran into a terrific thunderstorm near Philly, just poured down rain.  I had to ack off from my carefree 70 mph to like 40 mph cause the rain was so heavy that I had trouble seeing the road.  And I took the scenic route thru Pennsylvania instead of the faster but boring NJ turnpike route.  Tappan Zee bridge is gone.  It is now calling itself the Governor Mario Coumo bridge.  Ego trip much for New York's Granny Killer? It is the new bridge.  They have got the old bridge down and scrapped.  Not bad looking, pretty cable stayed design. 

Dr Seuss is STILL the best seller

 Wall St Journal,  listing for hard back fiction.  Oh The Places You will Go.  This is three weeks in a row for the good doctor as Number 1 best seller. 

Terro Ant Traps. They work good.

 Been having an ant problem at the house.  Hordes of them scuttling every where.  Upon prodding from Youngest Son, I bought a pack (four) of Terro Ant Traps and put them out.  They are working. I have hardly seen a single ant where I used to have hordes of them.  Dunno just how they work.  I don't see any dead ants in the traps, which are clear plastic with a clear liquid inside them.  Maybe they poison the ants so they scurry home and die in their nest?  Maybe they emit an smell that drives the ants away?  Beats me.  I am happy just to not see hordes of ants cruising my kitchen.

TV is still talking about UFO's

 Flying saucers or UFO's are not new.  They first made the newspapers back in 1947.  A private pilot flying a light plane out west somewhere, Oregon perhaps, reported seeing one (or maybe more, I don't remember) and the papers printed his story.  It caused a nation wide sensation, and sure enough a lot more were seen and reported in the following years.  I saw one about 60 years ago.  It was 50 years ago that Duluth scrambled fighters after one.  So they are not new, they have been flying around, doing their thing, what ever it is, for a long time.  

  The TV has shown some gunsite pictures of UFOs that are hard to explain.  I will leave it to others to attempt explanations. 

They ought to be able to keep the business running without computers

 The recent hacks of Colonial Pipeline and JBS meat packing shut down production after ransomware attackers encrypted all the files on the company's computers so that they could not be read or written.  I think that the pipeline should have been able to keep pumping and the meat continue to be cut and packed even though workers could not access computer files.  

  Company suits need to understand that computer security needs to be taken seriously and needs some money spent on it.  Both Colonial and JBS have lost barrels of money by shutting down.  I say the basic operations of any company should be able to keep running while the company computers are knocked off line.  Management should investigate and see why this cannot be.  I will bet that a lot of the stuff done by computer could be done by hand or with pencil and paper and training the crew to do so is not all that hard to do.

In the case where computers are essential to some process (CAD/CAM for instance) they need to designate the computer as "critical" which means take extra care to keep it backed up, keep it off the public internet and keep it in a locked room.  Have IT hand deliver Micro$oft patches on a DVD rather than allow the computer to download them over the internet. 

Greenies want to burn more fuel.

 

The greenies are pushing to remove natural gas from buildings and homes.  They think the all electric home produces less carbon dioxide emissions.  This story was front page on yesterday’s Wall St Journal.  This idea is a looser in the real world.

   The electricity has to be generated by real power plants.  Fake power plants (wind and solar) cannot be depended upon to produce electricity when needed, leading to blackouts like they had in Texas last winter.  Real power plants burn something (natural gas, coal, wood chips, anything) to make steam to drive steam turbines which drive the generators.  Due to unbreakable laws of thermodynamics, only 40% of the heat energy gets turned into electricity.  The other 60% is carried off by the plant’s cooling system.  And the same 60% loss occurs in gas turbine plants. 

   Whereas a gas stove or water heater puts almost 100% of the heat energy into heating pots on the stove or water in the water heater.  Natural gas burning appliances will save 60% of fuel compared to electric appliances.  And gas stoves are better than electric stoves, they will boil water faster and when you turn down the heat, it goes down right now.  Turn down the heat on an electric stove and it takes a while before the pot cools off, leading to burned food or boil overs. 

Dr Seuss is still #1 Best seller

 Second week in a row.  Best seller in hard back fiction.  Take that Amazon. 

Improvements in police work

In the face of a storm of criticism of law enforcement, I beg to differ.  Cops as a rule are conscientious public servants, polite, brave, skilled, good people.  There are however a few things we could do to make things better.

1.  Forbid no-knock raids.  Bust down someone's door at 0'dark thirty, and they will shoot to kill, every time.  Most of the time the cops shoot the victim, occasionally the victim manages to shoot a cop and gets himself put on trial for murder.  The original excuse for no-knock raids was to prevent drug dealers from flushing the drugs down the toilet to prevent them from being used as evidence against them.  That is not a strong enough reason to justify starting a gun fight where someone gets killed just about every time.

2.  Look for more non-lethal weapons.  Tazers seem to have worked out.  Tear gas works.  Flash bang grenades are used.  There are probably other things out there.  We ought to find them and make them available to cops on the street.  It's worth spending money on equipment that saves lives. 

3.  Repeal as many non essential laws as we can.  Eric Garner was killed during his arrest for selling single cigarettes on the street.  Far as I am concerned American citizens have a right to sell anything they like.  Garner died because the police were enforcing a law that should not have been on the books. There has got to be more laws like that which we could repeal.

Prevagen

 I have been seeing the ads for this stuff on TV.  They claim it improves your memory.  That sounded interesting, I am getting older and my memory is getting worse. So, first couple of times I got to the medicine section of Walmart I could not remember the name of the stuff.  I did remember it was made from jellyfish, but that didn't help find it on the shelf.  Anyhow I did remember the Prevagen name when I got to Walmart just the other day and found it on the shelf.  $60 for a bottle of 30 pills.  $2 a pill!  That's a ripoff.  So I didn't buy.  After I got home, I googled on Prevagen and up popped a lot of really negative comments and reviews.  FTC and FDA and AARP and others are against the stuff.  So much for magic memory cures.

Where do UFO's come from??

 Good question.  Asking this question only make sense if you think UFO's are space ships with live crews on board.  If you think they might be mirages of some kind, then they don't have to come from anywhere.  Other than Earth, nowhere in our solar system looks like it can support much life.  Mercury is airless, waterless, and very very hot.  Venus is not much cooler, the surface of Venus is hot enough to melt lead. Mars is nearly airless and cold.  Jupiter is a gas giant with no solid surface anywhere near the top of the atmosphere.  Jupiter's satellites are unpromising for life.  Ditto for Uranus and Neptune.  Uranus satellite Titan might support some weird kind of life that lives at temperatures far below water ice.  Pluto is frozen solid, colder than frozen. 

   Perhaps they come from another star system.  The physics we know now limits everything to traveling at light speed or less.   There might be an advanced physics that permits faster than light travel but we have not found it  yet.  The closest star is Alpha Centauri, four and a skosh light years away.  The others are all much further.  Gotta wonder about what sort of culture sets out on four year or more (each way) trips all that often.  

   Suppose they have faster than light?  I would expect an alien ship boosting up to light speed or braking down from light speed to show a very bright glare from her engines.  Something easily seen from earth.  Some years ago we launched a Saturn 5 after dark.  The glare from it's engines, just kerosene and LOX, lit up the entire east coast of the US.  I have no idea how faster than light engines might work, but I expect they would use more power than simple chemical engines. And there is always some waste energy that comes out as light.  Which is why I expect an alien faster than light drive to be super obvious in operation.

We should not allow Amazon to buy up MGM

 Amazon is too damn big already.  Now they want to buy up MGM for $9 billion.  Anti trust should forbid it.  MGM is plenty big enough to operate on it's own.  If they could get back to making good movies, they will do just fine.  Amazon has gained control of the on line market place.  You want to buy anything on line, you are probably buying it from Amazon.  We don't need Amazon to get any bigger.

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.