Whither North Korea?

Medium duty dictator, Kim Jong Il, croaked last night. We have no idea what comes next. The South Koreans might have a clue, but we don't. Perhaps heir Kim Jong Un (28) has the stones to take over from his father and actually run the country. Perhaps the North Korean establishment will run things with Kim as a figurehead. Perhaps the North Korean regime will collapse under the pressure of starvation and famine.
The last possibility is the most worrisome. If the North collapses, the South Koreans will be under enormous pressure to do something. A lot of South Koreans still have kin in the North. They will demand relief efforts to keep their relatives from starving to death.
The Chinese have been very happy with North Korea. It gives them a friendly border state, who can tie the Americans in knots at the drop of a nuke. The idea of having a pushy capitalist South Korea, hand in glove with the Americans, on their border is anathema. So the Chinese are under pressure to intervene to save the communist regime in the north.
So now we have South Korean army units, trucks loaded with relief supplies and peace flags fluttering from bumper mounts, tooling around in the north, with Peoples Liberation Army units doing the same thing. The nasty possibilities should be obvious.
If things blow up, we will be under enormous pressure to back up the South Koreans. They are good people, lots of us have been to their country and come back impressed with their country, their industry, their people, and their army. We will see the issue as support of a loyal long time friend of America, against Communist aggression.
We don't really want to get into a scrap with the Chinese, with whom we do a lot of very profitable business, but we don't want to leave a long time friend in the lurch either.
With luck, this issue won't come to a head until we have replaced Obama with a real president.

Why we love Microsoft

Trusty antique laptop had been running Office for years. For some damn Microsoft reason Office suddenly decided to stop working and whine. It wants "activation" and threatened to die for good if not "activated" within the next few usages. So, I clicked on "activate by Internet. The program hummed and whirred and then choked up. "Cannot contact Microsoft Activation Server, check your internet connection." Lovely.
So I tried "activate by telephone". At least the phone answered, a robo answering machine. The robo responder wanted me to key in a 54 digit magic number displayed by the program. After a lengthy button pushing orgy, the robo server decided the number was no good and hung up on me.
So I did some internet searching. Apparently I'm not the only one whose Office got surly for Christmas. But no real fixes were posted anywhere. I was hoping for a registry patch. No such luck.
Finally I tried the "activate by telephone" trick again. This time it worked. I keyed in all 54 digits and the roboserver responded with a second 48 digit magic number, which I copied down and then input to Office. Must be that I messed up keying in the magic number to the telephone last time.
I love Microsoft.

Teebow?

All I know is
1. He plays professional football. (Nothing wrong with that)
2. He is apparently pretty good at it. (Commendable)
3. He has been observed praying on the field. (Commendable)

And for this he is getting more air time than a Presidential candidate.

Coffee makes the age of reason possible.

This one is cool.

Aviation Week doesn't know why the drone crashed

They said it wasn't shot down, 'cause the picture shows it all in one piece, no blast damage, no scorch marks or bullet holes. Makes sense.
The undercarriage is hidden in the photo the Iranians released which suggests "The lack of crash damage would indicate the standard UAV flight-termination procedure after an airborne mishap of going into a flat spin."
That's cool. A flat spin slows the drone down enough to recover it in one piece. Just what you need on a peacetime test range. It's nice to have a chance to fix what broke and fly it again. Not sure if that's what you want in wartime. I think it ought to do a power dive into the ground leaving a big hole. And a lot of scrap metal.
Aviation Week said the nobody was very concerned about compromising secrets. They claim the payload was a "full motion video sensor" aka ordinary TV camera. As far as the air frame and engine go, the experts claim there is nothing new there. Right.

California Cognac

Cognac, the brandy of Napoleon. Comes from just one district in France, and is so smooth you can sip it neat, from a special glass (a brandy snifter). Under French law, only brandy produced in the Cognac district can bear the Cognac label. Everyone else must label the product "brandy". And just plain "brandy" is so rough that us ordinary mortals must add ice and soda to make it drinkable.
Out in California the E&J (Easy Jesus my son calls 'em) has long distilled an ordinary brandy and sold it in cathedral shaped bottles. E&J was OK as a brandy, but you don't want to sip it neat. Now E&J has gotten better at it, and offered a brandy marked "V.S.O.P." the traditional mark of high class Cognac. The NH liquor store carries it, at 1/3rd the price of Hennessy.
It's not bad. It's smooth enough to sip it neat. If they can keep it up, E&J might have a real product here.

HR whines again

This was on Vermont Public Radio this morning. An aircraft maintenance company out in the mid west is complaining about the lack of qualified aircraft mechanics to hire. An lady HR rep from the company said on air "You cannot just hire high school graduates to do this work."
The hell you can't. That's all we did in USAF. We enlisted high school graduates, put 'em thru a few months of tech school, and then put 'em to work on the flight line as apprentices (3 levels in USAF jargon). They worked under the supervision of journeymen and masters. After taking some courses, getting lots of hands on experience, and passing some tests, they got promoted to journeymen (5-levels). Took about three years for the average guy. And with more experience, and training, and testing, the journeymen became masters.
That maintenance company could do the same.
Then they revealed that they only paid people $12 an hour to start. No wonder they have trouble filling vacancies.