"Technology" in place of a real wall

We tried that once.  I was in Thailand back during the war.  We tried to close the Ho Chi Minh trail.  It was a real foot path, running from North Viet Nam, down thru Laos, to South Viet Nam.  The Viet Cong got all their supplies back packed down the trail.  It took a lotta comrades with back packs to equal what we brought to our troops using a single Army truck.   The trail ran under triple canopy jungle all the way.  You could not see it from the air.  The jungle canopy was so thick that when we dropped 1000 pound bombs we could not see the leaves even ripple when they exploded on the ground. 
   So, we dropped sensors up and down the trail where we thought it ran.  We brought in a squadron of big four engine C121 Super Constellation  recon aircraft to fly up and down the trail reading all the sensors, which were mostly microphones.  The plan was to have the Connies call in air strikes when ever they detected anything on the trail.  All they ever picked up was some monkeys, screaming at each other, and some water buffalo crashing thru the underbrush.  Never detected any comrades for us to bomb. 
   Now I am hearing Democrats on TV saying that "technology" is better to secure the southern border than a plain old wall.  Every time I hear that it reminds me of closing the Ho Chi Minh trail with "technology". 

Beat the Press goes up against the Shutdown

Host Chuck Todd spent much of his hour ait time wailing about the government shutdown.  Strange.  They have been shut down for two weeks and I haven't missed them at all.  My mail is getting delivered.  I don't expect a refund check from the IRS, so they can stay shut down forever far as I am concerned.  I don't fly much so I don't care about the TSA. 
   Far as I can see, things are working with some 800,000 civil servants off the job.  Maybe we could keep on that way and save some taxpayer money.  These people get paid far better than they would in the private sector, far better than most of my constituents in Coos county, they have first class medical benefits, first class pensions, and they are all democrats.  My sympathy for them is limited.  If they run out of money they can go out and get a real job in the private economy. 
   And, if the Congress had done their duty earlier this year, and passed the federal funding bills like they are supposed to, the government would be open right now. 

The Last Kingdom 2015

It is a TV series for 2015.  I netflixed the first disk.  It is a historical drama, Vikings vs Saxons in 900 AD England.  I watched episode 1.  I don't think I will bother with the rest of them.
   They hired the worthless cameraman from Game of Thrones, the one who turns the lights out on set before filming.  Some black on black scenes, and all the scenes so poorly lit I could not tell one character from another.  Plus everyone dressed alike,  identical outfits of furs and grey homespun.  We see the protagonist start off as a 12 year old Saxon heir to an important Saxon noble family.  He gets captured by and raised by the Vikings.  We see him as a 12 year old, and suddenly a time jump and he is a young man.  Uhtred serves more as a target for abuse, both from his Saxon family and his Viking adoptive family than a real protagonist.  If Uhtred has a mission to accomplish, or a quest to go on, you couldn't prove it by me.   His relationship with a girlfriend is pretty tentative, we never hear the girlfriend's name.   

Beware *.mov files

A new piece of malware places files with names like AB1234.mov on your hard drive.  They are badness, and clicking on them, to see what is in them, crashes my XP computer.  A quick search with Explorer found 11 of them.  I zapped them all.

Aquaman 2018

Saw it down in Lincoln last night.  It's long.  2 & 1/4 hours.  It doesn't move very fast.  Lots of really pretty CGI work creating Atlantis under water.  Lots of combat, chases, smashing and crashing.  Much of the movie is underwater down in Atlantis.  The underwater bit is convincing, the actor's hair waves gently in water currents, they float in the water, feet not touching the floor.  Lots of battle scenes, actors riding huge unlikely sea beasts.  When the sea beasts take enough hits from energy weapons they burst into flames, under water, which is a little confusing.  There is a plot,  Aquaman must retrieve a lost magical trident.  We only learn this halfway thru the movie.  Aquaman's girlfriend Mera has really outstanding bright red hair.  Brighter and redder than anything I ever saw on stage or in real life.  I kept wondering how they did that.  Was it a superior hair dresser?  A wig?  Digital retouching  with a professional movie maker's version of Photoshop?  It was striking no matter how they did it.  Nicole Kidman played Aquaman's mother, starting by falling in love with Somebody-or-Other Curry, a Maine light house keeper.  She is as cute as Mera.  Nobody addresses anyone by name in the movie, I had to go to IMDB to find the stage names. 
   The camera man did turn the lights on, and all the scenes were watchable, no black on black mystery scenes.  Sound man was adequate but not great.  The guy who did Spiderman was better, but I caught most of the dialog.
    Lots of hand to hand combat, fighters tossed each other tremendous distances, landing with a hard crash that ought to have killed an elephant, but everybody bounces right up and goes for another fall.  Atlantians (except Aquaman) wore armor and carried energy weapons.  Aquaman was into tridents and the bare chest look. 

Beat The Press does global warming today

Host Scott Todd started off the Sunday show by saying, "We are not goi9ng to discuss the science (that is settled) or give deniers a voice"  Translation "Ye shall believe in Global Warming and why are you not sacrificing to it?"  Well, I believe in thermometer readings.  Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS for short)  maintains a database of every temperature reading going right back to the invention of the thermometer.  I downloaded the whole schmeer.  It was old fashioned, data in fixed length 80 byte records, no separators, clearly a file going back to punch card times.  I wrote a simple data swabber in C to convert the old GISS data into comma separated variable format acceptable to Excel.  Plotted in Excel, the data shows that global warming leveled off 19 years ago.  Not a peep since 1999.  So, no I don't believe in global warming since it doesn't show up to thermometers.  I am an engineer, I believe in instrument readings. 
   The show went on.  They gave Governor Moonbeam a lot of air time. He spent it ranting against Republicans who fail to sacrifice to global warming.  The gist of the show, we need a good stiff "Carbon tax" to curb the burning of fuels.  And politicians who fail to vote to tax their constituents to support the holy cause are sinners.

HIding "Libraries" in Win 10

Micro$oft decided to clutter up Explorer with the concept of "Libraries".  They musta had a lot of software weenies hanging with nothing to do.  A library shows up in Explorer and looks pretty much like a file folder.  Win 10 comes with four built in libraries, Documents, Videos, Pictures and one other.  Although a "Library" looks like a file folder, it is not really a file folder, it's a collection of shortcuts.   If there is any use for "libraries" I have yet to discover it. 
I was able to clean up my explorer display by going to "View" and then "Navigation Pane" (far left and lower down)  Uncheck "Libraries" and bingo, most, maybe all of the duplicate file entries go away.  Making it much easier to find files.  Since Micro$oft assigns ALL your files to one of the four "libraries" it blesses you with, then ALL your files show up TWICE in Explorer, a PITA.

Now, if I could find a way to make Explorer search the ENTIRE hard drive, I might really have something.