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April 10, 2024 – When Experts Are Not Experts

April 10, 2024 /

As preparation for being sick, my wife wanted a new bed. She wanted one of those adjustable beds so that she could sit up and watch TV. We went shopping and tried out a number of them and settled on one. The goal was to get it delivered and setup before chemotherapy started.

I have a lot to say about these things after seeing them and using them for a couple nights now. I haven’t fully decided yet whether to cover the whole ins and outs of the adjustable bed. Maybe I will split the difference and talk about some of them.

First of all, they are expensive. I would say 5-10 times what a normal mattress would cost. If you are single, then any size bed could/would work. Queen size beds are single function, meaning the bed actuates as one unit. If you each want separate settings, you are going to have to get a king sized bed.

I am a morning person and not a big TV watcher. I do read in bed a lot of nights and go to sleep when I finish my chapter while my wife continues to watch TV. Consequently, we moved from a queen to a king. That meant that we had to also purchase another bed. Well, anything we could get quickly, was inexpensive and required self assembly.

This bed frame was flimsy. Each rail came in two pieces and the whole thing is engineered as a system. After the main assembly, I decided to put the slats in just for lateral stability. Fortunately, the adjustable beds have their own frames and sit inside of a traditional bed. But it also means that the box spring does not provide any rigidity. Of course, when the deliverers/installers came they said that the slats would not work. I questioned them and they reiterated that it would not work. They sat in the truck while I removed the slats.

I gave them their space. When they were done, we wanted to check out the new bed of course. I started looking at the situation and there was plenty of room to put the slats in. So, I put them back in.

I suspected that there was enough room and that they just did not want them in their way. That being said, their approach was not honest. And this is the point, a lot of people would have struggled to assemble the bed in the first place. After the fact they wouldn’t have checked to see if what was told was the truth. In this case, no big deal other than the sense of trust being slightly violated.

In the bigger picture, I think about places like oil changes and unsuspecting rubes getting told, ‘you need this’. While that is probably the lesser of two evils like changing fluids before they are due. What is probably worse is not doing something that is needed just because the ‘expert’ doesn’t want to do it.

Not every time I want to spend the energy to check and, I am not an expert in everything. The best advice I would give is go with your gut. Sometimes, you get a diagnosis that doesn’t make sense and it is not true and sometimes it is. This is why the colloquial advice is get a second opinion. Of course, I am not going to get a second opinion on setting up an adjustable bed nor am I going to drive my car to another oil change spot. But, if it doesn’t seem right or feel right, it probably is worth investigating.

End Your Programming Routine: Given that I have only slept on the bed a few nights at this point, I am going to reserve judgement. We also had to re-adjust the height and take the bed completely apart after the setup was complete because we determined the initial height was too high. Even if you don’t know the truth, use your senses and make your own assessment.

April 9, 2024 – Archiving, The Old Fashioned Way

April 9, 2024 /

What happens when your cloud drive starts to fill up? I am not there yet, I have probably only used a quarter of it. But what I didn’t know was that the cloud function synchronizes everything to my hard drive and I don’t have a free terabyte to do so. So, I am going to start archiving some stuff off of the cloud.

Many years ago, I was in charge of the physical act of backing up when I worked at the lab. I would burn data to DVD on a month by month basis. This is an option for things that don’t need immediate recall. I tried my DVD burner and while it could read disks, the write portion failed.

I thought about my options. I moved my mechanical hard-drive from my laptop to my desktop computer. This is a decent option because a mechanical drive failure can be re-built from the One Drive synchronization. Then, I resynched everything to that location. That at least gave me breathing room.

At some point, that is going to run out of room as well. So, I thought about media again. Each podcast I make runs between 1-2 GB with the raw files and these are things that I really don’t access other than to look for episode numbers or certain content. I decided to order another DVD burner. I was just about to start archiving things and then a thought occurred to me, what about Blue Ray?

It turns out that DVD only holds 4.7 GB of data making this project take forever (over 20 disks). The newest quadruple layer Blue Ray burners can do up to 100GB per disk. That is for me, I ordered one of those. I am waiting for it to arrive and then I will start archiving certain items particularly all of the AltF4.co content.

Do I think that there is any perfect solution? Ideally, I would have a backup array of hard-drives that had infinite storage and access at my finger tips. The downside of disks is that they can degrade and technology moves on. I think about the stuff I have on 3.5″ floppy drives that I have never accessed since I moved to a computer without a floppy drive. The good news is I still have a floppy drive in an old computer if I really wanted the files and you can buy a USB floppy drive for $30.

It is definitely a new world. My laptop does not have an optical drive or even an expansion slot. Policies on business owned computers prevent any sort of plugin devices, everything is moved electronically via the network. Disk images have to be ‘mounted’ in a faux drive fashion to emulate physical media. In many ways, a physical device is simpler and easier. I don’t like all that run around to get around having the device.

Other options would be an external hard-drive but those are not infallible either. I might eventually do both, but for now I just want to make sure that I do not have a problem. I am going with BD-R at 25GB per disk.

End Your Programming Routine: In the old, old days the professional way to go was tape back-up. That still may be used, I don’t know. We had Zip and then Jazz drives, then CD, DVD and now Blue Ray. It is not likely that I will really ever need these files again, but I hate to just delete them if I can get them into a easily storable and compact fashion. It is my life’s work after all.

April 8, 2024 – Gotta Get Better

April 8, 2024 /

This is no toolbox fallacy, podcasting is what I am really up to. Unfortunately, it takes me too long to put one together. I enjoy the process and am happy to do it but for the time. I need to practice having less notes and still talking, making sense and not having too many fillers or pregnant pauses, especially in this difficult time. Bear with me as I practice with a story about how time is taken during this process.

April 5, 2024 – The Divine Comedy, Purgatory, Canto X – XII

April 5, 2024 /

Finally, we are into Purgatory proper. Honestly, it wasn’t exactly as I thought it would be. I guess knowing nothing, I probably should have had no expectations. But, it seemed like a kinder and gentler hell. Maybe that was just my prospective. I was expecting a holding area until you served your time; kind of like jail.

If I understand Purgatory correctly, it is a place to atone for your sins before advancing. This is the first cornice and it is pride. On this cornice, souls will be penalized equal to their sin. As an example, the soul was proud for 40 years, therefore there is 40 years of cornice one. I presume that someone does not have just one sin and therefore once the soul advances, he will continue with the punishment regime for that amount of time until all sin is expunged.

Interestingly enough, when Dante entered purgatory, his forehead was marked with seven ‘P’s. This apparently weighed him down to the point where he could not proceed. Once Pride is atoned, one ‘P’ is removed and so is the weight for him to advance. The punishment for pride is carrying a giant bolder around. It was said that the souls were ground to dust by the weight of what they were carrying. It is as if the lesson of pride is the weight of the attitude will crush them.

One other key distinction between Purgatory proper and all of the previous levels is that temptation is no longer an issue. It seems that if you make it through the gates, you are guaranteed to move forward after you served your time. I don’t recall that being a subject earlier, but it was mentioned here.

Another feature of each cornice is a relief on entry and on leaving. In both of those cases, they are featuring characters through history and mythology that show the cause and effect of pride. I suppose it is a reminder of why you are here and the price paid for worldly behavior, specifically sin.

I have to admit, when it comes to a lot of names, I kind of zone out. First of all, I know next to nothing about mythology. I am uninterested in local, recent history as well. As a result, I have a very difficult time with who is who and what the backstory is on all of the relief figures or even conversations.

I think that I have evolved into a bigger picture person. When I was young, I was all about details. That saying ‘see the forest from the trees’ comes to mind. The world needs both types of people. But for me, it causes me to try and get to the point of things. I suspect that I was always this way but didn’t know how to analyze or distill all the data into something actionable. Therefore, when presented lists of names, I kind of glaze over or even skim. There needs to be a point of reference for perspective otherwise it is just a factoid that has little future bearing.

End Your Programming Routine: Next week is onto the second cornice for Envy. That would be Cantos XIII – XV. It is also worthy of noting that the climbing gets easier for Dante and Virgil. So far, there has been a lot of surprises in Purgatory. I guess that is what it means to be naïve.

April 4, 2024 – Never Have I Ever…

April 4, 2024 /

Listen very carefully at the beginning of this video and you will hear the tail end of someone shooting 15 successive shots. As far as I know, no person was found nor was any evidence. The 911 call revealed that several people had also called this in. However, like all recounts of evidence, the story was all over the place.

I happened to be outside when it happened. This is the reason the camera was on in the first place. I was putting some chairs back away in preparation for the weather to change and then all of a sudden, there were 15 rapid shots that sounded like it came from somewhere very close. My first thought was fireworks and I was looking in the sky. But, when no lights followed, my mind was trying to figure out what happened.

It is context. If I was at the rifle range, I wouldn’t have given a second thought about it. I have never heard fifteen successive shots at my home. In the country, you occasionally hear one shot or maybe some erratically spaced groups when some predator or pest shows it’s face at the wrong time.

Before I get completely speculative, no information is really known. Was it someone who just went into their backyard and fired a magazine? This would explain why there was no evidence. I talked to both neighbors next to me and we all thought the shots came from the same general direction.

You, the reader may not realize this but there are some other firsts here too. This is the first time I have ever downloaded a video clip from Ring. This is also the first time I have embedded video directly into WordPress. I think that function may be new because I have always put it to YouTube previously. So, this post was a little more than just ‘hey, I just realized I live in a war zone’.

I am not going to deny that I believe the social and moral fabric is eroding quickly in this town. That being said, I can remember thirty years ago my wife saying ‘that is where the coke dealers live’. I think what has changed is the level of violence and the quickness of escalation. There is more gang activity than ever, there is more police involved shootings and the frequency is getting shorter. Over half of the high school students come from families qualifying for reduced lunch, there is bound to be trouble.

In many ways, I feel like my home location’s greatest weakness is also it’s greatest strength. Because I live on a state highway, there is constant traffic and no legal parking. That keeps trick or treaters away but it also keeps people from stopping or loitering. The side street has seen it’s share of people up to no good, but vigilant neighbors keep an eye on things. It should be mostly empty due to a church taking the majority of the block across the street from me. Anyone stopping is immediately suspicious.

This morning I woke up to the garage door being open all night. Apparently, my son left it open after I locked up for the evening. It really makes me mad because I really try to perform good operational security. But that is only as good as the people in the system. Fortunately, we have never had any sort of theft other than a birdbath in our first year of living here.

End Your Programming Routine: So yes, I am in shock that I heard an entire magazine fired off very close to me. Yes, I do believe that this city is experiencing urban decay and increased violence. But, to put it into perspective it is a fact of life wherever people live, I am not one of those people that believe nothing ever happens, it is just a matter of whether I know about it or not.

April 3, 2024 – Always Say Yes

April 3, 2024 /

We had a wonderful weekend a couple of weeks ago. Since spring is here, so does the yard work. Since I pay someone to do most of it, when it comes to extras they check if we are OK with spending more money. They came with two propositions. One is to treat the grass and the other is to treat the pavers.

I am not big on chemical usage. I don’t care so much about weeds in the lawn but I really don’t want moss in it because it will eventually take over and kill the grass. I said yes to that. But, my wife and I differ about moss on the driveway. On one hand, it does cause degradation of the block setting, but I don’t feel like it hurts much. So, I said that I will do that.

This is probably only the second time I have used the sprayer in the picture. I remember getting it from my grandparents when we got into our first house in the late 1990s. I didn’t know if it worked even since it has been sitting for so long. Once I figured that out, I also learned that there was a lot of pumping involved.

This particular model has a port for a hose. The act of filling up the water pressurizes the vessel. Very nice until all the air leaks out. That happens when some of the powder (moss killer) gets into the threads or the rubber seals are dried out because they have never been lubricated. By the time I really figured all of those problems out, I was on the last tank.

The whole process took me about two and a half hours. My out of shape body was wondering if this was really worth the effort. But, it was one of the very first 70 degree days in spring and it felt really good to be outside with pleasant weather. As the moss killer works, I also notice that there is some grass also springing up . That actually requires a different treatment. So, now I have to go with a second application. I am less enamored with spraying something like Round-up than a zinc based moss killer.

If I look at this analytically, I saved myself $170. That is $180 for the job minus $10 for the moss killer. Given the time I spent, the pencils out to $68/hour. I am sure that I would not pay someone that rate to do this job. But, if I have to do it twice that is going to take it down to half of that and now I am getting into the rate that I would pay for.

I am not going to say that I didn’t learn some things, like how to use my sprayer. But, you always have to do the calculus of would that time be better spent doing something else. In my case, I am very close to that line. I am not too proud to do the job, I just have limited time to do things and I am not sure this is how I want to do use it. I also know that there was a significant amount of inefficiency in my doing the job and messing with pumping and the sprayer.

My grandfather was a farmer and my dad wishes he was one. Spraying has been in my whole life. Being a chemist and a believer in whole, natural foods and environment I think chemicals has a very limited place. One place is to not destroy property and infrastructure like my driveway. If you look very carefully at the picture, you can see some patches that are loose. I have tried to repair them several times. I don’t want that to get worse.

End Your Programming Routine: So, for now I will see how it goes. I feel like I should have paid the money. The last time I did this, I had a quote to prune the apple tree for $200. I did it and it took me 16 hours, plus I had to deal with all of the clippings. It is not like I have a burn pile. So you would think that I learned, it is just hard to spend the extra money.

April 2, 2024 – A Moveable Feast

April 2, 2024 /

A Moveable Feast by Earnest Hemmingway is the March Left Coast Culinary Book Club selection. By an unfortunate series of events, I had to cancel the actual moveable feast as my wife was having a procedure done in preparation for Chemotherapy. The plan was to go crabbing and then have a seafood boil afterwards.

I was introduced to the seafood boil in South Carolina, named the ‘low country boil’. It is sausage, corn on the cob, small boiling potatoes and some kind of regional seafood. We were planning on catching a couple local Dungeness crabs and feasting out. I have come to learn that there are many different versions using crawdads or lobsters or soft shelled crabs depending on what is available regionally.

A Moveable Feast was published posthumously and featured Hemingway’s years in Paris and some of France. It is really a series of writings that he made while he was there and tucked away in his belongings to be discovered after he died. As a result, it is kind of a incongruous set of chapters with different interactions of the period.

Hemingway served in World War I and kind of fell in love with Europe. He spent roughly 1921-1927 living in Paris as a result. While he was there, he tended to rub shoulders with all of the expatriates that were also there. The chapters were some of those interactions with people like Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and F. Scott Fitzgerald. By proximity and scene, he also befriended people like Pablo Picasso as well.

Hemingway was an interesting dichotomy. On one hand, he was an artist. He had passion, partied hard and loved hard. On the other hand, he was a man’s man interested in hunting and fishing and bull fighting. Clearly, he was worldly choosing Paris and Cuba for a lot of his life, but ending it in Idaho (literally).

I wouldn’t call myself a Hemingway fan per se but I definitely prefer him to many and most of the contemporary classic writers. I think about The Old Man and the Sea or The Sun Also Rises and remember not hating it like some of the others we read. But, I have to say that this book felt like a money grab. There was no real story, just anecdotes of his run ins with cronies. And not really interesting at that.

I believe that it is called Moveable Feast because nearly all of the chapters center around Ernest at a cafe and talking about writing or talking with other artists. They seemed to have a bit here, then move somewhere else all kind of dreaming and scheming about the work.

This isn’t a culinary book but there is plenty of food and drink in it. Beer, wine, cocktails and coffee flow freely as well. I proposed that if the book offended the senses of the hard-core cookbook readers of the group, they could also check out the PBS series of the same name. That I could get behind. I love Americana and people passionate about what they do.

End Your Programming Routine: My recommendation on this one is skip. If you are extremely interested in the life of Hemingway, then maybe this is your cup of tea. I simply did not find enough value in the book to recommend. I still want to have the seafood boil, but that will likely have to wait until after all of this cancer stuff. For now, I can keep on reading while I play the support role.

April 1, 2024 – Don’t Be a Fool

April 1, 2024 /

I am trying to bridge the past and the current today using my way too extensive experience with pharmacies. It is a total mess and their financial books show it. My main point is there is always more to the story than what the story says. I guess I don’t have too much in the way of facts other than one plus one does not equal three.

March 29, 2024 – The Divine Comedy, Purgatory, Canto I – IX

March 29, 2024 /

With all that is going on, I struggled to get through this week. In my book, nine Cantos was something like 160 pages, including the introduction to Purgatory as well. With all the notes and heavy language and combined with the distractions just made it difficult. I will put all of that aside because here we are.

As I have stated earlier in this review, I am not a believer in Purgatory. I have never really studied it and so I really don’t know much about it. After reading this week, I can kind of, sort of get a sense of it’s purpose in the role of heaven. At least I understand how the religion effects the after world.

Again, I imagine that I will get a real education throughout the series. But, for instance at the different levels are those that sought repentance from God at their last moments. Above them are people that died without last rites, like being killed in battle or murdered. Presumably they were mostly good or faithful but didn’t get a final blessing before death.

I don’t fully understand third shelf. It was political leaders who led their states into conflict, I think. Things do get mixed up between figures here versus other leaders in the Inferno. Like I stated there, I think this is as much as what side they were on in Dante’s perspective rather then their actual deeds.

Just as in hell, the symbology runs deep in Purgatory. Hell was all dark all the time. Purgatory has days and nights. Purgatory is described as a mountain. It is steepest at the start and gets easier as you go. The idea is that eventually, if souls stay on the right path or wait long enough and are earnest in their repentance that they will eventually advance. Just as the mountain is steep, they could just as easily not advance or give up. Makes sense to me.

Canto nine ends at the gates of Purgatory. There are moral challenges and judgement to entering. Also, the sentry warns them not to look back on entry or they will be kicked out. This is a serious stage gate in the afterlife.

Part and parcel with my beliefs, I don’t take the Catholic view of baptism to heart. Reading along here it was indicated people that died before receiving the initial baptism go not to purgatory but to hell. Presumably to the very first level that Virgil is in which is the level for souls before Christ. My belief in the new covenant and a benevolent God finds this belief almost counter-intuitive.

End Your Programming Routine: I am not anti-Catholic. I respect most faiths that generally fall into order with my line of beliefs. There is a lot of good that they do throughout the world and I have a lot of interaction with that faith because my wife’s family is largely Catholic. Heck, I’ve gone to baptism class twice even to be god-parents. There is just some doctrine I cannot get behind. Babies dying condemned to hell, while politicians waiting to get into heaven, no.

March 28, 2024 – No Wonder People Hate Technology

March 28, 2024 /

I am a programmer for goodness sake, why is so much information bad? A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that the hard drive on my primary desktop was almost filled. It wasn’t that long ago that I went on a cutting spree trying to free up space on that hard drive (a couple of months). I finally figured out that One drive was syncing everything wherever it was connected. I thought that I was putting stuff into One drive to keep my hard drive clean.

At the same time, I had enough of my laptop. The hard drive is constantly pegging at 100% use. It cripples the ability to do anything on the computer and has for many years. I had an idea, I am going to swap that hard drive for a solid state drive and take the old hard drive and put it into my desktop that is almost full.

I am no idiot. In the old days, you had a CD-ROM that you put into the drive and you rebuilt the operating system from disk. Well, I don’t even have an optical drive in my laptop. So, I looked up multiple instructions that concurred. Create a recovery drive on USB. Replace the hard drive and then boot from the recovery drive to rebuild the operating system. “NNNNNT, Wrong”.

First of all, a recovery drive is only for rebuilding working and existing hard drives. Trust me, I spent hours trying to make it work. I don’t care what expert said what, it does not work. It wasn’t even easy to build the recovery drive either. I spent probably six hours messing around with that.

The instructions say, you need a 32GB USB drive. OK, I went out and bought one. Then, it says use the recovery drive utility built into Windows. After two hours, the first one failed. Two more hours and the second one failed. I started checking the internet for why this was happening. As it turns out, the USB drive needed to be formatted in NTSC and not FAT32 format. Once I did that, add another two hours to create the recovery drive.

I swapped the hard drive and then booted from the recovery drive. At first, I tried the option that restored my settings. That got to 70% complete and then I was alerted that there was an error. I tried it again, same result. Then third attempt, I tried a new install, also failed. I went to bed for the night, pissed and bewildered.

The next morning, I started checking the internet and found out that this can only be done with a Windows image. The registration component is apparently on the motherboard. I didn’t want to ruin my recovery drive in case I still needed it, but I needed an 8GB drive for Windows 11 media. The only drive I had of that size was my bootable Ubuntu image. It turns out, when you build an Ubuntu drive, it write protects those files and so my 8GB drive had three partitions that I could not get rid of. I had to download Rufus again just to get rid of the partitions.

One of the permaculture principles is the problem is the solution. So, fortunately, all of my data was backed up to One Drive. But, I did have to re-connect mail, and download browsers and Microsoft 365 and all that stuff. This is the easy stuff since I have been religiously using Bit-Locker to store all of my account information. And now, I am just clicking through and adding stuff.

Did this make a performance difference? You bet it did. I no longer want to throw my laptop off of a building. Installing the old hard drive should be easy (compared to this). Once I have all of that working, I am going to start ripping DVDs of content that I am keeping on One Drive. I don’t want to get rid of my podcast raw data and things like that, but I certainly don’t need to keep easy access to it and I definitely don’t want it clogging up my hard drive. That is a whole different story. Even though I have a DVD burner, that is not working either.

End Your Programming Routine: We are in the habit of taking all information as good information, myself included. When multiple sources had the same instructions, I took for granted that it was correct. It may be that this was valid for Windows 10 and not 11, I don’t know what was wrong. This should have been done in a couple of hours and stretched into days based on bad information. I am glad that I had more than one computer and USB drive.