Category Archives: Beware of Leopard

This is the catch-all category.

9 Feb 2016

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Disappointing. Snow fell for about 18 hours, leaving a total accumulation of … nothing. A smattering on the grass, a damp road surface. It was just too darn warm coming into this event – the storm never had a chance. It didn’t even frighten the schools in my county into closing – and they frighten real easy!

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A challenging day at work, with Internet issues external to our sphere of control, but massively annoying, taking center stage. That, plus a failed piece of hardware, made the first half of my day disappear. I’ll get caught up, somehow (although there’s a replacement piece of hardware that’s in flight and will need fettling and installation tomorrow).

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I also finally figured out how to get the six tracks of AFP’s Strung Out in Heaven onto my iPhone. I’d had iTunes setup to do conversions to Apple’s lossless format, because why not? Well, why not appears to be: iTunes won’t transfer those tracks to the iPhone, being afraid I’ll be angry that they’re so big. So I dumped everything I did the other day, re-imported the WAV masters, then converted them to AAC format, which then synced to the iPhone just fine. I suppose I ought to figure out how many other things I’ve got sitting on this box in a frantically high bitrate. Just not tonight.

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New Hampshire? #WTF

7 February 2016

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I see that I missed y’all last week. No particular reason, at first, I was just busy. But as I broke into the last week, a strong cold hit me like a tonne of bricks, then morphed into the flu. Today was my first properly upright day since Tuesday last. I’m gonna have to talk to the doc about this shizzle at my next physical (a couple of months 0ff). After a good couple of years, I’ve been running into a bad stretch of health, and I can’t figure why. Oh, well. Life goes on, until it doesn’t.

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Speaking of which, David Bowie. David Bowie.

David Bowie made a HUGE impression on me with his music, from early on. Certainly Space Oddity was my first impression of the dude, but thereafter he never, ever failed to impress me with his talent, his ability to rebuild himself and his art around new platforms, new audiences, new everything. I’d hear a song on the radio, scratch my head and think, “That sounds a bit like David Bowie, but he doesn’t do this style.” Yeah, well, now he does. I saw the Thin White Duke but once, at the Oakland Coliseum for a Day on the Green Event. September 17, 1983 (I can trust Wikipedia for that, right?) It was a stop on the Serious Moonlight tour (SRV wasn’t playing in the band, sadly), and it was a rockin’ night. Some nobodies opened the show in the late afternoon, The Tubes put on a stellar set, then Bowie and the band played for a couple of hours with a grand stage show. By then, I was about 40 feet away from the stacks on stage, left center. Amazingly loud.

David Bowie knew how to put on a show. He was a proper artist, musician, human being. We were blessed by his presence. If you haven’t yet, then get his last album, Blackstar. Yeah, he worked the last months of his life to give us one more album. Videos, too, you can find them on the Tube of You. Deeply excellent and moving work, as usual.

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In related news, Amanda Palmer and Jherek Bischoff were working on a track one long day a couple of weeks back when the news of Bowie’s death dropped. Blink. It’s two weeks later and those to amazing people along with other musicians and artists have put together, recorded, mixed, mastered, and released a Bowie string quartet tribute EP: Strung Out in Heaven. I’ve got the tracks because I support Amanda on Patreon, there are many paths to get the music beyond that one, follow the link. The Blackstar cover is right there. Six tracks, strings and vocals with Anna Calvi, John Cameron Mitchell, and some bloke named Neil Gaiman contributing vocals, along with a bunch of artists doing up track artwork backing up Sarah Beetson’s wonderful album cover. Also highly recommended!

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Our condolences to the families and friends of these fallen warriors:

  • Sgt. Joseph F. Stifter, 30, of Glendale, California, died Jan. 28, at Al Asad Airbase, Al Anbar Province, Iraq, from wounds suffered when his armored HMMWV was involved in a roll-over accident.
  • Blane D. Bussell, 60, of Virginia, died Jan. 26 in Manama, Bahrain, of non-combat related causes.

25 Jan 2016

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Snowzilla, revisited. Here’s the “view” of the mailbox on sunny Sunday morning at 10° F, 12 hours after the storm ended. The driveway and sidewalk I’d cleared out had refilled pretty well:

After Snowzilla

After Snowzilla

24 Jan 2016

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“Snowzilla” – that’s the name some of the local weather liars gave to this storm, and it was a doozy! The closest local airport to us, BWI, had record snowfall of 29+”. I’d say that here, we got a total of 22″, probably a bit more. Hard to tell more precisely than that because of drifts and wind. Here’s the view out our garage door Saturday morning around 0900 EST:

Snowzilla - Saturday morning

Snowzilla – Saturday morning

I measured 14″ accumulated in the middle of the driveway. That drift next to the door was about 3′ high. I cleared the driveway and the sidewalks once on Saturday. The snow was just about the height of the throat of my snow blower, so that worked out okay. Today, I went out again and cleared everything again – the day started clear and cold (at 16 F), but I waited until after 9 again to start work, and the temps were up into the mid-20’s. By 1230 I’d cleared all my stuff, and helped out a couple of neighbors who needed it. Here’s the driveway:

Driveway after final clearing

Driveway after final clearing

Even with the machine, I still did a fair bit of hand shovel work at the berm down at the roadside.  I also cut a path to the mailbox in from the roadway, and cut a couple of spots off the driveway and sidewalk to give Lexi some greenspace on which to do her business. I’m reasonably tired, at this point.

The best news is that, regionally, we appear to have dodged the wide-spread power outages that were anticipated, between the heavy, wet snow and high winds. Can’t say as I’m disappointed, but I was ready: Along with the snow blower, I’d also spun up and checked out my generator on Thursday evening in advance of the storm – we were ready.

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DoD announced no new casualties in the last week.

24 Dec 2015

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Happy Christmas eve, if that’s your thing. Today I’ve finished up, finally, the second plumbing job I started on the weekend. I was reconnecting the sink and trap in the foyer area in the basement. It’ll be handy for a variety of purposes, so that’s all good.

In other news, I traded up in cars. After a few squirrelly episodes last winter, I found myself wishing for a four wheel drive car again. I still wanted “fun to drive”, but “massively fun to drive, yet safer” (say an Audi R10) is out of my reach. I’d also been mulling the “really fun to drive” option, with the M2 waiting in the wings for next year’s intro. Affordable, but … that’d be sub-optimal. It wouldn’t be driveable in the ice and snow, as a RWD-only car. What I ended up with is an M235i xDrive:

The new ride

The new ride

I test drove it during a rainy period, and found it to be a much more stable platform in the corners in the wet than my RWD 328i. It’ll probably also be fun and quick in the dry, when that happens again. I don’t have performance tires on it, all season is much more prudent. This, I expect, is going to be a long, long term car.

21 Dec 2015

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A day late, and a vacation dollar short. Yep, vacation. I’m “off work” for the next two weeks, which means that I only keep an eye on email, and respond if SMS messages flow my way. But for the purposes of day-to-day operations, I’m offline. Yay!

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In other good news, no vomiting in more than a week, so I’ve got that going for me.

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Please note that policy requires the new disclaimer in the footer of this site. So noted.

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The weekend flew by with assorted home-maintenance chores. They were mostly plumbing, which is mostly done – I still need a short length of 1-1/2″ pvc pipe, which I thought I had on-hand, but I was mistaken. So I also checked on my PVC cement, which I did have a can of … but it’s not a liquid as such, anymore. So that’s on the home center list, too.

I also managed to take some time to decommission some old data drives. For tin-foil-hat-reasons, I don’t just throw disks away or recycle them. I electronically wipe them, then destroy their ability to be read. Here’s the end result of one such session with 6 disks:

Data destroyed

Data destroyed

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Today I got my sump pit monitoring system back online. For a variety of reasons, I broke it a couple of months ago, and neglected for a long while to get it back online. Today, that is remediated. The sump pit monitoring setup is well documented by Al Audet on his Raspi-Sump page, so I would be too redundant to repeat it all here. But his code works, so get it and use it. Yes, you’ll need a Raspberry Pi, and some assorted other stuff along with a bit of soldering or breadboarding skills, but that’s not hard to come by, and none of the stuff is so expensive that you can’t replace the bit you break. Better yet, it’s MASSIVELY less expensive in both time and money than what you’ll go through if your sump pit overflows. There are commercial monitors available. Ones that will also send you text messages are heinously expensive. Try Raspi-Sump, you’ll like it.

Side-note – I was introduced to Raspi-Sump on the pages of Linux Journal.

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DoD announced no new casualties in the most recent week. Ciao!

15 Dec 2015

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Life is, by some definitions, a process of learning new things. The wonderful new thing I learned Sunday night is that my food-borne GI problems from the weekend before were not, in fact, caused by food from the new restaurant we tried that last Saturday evening. Instead, my homemade chili, that I’ve been eating from off and on over the last two weeks, was to blame. I can’t explain how whatever was in the chili only affected me really badly but twice… in hindsight, I had a couple of intermittently “bad days” in there that weren’t at the level of all-consuming, but I was feeling definitely off. Anyway, the tiny, tiny price I paid for this knowledge was another night of cramps and morning of vomiting. Oh, and the cost (built into my property taxes) of having the rest of the chili, some 10 or 12 servings, hauled off with the trash. I can’t explain how whatever was in the chili only affected me really badly but twice… in hindsight, I had a couple of intermittently “bad days” in there that weren’t at the level of all-consuming, but I was feeling definitely off. I got some sleep last night, ate reasonably well today, and expect to be sitting at my desk around 0700 tomorrow morning. Sorry for the cheery posts the last couple of weeks, but I expect that my troubles were hauled off by the trash truck this morning before 0800, and I won’t have to trouble you further about such things.

I have nothing new to report about the interval between Sunday and now, except that I live on. Ciao!

2015 Dec 6

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Sigh. Something I ate last night seriously disagreed with me. Up at 0100 with … okay, no details. But since noon today, I’ve had a few saltines, a couple of fruit cups, and two glasses of water. As the rest of me started feeling just that little bit better … the lack-of-caffeine headache kicked in. I’m not going to try to solve that until tomorrow morning (I’m taking tomorrow off).

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DoD announced no new casualties in the last week. Ciao!

2015 Nov 22

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This last week, we saw a brand new play, Poe, staged at the Reynolds Tavern by the Annapolis Shakespeare Company. An excellent show, good food, and a wonderful evening. How can I tell that a new play is wonderful? It leaves me wanting to know more about the subject, and in awe of the actors plying their trade. The 1747 Pub in the basement of the Reynolds tavern is a great place for the work, too. Only two more nights, this week, so go if you can! We also had Linda and Mike over to supper and a game of Ticket to Ride last night. Otherwise it was a normal, if busy, week catching up from my conference week. Nothing too exciting to report.

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DoD reported no new casualties in the last week. Ciao!