Applicable(?) Aphorisms #20

"The world is a mirror; see yourself in all beings." (Hinduism, Shvetashvatara Upanishad 6:11)

True, false, good, bad, useful, not so useful, etc.? Discuss.

My thoughts:

Probably good advice.

Are humans unique among species? Yes, in particular ways.

There are even reasonably strong arguments for uniquely human-based sets of ethics (e.g. a moral distinction between, say, humans and cattle as to which one it's OK for humans to eat).

On the other hand, all life is constructed from the same building blocks and its various forms are more similar to each other than they are to non-life.

And within some unspecified range, humans are very similar to other animals in many ways, as anyone who's ever watched animals at play likely intuits. There are probably lessons to learn in both the similarities and the differences. Which brings me to one of my favorite bits from Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

[O]n the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much -- the wheel, New York, wars and so on -- whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man -- for precisely the same reasons.

Wordle 1799 Hint

Hint: One type makes a good pot roast; another is used to hold a drill bit.

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First Letter: C

I Knew This Would Happen

I hoped it wouldn't. I tried to convince myself it wouldn't. But in my heart I knew it would.

Earlier this month, my household switched from Starlink satellite Internet to Cox fiber Internet.  Personally, I didn't want to, but the rest of the family did, and it is cheaper, with a five-year price guarantee.

At the previous house, we had Cox -- not fiber, just standard cable -- and it came with frequent outages. Sometimes four minutes, sometimes four hours, sometimes longer, but I don't think we ever went more than a few days without one of at least noticeable length, at least over the last five years (it wasn't as frequent before that). Sometimes easily explained (bad storm, "hey, a truck just smacked a utility pole down the street, etc.), sometimes seemingly just because.

With Starlink, I noticed a grand total of one outage of more than a couple of seconds, lasting maybe a minute and a half, in six months (not counting times when the house power blinked or blacked out and the router had to reset).

Why that one noticeable outage? Who knows? Maybe a deer was wandering around the yard and decided to stand in front of the dish or something. According to the very nice stats report in the Starlink app, it did occasionally go down, for a second or two, but not for long enough to notice. It would temporarily go down for a couple of minutes when the router software updated, which it did automatically in the middle of the night (the user can choose the time) and I think it did that once (I only knew about it from the app report).

So yesterday I heard the old familiar refrain from the previous house: "DAD!!! THE INTERNET IS DOWN!!!"

Why yes, it was.

Called Cox's automated line, chose technical support. "We see that there's an outage in your neighborhood. Technicians are at work fixing the problem and we expect service to be restored by [six hours from then]."

It was only an hour or so -- Cox usually seems to highball their time estimates -- but I'm just going to guess this will be a frequent thing. I had hoped that everything being buried fiber, for several miles from the outer wall of our house to wherever it surfaces, would minimize the outages. Not as much wire that's subject to storm winds or drunk drivers. But it does come up to the surface somewhere, and there are servers, etc. to go down somewhere, and of course even the underground stuff can experience technical issues.

But you'd think that decades-old ISPs could have their technical problems more in hand than a seven-year-old service that literally has to send its signals to space and back.

I'm already missing Starlink. And yes, I did yell a little bit at certain people about why the hell they wanted so very badly to trade reliable Internet service for unreliable Internet service.

Wordle 1798 Hint

Hint: When you talk your way through the day's Wordle.

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First Letter: V

A Linux Distribution You May Have Never Heard Of

You may not have ever heard of Azure Linux. It's not exactly a secret, and some of its code has apparently worked its way into other, major Linux distributions that you have heard of.

The reason you've probably never heard of it is that it's not designed to be used by individuals as a desktop operating system. The company that makes it prefers that you use a different desktop OS. That company is Microsoft and that other OS is Windoze.

Microsoft created, and uses, Azure Linux to run Azure, its family of more than 200 cloud-based products and services.

Apparently Microsoft doesn't trust Windoze with the important stuff -- it's just something to be sold to the yokels who don't matter except as revenue sources. For the things they need done well and reliably, they use Linux.

Wordle 1797 Hint

 Hint: When it comes to today's Wordle, I concur.

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First Letter: A

Semi-Annual Inclement Motorcycle Environment Time

If you don't live in the Gulf coast area, you may not be familiar with Plecia nearctica, usually called the "love bug."

No machine-readable author provided. Wikifrosch~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims). Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

One conspiracy theory has it that the bug was genetically engineered at the University of Florida, right here in Gainesville, as a mosquito countermeasure, but in fact it's been around for some time -- originating in Central America and observed in Louisiana more than a century ago before eventually making its way to Florida.

Anyway, twice a year the love bug emerges from larval form, takes flight, mates (continuously, for days, while flying), and dies. I don't know how many millions or billions there in an overall swarm, but in each individual "flight" there can be hundreds of thousands.

The semi-annual swarms annoy automobile drivers. A moving car's windshield can get completely covered, with dead love bugs and become largely opaque in minutes. They can gum up the cooling fins on radiators, vents and intakes, and their pH levels can be acidic enough to damage paint if not quickly washed off.

They can do all those things to motorcycles, motorcycle helmet visors, etc., too. Last year, I was out and about when I ran into the first signs of the swarm. By the time I got home, I had to completely wipe down and clean my helmet and wash my bike, too.

I know car drivers who avoid driving unless absolutely necessary during the swarms, and that's also my policy for riding a motorcycle.

The current swarm has been ongoing for several days, so I'm hoping today is the last of it (I seem to be seeing fewer bugs in the area, after sweeping thousands of bug corpses off my porch yesterday because I thought it was over then).

Wordle 1796 Hint

 Hint: A ruin (often of a ship), or the event that created its condition.

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First Letter: W

Pleased to Report ...

 ... that my app gripe from last week has resolved itself.

Or, rather, someone, but not me, resolved it.

InoReader (not an affiliate link) is no longer freezing up. Maybe there was a problem with the app itself and they fixed it, or maybe there was a problem in MX Linux that got fixed on an update, or maybe there was a problem in Microsoft Edge that got fixed in an update (I never spent enough time in other OSes or browsers to troubleshoot where the problem was).

So now InoReader is back to being, so far as I can tell, flawless and the absolute best RSS reader solution available anywhere.

Wordle 1795 Hint

 Hint: First name (with, for example, Springfield, Hill, or Rhodes).

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First Letter: D

The Ultimate One-Paragraph Case for Free Trade ...

... comes in fictional form, and from a "moderate left-wing" TV show, The West Wing. I've always loved the scene, and was glad to see Jake Scott do the work of pulling the monologue text at the Foundation for Economic Education. Here it is:

You want the benefits of free trade? Food is cheaper. Food is cheaper, clothes are cheaper, steel is cheaper, cars are cheaper, phone service is cheaper. You feel me building a rhythm here? That’s ’cause I’m a speechwriter and I know how to make a point. It lowers prices, it raises income. You see what I did with “lowers” and “raises” there? It’s called the science of listener attention. We did repetition, we did floating opposites, and now you end with the one that’s not like the others. Ready? Free trade stops wars. And that’s it. Free trade stops wars! And we figure out a way to fix the rest!

Mic drop, if that had been a thing back then. Whoever wrote that particular bit should have followed up with a book -- How to Make an Irrefutable, But Not Boring, Argument in 110 Words.

Wordle 1794 Hint

Hint: When you'd really rather not.

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First Letter: L

Wordle 1793 Hint

Hint: An internal organizational rule.

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First Letter: B

Applicable(?) Aphorisms #19

"The best revenge is not to be like your enemy." (Stoicism, Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 6:6)

True, false, good, bad, useful, not so useful, etc.? Discuss.

My thoughts:

Good advice, and also in a way yet another rephrasing of the golden rule: If you object to Characteristic X of your enemy's behavior, then Characteristic X is no more moral when you display it than when he or she displays it. It's not a good feeling to find yourself in the situation described by Pogo ("we have met the enemy and he is us").

Wordle 1792 Hint

Hint: The first one enjoys a competitive advantage.

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First Letter: M

Wordle 1791 Hint

Hint: Statement of faith or belief, e.g. Nicene and Athanasian.

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First Letter: C

Interesting Response to the Linux "Age Verification" Nonsense

It's called Ageless Linux. Brief description:

Software for humans of indeterminate age. We don't know how old you are. We don't want to know. We are legally required to ask. We won't.

It's just Debian (a major Linux distribution upon which a lot of other major Linux distribution is based), plus a script that "will analyze your system, show you exactly what it plans to do, then modify /etc/os-release and associated system identification files, neutralize the systemd userdb birthDate field, install our AB 1043 noncompliance documentation, and deploy a stub age verification API that returns no data."

Do I expect California authoritahs to fall into the Streisand Effect trap of trying to arrest even one person who produces or distributes Ageless Linux? I'd like to say no, but never under-estimate the stupidity of gummint types.

I don't really see any potential for involvement myself, but if I ever happen to be going to California, I guess I might buy a box of cheap USB drives, set them up with Ageless Linux, make room for them in my luggage, and throw them over an elementary school playground fence or something. That might actually be a little more risky than sending the non-export version of PGP to a friend in Russia, as I did back when they thought they could forbid that, too.

Wordle 1790 Hint

Hint: To become atremble, possibly from uncertainty.

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First Letter: W

Wordle 1789 Hint

Hint: Versus the current fashion, today's Wordle is frumpish.

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First Letter: D

Some Thoughts on Meeting Inflation

I don't like meetings very much. I know they are sometimes necessary, and sometimes necessarily long, and I'll do them if I have to, but I mostly try to avoid them. If I need to communicate with others, I prefer to do it by email. That means that not everyone involved has to be paying full attention for a pre-reserved bloc of time, as long as the communications of all involved parties are timely to the matter being addressed. I'm not in the 911 dispatching business or anything like that. Most matters I deal with can be handled over the course of days, or at least hours, not minutes or seconds.

By "meetings," I don't just mean physical get-togethers around a table or in a convention hall. I include their "virtual" equivalents done with video conferencing, phone conferencing, and group messaging. And over time, I think I detect two distinct "meeting inflation" effects from the latter.

While I do very few "meetings" myself, I have family members who seem to spend a lot of time on them for both work and community (e.g. non-profit board) stuff, and they seem to spend a lot more time on them now than they did in 2006 or 2016.

The first "meeting inflation" effect is in the number of meetings. I've seen family members' work "meetings" go from "quick huddle at the beginning of the day, with maybe one a week or one a month for any given big project" to "half the day, every day is spent on four different Zoom meetings, and most of the other half is spent preparing for them."

The second "meeting inflation" effect is in the length of meetings, particularly the community types. They seem to have gone from "this is the agenda, with time assigned to each item, let's get through it" to "count on several 15-minute stream-of-consciousness rambles that seemingly have little or nothing to do with why we're meeting."

I'm a big fan of "work from home"/"telecommute" for people whose jobs can be done that way. It saves commute time. It saves gasoline costs. It means the workplace doesn't have to be a four-story building with 100 offices that must be cooled, heated, and lit 24/7.

Obviously the ability to "meet virtually" makes all that more doable. But if it also encourages dramatically increasing the time spent on, and in, those "meetings," it reduces the benefit.

Wordle 1788 Hint

Hint: Three kinds: Atomic, cuckoo, and grandfather.

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First Letter: C

The Latest App Gripe

I use InoReader (not an affiliate link) every day, all day long. I've used it for years. I've maintained a paid premium account for years. It's well worth the money for someone who needs to see the newest content from a large list of sites on a recurring basis. And while I periodically test other RSS reader apps, it remains my favorite by far.

BUT!

As the app evolves with new features (most of which I don't use, but can see why they'd offer), they also keep screwing with the layout of the user interface. This morning, all of a sudden, a button ("Mark all as read") that I use many times a day, every day, has suddenly been moved halfway across the screen from where my muscle memory "knows" it is.

This kind of thing is not unique to InoReader, it just happens to be the latest instance of an annoying phenomenon that I seem to run into every week or two.

User interface changes in apps that have been out of beta and in regular production for years should be few, far between, and arguably necessary to correct a problem. 

Adding a new feature? Great -- put the button or form field for that feature somewhere new, too. Long-time users shouldn't have to re-train their minds and muscles on the old features just because the app's dev team needs to report "incremental improvements" to justify their jobs.

On a positive note, a problem I started having with InoReader right about the time I switched from Linux Mint to MX Linux has disappeared -- the site seemed to intermittently freeze then unfreeze, and now it doesn't. Maybe that's a side effect of the same update I'm griping about.

Wordle 1787 Hint

Hint: Very recently (as in "wed").

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First Letter: N

Wordle 1786 Hint

Hint: Inuit outerwear.

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First Letter: P

Not My Use Case, But Still Pretty Cool

Royal Enfield is rolling out its first electric motorcycle, a take on the WWII military "Flying Flea" model. Its first market will be India at about $3,000 US; it looks like a winner for the US market if they can keep the retail price here in the $5k range.

While I'm not opposed to the idea of an electric motorcycle, this one's not for me, for two reasons: Range and speed.

Royal Enfield claims a range of about 100 miles, a top speed of about 70 miles per hour, and a full charging time of two hours.

Anyone who's ever used an electric vehicle knows better than to trust the maker's range claims. To the extent that they're true at all, they're true for 1) new batteries in 2) ideal situations when 3) the bike is ridden in specific ways. Once you're out in the real world, doing real world stuff, cut them by 25-50%. I suppose Royal Enfield might be the exception, but I won't believe it until and unless I see lots of rider reports on the subject.

As for charging, it's AC only -- the DC fast charging like you can use with modern electric cars isn't a feature. Which means that every x miles, you'd be plugged in for a considerable amount of time ... and that x miles is probably around the same mileage as my small-tank internal combustion bikes, which I can fill up with gas in a couple of minutes.

Since x is, at most, 100 miles, the Flying Flea is effectively good for local riding, or commutes of up to 50 miles if you have a couple of hours to charge it at the far end. Long rides would mean a two-hour break after each hour to hour-and-a-half of riding, even assuming you could count on finding a place to charge at each such interval.

In order for me to switch to electric, I'd have to see:

• A real-world range of at least 200 miles;
• A top speed that's well into usual interstate highway territory (80 mph bare minimum, but a burst of 100 mph is desirable for quick movement in emergency situations); and
• Fast DC charging.
• A price point similar to this bike.
• A lot more "public charging" infrastructure so that I wouldn't get stranded in East Asshole, Arkansas while on a cross-country trip.

I don't see that all of that happening in the very near term. The speed probably isn't an engineering problem (a little more motor goes a long way), but longer range requires more battery and apparently the internal infrastructure for fast DC charging is heavy, high-volume, and produces lots of heat, none of which are good things where motorcycles are concerned. Getting there, and getting the costs of being there down, will take time.

But for the right kinds of rider -- someone who lives/works in or near a city and doesn't have to haul a lot of stuff (or additional people, although I understand the Flying Flea does come with an attachable/removable pillion seat for one passenger) around -- it might be very nice. Ride it to work, ride it around town, plug it in at home each night. Probably very low-maintenance. The noise won't annoy your neighbors. Finding parking will be easier than with an SUV. Between gas, maintenance, insurance, etc. cost savings, it might be a financially attractive option.

Applicable(?) Aphorisms #18

"Wherever you go, go with all your heart." (Confucianism, Analects 19:6)

True, false, good, bad, useful, not so useful, etc.? Discuss.

My thoughts:

I'm probably as prone as anyone to forget this recommendation  -- which, in different formulations, seems fairly ubiquitous across human populations (my favorite variation is probably "anything worth doing is worth overdoing").

It seems sound to me. The ultimate human scarcity factor is time. Why waste that resource on stuff that's you only consider important enough to you to do half-heartedly?

Wordle 1785 Hint

Hint: A glossy fabric weave.

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First Letter: S

Interesting (Literally)

While thinking about the news that yet another Trump tariff scam got noticed by a court as illegal yesterday, it occurred to me to ask whether the regime has to pay interest on illegally collected tariffs. The answer is: Yes.

My first reaction was that the rate -- 4.5% on amounts owed over $10,000, 6% on the amount up to $10k -- is far too low. To the extent that interest charges are an incentive to not pull this kind of shit, the higher the better. Perhaps the average credit card interest rate (a little over 20% APR), or even "payday loan" rates (which can approach 400%).

But then I thought a little more about it:

• Tariffs, as taxes on the import of goods, are initially paid by the importer, but mostly passed on to the final retail customer.
• Refunds of illegal tariffs are paid to those importers because it would be impractical (in many cases impossible) to track down everyone who paid an extra $5 on a $50 retail purchase.
• So the importers are getting their money back after having recouped much of that money from their downstream customers.
• And they're getting it back from those customers via taxation and government borrowing.

So any interest charges would simply be additional costs to those retail customers, not to the government, because the government doesn't really have any money it hasn't stolen in the first place.

It makes more sense for the interest burden on illegally collected tariff refunds to be imposed directly on the person or persons who ordered their collection in the first place. In this case that would be Trump, but if Congress passed an unconstitutional tariff and the president signed the bill, that would split the burden between the members of Congress who voted for it, the president, and maybe one more person (the vice-president, if he or she cast a vote in favor of the bill in the Senate). Garnish their wages and auction off their assets if necessary to collect restitution.

Wordle 1784 Hint

Hint: Today's Wordle is as shady as it gets.

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First Letter: U

Wordle 1783 Hint

Hint: When you move, or move something or someone else, just a little bit.

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First Letter: B

Two Hypotheses on Sudden Delivery Problems

My household has has had a "Walmart Plus" membership for a couple of years now. Since we do probably 2/3 of our grocery shopping at Walmart, the "free delivery on orders over $35" seems well worth the annual membership fee, even setting aside the included streaming media platform subscription (you can choose between Paramount Plus and Peacock). It saves us both extra trips into town and the time we'd spend in the store.

It usually works out just fine. Occasionally an order will be missing an item (and Walmart cheerfully refunds out money). Also occasionally we'll get stuff we didn't order because the driver got mixed up. That's even better because Walmart won't take the stuff back, they just tell you to keep it, and it's usually stuff we do use.

But the last few days have been interesting. We placed an order for delivery Sunday evening, and it didn't arrive. "Delayed due to driver availability issues." Reschedule or cancel.

We rescheduled for Monday evening. Same outcome.

This time we canceled, waited a few hours, and did the same order (plus more stuff we had put on our grocery lists in the meantime) from scratch. I decided to set the delivery time frame to daytime and see if it would actually happen, otherwise we could make a physical evening trip to the store.

It arrived.

Nothing like this has ever happened before with Walmart Plus, for us or for anyone we know who's mentioned using the service. Off the cuff I suspect we've ordered for delivery close to 100 times, with only one "delay" ever and that by only a couple of hours because a driver's vehicle broke down.

What's up with that?

Well, Walmart uses a mix of employee and contractor drivers, and evening delivery seems to lean hard on the contractor end. Considering that, I have two hypotheses:

1. It's college graduation time in Gainesville, Florida. In fact, University of Florida graduation was last weekend. If a lot of the evening contract drivers are students doing it part-time, there may have been a sudden exodus of graduates (and non-graduates going home for summer) that Walmart couldn't replace in a timely manner. 
2. Gas prices are up by 50% since Trump shit the bed in the Middle East. Which means the contractors aren't making as much money unless they're either getting bonuses to help cover the higher price of filling their tanks or are able to increase the number of deliveries they make per trip. Late evening delivery is probably less popular than other time frames, meaning less ability to stack a larger number of orders into one trip.

Any other ideas?

Wordle 1782 Hint

Hint: When you point out a resemblance.

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First Letter: L

Non Sequitur, Vote By Mail Edition

Los Angeles Times letter to the editor headline (paywalled, so I can only go with that headline claim, not any other facts of the writer's situation:

I’m in my 90s and I’ve given up driving. Voting by mail is my only option

Yep, only option.

Except for Uber.

Or a taxi, if those still exist in the writer's area.

Or asking a friend or relative for a ride to the polling place.

Or calling up the local party organization or political campaign of your choice, if they haven't already called you (in urban areas, election day is usually characterized by multiple phone calls offering voters transportation to the polls).

If you're 95 years old, there's a very good chance you live in some kind of "retirement community," ranging from "people have their own houses/apartments but there's infrastructure to support their needs" to full-on "nursing home." Many, maybe most, of those places provide transportion on both an individual basis ("I need to go to the doctor for my appointment") and group basis ("the van leaves for the mall at noon and returns at 3pm") as part of the package.

So it's highly unlikely that this writer's only option is to vote by mail. It's the most convenient. It's the least expensive. It's arguably more secure. But it's not the only option.

Interesting Easement Situation

As I mentioned recently, our household decided to switch from Starlink to Cox fiber Internet. I was happy with Starlink, but the gamers in the house wanted higher speeds and lower latency.

On the initial installation attempt, the contractor said we were just too far from the main node to connect, so we thought it was over. No biggie. But then another contractor came back and said "no, it's fine." He ran the fiber from the node to our house and told us they'd be back to bury it later.

Yesterday, there was a knock on the door that I missed, so I hopped on my motorcycle to go see if they were working on it down at the main road. They were, kind of ...

The gentleman who lives at the corner was telling them they couldn't bury the fiber because the path was on his property.

They kept trying to explain that they were burying it right at the edge of the road, well within the utilities easement.

He insisted that there WAS no easement, that in fact the road ran through his property but belonged to him, and that he just allowed the 10 or so households down it to use it out of the goodness of his heart, but that they couldn't bury the fiber there.

It's a road with a county name and a county street sign, and I showed one of the guys the county works the survey posts where the path for eventual paving are placed (the road as surveyed does not QUITE follow the path cars have actually been traveling, presumably for at least 20 years, but we had our property surveyed last fall and I found the posts in some trees just outside our survey flag).

Which was great, the guy told me, but even if there WAS no actual pre-described "utility easement," there would be an "easement by implication" (due to the long use of the roadway without objection from the property owner) and/or "easement by necessity" (without that road, all those properties would otherwise be "land-locked").

So they ended up running the fiber. Which, presumably, the other guy will never have any reason to notice, since it's buried right along the edge of, and in, the cow path the county says is a "road." So now the kids have their fast Internet (since I use wifi, and it maxes out below the speeds of either Starlink or fiber, the only change I'm seeing is the name of the network I connect to).

Anyway, I can't really blame the guy for objecting if that roadway WAS actually within the survey lines of the lot he bought years ago. But it did seem like a mountain and molehill situation. It's not like they were using a backhoe to trench up the path to his driveway and keep him  from getting in and out for hours. They had a little tracked thing that looks like one of those bomb disposal robots you see on TV shows, and the only evidence it left behind was a thin line in the dirt. Probably blocked his driveway for about 30 seconds.

Wordle 1781 Hint

Hint: It holds the door shut.

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First Letter: L

Wordle 1780 Hint

Hint: What you are when you wake up in the morning.

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First Letter: R

Hypothesis: If I Don't Have Time, Just Add Weight

Around the beginning of March, I decided to re-commit to walking 10,000 steps a day.

Around the beginning of April, I jumped that up to 11,000 steps a day.

Good results so far. Slightly lower blood sugar and my weight is down by several pounds.

But for the beginning of May, I reconsidered the "add an extra thousand steps a day" formula.

Steps are time, and I already commit around an hour a day specifically to walking (above and beyond the steps I take in the normal course of getting things done). Usually in two 30-minute dedicated outings.

Unless I considerably pick up my pace, which is already fairly brisk, there's a limit to how many steps I can take in x minutes. Once I get below 200 pounds for the first time in 25 years or so, I may try to work some running into my daily step count, but between bad knees and an old lower back injury, I have to get the weight off first for it to be doable.

If I could figure out a way to get work done while walking, heck, I'd walk all day. It's been a few years since I did more than 15 miles or so at a stretch, but I'm sure I still could. I found out in the Marine Corps that I'm a genetic freak in that respect. If I'm in anything approaching good shape I can start walking and not stop until told to, with as much weight as I can carry hanging off me. But absent some kind of cool augmented reality glasses with a bespoke work setup built into them, when I'm walking, all I can really do is, um, walk.

So instead of taking more steps per day, I'm sticking to 11,000 steps ... while carrying  barbell plates in a backpack on those dedicated walks.

Just got back from the first, one-hour, 2.x-mile test walk with 22 pounds (four 2.5kg plates) in the pack. Not only am I none the worse for wear, but the weight tends to correct my posture such that my back is hurting less than usual (good) and my quads are complaining some (good).

Wordle 1779 Hint

Hint: Edemic in appearance.

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First Letter: P

Applicable(?) Aphorisms #17

"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." (Taoism, Tao Te Ching 64)

True, false, good, bad, useful, not so useful, etc.? Discuss.

My thoughts:

A well-known one, and an obviously true one. You can't finish anything without starting it. You can think, dream, plan, but until you actually do the things, starting with the first thing, the things won't get done. I can't think of anything more to say about that, or imagine anything that anything else needs to be said.

Wordle 1778 Hint

Hint: When you go somewhere and take something with you.

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First Letter: B 

I Expect Some Kind of Combat in the Persian Gulf Today

I could be wrong, of course, but here's why I expect it:

• While the war was wholly, completely, and unquestionably illegal from the start absent a congressional declaration of war, there's a fiction under the "War Powers Resolution" through which a president gets a 60-day free pass to do whatever he wants.
• That 60-day period ends today.
• The administration is claiming that the 60-day clock stopped with the declaration of a ceasefire.
• It's in the Iranian regime's interest to establish that no, the clock hasn't stopped because combat operations are ongoing, and the best way to do that is to do something requiring a US military response.

Wordle 1777 Hint

Hint: Consider solving today's Wordle a feather in your cap.

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First Letter: P

Thanks For Asking! -- 05/01/26

No lines, no reservations required, no waiting ... just ask me anything in comments and I'll answer in, or linked to from, comments (applies to regular people -- pseudonymous trolls/bots are required to ask interesting questions to get answers).

I Finally Decided to Join a Veterans' Organization Again

When we first moved to Gainesville 13 years ago, I thought I might either join Veterans of Foreign Wars or rejoin the American Legion. I ended up doing the latter, but the post was pretty distant (15 miles or so) and I let my membership lapse because I really never spent significant time there.

BUT!

For 13 years now, I've passed AmVets post 88 in Bronson on a fairly regular basis. It's less than 10 miles from where we live now and I happen to really enjoy the motorcycle riding west of Archer.

So, on Sunday, I attended an event there -- a barbecue competition, $10 for food from five competitors. Good food. Met some of the members, checked out the facilities, etc. Very nice, very welcoming.

So I joined, and attended another event last night. More food, that was even better, and competitive trivia, and more new friends.

An Amber Bock draft is $2.25. The food, a large serving of spaghetti with meat sauce and garlic bread, $7.

The way I see it, I often have the urge to get out on the motorcycle and grab something to eat and/or a beer anyway, and I'll probably save more than I'm paying in dues by indulging those urges there instead of elsewhere.

Do I agree with the politics of the organization? Not especially, but not deal-breaker stuff. The two key points I came across are advocacy for more funding for veterans' needs (especially mental health and suicide prevention) and encouraging voting and "civic engagement." It's only to be expected that a veterans' organization operating in the current system would seek to engage with that system to its members' benefit. I can oppose the system without disliking those who take it as it is and just try to get the best deal they can out of it.

Do I agree with the politics of the organizations' "members?" Well, last night I heard one member spouting Democratic talking points, and noticed that the post's past commander was wearing a Trump 2024 hat. Can't say I'm a fan of either.

But I'm not there for political conversation. I get all of that I want elsewhere. I'm there for the beer, the food, the hanging out with new friends, and quite possibly the motorcycle stuff (they have a riding club). Ever since COVID shut everything down, I've noticed I don't get out as much as I used to to just have fun. Hopefully this will address that.

Just Got More Fiber in My (Internet) Diet

I really liked Starlink, and had no complaints whatsoever about the service. But others in the household wanted gigabit fiber and it finally became available. So now we have it.

It doesn't make a lot of difference to me since most of my Internet use is via wifi from the camper office, so the speed is limited to the speed of my wifi equipment. It's plenty fast for everything I do, including streaming video Presumably the gamers in the house will enjoy more speed and less latency. So far, so good.

Since it's fiber that will be buried (right now it's just laying on the ground), the system in general will hopefully be far less vulnerable to outage-causing weather events and so forth. With Starlink, my plan had been to bring the dish inside during the worse parts of hurricanes.

It does save me money, in two ways.

One is that the bundle price is even lower than Starlink with a five-year guarantee. Our previous cable Internet, through the same company (Cox) was more expensive than Starlink.

The other is that I had been meaning to buy a second Starlink kit ($300+ last time I checked) so that if something got broken I wouldn't be down for days awaiting a replacement. Now I don't need that. I'll stow the Starlink gear away and in any kind of long-term Cox emergency I can set it back up and reactivate the service. I've also got that service paid up through the 16th of May, so I've got a couple of weeks to make sure nothing goes horribly wrong with the fiber.

Wordle 1776 Hint

Hint: As cookware goes, today's Wordle is kinda slow, but literally down to earth.

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First Letter: C

Wordle 1775 Hint

Hint: "Out in the country."

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First Letter: R

Wordle 1774 Hint

Hint: A charlatan/mountebank.

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First Letter: Q

OK, I Support Trump's Ballroom, But Only With Conditions

Some people seem to be taking post-assassination-attempt claims from US president Donald Trump and various administration officials -- to the effect that the reason the old East Wing of the White House needs to be turned into a ballroom is because it's unsafe for the president to venture out to e.g. the Washington Hilton -- as evidence that the assassination attempt was a sham/false flag that happened entirely to justify such claims.

In the absence of any real evidence, I'm assuming it was an actual attempt by an actual whackjob, and that the "we need a ballroom" whining is just opportunism.

BUT!

On those specific grounds, I think it's worth making a deal:

1. The White House gets the big ballroom, where the Secret Service controls security 24/7 and has a facility they're familiar with every nook and cranny of. In return,
2. Whoever's president hunkers down in the White House (and on its grounds) for four years instead of creating a public nuisance every time he or she wants to go somewhere via motorcade, Air Force One, or Marine One. He or she walks in  on January 20 after being elected in November, and walks out on January 20 four years later to get sworn in again or pass the baton. In between, no outside excursions except for medical treatment that can only be provided at a full hospital rather than in-house.

If necessary, let the White House buy up some of the surrounding land for a nine-hole golf course, etc., instead of the mere putting green it has now. I have nothing against presidential comforts (other than preferring to have no presidency at all).

Bonus points h or shee also shuts the fuck up and does the job of the president, which is to sign or veto bills, hold cabinet meetings to ensure his or her underlings are doing their jobs, and occasionally issue a "State of the Union" report to Congress, which can be (and used to be) delivered in writing rather than in person.

It would be wonderful if the President of the United States left home in a public manner even less often than Punxsutawney Phil.

A Nice Tool for the Alternative-OS-Curious

It's called Ventoy.

1. Install Ventoy on a USB.
2. Copy the .iso files for any and all operating system you're interested in to that USB.
3. Boot your machine from the USB.

At that point, Ventoy presents a menu and boots into whatever OS you choose from those you've put on the USB.

It's an easy way to play around with various operating systems before pulling the "install this to my hard drive" trigger.

At the moment I've got five or six Linux distros on a Ventoy USB. Although I'm pretty settled on MX Linux as my non-systemd distro, I'm still looking at Alpine, Adélie, Devuan, etc. I've also got some systemd distros just to look at because reasons (I've already decided I don't like Pop! OS and haven't yet booted elementary OS).

Anyway, it's a nice little tool for those considering OS changes.

Wordle 1773 Hint

Hint: That "hair on the back of your neck stands up" feeling.

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First Letter: E

Even I Can Admit That Tariffs Occasionally Produce Good (Unintended) Results

Yes, really.

I don't support tariffs, and the results of tariffs will always be overall bad for most people.

However:

In 1983, Ronald Reagan announced 45% tariffs on Japanese motorcycles with engine displacements of 700cc or more.

He did that for an openly protectionist/crony capitalist reason. Japanese motorcycles were cleaning Harley-Davidson's clock. Harley was coming in at the rear of the motorcycle sales pack and nearing bankruptcy. Reagan wanted to give the company a chance to get competitive again ... but making its competitors artificially more expensive.

Which, of course, is a bad thing. It meant that American consumers had to pay 45% more for big bikes from Japan, which gave Harley a cushion to keep its own prices high.

So, what was the up side?

Well, the Japanese companies decided to re-orient their production to smaller motorcycles ... and engineer more power and better performance into those smaller motorcycles. Instead of a 45%-tariffed 750cc, you bought a non-tariffed 699cc bike ... and you probably loved it.

Harley did make the most of the situation in terms of improving its own product and regaining market share, and survived when it probably shouldn't have (it continues on and off to have real problems with its business model and profitability).

But in the meantime, a whole generation of riders got a dramatically improved experience in the "mid-size" range. Speaking of which, Harley itself is now promoting a "Street 500" model.

I'm still riding small bikes, but I'll eventually move up into the 350-650cc range, and performance-wise I'll likely be getting a better bike than I would have if Reagan hadn't robbed American riders in the early 1980s. I don't agree he should have done that, but hey, silver linings.

Applicable(?) Aphorisms #16

"Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without." (Buddhism, Dhammapada 20:28)

True, false, good, bad, useful, not so useful, etc.? Discuss.

My thoughts:

Many religions include an introspective element aside from appeals to deity, and many schools of philosophy focus on the thinker's internal mental state rather than on action or external stimuli (some philosophies even doubt the reality of the latter).

But this particular aphorism really works in all such settings to the extent that "peace" is itself a mental state, presumably equating to "happiness" or "calm" or "contentment." You may or may not be able to affect things external to your mind in ways conducive to that mental state, but most people, most of the time, can probably work directly with that mental state to quiet the roar of negativity.

Wordle 1772 Hint

Hint: Superficial shine.

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First Letter: G

Wordle 1771 Hint

Hint: They're more than half the population, but -- contrary to the conventional wisdom among the other fraction concerning driving skill -- are involved in less than half of auto accidents.

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First Letter: W

An Almost Guaranteed Way to Make it Rain ...

... is to take a motorcycle ride of more than a few miles. So I should have known that when I took the Italica Bulldog 150  out for a 50-mile round trip today, I'd end up running into precipitation.

I'm not complaining, mind you. It wasn't much, certainly not enough to be any great trouble while on the road.

In fact, I may take a long ride on the Lifan KP Mini 150 tomorrow and see if I can get a real thunderstorm going. We need it -- we've had multiple wildfires in the area this week. None have been especially close to the house, but the longer the dry weather continues, the more we have to worry about that possibility.

Wordle 1770 Hint

Hint: Please don't drive in this condition. 

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First Letter: D

Wordle 1769 Hint

Hint: Even people who finally stopped calling X by its old name usually still call an X post this. 

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First Letter: T

Did SegWit Really Fix Anything?

When Bitcoin Cash came out as a fork of Bitcoin, I thought the former would work better, and for several years used it preferentially.

The debate that led to the fork was over how to speed up transaction times. The Bitcoin Cash solution was to double the block size. The Bitcoin "main" solution was something called "Segregated Witness," which separates signatures from transaction data so that more transactions fit into a block.

It's probably been at least a year or so since I did a Bitcoin Cash transaction, but they're quick. I don't think it's ever taken more than 5-10 minutes for the necessary confirmations.

During REALLY congested times, I've seen Bitcoin "main" take more than a day. Right now, I'm awaiting a transaction confirmation that's been sitting in mempool for more than an hour and has been saying "~30 minutes" away from confirmation for most of that hour. I could increase the miner payment to supposedly speed that up to "~12 minutes." For $62 worth of BTC. On a $300 transaction. No thanks.

I've had friends who do prefer SegWit to increased block size, and therefore BTC to BCH, explain why they consider the latter less reliable and/or more vulnerable, but really I just want speedy transactions unless there's some really severe problem with the BCH way of doing things. To me, the ideal is still being able to buy a soda at a convenience store with crypto.

I may start moving back toward Bitcoin Cash.

Periodic Complaint About Proton Drive, w/ Petition Appeal

I am a Proton Mail user (yes, that's an affiliate link -- if you try it, like it, and sign up for a paid account, I get some credit toward my own).

I am a paying Proton Mail user. I like the service, including not just the email client, but also the VPN, password manager, and calendar.

I want to like Proton Drive. I want to use Proton Drive.

But 5 1/2 years after Proton Drive's introduction, there's still not a working desktop client for Linux.

They've got one for Windoze. They've got one for MacOS. They've got one for Android. They've got one for iOS.

But they don't have one for Linux.

Apparently they briefly had one a couple of years ago, but then deactivated it.

According to an informal, non-scientific Reddit poll, 28% of Proton's users are Linux users.

I suspect the Linux percentage of paying Proton users is even higher, just because there's considerable overlap between 1) Linux users and 2) privacy-enthusiastic computer users, and Proton is big on privacy.

I still haven't completely cut ties with Google's various offerings, but over the past few years I've tried to minimize my use of them.

For file syncing, I use Dropbox ... because Proton Drive doesn't have a Linux desktop app that lets me sync a folder on my hard drive to a folder in Proton Drive.

If necessary, I'd be willing to pay a little more per month than I already do in order to have that feature. I like one-stop shopping. It's the one missing link in the "everything via Proton" chain.

Therefore, I have created a petition. That'll show'em. Sign if you think it matters. If you don't think it matters, well, sign it anyway.

Wordle 1768 Hint

Hint: A way of sawing logs that requires no trees and produces no lumber. 

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First Letter: S

Wordle 1767 Hint

Hint: A clod or cluster.

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First Letter: C

Wordle 1766 Hint

Hint: It's good when you do it with yarn, but bad when you do it on the road.

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First Letter: W

A Rather Dry April So Far

Alachua County Florida, long-term, averages 2.8 inches of rain each April.

Total so far this April, per the weather station at Gainesville Regional Airport: 0.1 inches.

And there's no rain in the forecast for the rest of the month.

Up sides:

1. Not as frequent a need for mowing.
2. Time to de-tarp the Jayco pop-camper and remediate leak problems without worrying about a sudden storm. I've already given the roof one coast of elastomeric sealant and may get the second coat done today. Since I'm not willing to spend three figures on brand new canvas for the pop-outs, I'm looking at various tarp alternative that hopefully won't be quite so ugly.

Down side:

There aren't really any natural water sources for the wildlife for at least a mile in any direction (I'm assuming any small, non-obvious streams are dry at the moment).

We've got a bird bath that I keep filled, and the "tiny pond" as well (I've seen small mammal tracks around it, but can't tell how much water loss is evaporation versus drinking), and I'm also keeping (and cleaning/refilling each day so it doesn't provide mosquito habitat) a five-gallon bucket out in the yard, which does seem to be down significantly each morning after being filled in the evening.

Wordle 1765 Hint

Hint: The highwayman's alleged first and adamant comand (the second is "deliver").

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First Letter: S

Applicable(?) Aphorisms #15

"Who is rich? One who is content with his portion." (Judaism, Pirkei Avot 4:1)

True, false, good, bad, useful, not so useful, etc.? Discuss.

My thoughts:

There are at least three ways to read this one. In no particular order:

• As a quasi-Buddhist caution against striving/desire, linking enlightenment as "riches" to avoiding ambition and the chase for material wealth.
• As a classist "don't try to rise above your station in life" admonition.
• Or, far more simply, an invitation to let one's self experience happiness whatever one's situation may be

The first two rub me the wrong way. Maybe it's just a personal preference, but I tend to find my happiness in the setting of goals and process of achieving those goals. More so, often, than in my subsequent enjoyment of whatever benefits the achievements deliver. Not even big goals, necessarily. Like Steve Jobs said, "the journey is the reward."

As for the third, well, yeah. It's better to be happy than not, and if there's something in the "current portion" to be happy about, use that.

Wordle 1764 Hint

Hint: A sycophant or flunky.

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First Letter: T

I've Pretty Much Made Up My Mind ...

... to keep the Jayco 806SD pop-up camper as my home office, rather than upgrading to a larger camper.

When I got it, I pledged to give it at least six months before deciding to 1) keep it, 2) buy a larger, non-pop-up, camper, or 3) just move my office back into the house.

It's only been four months, but the little camper has proven to be plenty large for my office needs, and my various climate control experiments have been educational enough that I expect, over the summer, to be able to get it really well insulated, de-drafted, etc. at fairly small expense. Might as well go that way as mess with a complete change of venue.

I've got elastomeric roof sealant arriving today so that I can pull the tarp off the top and get that taken care of. When I first got the camper, there seemed to be one (invisible to the naked eye on inspection) tiny roof leak that allowed a very small amount of water into the main compartment, so the tarp went on for the winter.

Now I've got dry weather (very dry weather, and no rain in the 10-day forecast) to take care of that, and to start figuring out a better way to remediate the crappy canvas in the pop-outs. One solution is to just remove the pop-outs and frame the thing in at both ends, but I don't know if I will do that or something else.

In lieu of the larger camper, I am mulling the idea of looking for a cheap but mechanically sound van with tow capability. I haven't owned a four-wheel vehicle in decades, but I was thinking the other day how cool it would be to have a vehicle that I could roll one of my motorcycles into the back of, strap a kayak to the roof of, hook my camper to the rear of, and drive off for camping, etc.

On the other hand, I may just save my pennies and, later this year or early next, start looking at larger motorcycles. I'm starting to see reasonable prices on my preferred brand (Royal Enfield) in the used market, and I expect those prices to fall further because it's now been a few years since that brand started really penetrating the US market ... so there should be some Interceptor 650s that are reaching the "this takes up garage space but I hardly ride it, might was well sell it" age group.

Wordle 1763 Hint

Hint: A beautiful woman; or, a B-17 bomber named for Memphis.

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First Letter: B

Another Thing I Didn't Know About MX Linux

Technically, I began using Linux in 2002, with an ill-fated attempt to install Fedora on a PC -- not my daily driver -- just to see how I'd like it. I didn't. I don't know if I did something wrong in the installation or if that's just how Fedora came back then, but all I got was a command line and I wasn't going to move away from MacOS and Windoze unless I got a nice GUI interface.

As a practical matter, I began using Linux in 2003, when my Windoze computer got a boot sector virus that none of the usual tools could seem to destroy, and I had a couple of CDs a friend had sent me with Mandrake Linux on them. In an 18-hour period, I went from finishing my workday, to nuking my Windoze PC's hard drive, to installing and configuring Mandrake, to teaching myself enough to get by, to starting my next workday, with not a lot of sleep in between.

Since then, I've use a lot of different Linux distributions. A few that I can remember, after Mandrake, in no particular order: Debian, OpenSuse, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Puppy, openSUSE, Slackware, Arch, Manjaro, Knoppix, Raspberry Pi OS, and Mint. I've used some of the previous ones in different versions, GUI setups, etc., and those are not nearly all of them. I've probably at least live-USB-previewed 50 or 60 distros.

And until I went looking for non-systemd distributions, I don't ever recall even hearing of MX.

So I found this headline on my "new tab" page a few minutes ago quite interesting:

3 reasons why MX Linux is more popular than Ubuntu, Fedora, and Zorin OS

I'm not sure the headline is really 100% truthful.

Distrowatch's "Page Hit" rankings have MX third behind CachyOS (which I've never used and barely heard of) and Mint, which indicates a lot of interest, but not necessarily more interest than many distributions that people get other than by visiting the distros' own web sites. It's worth noting, however, that that home page popularity long pre-dates the systemd controversy. Clearly, a bunch of people have been interested in MX Linux for quite some times.

And ranked on the basis of ratings by DistroWatch readers, MX comes in 26th of 34 distributions and behind two of the three in the headline (Ubuntu comes in 31st).

So I wouldn't put it in the "more popular than" league, necessarily. A lot of people get their Linux pre-installed on new machines (especially Ubuntu), or buy one of those "flash drive with 17 Linux distributions" things on Amazon, or get a USB from a friend, or whatever.

Also, the "three reasons" are kinda BS. There are all kinds of Linux distros that work great on all, or under-powered, hardware, that are easy to install/configure/update/maintain/use, and that fit offer "persistent live booting" if you want to run them from USB.

MX is, however, a bigger player than I assumed it was. And it deserves to be. It's a solid Linux distro.