Category Archives: General

General, Popular Culture, Science And Society, Space, Technology and Society

Project Hail Mary

10 Comments

Peter Suderman likes it.

[Afternoon update]

[Late-afternoon update]

Administrative, General, Technology and Society

Back On The Air

24 Comments

We got back from the funeral in Michigan yesterday morning, and I’m slowly getting my computer functional again. I had to reinstall the OS, and I’m still not sure I’ve solved the problem that I installed a new graphics card for. I’m slowly/painfully restoring the functionality in terms of software, and configuration of things like Thunderbird, Brave, Chrome, which lost all their settings after I reinstalled the OS, despite the fact that /home is on a separate drive that I mount after boot. Anyway, I’ll start posting again soon. There’ve been a lot of interesting developments in space policy…

[Thursday-morning update]

For those curious, I was having difficulty in that the machine was running like molasses, and it was initially diagnosed by Grok as an incompatibility between Wayland and my old GPU. So I replaced the GPU (a hundred-buck RX500 card), but it didn’t solve the problem. I couldn’t get it to boot with Xorg, and long story short, I finally solved it by switching from Gnome to KDE…

[Thursday-morning update]

I’ve finally run down the issue. It wasn’t software; it was hardware. My /home drive is failing. Out to get a new one.

[Friday-the-13th update]

Drove down to Irvine to Microcenter and bought a new Seagate 4T drive. I disconnected the old one, connected it the new one, formatted it ext4, reconnected the old one, mounted both, and I’m doing rsync from the old to the new.

Administrative, General

Light Posting

3 Comments

I’m still having computer issues. I had to reinstall the OS, so it will take a while to get everything back up and working. Beyond that, we’re flying to Michigan tomorrow for a funeral of a relative on Friday (a first cousin once removed, but the relationship was more like an aunt — she was 98). Plus, we have a sick cat, and Patricia may have to stay home with him. Anyway, I’ll have the laptop, but probably not much time to post until Monday. I’ll be back Sunday night. Open thread in comments.

General, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture

Ice Dancing

30 Comments

This is an age-old controversy, but while it (and figure skating in general) is entertaining, it is not a sport. It’s ballet on ice, except that ballet has no judges, biased or otherwise. The American team was clearly robbed. I have no problem keeping it in the Olympics, and it’s athletics in the sense that it requires training and practice, but stop pretending that it’s a sport. Sports scores should be objective, not whimsical.