Category Archives: Administrative

Administrative, Popular Culture, Technology and Society

Busy

7 Comments

Watching football while replacing all the plumbing under the kitchen sink. Trap is clogged, and while we were renting it a decade ago, some idiot glued in two-inch ABS down there that’s impossible to get apart without cutting it off. It will give me a chance to get the disposal off to replace the old web in its throat, and put in separate traps for each sink, plus make it much easier to work on in the future.

[Monday-morning update]

Well, that turned into an adventure. Ended up replacing everything under the sink, including disposal, and still not sure I solved the drain problem, and won’t know until I go get an extension for the dishwasher drain hose.

[Monday-morning update]

Got all the plumbing put together, and determined that the drain problem was indeed downstream. Just paid a plumber $160 to snake it, and now it’s running clear. All in all, job cost about $450, but that included a powerful quiet new disposal. Hate to think what a plumber would have charged to do everything I did.

Administrative, Business, Technology and Society

Computer Problems

17 Comments

Did a kernel upgrade in Fedora yesterday. Rebooted today. Wouldn’t boot, had errors. Rather than simple reboot, I decided to shut the whole machine down, then turn it on again. Now it’s dead.

Guess I’ll try swapping the power supply first. If that doesn’t work, sounds like a motherboard or CPU problem.

[Update a few minutes later]

Aaaaaaand, I can’t find any spare supplies. Have to run over to Fry’s to buy one, that probably isn’t the problem…

[Update after returning from Fry’s]

Welp, before I opened the new PS, I tried firing it up again. It booted without complaint. I guess I scared it with the new PS. #HappyHalloween

Seriously, though, it’s probably still a symptom of an incipient problem, probably from overheating.

Administrative, Business, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

Totalitarian Twitter

10 Comments

The service has just blocked all of my accounts (including my parody @HealthDotGov) account from posting, with no explanation other than:

Tweet from @HealthDotGov failed: To protect our users from spam and other malicious activity, your account is temporarily locked. You cannot use the team account while your account is locked.

This is outrageous. No moron who objects to something that I tweet should be allowed to do this.

[Thursday-morning update]

It didn’t seem to last long, and things are back to normal now. Still no idea what happened, though.

Administrative, Business, Economics, General, Health

Hurricane Update

6 Comments

We’re now into our second full day without power. Fortunately, we’re flying back to CA tomorrow. Things are slowly getting back to normal in Palm Beach County, but there is still a curfew from dusk to dawn (it just ended for last night). Our ice has essentially melted, and we’re down to the last of our pre-storm food, but Publix are open, and hopefully they’ll start to re supply. We have several fallen limbs to cut up, but Home Depot is out of chain saws, and doesn’t know when they’ll be getting more (the storm moving up north is likely disrupting supply chains).

On the cat front, it seems to be a lymphoma, but an aggressive one. The bad news is that the tumors aren’t shrinking with the steroid treatment, but the good news is that they aren’t growing, either, and she seems to be stable and happy. We don’t get in until after the hospital closes tomorrow, but should be able to pick her up on Thursday and bring her home, for however long she ends up living.

[Thursday-morning update]

We got in about five last eveing, had dinner and went to bed. Feeling much better now, and it’s nice to be back in CA, despite the idiocy of the voters here. Had the first good night’s sleep in days, to cool temperatures and the sound of our new garden fountain outside our window. Going in this morning to bring Rerun home, and try to get things back, as much as possible around here, to normal.

Administrative

Battening Down

19 Comments

We’re in Boynton Beach, getting ready to board up our house in Lake Worth. Posting will be sparse because my only computer is my phone and Patricia’s iPod.

[Wednesday-evening update]

Here’s the sitrep. We’re staying on the third floor of a new apartment building a block from the Intracoastal (not on the island). It’s solid concrete, built to current Palm Beach County codes, with the only glass patio doors rated to 150 mph. We’re boarding up a house a few miles inland that probably couldn’t take a direct hit of a 4 or 5, but that seems unlikely. We came down here to prep it to sell, and Patricia’s son is living in it. We could bug out in theory (American is offering no-fee flight changes), but we don’t want to leave him in the lurch. Worst case for us is if it does come right up the middle of the peninsula, which would put us on the dirty side of the storm (our apartment windows are south facing), but I think we’ll be OK even in that event. We are well above any potential surge, as is our car (in fact, it’s a floor above us). Our current concern is finding gas before it hits. A lot of lines, and we’re a little below half. We’d really like to top off.

[Thursday-night update]

I went out and spent 45 minutes in line getting gas this morning. We’re storing water in bottles, and making ice and putting it in gallon zip locks in the freezer. We’ll move into fridge as necessary if we lose power. Fortunately, unlike most here, we only need hold out until we can get flights out next week when airports reopen after the storm.

[Friday-night update]

Bad news for Cuba and southwest Florida, good news for us. The storm has taken a turn to the south and west, scrubbing the upper west coast of the island, and heading for landfall perhaps near Naples, perhaps with reduced strength from the Cuba encounter. But it won’t have reduced it enough to spare Naples and Fort Myers a huge storm surge.

What it means for us is that, while we’ll still probably see hurricane-force winds, they will be much lower than previously anticipated, and nothing we can’t handle. The only bad news is that the northeast side of the storm, where we’ll now be, will have a lot of tornadic activity. No problem for us in the apartment building, but it puts the house at risk.

[Sunday-afternoon update]

Almost 5 PM EDT, and the winds are continuing to increase. We just lost power, most likely for the duration, until crew can start repairing after the storm. We’ll start to move accumulated ice from the freezer to the fridge.

Administrative, Business, Technology and Society

Email Disaster

6 Comments

Evolution is running like molasses, chewing up CPU, apparently because it’s choking on half a million emails in my “Junk” folder. And I can’t clean them out because, you know, half a million messages in my Junk folder. I’ve tried loading the folder into a browser tab in roundcube, but it can’t open it either. Any ideas how to go in on the server directly and clean things up there? vi would be a nightmare.

Administrative, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Tripling Down On Stupid

48 Comments

OK, we have a regular commenter, probably the most prolific one (note that this is not a quantity with a quality all its own), who thinks that the Republicans would like to replace Trump with Hillary.

No, don’t laugh, he apparently really thinks this:

In about a femto-second the left would choose a new primary target so we could all suddenly realize how stupid and evil that person is. It would not be Pence because a tie breaking vote is not much real power. The GOP would try to enact law to retroactively make Hillary president so they can return to their safe space where nothing positive is actually accomplished.

So I responded:

Ken, even if that were legally possible, it would be politically impossible, and very few Republicans would have any desire to do it. That’s just stupid.

If you seriously believe that any Republican wants Hillary (as opposed to Not Trump) as president, you’re insane. The only reason any Republican supported Hillary last year was because she was the only serious alternative at the time. Every Republican would be perfectly happy to replace Trump with Pence. [Emphasis added for future reference]

Now note his response:

Many said they voted for Hillary. They could have just not voted. Bush voted for Hillary (and we wonder why the country moves left regardless of elections.)

That’s it. No recognition whatsoever of my emphasized words above. He is fantasizing that because they voted for Hillary a year ago, they want her to be president now, and would prefer that to a President Pence. He offers no sane rationale for this fantasy, but there we go.

There’s a lot more nuttiness over there if you want to wade through it, but it gets really great here:

You seem to be presuming Pence would get the vote of every Republican over Hillary. This is you asserting your faith because there is no logic based on any fact that provably reaches that conclusion.

About the only related fact we have is that some Republicans did vote for Hillary when some conditions existed. Neither you nor I know if Pence being the alternative would not be such a condition for every Republican.

I am not presuming that Pence would get the vote of every Republican over Hillary, and it is not necessary for me to assume that. I am assuming, because I didn’t chow down on lead paint chips when I was kid, that there is an insufficient number of Republicans who would prefer Hillary to Pence for this to occur. I think any assumption other than that is insane.

Set aside the fact that neither he, or anyone else has responded to my challenge to name a single Republican who would prefer a President Hillary to a President Pence. He doesn’t even posit a Constitutionally plausible mechanism by which this could occur, even if it had (and again, this would be insane) majority Republican support. All he says is that “The GOP would try to enact law to retroactively make Hillary president.” It betrays an utter ignorance of how our government works. Congress has no power to simply remove a president, bypass the existing vice president, and name someone else president.

Is he saying that they’ll impeach and remove both Trump and Pence? Really? Then Orrin HatchPaul Ryan is president. Will Orrin Hatch Paul Ryan nominate Hillary to be Vice President? Really? And a majority of the House will go along with that? Really? And then he’ll resign, or they’ll impeach and remove him so they can get their precious President Hillary? Really?

No, this is just anti-anti-Trump derangement. And I wish I didn’t have to waste time responding to blithering idiocy like this in my comments section. But I guess the only way to avoid it is to either ignore it, and let it continue to clog it up, because he clearly has no more self control than his Lord and Savior Trump to stop doing it, or to ban him.

[Late Monday-night update]

Part of the purpose of this post was to ferret out other loons in my comments section. It seems to have succeeded. Also note that Ken is now saying, “Oh, I didn’t mean it, I was just joking,” after repeated defenses of his original idiocy.

Sorry, no.

The worst thing about Trump is arguing with morons who support him, even when I compliment him on the rare good things he does, like tonight’s speech (which obviously someone else wrote, but with his input, to make sure he had the right 3rd-grade words in it, like “horrible”).

[Monday-afternoon update]

OK, so there are still some people operating under the delusion that there exist Republicans today, who would, if they could, remove Trump and replace him with Hillary, in preference to Mike Pence.

The “logic” (such as it is, but it isn’t) seems to be:

a) Some Republicans voted for Hillary over Trump last year
b) Republicans cannot be trusted

Therefore, they will replace him with her at the first opportunity.

Folks, this is what is called a “broken syllogism.” It has two premises, both of which are true, and yet the conclusion in no way follows from them. It is a leap of logic that puts Evil Knievel’s attempted jump of the Snake River Canyon to shame. It makes as much (and as little) sense as “Roses are red, violets are blue, and therefore my chicken is unable to lay eggs.”

I personally know some conservatives who voted for Hillary. For instance, I’m pretty sure that Bob Zubrin did. They were (and in some cases remain) “Never Trumpers.”

Why did they do this? Was it because they preferred her policy positions? Or her picks for the Supreme Court? Or that they didn’t believe all the stories about how corrupt she was?

No.

They did it because, as awful a president as they expected her to be, they thought that Trump would be even worse. They did it not as an affirmative vote for Hillary, but as the only effective way to vote against Trump. Ken wrote “they could have not voted.” Yes, they could. They could have also howled at the moon. But neither of those things would have done anything to reduce the chances of a Trump presidency in the way that voting for Hillary Clinton would.

Now you can disagree with their assessment, and in fact I do. I felt physically relieved that she lost, but I recognize that the last election presented us with the most awful presidential choice in our lifetime, and I’m not going criticize them for that decision at that time.

But the other thing I’m not going to do (unlike, apparently some here) is to fantasize that they’re idiotic enough to actively want Hillary to be president, either then or now (as opposed to Trump not being president). They weren’t voting for Hillary, they were voting for the only Not Trump available at the time. That was then, this is now, and the best Not Trump option is Mike Pence. The second, third, fourth, fifth…ten millionth next best option is any (actual, as opposed to Trump) Republican. This was, in fact, one of the reasons that I preferred him over her, because he was potentially removable, and she never would have been. As I’ve repeatedly said, the notion that there are any prominent Republicans, let alone a significantly large number of them that would, if they could, replace him with her today, is utterly deranged.

But my challenge stands. Name one.