The organisation known as PETA is more properly People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (not, as I learned today, People Eating Tasty Animals).
PETA is also another word for crazy - witness their latest insanity:
PETA Says Eating Cheese is Sexist (no link for them - search it yourself)
Monday, 26 March 2018
And eight months later...
Is this thing on?
It's really been eight months since I posted last? Talk about slacking.
I've been REALLY busy! Well, kind of busy. Would you believe moderately occupied?
So many things to do, so little time. Splitting time between house renovations, car projects, competitive shooting, and computers sees little time for much else.
Just when I thought I was getting on top of things, I lost a couple of critical servers, and spent a lot of time rebuilding machines and recovering data. I was running semi-professional systems, RAID disk and all, but decided that replacing the broken systems with real data-center stuff would be a good idea - this wasn't the first time that the semi-pro stuff had let me down.
I picked up a couple of older IBM servers - rack-mount, redundant power, redundant memory, redundant disks, the lot - and migrated everything to freshly installed (and licensed) Windows server 2012, then I picked up a couple more identical servers, and migrated all the other stuff (Linux web stuff, and VMWare mainly). So now the house reverberates to the keening sound of MANY cooling fans, and nobody can sleep, so another project gets started to build a dedicated, sound-proofed, and temperature and humidity controlled server enclosure.
Oh well, at least I taught myself to weld.
Of course all those cooling fans, and power supplies, and disk drives means a spike in the power bill. Solar panels here we come! If only batteries were cheaper.
Funny thing is, the Oz government offers rebates (in the form of traded RECs - Renewable Energy Certificates) that have seen the price of household solar systems not change at all. Before the implementation of the REC system, a 5 kW system cost about AUD$8,000 - immediately after implementation the price was AUD$8,000. Subsequent price drops have all come from improved yields on panel manufacture, improved technology, and economies of scale.
Stupidly the effective maximum allowable capacity of a domestic, grid-connected solar system is 5kW. That's not what the law actually says - it states that the maximum difference in generation capacity between phases is 5 kW - but nobody ever said that the electrical trades draw the best and brightest. Even more stupidly, it is illegal for a solar system to generate power if the grid is down. If the system is NOT connected to the grid, all bets are off, and capacity is dependent on the depth of your pockets. Which brings me back to the ridiculously high cost of batteries. If they were cheaper, I'd go totally off-grid, but to do that would take four (or maybe five) Tesla Storage Wall batteries, and a larger panel farm to feed them. Even then gloomy winter days would see me running the numbers to decide what to shut down. Oh well, first world problems.
Back to more enjoyable subjects, I spent a few weeks thrashing on one of the car projects, and then drove 700 km to a seaside resort for a week. Foolish maybe, as I didn't get everything on the list done, and only had a day and a half of testing before departure, but the car performed almost perfectly. Only minor issues with a slight tyre rub (from larger wheels and tyres than stock), and a broken ABS sensor wire. Trivial really. The outbound trip was sedate - long weekend, so double demerit points applied - but the home-bound trip was a little faster, as my confidence in the work that I had done increased, and also the police presence on the roads was a little thinner.
Did you know that a four-speed auto equipped V8 will change to SECOND gear at 90 kph if you stand on the throttle? Which of course I would not have done if I hadn't encountered a road user who thought it was funny to do 30 kph less than the speed limit where I couldn't pass, then speed up to 5 kph OVER the limit when passing was possible. I dropped in behind him, and he slowed to 30 under again. Hence, the firm prod of the right foot. The speed warning device in the passenger seat went off at 170, but somehow couldn't detect that I slowed to 140 instead of all the way back top the 110 limit. Oh well.
Enough for now.
It's really been eight months since I posted last? Talk about slacking.
I've been REALLY busy! Well, kind of busy. Would you believe moderately occupied?
So many things to do, so little time. Splitting time between house renovations, car projects, competitive shooting, and computers sees little time for much else.
Just when I thought I was getting on top of things, I lost a couple of critical servers, and spent a lot of time rebuilding machines and recovering data. I was running semi-professional systems, RAID disk and all, but decided that replacing the broken systems with real data-center stuff would be a good idea - this wasn't the first time that the semi-pro stuff had let me down.
I picked up a couple of older IBM servers - rack-mount, redundant power, redundant memory, redundant disks, the lot - and migrated everything to freshly installed (and licensed) Windows server 2012, then I picked up a couple more identical servers, and migrated all the other stuff (Linux web stuff, and VMWare mainly). So now the house reverberates to the keening sound of MANY cooling fans, and nobody can sleep, so another project gets started to build a dedicated, sound-proofed, and temperature and humidity controlled server enclosure.
Oh well, at least I taught myself to weld.
Of course all those cooling fans, and power supplies, and disk drives means a spike in the power bill. Solar panels here we come! If only batteries were cheaper.
Funny thing is, the Oz government offers rebates (in the form of traded RECs - Renewable Energy Certificates) that have seen the price of household solar systems not change at all. Before the implementation of the REC system, a 5 kW system cost about AUD$8,000 - immediately after implementation the price was AUD$8,000. Subsequent price drops have all come from improved yields on panel manufacture, improved technology, and economies of scale.
Stupidly the effective maximum allowable capacity of a domestic, grid-connected solar system is 5kW. That's not what the law actually says - it states that the maximum difference in generation capacity between phases is 5 kW - but nobody ever said that the electrical trades draw the best and brightest. Even more stupidly, it is illegal for a solar system to generate power if the grid is down. If the system is NOT connected to the grid, all bets are off, and capacity is dependent on the depth of your pockets. Which brings me back to the ridiculously high cost of batteries. If they were cheaper, I'd go totally off-grid, but to do that would take four (or maybe five) Tesla Storage Wall batteries, and a larger panel farm to feed them. Even then gloomy winter days would see me running the numbers to decide what to shut down. Oh well, first world problems.
Back to more enjoyable subjects, I spent a few weeks thrashing on one of the car projects, and then drove 700 km to a seaside resort for a week. Foolish maybe, as I didn't get everything on the list done, and only had a day and a half of testing before departure, but the car performed almost perfectly. Only minor issues with a slight tyre rub (from larger wheels and tyres than stock), and a broken ABS sensor wire. Trivial really. The outbound trip was sedate - long weekend, so double demerit points applied - but the home-bound trip was a little faster, as my confidence in the work that I had done increased, and also the police presence on the roads was a little thinner.
Did you know that a four-speed auto equipped V8 will change to SECOND gear at 90 kph if you stand on the throttle? Which of course I would not have done if I hadn't encountered a road user who thought it was funny to do 30 kph less than the speed limit where I couldn't pass, then speed up to 5 kph OVER the limit when passing was possible. I dropped in behind him, and he slowed to 30 under again. Hence, the firm prod of the right foot. The speed warning device in the passenger seat went off at 170, but somehow couldn't detect that I slowed to 140 instead of all the way back top the 110 limit. Oh well.
Enough for now.
Monday, 7 August 2017
The world has gone crazy ... Part 92,895,444
Reading the news feeds this morning, and I see a report that there has been a blackout or two in India - affecting 310 million people in one instance, and 670 million in the other.
Remembering the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect, I wonder just how, exactly, were those two figures determined, but regardless, let us assume the figures are accurate.
The latest figures that I found in a quick search state that (according to Google) India has a population of 1.324 billion, so that means roughly half of the ENTIRE country lost electricity.
Which raised the question - How much of India HAS electricity in the first place?
According to Wikipedia, 300 million Indians have NO access to electricity, so roughly 1 billion people have some form of electricity supply. Other sources claim that rural supply is intermittent and unreliable.
So that HALF losing power becomes closer to TWO-THIRDS - of the whole country.
Does anyone really believe that scale of outage can be caused by anything but deliberate, malicious action?
... and who in their right mind would interconnect and expose SCADA (System Control And Data Acquisition) systems so closely as to allow malicious action to propagate so far?
Remembering the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect, I wonder just how, exactly, were those two figures determined, but regardless, let us assume the figures are accurate.
The latest figures that I found in a quick search state that (according to Google) India has a population of 1.324 billion, so that means roughly half of the ENTIRE country lost electricity.
Which raised the question - How much of India HAS electricity in the first place?
According to Wikipedia, 300 million Indians have NO access to electricity, so roughly 1 billion people have some form of electricity supply. Other sources claim that rural supply is intermittent and unreliable.
So that HALF losing power becomes closer to TWO-THIRDS - of the whole country.
Does anyone really believe that scale of outage can be caused by anything but deliberate, malicious action?
... and who in their right mind would interconnect and expose SCADA (System Control And Data Acquisition) systems so closely as to allow malicious action to propagate so far?
Wednesday, 7 October 2015
Even Sisyphean Tasks Still Need Doing
The Starfish Story…
A young man is walking along the beach after a storm, and sees thousands and thousands of starfish have been washed ashore.
Further along he sees an old man, walking slowly and stooping often, picking up one starfish after another and tossing each one gently into the ocean.
“Why are you throwing starfish into the ocean?,” he asks.
“Because the sun is up and the tide is going out and if I don’t throw them further in they will die.”
“But, old man, don’t you realize there are miles and miles of beach and starfish all along it!
You can’t possibly save them all, you can’t even save one-tenth of them. In fact, even if you work all day, your efforts won’t make any difference at all.”
The old man listened calmly and then bent down to pick up another starfish and threw it into the sea. “It made a difference to that one."
h/t Matt G via OldNFO
A young man is walking along the beach after a storm, and sees thousands and thousands of starfish have been washed ashore.
Further along he sees an old man, walking slowly and stooping often, picking up one starfish after another and tossing each one gently into the ocean.
“Why are you throwing starfish into the ocean?,” he asks.
“Because the sun is up and the tide is going out and if I don’t throw them further in they will die.”
“But, old man, don’t you realize there are miles and miles of beach and starfish all along it!
You can’t possibly save them all, you can’t even save one-tenth of them. In fact, even if you work all day, your efforts won’t make any difference at all.”
The old man listened calmly and then bent down to pick up another starfish and threw it into the sea. “It made a difference to that one."
h/t Matt G via OldNFO
Sunday, 4 October 2015
What would happen if ...
I drove to the range this morning at a sedate pace, obeying all the road rules, and intently monitoring my surroundings.
It wasn't due to a hangover after drowning my sorrows at the big game results.
It wasn't a response to the shooting by the Iranian teenager in Melbourne.
It wasn't because of a significant traffic police presence.
It was due to a "what if ..."
You see, I had committed to shooting both revolver AND semi-auto in the weekly competition, and intended to test some new ammunition in a couple of rifles. This meant I was carrying enough firearms and ammunition to start a small war. Well, would you believe a nasty tribal conflict? How about a street gang turf war?
In addition to this, I had plans to start a homebrew of ginger beer after the shooting, so I had a couple of plastic containers of a crystalline, whitish powder (raw sugar), and some chemicals (steriliser, de-chlorinator) on the back seat.
I was wondering, "What if I were to be stopped for a traffic infringement? How long would it be before I got out?"
It wasn't due to a hangover after drowning my sorrows at the big game results.
It wasn't a response to the shooting by the Iranian teenager in Melbourne.
It wasn't because of a significant traffic police presence.
It was due to a "what if ..."
You see, I had committed to shooting both revolver AND semi-auto in the weekly competition, and intended to test some new ammunition in a couple of rifles. This meant I was carrying enough firearms and ammunition to start a small war. Well, would you believe a nasty tribal conflict? How about a street gang turf war?
In addition to this, I had plans to start a homebrew of ginger beer after the shooting, so I had a couple of plastic containers of a crystalline, whitish powder (raw sugar), and some chemicals (steriliser, de-chlorinator) on the back seat.
I was wondering, "What if I were to be stopped for a traffic infringement? How long would it be before I got out?"
Friday, 2 October 2015
Offspring
I don't go out of my way to identify myself in cyberspace. Even with the limited information available, it would not be all that hard to find out who I am in meatspace, but I don't make it trivially easy.
That makes it somewhat difficult to brag about my children - if I identify them, and admit the paternity, then identifying me is absurdly easy. Do I care all that much? Not really, but why make life simple for the thought police? These days, just having an opposing opinion can be viewed askance, and make problems that I don't need.
So, I wrote all that to explain why what follows is mostly obscure reference, rather than direct links and quotes.
My daughter is a dancer. I think that she is a very GOOD dancer, but she is not ONLY a dancer. She is also blonde, but she is most definitely NOT the archetypal "dumb blonde" - being among the best high school students in the state doesn't happen by lottery (yet).
Having performed with a number of dance companies in the state, she has finally hit the big screen! The big screen at the Cultural Centre, that is, with a solo dance piece that she helped create being screened multiple times over several weeks.
They say that pride is a sin, but I don't care - daughter of mine, I am proud of you and your achievements. Forgive me for not making it possible to easily identify you.
That makes it somewhat difficult to brag about my children - if I identify them, and admit the paternity, then identifying me is absurdly easy. Do I care all that much? Not really, but why make life simple for the thought police? These days, just having an opposing opinion can be viewed askance, and make problems that I don't need.
So, I wrote all that to explain why what follows is mostly obscure reference, rather than direct links and quotes.
My daughter is a dancer. I think that she is a very GOOD dancer, but she is not ONLY a dancer. She is also blonde, but she is most definitely NOT the archetypal "dumb blonde" - being among the best high school students in the state doesn't happen by lottery (yet).
Having performed with a number of dance companies in the state, she has finally hit the big screen! The big screen at the Cultural Centre, that is, with a solo dance piece that she helped create being screened multiple times over several weeks.
They say that pride is a sin, but I don't care - daughter of mine, I am proud of you and your achievements. Forgive me for not making it possible to easily identify you.
You can't choose your family ...
I had an ... interesting ... conversation with my cousin (female, mid-thirties - the French have gendered nouns, why can't we?) yesterday.
She was raving about the Australian government now forcing people to work until they are 70, and bemoaning how unfair that was.
Sadly, I am all out of fucks to give, and it was annoying as shit, so I just HAD to correct her, somewhat forcefully.
1. The government is not forcing anybody to work until age 70 - they are removing the financial support that sees people receive OPM (Other People's Money aka "the age pension") once they turn 65.
2. There is NO LAW that mandates ANY retirement age - if you have enough resources to live on, then don't work. It's your choice. The statutes only talk about how old you must be to qualify for certain benefits (paid for with OPM).
Sure there are clauses in various superannuation policies that say you can't take out your money until you reach a certain age (barring certain extenuating circumstances), and these are there to comply with Australian law, but if you have other ways of supporting yourself, there is no compulsion to work.
3. If it comes to either working until 70 or starving, then whose fault is that? Nobody else but you made those choices (overseas holidays, new cars, having children, drinking, smoking - all when you couldn't afford it) and fuck it, you can live with the consequences. Or not, I don't care.
4. Just because you are a fool when it comes to money is no reason to transfer OPM to you, EVER. Maybe the next generation will see your stupidity and learn something. Or not, I don't care.
Of course, this attitude makes me heartless in her eyes; it's FOR THE CHILDREN!!!!
5. What is more heartless, seeing fools (and their children) face the consequences of their own willful stupidity, or taking money from ME (who made mostly smart choices), that would otherwise have gone to making things better for MY children?
I swear, the more I see of the effects of the welfare state, the more I want to see it burn to the ground so the survivors can start over.
Now piss off, I need to reload.
She was raving about the Australian government now forcing people to work until they are 70, and bemoaning how unfair that was.
Sadly, I am all out of fucks to give, and it was annoying as shit, so I just HAD to correct her, somewhat forcefully.
1. The government is not forcing anybody to work until age 70 - they are removing the financial support that sees people receive OPM (Other People's Money aka "the age pension") once they turn 65.
2. There is NO LAW that mandates ANY retirement age - if you have enough resources to live on, then don't work. It's your choice. The statutes only talk about how old you must be to qualify for certain benefits (paid for with OPM).
Sure there are clauses in various superannuation policies that say you can't take out your money until you reach a certain age (barring certain extenuating circumstances), and these are there to comply with Australian law, but if you have other ways of supporting yourself, there is no compulsion to work.
3. If it comes to either working until 70 or starving, then whose fault is that? Nobody else but you made those choices (overseas holidays, new cars, having children, drinking, smoking - all when you couldn't afford it) and fuck it, you can live with the consequences. Or not, I don't care.
4. Just because you are a fool when it comes to money is no reason to transfer OPM to you, EVER. Maybe the next generation will see your stupidity and learn something. Or not, I don't care.
Of course, this attitude makes me heartless in her eyes; it's FOR THE CHILDREN!!!!
5. What is more heartless, seeing fools (and their children) face the consequences of their own willful stupidity, or taking money from ME (who made mostly smart choices), that would otherwise have gone to making things better for MY children?
I swear, the more I see of the effects of the welfare state, the more I want to see it burn to the ground so the survivors can start over.
Now piss off, I need to reload.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)