I don’t think this one’s been written yet…

“Reborn in another world as a tentacle monster, I defy hentai stereotypes by living a quiet life as a potato farmer, rebuffing the unwelcome advances of every kind of horny otaku waifu.”

User workarounds for Apple’s failures

• hosed Catalina

• hosed Mojave

Oh, look, now iCloud’s down!

Apple’s really having a great week. Looks like all iCloud services went offline around 4:45 PM PDT.

Can I at least parry?

(sorry about that…)

Microsoft Loops

I bought the new, well-reviewed Flight Simulator, because it was half-price thanks to my old MS Alumni discount. If you’ve paid any attention to this launch, you know that someone thought it was a great idea to make the downloader play a short music clip, over and over and over while it downloads more than 100 GB of data. Even in the background. Even minimized. Fortunately you can use the mixer to silence a single app, so I was able to sleepwalk through the Diablo 3 campaign while FS downloaded the world (because I’d only finished it on seasonal characters from a now-closed season, so the progress didn’t count when they became “normal” characters).

On the bright side, at least their QA only missed something annoying, unlike Apple’s spectacular screwups with their latest Watch and Mac OS releases. (no comment about the massive Azure auth & Office outage yesterday… 😁)

A few years ago, someone acquainted with the relevant VP tried to share the spin he’d received from his friend about how well QA is handled at Apple. He simply wasn’t technical enough for me to explain how everything he was parroting was a bad idea. Honestly, I think the real reason they’ve moving the Mac to ARM is that they ran out of disposable 23-year-olds who know what the words “CPU architecture” mean.

Amazon Filing System

Using urban fantasy novels to navigate the real world generally doesn’t work out particularly well…

Toothpicks at Dawn

This is the sort of home decor that gets you banned from air travel.

🎶 There’s a ringin’ in your brain…

(classical reference (sadly-censored radio version))

None Shall Pass

Pro tip: when your SSL-enabled LDAP query throws a java.security.NoSuchAlgorithmException error, make sure that your cacerts file isn’t completely empty. It’s always fun when an application startup error turns out to have been accidentally caused weeks ago, making it difficult to find the culprit.

Make Epic RPGs

So, the trailer for RPG Maker MV on Steam is narrated by Epic Voice Guy. I suppose that makes it an Honest Trailer. This is old news, but I only noticed it because MV is steeply discounted right now (both on Steam and Humble Bundle).

Watch that cart!

When I placed this Anker Thunderbolt 3 dock into my cart a few weeks back, it was $320 with Prime shipping. When I went to buy my cart today, I noticed that they’d selected Woot as the dealer for it. That seemed odd, so I went back to the product listing and discovered it was available for $250 with Prime from AnkerDirect. And there was a $20 instant coupon available.

So, um, yeah, I’ll take the $90 discount with no warranty issues, thanks.

Why a new Thunderbolt-3 dock? Because I’m replacing my 12-inch MacBook and its sole USB-C port with a new MacBook Air and its dual Thunderbolt-3 ports. This will likely be my last Mac, between the upcoming ARM shift and the fact that Catalina is about to be replaced while still in beta (most of my old environment will be migrated into a VMware image, so I have a stable OS that still runs 32-bit apps).

Work supplied a 16-inch MacBook Pro, so I don’t need a powerhouse Mac, just something portable that has a non-terrible keyboard. And I’ve got enough time left on the MacBook’s AppleCare that by the time I’m fully off of it, I’ll still be eligible for a keyboard replacement before giving it a new home, if necessary.

I came this close to buying an Asus ZenBook Pro Duo with a 10th-gen Core i9, 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD, but decided to hold off on upgrading the Windows side of the house until sometime next year. It is still 2020, after all, and I might need that money for whatever comes next.

Inspired by my purchases, you say?

I purchased a branded item as a gift, and now they think I drink the stuff straight.

One of these things is not like the others…

I’d been wondering what all those vaguely key-shaped items were that have been popping up online, and they turn out to be the latest in fear-of-doorknobs technology. The one-hitter hash pipe is apparently also used to relieve virus-based anxiety.

How about them apples?

Emacs should never refuse to start

Especially with an error like this:

Error in GnuTLS initialization: ASN1 parser: Generic parsing error.
Segmentation fault: 11

Come on, guys, it’s a text editor.

(fresh install of Emacs 27.1 via Homebrew on a machine that’s not crufted up with years of old software; literally the only Google hit for this error message is for Emacs 25.1 from four years ago on Debian GLU/Ninix)

One is never enough

I’m kind of glad Amazon can’t sell cars yet, because the moment you ordered a Toyota Corolla, you’d see:

• Trending deals: BMW i3, Chevy Silverado, and Fiat Spider

• Brands you’ve shopped with before: a Yaris, a Tacoma, and three Prius (Prii?)

• Recommended items other customers often buy again: Mercedes S-Class

• Inspired by your purchases: Kia Soul

• Inspired by your shopping trends: Lexus GS

• Books you may like: 1973 Dodge Dart owner’s manual

• Recommended For You: “Buy it again in Cars” tile

How much to call me Ishmael?

One of the many Star Trek novels that were better-written than any generation of the shows, Barbara Hambly’s Ishmael was on sale for $0.99 for Kindle. A relatively small number of the usual OCR typos (“doom” instead of “Cloom”, etc) failed to mar the reading experience.

The problems with the Kindle edition of John M. Ford’s brilliant How Much for Just the Planet, also $0.99, were mostly with failure to add white space between the frequent PoV changes, causing the reader to resync at annoying intervals

🎶 If ya liked it then ya shoulda put a steak in it

Not dead, not sick, still getting used to having a job again, especially the multiple daily Corona-induced Zoom meetings. On the bright side, the first check paid all my bills for the month, and that’s with a substantial 401K contribution. The next one will be smaller due to the ESPP contribution, but still quite healthy.

The Adventures of Pluto Nash

This showed up as something to stream on STARZ, and I remembered only two things from seeing it ~17 years ago: Rosario Dawson and the Big Reveal. Okay, three things: it’s cheesy as hell. To my surprise, I actually enjoyed watching it, largely due to it being one of Eddie Murphy’s more restrained roles. Also, Rosario Dawson.

Gatling

Most of the past week was spent building up a decent load test for our Jira cluster using Gatling. Easy to install, easy to set up basic recordings, heavily documented in slightly-awkward English, almost no online examples of how to really build useful scenarios.

For instance, Atlassian recommends it as a testing tool, but has nothing on how to use it with their products. Honestly, the most useful example I found was a screenshot embedded in a years-old presentation on Youtube. It was a bit fuzzy, but it cleared up a lot.

The recording functionality works great for capturing the info you need and replaying it multiple times to generate background load, but is so full of cruft that I gave up trying to scrub the 5,000+ lines, and extracted about a dozen that were useful.

I ended up with roughly 100 lines of code for a test that scales up to ~180 simultaneous users logging in and each browsing 50 random Jira issues selected from a CSV file, with small random delays between requests. Aiming that at a test instance pounded it just hard enough that 9 requests out of 28,000 timed out and failed, while interactive use from a browser was obviously impacted but still functional. The output is quite readable and useful (including things like finding particular issues that render very slowly even without load).

I worked a bit with Selenium way back when, and this was a much more pleasant experience. Except the looking-for-useful-examples part.

(ordinarily I’d end a rant about “no examples online” with a clear, commented one, but I need to double-check the various documents I docusigned about “code written on company time”…)

Supreme Court Follies

I have never previously mentioned Ruth Bader Ginsburg on this blog. It seems odd to do so now that she’s passed, so I will merely wish her family and friends well, and say that the timing of this sad event just made 2020 even crazier.

Further comment on that deferred for a few days.

Unicorn Chaser: Eri Tokita

“I pledge allegiance, to the flag, …”

(more here and here, sites obviously NSFW)

Unrelated

I am in the process of migrating my pantry storage from Oxo POP containers to Neoflam Smart Seal. I first spotted these at Safeway and tried one out, then bought some more online. I like the twist-seal better than Oxo’s push-button, which doesn’t seal as well and can pop up as you’re moving things around in the pantry. Neoflam bonus: people unfamiliar with your kitchen won’t just try to pull the lid off without releasing the seal. Also, the lids are much easier to clean.

Ear-cleaning in Japan is apparently not as romantic as anime has led me to believe:

And I have a hunch that these don’t look as good in reality as claimed:

These seem more practical and attractive:

…assuming your phone still has a headphone jack, that is.

Bring It On, Ghost

Korean rom-com series on Netflix, featuring a clean-cut college boy who works part-time as a one-punch exorcist, and the amnesiac high-school-girl ghost who moves in with him. Difficulty: not Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs, so it’s not filled with fan-service shots of the delightful young lead actress (note: she was 17 at time of filming to his 28). He does at least manage to land on top of her in a compromising position, but he lacks Kogarashi’s talent for optimizing hand positioning. Also, not a harem comedy, although Our Hero’s college has a well-furnished eye candy department.

And that is called paying the CoC-geld…

The CoC-blockers are trying to destroy Linux again with another coordinated attack on Linus. This is your daily reminder that “codes of conduct” in open source are not about civility, they are about control.

Zeroslotlan

The Scott Who Comments By Email wins the no-prize: it was Avatar Technologies.

Update

Oh, cool, the River and Carmel fires are officially out. They no longer appear on the LA Times wildfire map.

Afternoon Update

At the present time, my neighborhood is not on fire, and is not predicted to be on fire any time soon. The wildfire that’s south of town is apparently moving further southeast into the mountains. This would be a good day to wear real masks, though, rather than the mandated sneezeguards.

Just Say No

MoveOn just spam-texted me to ask if I’ll be supporting Joe Biden, because (no shit, it really says this) “we deserve real leaders who govern for all of us – not just the wealthy few”.

Related, did anyone ask Billy Porter why he borrowed his DNC wardrobe from the set of The Hunger Games? Is he working on a Broadway musical version of it?

When October Goes

As I continue casting about for things to watch, I tried out Netflix’s October Faction. It’s a one-a-day sort of series that doesn’t binge well, and so far Deloris is the only character I find interesting. Also, while the twins are delivering lines written in comprehensible Japanese, the actors obviously don’t speak it. Their phonetic delivery reminds me a lot of Jack in Asobi Ni Iku Yo!. At least it didn’t remind me of this (Not Safe For Sanity).

This discussion of its non-renewal pretty much nailed it:

“For fans of the monster-of-the-week genre, you can think of it like Supernatural with a more stagnant setting and less charismatic leads.”

This rare moment of clarity doesn’t mean that every other article on Looper isn’t completely full of shit, of course.

Amusing connection: the actress playing mystery gal Alice was on an episode of Forever Knight.

Bullfight of Love

Completely unrelated, I happened to be listening to a mix of the top 100 songs in Japan from 1981, and Ai no Corrida is on it. I’m inclined to think that Quincy Jones kind of missed the point of the original movie.

Amusing note: one of the short pieces we went through in my Japanese group reading class mentioned filmmaker Ōshima and this film, and the teacher realized for the first time that the title included the Spanish word for “bullfight”. Difficulty: she has a PhD in Spanish literature.

By the way, that top-100 list also included Fame and Morning Train. And, yes, City Connection.

Get out of jail free

According to the official daily numbers for my county, fully 25% of jail inmates have tested positive since they started covid-counting, with zero deaths.

Geofail

Engadget’s inline ads continue to think I’m located in Quincy, this time to shill for match.com. Pretty sure I don’t want to drive 300 miles to meet an available woman. Mostly because stories that begin that way often end with “found in shallow grave”. Also, not desperate.

9 to 5

With two weeks left to go before I start the new job, I’m trying to come up with a “workday routine”. It has, after all, been over four months since I had a “work day”.

Since I don’t have actual work to do yet, those portions of the routine will be devoted to things like tearing my home office apart and putting it back together in a way that looks good on Zoom. I believe the large framed photo of Carmen Berg in lingerie would invite unwanted attention from HR, and I should probably keep the sword rack out of sight for at least the first few weeks.

I’m thinking travel posters, Funko Pops, plushies, and the usual pile of obsolete computer hardware should work nicely. Maybe some camera gear.

Wide base to prevent loss

I parsed this image wrong at first. At least, I hope I did.