Reality

Make America Grow A-pair


It’s too late to create a Cancel Culture Bingo Card; they shut down the Senior Citizens Center a year ago. And Cuomo shut down the senior citizens, permanently.

“They can have my Green Eggs when they pry it from my cold, dead Hams.”

Honestly, I have trouble telling the Marxists and the Toddlers apart these days.

“When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have The Cat In The Hat.”

The only thing Heinlein got wrong in “If this goes on…” was the name of the religion that would destroy freedom in America.

"I'm sorry, did you need that?"


How Disney destroyed Star Wars, catfight edition.

Quisling Revelry


You can take the boy out of the Soviet…

…but you can’t take the Soviet out of the boy. Ilya Somin offers “helpful” “advice” on making shampeachment 2 “bi-partisan”.

Bi-Partisan: involving two sets of quislings.

On that note, the only constitutional remedies from a successful impeachment are to remove Trump from office (which McConnell has refused to schedule), and/or prevent him from holding office ever again.

If the people involved are even slightly brighter than the rocks from under which they crawled, they know this, and they’re proceeding anyway, after he’s out of office. Which means that they are either legitimately terrified that he could once again be elected to national office, or they are attempting to utterly destroy him as an example, so that never again will they have to face opposition that is Not Our Kind, Dear.

Or both.

With Apologies to T.S. Eliot

Impeachment of Trump’s not a serious matter,
  It’s really just one of those Democrat games.
You may think Pelosi as mad as a hatter,
  Pursuing D. Trump to the END OF HIS DAYS.

Proposition!

“I’ll concede that Biden legitimately won the election if you spend six months mucking out stables with your tongue. That way we’ll both have the taste of horseshit in our mouths.”

The week the masks came off


Remember when The Volokh conspiracy was vaguely libertarian? Ilya Somin doesn’t. Pro tip: when you find yourself arguing against due process, and claiming that the facts are so clear and indisputable that you don’t even need a show trial, you are an enemy of Western Civilization.

Reconciliation...


  1. The SolarWinds breach allowed Russian hackers to vigorously penetrate the US government.

  2. Most Secure Election Ever.

Unconscious Minecraft


Microsoft’s 2020 “Hour Of Code” considered harmful. By anyone sane:

…the accompanying Educator Guide suggests opening the 45-minute coding lesson (using Blocks or Python) with a 10-minute discussion of unconscious and conscious bias, including “prejudice based on race, ethnicity, age, gender, gender identity, physical ability, religion, and body weight.”

So, 45 minutes isn’t an “hour”, and 10 of those are wasted on deranged Leftist pap. Why not just call it “35 Minutes Of Instantly-Forgotten Pre-Digested Code Templates”? The teachers already have scripts for the propaganda, and will eagerly spend more than 10 minutes on it.

"Say hello to the 21st century"


The last time I had to go through a new-hire process was at the beginning of 2007, at a startup that didn’t quite fit in two large rooms. The onboarding process was basically “oh, you’re here; good thing you already know half the company from working with them six months ago”.

This week is a bit more involved, in a good way. Even without the aggressive use of online services to work around all the Corona-induced issues, it’s clear that the new company has invested the time and money to get people onboard and up to speed well.

I’m spending a crapload of time on Zoom, but my time isn’t being wasted. Instead, I’m seeing a lot of things being done right that we had to half-ass at the other place, because nobody had the free cycles or the management support to expand on solutions. There’s automation I set up in 2007 that’s still running basically unchanged, because that’s-good-enough-now-here’s-another-hat-to-wear.

Seriously, there’s a script I wrote in the middle of our first building move to let the rest of build team quickly handle config updates for physical and virtual machines, with the obvious name QUICK. It gained features and safeguards over the years, but deep down, the central pillar of corporate IT remains a weekend hack, running on ancient hardware with an obsolete version of CentOS. (technically there’s only one piece of it that couldn’t be migrated to a current OS on a VMware virtual, but that had to be kept alive as long as there were still Windows 7 machines in the company) (and the last attempt to do a P2V conversion before I left failed)

Yesterday afternoon, I was shown a self-service web portal that made my old script look like, well, the weekend hack that it was. It’s like they started in the same place, and then it became someone’s job to keep making it better. With funding and management support.

I was also shown a nice tool that looks quite a bit like something I proposed a while back, that got shot down because it would have disrupted The Way Things Have Always Worked. Which was the entire point. Because The Old Way was a compliance/audit nightmare.

(classical reference)

Wildfire update


The SCU Complex and CZU Complex fires continue to threaten Silicon Valley from both sides, but while the evacuation zones have advanced, they still haven’t crossed 101 or 280 yet, and the fires were not visible from 101 when I drove up to San Jose yesterday (needed to show ID to prove I’m legally eligible for employment; the company’s using a remote service, but their location in Salinas was booked past my start date).

On the way home, I stopped off in Morgan Hill for Boar’s Head lunchmeat and a car wash, and not only was the car still clean today (apart from the paw-prints), late this afternoon the air quality index was back to a safe-and-healthy 25, so I was able to open up all the windows and air the place out.

According to AirNow, the sensor nearest to my house peaked at just over 200 on Saturday, but is down to 8 right now. By comparison, Mountain View was over 150 today, and is currently down to 62.

“Need a clue, take a clue,
 got a clue, leave a clue”