Surprise Delivery

Yesterday afternoon my doorbell rang twice, but by the time I got there, the person making a contactless delivery of organic fruits and vegetables was long gone. Unfortunately, I didn’t order a 20-pound box of organic fruits and vegetables, and there was no label on the box to indicate who did. A call to the company listed on the box just went to voicemail, and a review of my front-porch cameras showed some old guy in work clothes.

When they called back a few hours later, they explained that this was part of a USDA farmer relief program where they paid farmers and ranchers for produce and distributed it through churches, etc. Her guess was that some neighborhood group picked them up there and dropped one off on my porch. Zooming in on the camera footage of the old guy, I could just make out the word “veteran” on the rim of his baseball cap, which explains that.

I re-gifted it to one of my neighbors who has a large family. Most of it would just go bad before I could eat the parts of it that I’d actually eat.

#3

Since I only got one guess, I’ll go ahead and reveal the answer: the closest I ever got to Harlan Ellison was about 50 feet. All the others were people who showed up at Glamourcon when I was the show photographer. Gene Simmons did a Playboy photo shoot with a bunch of models in Kiss-face, and Verne Troyer did one as Mini-Hef.

Gene was loosely orbiting his wife’s table and shamelessly photobombing anyone trying to get a picture with one of the models. Meanwhile, all the models wanted pictures with Verne, and rather than having them come out from behind their tables, he just went under and joined them on their side. They were quite surprised the first few times he did that.

Hard Cider

Juicy bug in Apple’s current MacOS release, where it leaks a gigabyte an hour if you run virtual machines.

As part of the investigation, it was discovered com.apple.security.sandbox was allocating millions of blocks of memory containing just the text “/dev” and no other data.

Current workaround: don’t run virtualization software, or reboot every few hours. Or don’t install 10.15.6, even though it fixes a serious USB-2 disconnect bug.

Animal Recovery Service

Animal Crossing: New Horizons encourages you to spend hundreds of hours carefully customizing your island, which can’t be backed up or transferred to another device. So instead of supporting the standard Switch cloud save process, they’re adding a special backup-to-cloud service that will allow you to call Nintendo Customer Service to beg for a data restore after theft, loss, or purchase of a new device.

Meanwhile, the Pokémon team is determined to keep fucking you over by not supporting cloud saves, although they at least allow you to (destructively) transfer your data from one Switch to another. Their excuse is that it would enable wholesale duplication of rare mons, which is currently restricted to dozens of web sites and ebay dealers that create anything you want with save-hacking tools and sell them to you, and which advertise in-game with random trades that have their URL as the original trainer name.

Skittleized For Your Protection

I installed the new Windows Terminal. I had to edit a JSON file in order to set it to black text on a white background, in a decent font at a reasonable size. I used Notepad++ for this, after disabling the color syntax highlighting that made the contents of the file unreadable.

Then I installed WSL2, for which the official instructions use several PowerShell incantations and a manual download. That meant I also had to find the incantation (recently updated after a breaking change) to disable the color syntax highlighting that made commands unreadable. And the incantation to make it possible to have a profile.ps1 file that runs on startup, so it won’t be unreadable next time.

Then I installed Ubuntu, and went through the familiar process of disabling the unreadable colorized prompt and unreadable color-coded ls output. (this is completely different from the way you disable it under distros like Alpine, by the way)

Then I discovered that the two black-on-white themes that are pre-configured for Terminal include a light-gray-on-white mapping that less uses to display emphasized text in manpages. Also line numbers if you turn that option on. More JSON editing, this time involving holding the Alt key down while clicking on “Settings” in order to open the other JSON config file.

“How much other Lion functionality depends on guessing that if you wave the rod with the star a crystal bridge will span the chasm?”
     …and this was before Apple went completely nuts

Looks like I’ll have to go outside the MS store for distros other than Ubuntu, though, since I really don’t want to buy the ones built by random guys in China, and there’s no reason to pay for them in the first place.

First thing I tried was Fedora32, which unfortunately was built from a very stripped-down Docker container that made it useless as a general-purpose distro. So I tried someone else’s CentOS 8.2 build, which includes useful things like manpages. I may try rolling my own Fedora at some point, since I have plenty of experience creating small-but-useful kickstart configs.

Next up: overriding the key bindings in Terminal so I can run Emacs. My fingers have very specific expectations for the behavior of Control-X, Control-C, and Control-V.

Dear Netflix

Could you please cut it the fuck out with the autoplay video while I’m trying to decide if anything’s worth watching? Seriously, it often kicks in before I even have time to click to the next show. (Amazon FireTV version of the client, FYI)

The Kanji Police

Scammer posing as detective arrested because he couldn’t write ‘detective’. Or ‘fraud’.

Gathering Momentum

I’ve got several video interviews this week.

Y’know, for a long time I’ve been saying that I just don’t have time for all my hobbies any more, and when I suddenly have months with nothing but time, I discover that many of them involve being able to leave the house and go somewhere. Sigh.

Silent But Deadly

Unannounced and unexpected, Homebrew changed the behavior of brew upgrade to include brew cask upgrade (casks being vendor installers that may include GUI components, require root access to install, require a reboot, etc). This change is not mentioned in the release notes or documentation. Who do they think they are, Apple?

Otaku Of Gor

Those who do not read history are doomed to write isekai novels that repeat it.

With one key difference: for all the (mostly true) complaints about how horribly misogynist the Gor novels were, the core audience was female. The local bookstore clerks who more-or-less adopted me in the late Seventies often laughed about how women would come up to the counter with a Gor novel artfully concealed in the middle of their purchases.

Behind Every Successful Woman…

…is Joe Biden, sniffing her hair.

Mall-be-gone

Late last year, my local mall was finishing up a major renovation that was designed to attract more upscale stores. And it was working, until all those stores were forced to close for nearly three months, invest in expensive sanitation measures to reopen, and then forced to close down again a month later. The lucky few who have their own exterior entrances can do some business, but for the rest, the only good news is that they’re not being looted or burned out. Future lease negotiations are going to be pretty tense, with the property owner desperate to pay off the renovation and the business owners running on fumes.

Like with a cloth

I wiped and reinstalled my Surface Pro 2 last night. It is now approximately 7 zillion times faster. Next up is finally trying out WSL2 and the new Terminal app.

What J’s Watching

I tried to watch Jumanji: The Next Level last night; I’m glad it was free (Starz), because I got bored and walked away. Actually, a lot of the things I’ve tried to watch recently have bored me; this could be a more general problem with the extended lockdown.

On the other hand, I also watched the first episodes of Brand New Animal and Warrior Nun, and I’m at least willing to try another.

Stylish And Full Of Fail

Cop Craft is out on Blu-ray. It’s a bargain at $10; pity it costs $50.

When I initially reviewed this series, I said:

“They’ve got 6 light novels of source material to work with for 12 episodes, so they shouldn’t run out.”

I was so wrong. It starts off solid, and is still pretty good through episode 7, but then it all goes to hell as you realize they’re desperately shredding the story to reach the end of book 6, and they even threw in a clip episode.

I’d like to believe that this was deliberate sabotage by someone instead of complete incompetence by the team. The director’s not a noob, and even the story that replaced book 3 was written by the original novelist, but somewhere in the middle of production, they screwed the pooch. It’s almost certainly tied to the reason that the first 7 episodes were written by the novelist, and the rest by someone else.

Also of note is that book 7, which was supposed to come out while the series was airing, was first delayed, and then completely canceled. Although the final cancellation may have more to do with the author being canceled over his remarks about Scoldilocks.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Ready Player Two is coming out in November. I suppose a sequel was inevitable, but while the book was much better than the movie, it still wasn’t really good.

Cultural Appropriation

This is a little cheesy:

Spot The Lie:

“List 5 famous people you’ve either met or have been within a few feet of, but ONE is a lie. Then let your friends guess which one they think is a lie.”

My answer:

1. Gene Simmons
2. Ron Jeremy
3. Harlan Ellison
4. Hugh Hefner
5. Verne Troyer

Oh, China, never change…

Guess the product:

“Multi-use for everyone, you will love this soft fluffy rug under your feet !”

By WETONG, from YeHow. Pretty much every line is pure gold. Four stars, ~2,400 reviews in just over a year. Competitive products available from Rechishre, BAKHUK, JSDOIN, Ouddy, Bomstar, Ozera, iReaydo, L LEIWEK, and other well-known brands.

Schlock Mercenary has ended

On the one hand, I’m sad because this was a consistently entertaining MilSF webcomic. On the other hand, now I can stop averting my eyes from the cringeworthy tweets in the sidebar. It’s become increasingly difficult to reconcile the two since you-know-when.

Esil is Best Girl

The manwha adaptation of Solo Levelling is long on full-page battle scenes, making it a brisk read. The artist has designed a number of distinctively attractive female characters, but the one who stands out for me is the demon princess/sidekick Esil (에실).

In addition to being cute as a button, she has the guts to intervene in a fight that’s way above her weight class, aiding Our Hero at a critical moment.

Sadly, peeking at spoilers from the original novel, she never shows up again.

False Positives

Dinner last night was a quick stir-fry of onions, bell peppers, Kevin’s Korean BBQ-Style Chicken (sous-vide chicken breast with nearly-sugar-free BBQ sauce), and leftover white rice. As I added the rice and stirred it in, my Apple Watch pinged me, saying that it had detected a workout in progress and wanted to know what type. Sadly, “carbio” wasn’t one of the options.

(I don’t give a damn about Kevin’s products being natural, gluten-free, paleo, minimally processed, no artificial ingredients, with coconut aminos; I care that it’s fully cooked, vacuum packed, low-sugar, available at Costco, and fairly tasty, with enough sauce to coat the veggies and the rice)

False Narratives

Highly-accurate Corona-chan tests will hit the market faster if they don’t have to be highly accurate. Where “highly accurate” is defined as only 20% false negatives, with no mention of false positives…

Reminder: scary stories about rising Corona-chan cases are actually just reporting confirmed positive tests. Not deaths, not ICU admissions, not hospitalizations, not serious illnesses, not necessarily even a bad case of the sniffles. You can see this in the daily reports for my county, where out of the 3,726 confirmed positive tests, there have been only 245 hospitalizations.

Speaking of metadata…

This is because HarperCollins still owns Last Call and is keeping only the Kindle edition in print to keep the rights from reverting to the author, who sold the other two to Baen, which apparently doesn’t have clear ebook rights yet.

Earthquake Weather, by the way, is the single least satisfying Tim Powers novel I’ve read, although this year’s Forced Perspectives comes a close second, and for the same reason: they’re sequels. Last Call and Expiration Date work perfectly fine as standalone novels, but merging them together in EW just didn’t work for me. I don’t want to know “what happens next” at the end of a Powers novel, I want to know “what world’s next”.

Lots of nibbles, not much biting

I never expected my job search to take more than a few weeks, but that’s because I never expected the jaw-dropping imbecility of the political response to the ongoing clusterfuck that is 2020. Silicon Valley HR groups are swamped with applications from laid-off techfolk who don’t have the financial reserves I do and are desperate for work. One thing I’ve noticed in particular is the high percentage of people with Master’s (can we still call it that?) degrees applying for entry-level positions.

I’ve turned down several contract offers, not just because they’re contracts, but because once the lockdowns end, they all revert to “commute to downtown San Francisco”, something I wouldn’t do even if it weren’t a two-hour drive away. Shit-stained sidewalks, violently crazy street people, and unsafe parking garages just don’t hold much appeal for me.

I had a promising call yesterday for an SRE/sysadmin position with a decent company in Mountain View. There’s some 24/7 support involved, but that’s fine if it’s a real rotation with a team, not the 13 years of non-stop on-call that I had at Ooma. Bonus is that they found me; it’s not something that turned up in my LinkedIn searches.

(sometime, there will be a lengthy rant about what a dumpster-fire LinkedIn is)

Afternoon Update

Yesterday’s promising recruiting call was followed up by today’s “let’s schedule the interviews” call. I was standing in Costco wearing a mask at the time, so conversation was a bit difficult, but we exchanged email after I got home.

Check, please!

My last dentist appointment included an item that wasn’t covered by my insurance, and which set me back $500. No problem, says I, I’ll transfer the money from my Health Savings Account. I log in to the credit union, initiate a transfer, and the only method they offer is mailing a live check. Which arrives over a week later, from South Dakota. Unlabeled, resembling common junk mail.

I used to have a debit card for this account that let me just handle this sort of expense directly, but when it expired, they didn’t send out a new one. I think it originally came with a batch of checks, but that was so many years ago that they didn’t turn up when I cleaned my office. I must have put them somewhere “safe”…

Dear Adobe,

Did you just move the Flash team over to Photoshop support, or do all your developers like arbitrary code execution security holes?

Immune To Parody, I Became An Isekai Novel

I was mostly kidding when I dummied up a cover for an isekai series. Then Pete recently linked to a scanlated manga about a loser who gets transported into another world as a walking cheat-code who assembles a harem of eager slave girls. His adventuring party and home entertainment system eventually includes Busty Dog Girl, Cute Dwarf Girl, Cuddly Cat Girl, Giant-Breasted Dragon Girl, and Fallen Noble Elf Girl.

Skimming the translated web-novels, what struck me most is that Our Hero never faces any conflict or setbacks. The dungeon battles that take up most of the text are just the details of the party’s inevitable and painless victory, the author doesn’t write sex scenes, and the world-building is generic and bland.

Sponsored By Idiots

Engadget has started slipping frequent “sponsored” content in between their articles (1:5 ratio), visually distinct and achingly stupid. This was the first one I noticed:

Pretty sure I don’t need an attorney in Quincy, because Quincy is a 300-mile drive from my house. I had to look it up, because I’ve never been anywhere near the Plumas National Forest.

The usual geolocation failure for my IP block puts me somewhere near Berkeley, so these bottom-feeders aren’t even using second-rate data sources.

Dear Publishers

Check your metadata when releasing books on Amazon:

Apple Knows Best

The recent iOS update apparently silently changed update settings. Some of the folks in this discussion seem surprised, but I’ve been double-checking settings after every update for years, because they pull stunts like this all the time. Especially when it comes to enabling iCloud “features”.

Goodbye Outback

The Outback Steakhouse in my town has closed for good, thanks to Benito Newsom’s arbitrary re-closing of restaurants. I saw them painting over the sign yesterday when I was driving to the post office.

There are several lessons to be learned from the Samsung Blu-ray player fiasco, in which pretty much their entire product line turned into a useless pile of e-waste.

1. You don’t know what your Internet-connected appliances are doing, and the manufacturer won’t tell you. Customer service probably doesn’t even know about most of it.

2. The people designing your appliances often don’t think about or thoroughly test boot or update processes.

3. Always mount a scratch monkey.

4. XML makes a terrible config-file format. Ditto YAML and Apple’s Plist format (both of which are just as complex and unforgiving as XML).

When I was at WebTV, every client release meeting included someone who had precise statistics on how many devices were bricked by each previous release, how much it cost to replace them, and the effect on customer churn. This neatly negated the efforts by development and marketing to take shortcuts with QA.

On the service side, we were usually able to just roll back to a previous code or content release within a few minutes of detecting a problem, but there were occasional out-of-band updates, as well as external dependencies. One that bypassed QA one night was an update to the XML config file that controlled ad rotation on the home page. As each ad server retrieved the new file and parsed it, they locked up. When I traced the appropriate process, I saw it spinning in a tight loop trying to parse a comment; someone had manually removed one ad from the rotation. At least, that’s what they thought they’d done, with their limited understanding of XML syntax.

In our case, the code checked for errors, but never got there because it was stuck in an infinite loop; the Samsung startup code simply didn’t check for errors. If the file was syntactically valid, of course it must be semantically valid.

Given the direction that Butcher is taking things, I can see why he had to give up trying to fit it into one book. As is, it’s still bursting at the seams. As expected, however, if you’re not 100% up-to-date on the short stories, there are some things you’ll miss. Like why Carlos is bitter and badly injured.