When installing a system update on one of your NAS products, having it fail with the following message is “less than encouraging”:

Re-downloading the DSM update (6.2.3-25426) and trying again didn’t help.

On the bright side, it’s still up and running.

Unrelated,

Somehow I missed an episode of Good Eats: Reloaded, so I got to watch two back-to-back yesterday: pot roast and oatmeal. I never tried the much-reviled pot roast recipe from the original episode, and Alton would be horrified to discover that I actually like single-serving instant oatmeal.

What stuck out for me was that the reloaded oatmeal recipes (1, 2) are tarted up with those trendiest of grains, quinoa and chia. The reloaded granola recipe just sounds unpleasant. The new pot roast looks decent, but I’m not going to run out and try it when it’s hot out.

Perhaps when the rainy season starts again in the fall. (although I’m actually still getting some light rain occasionally, mostly at night)

Metaphor Alert!

I went to check on the status of Corona-chan restrictions in Monterey County, only to discover that none of the authoritative DNS servers for www.co.monterey.ca.us are responding, and the records have timed out everywhere. Sounds like a virus to me!

Stage 2.2 update

Yesterday, the county agreed to beg the governor for permission to enter phase 2 of stage 2. The state has “acknowledged receipt of the Form”.

Should they approve it, dine-in restaurants, full-service car washes, shopping malls, and pet grooming will once again be legal. Not sure about haircuts, since there’s industry-specific advice that suggests yes, but they fall into a category that’s still listed as “phase 3”.

On the bright side, residential cleaning services will be permitted to reopen, which means I can have my already-pretty-damn-clean house thoroughly scrubbed.

Hopefully my dentist had the financial resources to ride this out and can reopen. Soon.

By golly, haircuts are in stage 2.2 now

…assuming salons and barbershops meet the detailed requirements to reopen, some of which assume the owner/operator has plenty of extra money to upgrade the facilities and purchase a large stock of disposable everythings. And that they can get stylists to come back to work despite making more on unemployment thanks to the extra-goodies laws.

(in many cases, stylists are basically independent operators who rent their stations, making them ineligible for unemployment benefits, but California mostly outlawed freelancers this year, so I’m not actually sure what their status is any more)

Another day, another cheesecake. If I did that in real life, the “Covid 15” would be the “Covid 50”…

Unrelated…

On Monday, Monterey County supervisors announced their intention to beg the governor for permission to enter “second stage phase-two”. They didn’t actually do it, they just created an agenda item for today in which they will decide whether or not to send a letter in support of the medically-induced begging effort.

It will be in the eighties again today. Sure would be nice to get a haircut, but that’s somewhere in “phase three”…

Related to Unrelated…

Finally figured out where all the coordinated car-horn-honking has been coming from. The Monterey County Health Department is just over a mile away as the bat flies, and as they’re the ones issuing the compliance orders, they attract protests like wet markets attract disease. And as with all public protests, the people who show up inevitably have a variety of agendas…

more...

What exactly did you add to an animation tool that allows a buffer-overflow error to lead to remote code execution?

I mean, even this month’s critical security holes in Acrobat are less severe than that, and Acrobat’s made PDF nearly the malware vector that Flash was in its prime.

Unrelated…

Pro tip: if your delivery service does not accept cash at this time, update your web site so that customers cannot select it as a payment option.

Like everything else in California, Silicon Valley hiring is best described as “paused” at the moment. On a whim, I decided to see if my former employer has taken even tentative steps to once again have more than one senior system administrator in residence. The answer was an unsurprising “no”, but to my amusement, there is a director-level position posted for IT, placing the successful applicant in charge of an organization consisting of five full-time staff (two help desk, one intermediate sysadmin, one senior linux/network admin, and one senior network engineer/manager) and two contractors in India.

For even more amusement, there is an opening for a Site Reliability Engineer in a completely different organization (the one that handles the actual production service, and thus has always had more staff than corporate IT). Since I am quite obviously qualified for this position, I applied.

I don’t know if I’d actually take it, but I will be very interested to see how they respond. 😁

Relaxing food-porn for the win!

I’ve been reading the light novels for this one as well, and Aletta’s increased confidence has had results. She’s been handling deliveries from the restaurant’s Earth-side suppliers, and one of the delivery boys has become quite smitten. In a triumph of otaku acculturation, he thinks her horns are just cosplay ornaments. No big deal for a modern Tokyo youth.

An interesting note is that the occasional mild fan-service that was added for the anime was not further enhanced for the Bluray release.

Related, Amazon may still be determined to kill Brickmuppet under a pile of packages, but they’re no longer delaying Prime shipments for weeks at a time. Every in-stock item I’ve ordered recently has shipped out promptly. The categories that seem to be most sold out now are things like home exercise gear, for people who live in Bluetopian states under lockdown. The fact that most of that stuff was being made in China doesn’t help.

Also related, when I went in to my local drug store to pick up prescriptions yesterday, they had a huge display by the checkouts selling individually-packaged disposable surgical masks for $1.29 each. Also candy bars.

Nothing says “safe and comfortable” like exposed screw heads on exercise equipment, perfectly positioned to dig into your skin.

The person who designed this mutant offspring of a medicine ball and a kettlebell was clearly unfamiliar with “rack position”.

Sad thing is, this was sold out on Amazon along with pretty much all other exercise gear, which means a whole lot of people are going to be taping padding over those screws soon to protect their wrists.

How bored am I right now?

“Buying 40-year-old Japanese art books on Amazon” bored:

(they’re excellent books, by the way, with lots of quality photos and well-translated text)

Movie night

Reminded of it by the state of the state of California, I dug through my shelves to find my ancient DVD copy of Zorro: The Gay Blade. My Bluray player (a region-free Sony) needed a serious power-cycling before it would display anything via HDMI, but after a bit of coaxing I was able to watch this charming and quite quotable little film again for the first time in many years.

For some reason, it’s not available on any streaming service, or on Bluray, and of course the DVD has been out of print for many years. You’d think a story about a campy gay man freeing Californians from a tyrannical oppressor would resonate with the pipples.

Two dams have failed in Michigan, forcing the evacuation of 10,000 people; and, hey, look, there’s a major chemical plant right along the river in question, so what could possibly go wrong?

Now that Gretchen Whitmer has an actual emergency on her hands, will she free the rest of her subjects to cope, or double down on the stupid? Rhetorical question, I know.

"You'd call off the attack?"

"I could."

"Everyone would be saved?"

"Yes... and no. After the earthquakes and tidal waves, they

won’t be quite the human beings you remember. They’ll be more… tractable. Easier for you to rule, in the name of Ming.”

"You mean slaves."

"Let's say... they'll be satisfied with less."

California temperature forecasts for Memorial Day

Salinas: 81
Los Angeles: 89
San Jose: 90
Fresno: 97
Sacramento: 97
Bakersfield: 99

Monterey: 70
Half Moon Bay: 70
Ventura: 74
Santa Cruz: 75

Masks, social distancing, and “stay-at-home” hardest hit.

The porch cat has started stalking me around the house. He’s figured out that if he finds an open window near me (generally, sitting at the kitchen table or reading/gaming on the couch), jumps up onto the screen and hangs there by his claws, he can look me in the eye and meow for attention. Reminds me a bit of my first college girlfriend.

This week’s episode of Good Eats: Reloaded involved buttercream frosting. I too wish to frost delicious cake.

more...