How to build a small Data Center, from scratch

Data Center Article 1.

So I am now trying to build a Data Center that is functional, but not an ugly monster like those in Northern Virginia.

Step One is to reuse an existing building, so I'm not starting a "greenfield build".

There are lots of buildings around that are kinda just basically warehouses, or at least warehouse-like in that they are big empty boxes. Most town of any size have buildings that are empty and are the right minimum size (which I would say is about 8000 sq ft, although 5000 would work too. Anything smaller is probably too expensive to rent.

Step Two is to make sure that building has adequate power. I'm aiming towards about 10 KW per rack, which means NOT doing big AI. If a building has 2-5 megawatts present, or available, that's adequate for a small space.

Step Three is to worry about cooling--are you going to need anything special? For 2-3 MW, probably not. You'll want more than is present in the building unless it was a cold storage building, I would figure on one megawatt of cooling for 3 megawatts of computing.

Step Four is that you need a decision about what software services you are supporting

Step Five is you need a rack design

Step Six is you need a network design

From 2010 through 2014 I was a user of what we now call "cloud services" except that didn't exist with that name at the time. But I needed what is now "rentable cpu", and some reasonable amount of data storage. So what I am trying to build to provide for others is what would have satisfied what I needed but couldn't get 10-15 years ago.

I will address all of those things in this series; some are of course harder than others.

I will also have some sidebar articles about details (such as the ProxMox-on-HP-Gen7).

I am primarily using ProxMox (https://proxmox.com/en/) for Virtual Machines; will probably have some Windows Server 2022 Data Center for folks who need Windows.

I am using NextCloud for casual data storage available to outside users. 

For large internal data storage availability, I am still investigating tools (things like CEPH, for example). I actually started to write my own version of this a few years ago, after having thought about it for a few years around 2011-2012; I ended up not needing it on that project, but that was because I got customer permission to buy a SAN.

Data Center: How to install ProxMox 9 on older servers

Keywords: ProxMox 9, HP DL380 Gen7, installer solved

How to create a small Data Center, Article 2.

How to install ProxMox 9.1 (and likely a few other recent but older versions) onto older rack-mount servers

It took me quite a while, over a year I think, to get to this answer. Not because I spent all that time looking for the answer, but because I didn't really ever find a good enough, or complete, answer.

So here's the problem: ProxMox 9 (8 as well, and apparently some late versions of 7) are different in ways not introduced by the creators (www.proxmox.com), and not detected by the creators, because they aren't test installing on older hardware (specifically HP DL 360/380 Gen 6/7).

What if you need to install on older hardware, for whatever reason? You seem to be SOL. This problem happens on HP DL360 Gen 6 and 7. The problem doesn't happen on Gen 8/9/10/11, because that's newer hardware, newer video hardware specifically, that does in fact include this video mode properly.

But you aren't SOL, although finding out how to get around the problem is non-trivial.

The problem is that while you can get to the initial splash screen and menu, you can't proceed beyond that, because the screen goes black and never recovers.

Why? The newer/est versions of linux installer attempt to set a video mode on the MOBO video electronics that does not exist, the screen goes black and stays that way. The installer doesn't detect a video mode failure, but it can't continue. This problem has nothing to do with a video driver, it is a failure in the hardware, there isn't a solution like "well just update your drivers" like you always have with Windows.

If you read widely enough online, you find a lot of comments to questions where people ask "why is this happening?" but not really much good in the way of answers.

So here's the solution (I did this successfully on five Gen 7 machines, and will be testing on Gen 6 shortly): 

Before you even get to the install, make sure your RAID config is what you want.

Then, when you get that initial splash screen with the four-item list of install options, the first one is "graphical", and on Gen 8/9/10 this works fine, the second one is "Terminal UI" and this is the one you want to use. 

The first menu option, "Graphical", is highlighted, so press down arrow to move the highlight to the second choice, "Terminal UI". Now press "e" (which in this case is short for "edit"). This is a hidden option built into GRUB. Deep in the background there is a file on your installer USB stick that holds a little "grub script" that is being executed to do this install. You can edit this script on-the-fly at this point and add a special codeword in the right place to cause the installed to not set this illegal video mode.

When. you press "e" you get an opportunity to edit the script, the line you want to edit is the one that starts "linuxvm". You want to move the insert cursor to the end of that line, hit space, then enter "nomodeset" which is the magic word that tells linuxvm to NOT set a video mode, but to just use the text interface.

Next press control-x to terminate the editing, that little script will get executed, "nomodeset" will get used, and you will get the "terminal UI" version of all the otherwise graphical (i.e., needs a mouse) entry screens, wanting the same info, and of you go, give the same answers, let it run. It will auto-restart, and if you aren't paying attention to that, you may end up back at the ProxMox installer screen. If that happens, it means you didn't remove the USB stick, so do that and reboot the machine. Now you're good.

You can now integrate this new machine, PM install into you cluster.

Alternate aspects: rather than have to do the "edit" to add "nomodeset" every time, you can modify the original script on your USB stick. This file is "grub.cfg" and you enter nomodeset the same place. This is on line 69 in /boot/grub/grub.cfg

I found this explanation on a Dell website, with no pictures, but apparently their machines have the exact same problem with some older models. I am not a Dell user, so I can't attest to the success of this, but it sounds right. I've lost that URL, sorry. 

You can find plenty of discussion that is just "me too" noise, or partial suggestions that aren't helpful, or non-answers like "have you tried this?", and really no answers anywhere, except for some really peculiar magic keystrokes that sound like unique-to-someone accidents. My solution above will work for all. 

So far I have used this on 5 DL380 Gen 7 and 1 DL360 Gen 6; my other Gen 6 seems to have some other hardware problem that is preventing me even booting the USB Stick; might be that this server is finally dead.

Here's the Dell link where I found the right words:

Dell link for nomodeset   

Reset an Apple Homepod WiFi problem

Just did this today. Found a lot of not-quite-complete info online. I am hoping this helps you resolve this if you're having trouble. 

So here's the starting problem: Homepod has somehow lost internet. I don't know what is going on, it is having serious difficulty playing my local music. I think the actual cause of this is that my ISP-supplied router (a Comcast unit) has flaked out on WIFI. Homepod may have been coalmine canary on this.

Eventually, tho, the iphones were having trouble too. Wired connections are ok, but WIFIs are not. The WIFI broadcast is still alive, but broken--this is why the HP is having trouble. I

 had a second WIFI unit turned on already, was doing some test config for other reasons. So we switched phones to use that. All is good again. That was about a week ago. 

Today it occurred to me that maybe the HomePod had gotten lost in the shuffle, since I hadn't even TRIED to use it for a while. Siri said she had lost internet connection, and "Home" App said something similar. Of course the problem was that HP was configured for the old WIFI, which is still ON but not WORKING. 

So I looked online for how to switch WIFIs on a HomePod. Simple answer: you can't actually do this. Well, in theory you can, but NOT in my situation here. How to fix this? Not as easy as you think.

Solution steps:

1. make sure BlueTooth is turned on on your phone.  I had it off, none of this is going to work without it.
   
2. Tell the "Home" App to forget the HP. Completely forget it. 
3. Do a factory reset on the HP. This means pull the power plug out. Wait 10 seconds. Plug power back in. Touch and hold the top of the HP. Siri is going to tell you it is going to reset and to wait for 3 beeps. 
4. make sure your phone is ON and near the HP, and is logged in on the WIFI SSID you want the HP on; i.e., not the broken CC one I still have. The HP uses your phone, via BlueTooth, to grab settings about logins and whatnot. Essentially the HP is configuring itself to be like your phone. 
1. In actuality that isn't quite what I want, but it's how it works. 
5. You are now configuring the HP from scratch, let it do what it did the first time, etc. Nothing complicated here. 
1. Add the HP in the "Home" App on your phone. 
6. In theory you can play from iphone to HomePod, using "Handoff" but that seems to not work for me. OK, no big deal, it was just a test, not what I actually want. 
7. Any Mac device you have ON THE SAME SUBNET as the HP can see the HP in "Settings->Sounds->Output" and use it as such a device. Because I'm using a new WIFI, it's a new local IP space, and my Mac Pro is upstream and can't see it. 

So I got the old laptop out, got it on the new WIFI ok, it could see the HomePod ok, and itunes can play to it. I want my Mac Pro to play to the HP because that's where all my music is (500GB), so I'm going to have to rejigger this whole network again. I need to do that anyway, and since the CC router has flaked out, I'm going to go ahead and make all that changeover. That will result in a whole new WIFI/wired network setup, new devices, etc, but no big deal that's kinda what I "do for a living" now. 

According to some online reading I did, apparently you can much more easily change the HP WIFI connection IF BOTH ARE ALIVE AND WORKING. Of course that was not my situation, as noted above. 

 I think Siri on HP could do a better job of saying "I'm doing this" or "turn on bluetooth on your phone and hold it close to me". Some pieces of this software suite of iphone and HP and whatever else is running in the background feel unfinished, to me. 

What would ALSO be interesting is if the HP operated via POE, although that's hard to imagine as I expect it wants more raw power than POE is going to provide; there are a lot of flavors of POE, so maybe that's not true. I would prefer that HP be on a wire, tho, but I realize that wireless is the way of things. I'll update this if need be when i do the larger network reconfig.

I'd also like to be able to config the HP via a browser page for the factory reset. I can do this with nearly everything else I have to work with, they have what's called "Management WiFi" which turns on for 15 mins when you power-up the device.

----------

Later: THIS IS WAY NIFTY. Software updates have made it possible to play straight from my iPhone to the HomePod. So I pushed a bunch more music onto the phone.

Am rejiggering my home network

Jazz Music.

Watched Ken Burns Jazz on tv earlier this year. PBS ran it over about 10 weeks.

Interesting stuff. I knew most of the players already, but not all. Had music by a lot of them already.

And now I have about 30 new CDs of them.

The film begins approx 1900 and runs to about 1975. I missed the first episode, so I didn't hear that earliest part.

Weeks later, I couldn't tell you much about the details, but good music.

New Stuff: Basie, Parker, Gillespie, Duke, Miles, Monk...other assortments. Good stuff, should have had some of this before.

COVID and other Vaccinations

I got my shots in March. A bit of an accident at first, but whatever.

Lots of people around the country are not getting the shots, for a variety of reasons that sound mostly stupid to me.

"I don't want to get microchipped" -- as though we can make such a thing small enough to go through a shot needle. Which, btw, are apparently 0.5 millimeters on the inside, bigger than I thought.

"It's made of dead baby parts." That is some sick thinking.

"Happy for the rest of you to get it so I don't have to." That can actually work, and someone I know said this to me. Of course, that person is no engineer/scientist, and could not possibly explain to you what the reality of herd immunity is.

"If God wants to me to die, well, that's it" Maybe he wants you to use your brain. Hard to tell.

But separately from all that, since the "refuseniks" aren't going to become convinced by any outside info...

What would the infection rate have to be, and how severe would the consequences have to be, before they would ignore the garbage they choose to hear/believe, and get it anyway? How quickly would it have to be fatal?

I know some people who have gotten it, and gotten over it, or have died. I don't think I know anyone who got it and clearly has long-term issues; not sure about that one.

But, if C19 was low infection rate but absolutely fatal? High infection but the worst you got was permanent Chronic Fatigue?

My suspicion is that there is a "Big Data" opportunity here that hasn't been seen yet, and awaits discovery. Probably needs more longitudinal data collection, which probably awaits the next few waves of infection.

I understand all the data, the models involved with studying this. Somewhere in my software past I've done some similar modeling and numbers work. You can find plenty of visual models online to show roughly how the infection/immunity process behaves; I'm not making yet another one of them :)

So I don't know if 70% is the magic number here for the herd immunity to be the steady-state situation. There are a lot of variables that are relevant. Example: I wasn't personally too worried about how soon the vaccine would get to me, because I have nearly zero interaction with other people over any time-frame you want to use, so my exposure probability was/is close to zero--that's how my life is these days; a few years ago that was simply not the case (I caught the actual flu once ~10 years ago while on the subway).

If we have a mutated next wave that is worse, what will happen? I suspect we can create and distribute faster, now that we have practice, but still: what will be the refusal rate? How long before the refuseniks die off enough that the remainder get the vaccine?

2020 Word of the year

Excoriate.

you can't get away from this word, in 2020. Seems like hardly a day goes by that I don't see it in some piece of brand-new writing that day.

So you can bet on it taking the prize.

I haven't seen it getting mis-used, yet, but it's getting OVER-used.

Oil prices.

Well, they're scary.

Bad scary. Yesterday (April 20) WTI went to zero. ZERO. Think about that. If the price is zero it means NO ONE is buying.

I used to live in TX, where the "awl bidness" drives the economy. You know folks there are freakin out.

I've found this nifty little javascript widget that shows you what WTI is. There's another for Brent. I'm guessing that the negative means futures contracts being cancelled.


WTI stands for West Texas Intermediate, fwiw.

Concerts I've been to

This is a newly created list, so it's incomplete, and incorrect, but covers a bunch of them:


There are of course other things...seen Brave Combo at least a couple more times that didn't involve tickets, so I can't list them properly...once was Lewisville TX, outside at some amphitheater, another time was outside at the Kennedy Center, DC.

At some point soon I will photograph the concert tickets and add them to the shows.
Click here
Later: OK, I'm missing like 3 tickets. There's a concert I've remembered and forgotten, no ticket there, and there were several shows that were free and didn't HAVE tickets. So this is pretty complete.

July 5 2021. And now the viewer is broken. As amazing as the Internet actually is, this sorta shit bugs THE CRAP outta me.

Interesting internet goings on

I own/run an ISP.

We finally reached the situation where I needed some IP addresses of our own, so now I have 16 of them.

Not actually that hard to acquire, interestingly enough. Not trivial, but not hard. And not too expensive. But now they're mine. Mine, I tell you!

Will be putting some things online a little closer to my own control. That's going to be interesting. Will be able to do my own actual web-hosting, as opposed to using someone else's service.

New things to learn, that's for sure.

Books and awards and humor...

This morning I read this in WaPo. Apparently "romance writing" and the "writers association" and its annual awards have somewhat the same "diversity" problem as movies and Oscars.

And this early comment:

"Riff on idea by J Jencks- Romance writer’s convention. Murder most foul. A Scottish vampire (inspired by Nora Roberts comment), and a Chinese woman who is a world famous detective, team up to disaggregate the formulaic romances churned out at an increasingly rapid (and vapid), rate. They discover the great publishing houses of romance writing have harnessed AI robots to gobble all romantic scenarios ever engaged in by humans since they climbed out of the trees; and even before. (Many deaths and injuries there but that’s another tale.) a disgruntled writer, about to disclose, is killed and our two heroes must discover why. Meanwhile, the robots start falling in love with each other. Another subset of romance lit is born. Robot Romance. Future idea: “Like a Machine; When Humans and Robots Cross Over” Wow..."

I'd read that book. Needs a better title than "Murder Most Foul"

But hmm...robot porn? Discrimination against cyborgs?


Chinese detective: Judge DeeDee? Charlene Chan (or Number One Daughter)? Mrs Wong?

--

The Nora Roberts comment is in the article: “Jesus, it’s fine to have a character fall in love with a freaking vampire, but not someone of the same sex?”

(no idea who "J Jencks" is, maybe some other commenter?)

Socio/psycho-illogical something or other

I bumped into a hilariously offbeat opinion piece online last week.

"Your Refusal To Date Conservatives Is One Reason We Have Donald Trump"

https://thefederalist.com/2017/09/19/refusal-date-conservatives-one-reason-donald-trump/

Yes, on The Federalist.

It's reasonably short, so you should read THAT before reading THIS.

Skip the OkCupid aspect, which isn't actually relevant, other than as a convenience facilitator.

The question underlying this whole silly idea, is whether you want to be married to someone with whom you find some fundamental attitudes totally abhorrent. When you come home from work (or whatever) do you want to be getting into a verbal battle with your spouse?

I certainly don't. We occasionally have some serious disagreements here at work about technical details of this or that, often about someone's not knowing something. I wouldn't want to go home and have another argument about something or other. 

Eventually you'd stop talking to your spouse. It'd be too much work. Of the few couples I've heard of with seriously opposing political views, home life sounds...tricky. 

How much do you want to tiptoe around topics that are going to anger your spouse?

How much should you sacrifice of your own personal "security" to prevent the possible rise of another Trump? Would it even work? How?

There's a hint in that "headline" that conservatives are malleable, and that dating non-conservatives will change them enough that another Trump will be avoided. Is that even possibly true?

Would it take an Advanced Degree(tm) to figure this out? Hmm. No. It won't. 

But it's not going to happen. Who's going to specifically go looking for that kind of difficulty?

"Will you go out on a date with me so I can change your political persuasion?" 

The only way I'm changing my voting for someone else is if its Scarlett Johannson, and she's having sex with me every day. And I'd find out in advance what her politics are, just so I could say mine were different, if I thought that'd work out that way.

Assortative mating is when members of a group specifically seek other members of that same group as mating/family partners. Group membership can be defined however you like. This is as opposed to completely random selection. We have always behaved this way, usually based on skin color, but ultimately it is related to your ability to even meet other people. That aspect leads to economic sorting--you meet/mate with someone of similar economic background because that's who you can meet. Meet a woman at work? She likely has similar financial situation. Grow up in a big enough area, and the kids you meet at school all likely have approx the same economic status.

If you're a really pretty female, you can escape a lower economic status based on that alone. Probably true for males, altho I'd guess to a lesser extent.

Just Cause games...

I've played these...all 4.

Good fun, but eventually I reached a point in the first three where I lack the skill to go any farther.

Didn't feel like I didn't get my money's worth for them, took long enough to reach a required mission that I simply couldn't do that I didn't mind.

Just Cause 4, however...

Repeated annoyances, almost from the very beginning. 

Timed missions. I hate timed missions.

No difficulty adjustment.

Checkpointed game saves. Random respawn points.

Really awkward UI. Way too complex.

It runs weirdly slow. I think it is stuck on the 4K settings somehow. I changed resolution down to regular HD, with medium textures, but it didn't seem to help much, if any.

They did at least get rid of the "collect the little white boxes monkey-biz".

Played about 12 hours. Haven't figured out what some aspects are even about. Squads? What are they for? Looks like I won't be going back to this one...

Fallout 76, one final time.

So the updates a weeks ago...well, I'm done with this game.

Why? They are ratcheting up the issue about carry weight, having already bungled it more than once.

Now, while they aren't forcing you to drop stuff immediately in order to walk at all, you cannot eat anything to solve the hunger need. Food level low? Previously: eat dog food. Now? Eating only destroys something, it doesn't boost your food level. Solution: Drop everything you are carrying. Now eat. Next: decide what all you are taking with you, and leave 90% behind.

No thanks.

So today, when Bethesda email'd me to take a survey, I ripped em a new one.

I was a B.E.T.A. participant, but now FO76 is first on the chopping block when I need disk space.

Maybe if Linda Carter calls me personally and says they changed the weight stuff the right way I won't...

----

Later, Spring 2020.

So finally Bethesda released an FO 76 update that is in fact the game they should have released originally.

A friend and I agreed we would do the update and start over. There was clearly no way I was recovering the old character.

This is better, they are a number of newly interesting things going on. My character is approaching level 100, but I feel like i've more or less run out of interesting, and have reached repetitive. It's not clear where anything is going that is changing, probably because that can't happen.

My friend went with the "First" upgrade, but I can't say that's necessarily exciting, other than you aren't bumping into any other players who are either going to murder you and take your stuff or cause weird side-effects.

Where is it all going?

Why is there still trash everywhere?

Why is there a limit on the size of my stash?

Deep Fake Photos...

While I agree that there's a problem here:

WaPo story on them

It also means that we will be able to make and watch the movie sequel to The Maltese Falcon.

THAT is something I do want to do.

What's the plot, you ask? Well, think about where the original leaves off...they don't have the Falcon, and Sidney Greenstreet is going to continue looking.

So, a few years later, Bogey is in his office, fiddling with some paper clips. The phone rings.

Bogey: "Oh. It's you, fat man. What's this about?"

SG: "Ha ha. So you are still there. I must tell you, I have a lead on the Falcon. But I am the wrong man to retrieve it here. You must come to Vienna. Immediately. I will have a car meet you in Paris. You can be here in two days."

Bogey (while fiddling): "I'm kinda busy here. Two cases today."

SG: "Do not worry about the money. This is far more important that--this is THE FALCON. I shall expect you on Thursday. I have already bought your tickets."

click.

Bogey holds the phone handset out and looks at it, cocks his head slightly, smiles that smile, and puts it down. "Well."

The door opens, his secretary comes in and says "a courier just left this envelope for you."

Quietly in the background, a few notes of the theme from "The Third Man" play as the light fades out.



Yeah, I want to see that.

Star Trek Discovery

Got the DVD set for xmas. I think the first episode (2?) were on regular broadcast back in the beginning, some of it felt familiar...

So finally did a binge watch of the entire first season.

This is probably the best that Star Trek has ever been.

And I say that as a guy who watched TOS as a kid. AND the cartoons 5 years later. AND the movies. AND the other shows (TNG started way too slow/weird, etc). Have seen all the TOS episodes more than once. The other shows, well, not so much.

I would argue that none of the prior series had an entire season that was a good as Discovery's entire first season.

And Discovery may not be able to repeat that. Season two doesn't start as strong, but I've only seen two episodes so far. So we shall see.

But S1 is fabulous. TV Sci Fi may never have been quite this good (although I need to rewatch Farscape for comparison). I've seen a lot of tv sci fi over 50 years, none of it was this good.

S1 has a coherent story line (well, multiple, really) that advances every episode. In addition, if you've seen TOS and know your lore, the tie-ins are clear.


I don't normally stay up all night for something like that, but damn that was good.

Artificial Stupidity

You've heard of Artificial Intelligence of course...

This is artificial stupidity :) 

A friend and I had a joint xbox session of Fallout 76. We went to the Red Rocket large truck station, grabbed the workstation, and got several waves of attackers a little later.

Those attackers were the stupid Chinese head-crab "liberator" robots. The station has a few Protectrons. Generally those things aren't very capable, but these liberators are the epitome of Artificial Stupidity here.

In this video, you can see some of those head-crabs and a protectron (aka "red robot"). Red is standing there shooting some head-crabs. The head-crabs are too stupid for words. So stupid that they're funny, doing their very own Morris dance (imagine photo from The Holy Grail here that has those jumping ninnies from Launcelot's solo scene at the castle rescuing Alex Herbert; I couldn't find it and don't have time to frame-rip the entire movie and then hunt for that bit)

Similarly artificial stupid: when your NPC companion steps in between you and a target just as you shoot a massively hard range attack while zoomed in such that you can't see where your companion is and your companion gets killed instead. Or when a bunch of opponents stand around looking at you, but doing nothing, because altho they can see you up close, they can't figure a traversal path to get next to you to hit you--but they jiggle back and forth because they're in a weird math spot where they can't do otherwise.

2018 Elections

It's two years later. Been a crazy time. What do I think about the elections? Recall that last time, Sept 2016, I said I thought Trump would win. 

This time? Next week...I think there's a very good chance the Republicans will retain control of both sides of Congress. [OK, I was wrong this time, yay]

It didn't look like that a few weeks ago, but then we had the Kavanaugh episode. Now we have the "Executive Order terminating birthright citizenship". 

Recall that Kavanaugh was quoted to have said "there's no such thing as 'settled law'". This is correct, regardless of what anyone wants.

The thing folks most want to equal "settled law" is the Constitution. But it's possible for an amendment to overturn any piece of it, including another amendment. We've already done that once. (Remember Prohibition?) You know Trump picked Kavanaugh because he's likely to go along with the "self-pardon" idea.

So if there are things said, whether "constitutional" or not, that cause supportive voters to go vote to keep the power structure exactly as is, well, you know what that means.

If an XO can negate one thing, it can negate another thing, and then the entire document means nothing.

So do I think this will happen? The slippery slope has already begun...I can readily imagine that the XO doesn't get challenged, some shenanigans occur, and Trump decides to alter some other things.

What happens when he decides news reporting cannot contain what he considers "fake news" ? And that the purveyors of such can be eliminated?

Or when he decides that people who voted against him are, well, need to be removed.

Given that there are clearly people in the law-enforcement arena who are more than willing to follow orders like those of separating little kids from their parents (and probably enjoy it, or they'd refuse), what happens when he decides that the names on the lists of registered Democrats are just as much a threat? 

Do you really think that no one would go along with it?

Came to an interesting conclusion just now...

Was reading a WaPo anti-trump piece, on Election Day, and there's a comment:

"[trump] massively overestimates his abilities so he is forever driving things into the ditch, and ends every venture with disaster but still manages to walk away as everyone else is carted off the emergency room"

Remember the book "A Spell For Chameleon" ? By Piers Anthony. One of his best.

I read that when it was new, 40 years ago. The book is about a parallel universe zone in Florida near Okeechobee where magic is a real thing. Each person there has a magic skill. Except the hero. He has nothing. The book is a classic "voyage of self-discovery" in that he DOES have a skill, but it's a passive skill, not an active skill. That passive skill is that he cannot be harmed by magic. *Something* will happen to negate or block any magical attack on him. It's not a thing he controls, it just happens. 

The quote in the comment feels like this. His actions may produce disasters, but he emerges largely unaffected by the outcome, and always claims a win.

The problem in the book was that "sticks and stones could break his bones, but magic could never hurt him". Most of the rest of folks had what could be attack magic, which was rendered useless, but everyone could use a stick.

Trump feels like that, a bit. Reagan, the "teflon president", kinda did too. Altho Reagan's disasters were not on the same scale. 

That'd lead to some weird personal assumptions--like "everything I do works out good", even when it doesn't. 

Another weird episode on my Mac

I'm not sure what brought this on...

Some months ago (less than six, but more than one), after an OSX update of sorts, Messages stopped showing peoples' names and began just showing the phone numbers.

Quite irritating. For any given messager, for the very few I have a photo of, I could see that, or, if the number matched a Contacts entry, I could see first and last initials ("AB"), but that darn number was always there in place of the name.

For computers, it's more efficient to use the numbers. But for people, well, we don't work like that. Partly because we tolerate duplicated names ("John Smith") where the computer cannot.

If you look online you can't find a solution. Apparently talking to Apple Tech Support won't get it done either. (???)

Well, ok, you CAN find solution online.

Here's my situation: all works great on my iPhone. But suddenly not on my Mac. Mac running High Sierra.

Nothing I do/try fixes it.

Until this:

1. Close the contacts app. Close Messages. Close Mail.
2. Go to ~/Library/Application Support/ (in Finder, using command-shift-G)
3. Rename the "AddressBook" folder to something like "AddressBook-old" just to be safe
4. Open the contacts app. Wait a couple minutes for it to resynchronize
5. It will create a new AddressBook folder that syncs to icloud properly. Wait until you see all your contacts re-appear.
6. If it's all dandy delete the renamed AddressBook folder

OK, if it's NOT all dandy, quit Contacts, delete the NEW AddressBook folder, and rename the old one back to AddressBook.

But this worked for me. (other folks found that making sure the phone number format lined up exactly the same did the trick--but I would argue that that is a different problem)

Really don't know why. If *I* were the author of the software, Contacts, Messages, all that contacts-using stuff, this wouldn't ever happen, and some other annoyances would also go away. 

All this "Account" stuff in OSX has got some fundamental issues, primarily associated with what happens when you have a bunch of accounts and old ones go away.

Mail has never had this problem for me, but maybe that one is better about multiple accounts.

The inconsistency is annoying.

3D work on-screen

Just discovered this:

OpenJSCAD

If you've used OpenSCAD, and you are comfortable with programming, you REALLY need to check that out.

It is NOT an online OpenSCAD, although it's very similar to such a thing. You type in your code, which in this case is javascript plus all the OpenSCAD functions, and you press F5 or Shift-Return, it renders something using the OpenGL interface in your browser.

the basics:

your code has to include:

function main() {

   itemA = cube([1,1,1]).translate([-2,-2,-2]);
   itemB = sphere({r:2,center:true});

    return [itemA, itemB];
}

The return there is what gets drawn.

This is pretty nifty. Although you might feel like it takes an Advanced Degree(tm) to figure it out.

Note that the ".translate([])" is like, but not identical to, OpenSCAD:

translate([2,2,2]) cube([1,1,1]);

The .translate is a Javascript-style coding. Same thing gets done, but the syntax approach is different.

Looks like it can generate STL output, for going straight to 3D printer (yeah, agreed, you probably have to do the triangle correction step somehow).

It will generate an STL file you can download. I have no idea if it's any good, but the ASCII version is readable.

What you probably cannot do (nor, really do I think I would try) is load/copy/paste your existing OpenSCAD into OpenJSCAD. Not going to work--you'll have to fix it up quite a bit.