Posts
My favorite flavor of music is called "Progressive Rock."
If you know what it is already, then you know what it is. If you don't know what that name means, a short description is that it is rock music that has/is progressed beyond simple 2-or-3-chord songs.
Generally it's roots are classical music rather than pop songs. It's longer, more complex, listening rather than singing or dancing music. The focus is much more the unstrumental composing than the lyrics; lots has no lyrics at all.
And it is generally best described by a list of the performers. The category is broad and there are flavors of Prog Rock I'm not keen on (in general, newer and kinda derivative). So: ELP, Yes, early Genesis. The style originates about 1968.
My favorite online source for info is the Gibraltar Encyclopedia of Progressive Rock. I was casually involved with that back in the 90s, before it was even an online source. My participation was slight in the early-mid-90s, but it was there, when there was really just the alt.music.progressive thing (or whatever it was, been years). The web has improved the amount of info, but things have splintered. Things like FreeDB are good, but have zero meta-info beyond album name, track names, and track lengths--and zero cross-linking.
Anyway. GEPR. There was once a book of it. I bought that, it's a great item, but such a thing is out of date the day after it's printed.
The GEPR website has languished for about six years now. Fred Trafton was running it for years, still owns it, and hasn't had time for it, endangering the value and life of the content (granted, the Wayback Machine would still have it all if Fred didn't at least renew the domain name).
So he and I were having an email chat a few weeks ago. I argued that it needs converting into a Wiki existence, so that others can participate, and he doesn't have to worry about maintenance. I offered to do a chunk of that initial setup. In particular, to scrub the existing website and strip out all the raw info from the web-pages (regrettably, there's no database in the background, just hand-managed HTML, and aging HTML at that).
So I've been working that. Did a large data-mine off another (actually dead) website a few years ago, so I knew what I was up against in attempting it. I don't expect or intend to achieve a perfect extraction, no way that is even worth my time to attempt; because it's hand-made HTML there are a lot of little tiny variations all over, and I'm not writing special handlers for each one.
At this point I'm approaching 2/3 completion. Some of that is done via correcting HTML flaws in the source rather than writing special-case handling for singletons.
The hard thing about doing this kind of extraction is that people who make pages like this treat HTML as a structural content organizer, rather than just as visual markup. And then they aren't consistent about what they do, so the structure is casual rather than strict. This is possible because web browsers tolerate a lot of slop in the HTML. That's really not a good thing any more.
The extraction is going into a database now. Once I can read everything I want from the HTML into the DB, then I have to make a simplistic form for getting it out again, so that I/we can test to be sure there's no content-rip disasters in there.
Then I have to figure out how to dump that database into something that is wiki pages. I really have no idea how I might do this. Maybe I don't even want to do that, exactly. Maybe I want to push the DB into a wiki DB.
My involvement here is to get to the point where there's a wiki full of as much content as I can manage without spending forever on it. I don't want to own it after that.
Monday, June 12, 2017
Sunday, June 11, 2017
EMail programs
It is possible to use your web-browser to do your email work. I am currently doing this with Chrome and GMail. Can't say I like it, but it more-or-less works. I regularly press control-R to reply, only to have the browser window refresh itself because I forgot that that was what control-R does.
I used to use Seamonkey. That's a Mozilla product, and I was using it because of the set of tools it integrates, and is the real successor to Netscape's unified product (whose name I now don't remember, sorry Jamie...Communicator?)
Anyway. Mozilla products have problems these days (see earlier blog on this topic). There's something wrong on there somewhere that causes/allows memory leaks, and those always turn into problems at runtime eventually; not a BSOD or equiv, but exhausting memory, VirtMem, disk space...
Mozilla's alternative standalone email is Thunderbird, but it's still Moz, which means that the HTML rendering engine inside is the same as Firefox and SeaMonkey. Which means it is going to have the same mem-leak issue. So I can't be using this.
(fwiw, Chrome has some memory issue, too, I don't yet know quite what, but the way it runs means that if a window has a memory problem the others are not affected--Mozilla craters in toto if any one window is the source of the leak)
So I gotta try some other tools. I've used Outlook, not really interested in that. Going to start with things listed here:
http://www.techradar.com/news/the-best-free-email-client
The real question is what HTML engine is in use?
On my Macs I'll be using Apple Mail. That integrates nicely with my phone, ipad, and the multiple machines I use.
I liked Seamonkey. I just can't deal with the memory leaks.
I'd take suggestions for email programs from readers...
-----
Update: Opera Email is working pretty well for me. It's not as fancy as I'd like, there are some behavioral tweak I ought to be able to do, but can't. The alternative would be for me to write my own email program...which, now that I think of it, might be an interesting thing to do.
I used to use Seamonkey. That's a Mozilla product, and I was using it because of the set of tools it integrates, and is the real successor to Netscape's unified product (whose name I now don't remember, sorry Jamie...Communicator?)
Anyway. Mozilla products have problems these days (see earlier blog on this topic). There's something wrong on there somewhere that causes/allows memory leaks, and those always turn into problems at runtime eventually; not a BSOD or equiv, but exhausting memory, VirtMem, disk space...
Mozilla's alternative standalone email is Thunderbird, but it's still Moz, which means that the HTML rendering engine inside is the same as Firefox and SeaMonkey. Which means it is going to have the same mem-leak issue. So I can't be using this.
(fwiw, Chrome has some memory issue, too, I don't yet know quite what, but the way it runs means that if a window has a memory problem the others are not affected--Mozilla craters in toto if any one window is the source of the leak)
So I gotta try some other tools. I've used Outlook, not really interested in that. Going to start with things listed here:
http://www.techradar.com/news/the-best-free-email-client
The real question is what HTML engine is in use?
On my Macs I'll be using Apple Mail. That integrates nicely with my phone, ipad, and the multiple machines I use.
I liked Seamonkey. I just can't deal with the memory leaks.
I'd take suggestions for email programs from readers...
-----
Update: Opera Email is working pretty well for me. It's not as fancy as I'd like, there are some behavioral tweak I ought to be able to do, but can't. The alternative would be for me to write my own email program...which, now that I think of it, might be an interesting thing to do.
A new toy
I got a couple of new toys in the past week.
The first is an HP 9050DN printer. Why? Because it will print 11x17 double-sided. I am doing some documents work these days where the target is 11x17 and although I'm not do the final deliverable printing, it's darn sure good to be able to proof things at final size. Already I've caught a couple of changes that need to get made that I wasn't seeing otherwise, and I receive one of the final printed copies. This is a "on-loan" item, paid for by the group I'm doing the docs for.
The second toy is much more interesting, and a lot less common:
a laser cutter. (yes, that's two laser things in the last week)
It's a VersaLaser VL 200. 25 watt, 12x16 cutting area. Bought it from the guy who was actually cutting for me 10 years ago, for $4K.
Why? you ask. Well, because once I am well familiar with how to use it, I can make things for myself better/faster/cheaper than paying someone else to do it.
(OK, thought you were retired and therefore a cheapskate, you also say. Well, yeah, kinda true, but this has been in the works for months, or years if you go back to the larger one I almost bought from him over 2 years ago. Plus, I am getting a new big riding lawnmower tomorrow. Expensive week.)
What will I be doing with this? Model railroad stuff is the target. I'm figuring if I use it to design/build 100 things that averages $40 each, which is a pretty good deal.
Expect new blogs on this topic over the next months. And I hope some magazine articles that pay $ which will help with the cost.
The first is an HP 9050DN printer. Why? Because it will print 11x17 double-sided. I am doing some documents work these days where the target is 11x17 and although I'm not do the final deliverable printing, it's darn sure good to be able to proof things at final size. Already I've caught a couple of changes that need to get made that I wasn't seeing otherwise, and I receive one of the final printed copies. This is a "on-loan" item, paid for by the group I'm doing the docs for.
The second toy is much more interesting, and a lot less common:
a laser cutter. (yes, that's two laser things in the last week)
It's a VersaLaser VL 200. 25 watt, 12x16 cutting area. Bought it from the guy who was actually cutting for me 10 years ago, for $4K.
Why? you ask. Well, because once I am well familiar with how to use it, I can make things for myself better/faster/cheaper than paying someone else to do it.
(OK, thought you were retired and therefore a cheapskate, you also say. Well, yeah, kinda true, but this has been in the works for months, or years if you go back to the larger one I almost bought from him over 2 years ago. Plus, I am getting a new big riding lawnmower tomorrow. Expensive week.)
What will I be doing with this? Model railroad stuff is the target. I'm figuring if I use it to design/build 100 things that averages $40 each, which is a pretty good deal.
Expect new blogs on this topic over the next months. And I hope some magazine articles that pay $ which will help with the cost.
Monday, May 08, 2017
Revisiting Oblivion
This is still my favorite Bethesda game. Newer ones do have improvements in various places, but I like the looks of this one best. Mostly because of inside the Oblivion Gates was so radically different. And the normal terrain wasn't snow. I hate snow.
So I re-acquired it on Steam last year. Decided I would play it without using Chameleon at all, and on much higher difficulty.
Well, the decision to not use Chameleon went by the wayside. The higher difficulty level pretty much killed the possibility of avoiding it.
I'd also forgotten the need to craft a character design better. So I picked a standard flavor, which resulted in most of my major skills being ones I don't care about, and skills I *do* care about aren't helping me level up.
I remembered the need to run Sneak to 100 during the training tunnels, and I invented a new (for me) approach to boosting various magic skills (you have to get into the University, but once you do you can craft a micro-spell that takes 2 magicka per cast and then lean on the "cast" key until you hit 100. Can run around at the same time, but I think that before I do this ever again I'm going to make myself a small weighted gadget that will sit next to the keyboard and do the "leaning" for me; it's a thing that will take several hours, and I don't want to sit there the entire time.
So for that to work interesting for you, you also need to pay for training 5 times each level, to maximize the speed at which you can level up. You do this because at the bottom loot and gear are really uninteresting.
On easy mode, you won't see glass armor until level 10. On "hard', not until you pass 20.
So I'm a weakling character, at Level 23 I have 225 Health; the only way I can take on an opponent is with Chameleon > 100%. So I had to get into Unseen University to craft spells and enchant armor. With Chameleon > 100% you are, to all intents and purposes, permanently invisible. This is, of course, an unfair advantage, and the game becomes less interesting overall. You can't be attacked, you WON'T be attacked, because nothing can see you to do it.
At this difficulty level, opponents are significantly stronger than you, 2-3 hits and you are dead.
(In Morrowind the ability to levitate/fly was similarly "cheating", because only those attack birds could come after you. It may have been that chameleon was equally bad, I never even tried it as I didn't know what it was.)
But when you don't ever have to fight, then you're really going around collecting loot. The best loot is found inside Gates.
If I decide to go through this again, I'm going to try harder to remember how to create my character up front, and avoid Chameleon. And probably play at a lower difficulty.
So I re-acquired it on Steam last year. Decided I would play it without using Chameleon at all, and on much higher difficulty.
Well, the decision to not use Chameleon went by the wayside. The higher difficulty level pretty much killed the possibility of avoiding it.
I'd also forgotten the need to craft a character design better. So I picked a standard flavor, which resulted in most of my major skills being ones I don't care about, and skills I *do* care about aren't helping me level up.
I remembered the need to run Sneak to 100 during the training tunnels, and I invented a new (for me) approach to boosting various magic skills (you have to get into the University, but once you do you can craft a micro-spell that takes 2 magicka per cast and then lean on the "cast" key until you hit 100. Can run around at the same time, but I think that before I do this ever again I'm going to make myself a small weighted gadget that will sit next to the keyboard and do the "leaning" for me; it's a thing that will take several hours, and I don't want to sit there the entire time.
So for that to work interesting for you, you also need to pay for training 5 times each level, to maximize the speed at which you can level up. You do this because at the bottom loot and gear are really uninteresting.
On easy mode, you won't see glass armor until level 10. On "hard', not until you pass 20.
So I'm a weakling character, at Level 23 I have 225 Health; the only way I can take on an opponent is with Chameleon > 100%. So I had to get into Unseen University to craft spells and enchant armor. With Chameleon > 100% you are, to all intents and purposes, permanently invisible. This is, of course, an unfair advantage, and the game becomes less interesting overall. You can't be attacked, you WON'T be attacked, because nothing can see you to do it.
At this difficulty level, opponents are significantly stronger than you, 2-3 hits and you are dead.
(In Morrowind the ability to levitate/fly was similarly "cheating", because only those attack birds could come after you. It may have been that chameleon was equally bad, I never even tried it as I didn't know what it was.)
But when you don't ever have to fight, then you're really going around collecting loot. The best loot is found inside Gates.
If I decide to go through this again, I'm going to try harder to remember how to create my character up front, and avoid Chameleon. And probably play at a lower difficulty.
Sunday, May 07, 2017
The Future: Your choices--which will it be?
There are three choices for what your future looks like. Which one are you choosing?
1) Star Trek
2) Handmaid's Tale. 1984. Depends on whether we go for the theocracy or the SS flavor of totalitarianism. "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever."
3) Mad Max
Your attitudes and voting behavior will determine which one it is.
You can imagine which one *I* am in favor of.
This blog entry brought to you by:
1) Star Trek
2) Handmaid's Tale. 1984. Depends on whether we go for the theocracy or the SS flavor of totalitarianism. "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever."
3) Mad Max
Your attitudes and voting behavior will determine which one it is.
You can imagine which one *I* am in favor of.
This blog entry brought to you by:
Saturday, April 22, 2017
OK, now I really *AM* retired
A short pome, from Thursday April 13:
Today I got fired
So now I'm retired.
And, as a friend put it a couple years ago: "When you're retired, ever day is saturday." And some of the actually ARE. Like today. I think today is saturday. Yesterday I wasn't sure what day it was. As if it even mattered :) Yesterday was saturday too. So is tomorrow.
Check the entry for Nov 10. Had a new job. Was hired for a specific contract, that contract never materialized, worked on some other stuff for them, but ultimately there was cash-flow issues, and as I wasn't critical to their success (yet) it was time to be done and gone.
Just as well, I need that time to work on the old house in order to sell it.
and I was going to give notice in a couple months anyway. I got to learn some new stuff, but it was clear to me that i was only half of the right person for the job.
Well, on Thursday the 13th I "got fired". It was abrupt, but polite. But it hadn't been all that exciting.
---
It will be fabulous being retired. It darn sure was back in October. My finances went up 5% since then, which is weird, but ok with me. Now I just have to sell the old house, get signed up for Obamacare, and live like a poor person for umpty years. And not work for someone else.
Yay!
---
One of the new things I learned is "Docker". This is kinda cool, and lets you avoid what is other an issue about contamination and collision of software pieces. Docker is a lightweight VM mechanism. I now know how to make Docker images from scratch, install other pieces in them, save/run/etc. This works best on Linux, unsurprisingly, but one thing it means is that you can run multiple flavors at the same time without having to dedicate hardware (which I don't have). I have tools of my own that want to run in Docker, don't need full machines or VMs, but do exist as services, and want to be isolated.
---
Today I got fired
So now I'm retired.
And, as a friend put it a couple years ago: "When you're retired, ever day is saturday." And some of the actually ARE. Like today. I think today is saturday. Yesterday I wasn't sure what day it was. As if it even mattered :) Yesterday was saturday too. So is tomorrow.
Check the entry for Nov 10. Had a new job. Was hired for a specific contract, that contract never materialized, worked on some other stuff for them, but ultimately there was cash-flow issues, and as I wasn't critical to their success (yet) it was time to be done and gone.
Just as well, I need that time to work on the old house in order to sell it.
and I was going to give notice in a couple months anyway. I got to learn some new stuff, but it was clear to me that i was only half of the right person for the job.
Well, on Thursday the 13th I "got fired". It was abrupt, but polite. But it hadn't been all that exciting.
---
It will be fabulous being retired. It darn sure was back in October. My finances went up 5% since then, which is weird, but ok with me. Now I just have to sell the old house, get signed up for Obamacare, and live like a poor person for umpty years. And not work for someone else.
Yay!
---
One of the new things I learned is "Docker". This is kinda cool, and lets you avoid what is other an issue about contamination and collision of software pieces. Docker is a lightweight VM mechanism. I now know how to make Docker images from scratch, install other pieces in them, save/run/etc. This works best on Linux, unsurprisingly, but one thing it means is that you can run multiple flavors at the same time without having to dedicate hardware (which I don't have). I have tools of my own that want to run in Docker, don't need full machines or VMs, but do exist as services, and want to be isolated.
---
Wednesday, January 11, 2017
Jack Reacher books
author is Lee Child (not his real name). If you look the website, you discover that pub-date order is NOT character-chrono order. I wish publishers would fix that on the covers. I also wish they would in general put series order number on books. These have neither.
After the second movie of Jack Reacher with Tom Cruise, I decided I would read a couple. Got the first one and the last one for xmas.
They remind me of John D Macdonald's Travis McGee. And Tom Cruise looks nothing like Reacher in the books. Reacher in the books is 6-5, weighs 220-250. That's nearly a foot taller than Cruise, and probably 50-75 pounds heavier. A guy that size is going to be physically imposing no matter what.
As of this writing, I've read the first three published. Went to the used bookstore last weekend and got a couple of all the ones they had; have subsequently ordered the remainder via abebooks.com (better prices than Amazon was showing for used copies).
[Later: read a few more. Reading order seems irrelevant. They are mostly better plotted than Macdonald; "Echo Burning" felt exactly like a McGee book. McGee was essentially a "personal avenger", and Reacher is having a similar feel. Child avoids the issue of recurring characters by having Reacher constantly on the move around the country. Macdonald avoided it simply by not having them, as though anyone's life is like that; McGee lived on a houseboat but never really went anywhere in it.]
The stories move pretty fast. Good excitement, action. Not perfect, but good.
By not perfect I mean: if you're an author, and you're going to write about real places, you need to be present at those places at the time of year you write about before you say anything about the weather.
Book #3 takes place briefly in two places I lived, and makes mistakes about both. Dallas and Honolulu are the places. It's June. Author says something like "temp in Dallas was it's usual hundred degrees". Nope. Sorry. Not in June. Not Dallas. Lived there a decade. 100 degrees doesn't start until mid-July or so. Not June. And then Reacher flies to Honolulu, whereupon author says the humidity in Honolulu was just like Dallas. Nope. Sorry. Not ever. Honolulu is going to have much higher humidity, given that, well, you know, the largest body of water on the planet is one of the boundaries of Honolulu. Depending on the wind, if there is any (leeward side of Oahu, so not nearly as much as Kailua, where I lived), the temp is likely 90+, but not 100--the humidity is probably 90+ as well. But in Dallas? in June? The humidity is at its highest at ~6am, and that amount is 75%, and it's not 100 degrees F. In the afternoon, when the temp is highest, the humidity is 25%. Seriously dry. (Not the hottest place I've been, that was Tucson, summer, it was 110. Bone dry, too. Ouch.) I live in Virginia now, outside DC; it is readily possible for the weather to be 98 and 98, and *that* is uncomfortable. DC is like that. So no, the humidity in Dallas is NEVER like the humidity in Honolulu.
But yeah, please visit, or talk to a resident about this stuff...mistakes like that make you the author look lazy. And these statements are in no way critical to the plot, just throwaway lines. Still...lazy.
[Later: Number 5, "Echo Burning", is a really weak/stupid plot. That one really feels like Travis McGee. #6 is back to a better plot.]
#4 has some people getting in effect drowned in a bathtub of paint. He writes that after what is a day or two "the paint will have a skin depth of 1-1.5 inches. Clearly he didn't test this--24 hours of paint open-air in a bathtub and you might have 1/16" someplace that was really dry. I'm not sure how long 1 whole inch would take, but probably weeks to months. I've had paint remnants in cans out open to dry so I could dump them in the trash can, it seemed to take forever for that last little bit to harden.
A couple of them have really stupid plots. Then there's the several where there's a predictable "showdown at the deserted farmhouse" conclusion.
[Later later: I've read about 2/3 of them. The ones that have good plots are good stories, but none are "Where Eagles Dare", and REALLY not "The Bourne Identity". There are some very good ideas in here, but they're still small. I don't remember Travis McGee too well, but these all feel better than that, but not as good as Maclean, Ludlum, etc]
[Also: why I could never be a writer: one of them has two movie quotes. I couldn't write a novel without having A LOT of movie quotes--I can't hardly have a conversation without using movie quotes, so there's no way I could write a book without them.]
After the second movie of Jack Reacher with Tom Cruise, I decided I would read a couple. Got the first one and the last one for xmas.
They remind me of John D Macdonald's Travis McGee. And Tom Cruise looks nothing like Reacher in the books. Reacher in the books is 6-5, weighs 220-250. That's nearly a foot taller than Cruise, and probably 50-75 pounds heavier. A guy that size is going to be physically imposing no matter what.
As of this writing, I've read the first three published. Went to the used bookstore last weekend and got a couple of all the ones they had; have subsequently ordered the remainder via abebooks.com (better prices than Amazon was showing for used copies).
[Later: read a few more. Reading order seems irrelevant. They are mostly better plotted than Macdonald; "Echo Burning" felt exactly like a McGee book. McGee was essentially a "personal avenger", and Reacher is having a similar feel. Child avoids the issue of recurring characters by having Reacher constantly on the move around the country. Macdonald avoided it simply by not having them, as though anyone's life is like that; McGee lived on a houseboat but never really went anywhere in it.]
The stories move pretty fast. Good excitement, action. Not perfect, but good.
By not perfect I mean: if you're an author, and you're going to write about real places, you need to be present at those places at the time of year you write about before you say anything about the weather.
Book #3 takes place briefly in two places I lived, and makes mistakes about both. Dallas and Honolulu are the places. It's June. Author says something like "temp in Dallas was it's usual hundred degrees". Nope. Sorry. Not in June. Not Dallas. Lived there a decade. 100 degrees doesn't start until mid-July or so. Not June. And then Reacher flies to Honolulu, whereupon author says the humidity in Honolulu was just like Dallas. Nope. Sorry. Not ever. Honolulu is going to have much higher humidity, given that, well, you know, the largest body of water on the planet is one of the boundaries of Honolulu. Depending on the wind, if there is any (leeward side of Oahu, so not nearly as much as Kailua, where I lived), the temp is likely 90+, but not 100--the humidity is probably 90+ as well. But in Dallas? in June? The humidity is at its highest at ~6am, and that amount is 75%, and it's not 100 degrees F. In the afternoon, when the temp is highest, the humidity is 25%. Seriously dry. (Not the hottest place I've been, that was Tucson, summer, it was 110. Bone dry, too. Ouch.) I live in Virginia now, outside DC; it is readily possible for the weather to be 98 and 98, and *that* is uncomfortable. DC is like that. So no, the humidity in Dallas is NEVER like the humidity in Honolulu.
But yeah, please visit, or talk to a resident about this stuff...mistakes like that make you the author look lazy. And these statements are in no way critical to the plot, just throwaway lines. Still...lazy.
[Later: Number 5, "Echo Burning", is a really weak/stupid plot. That one really feels like Travis McGee. #6 is back to a better plot.]
#4 has some people getting in effect drowned in a bathtub of paint. He writes that after what is a day or two "the paint will have a skin depth of 1-1.5 inches. Clearly he didn't test this--24 hours of paint open-air in a bathtub and you might have 1/16" someplace that was really dry. I'm not sure how long 1 whole inch would take, but probably weeks to months. I've had paint remnants in cans out open to dry so I could dump them in the trash can, it seemed to take forever for that last little bit to harden.
A couple of them have really stupid plots. Then there's the several where there's a predictable "showdown at the deserted farmhouse" conclusion.
[Later later: I've read about 2/3 of them. The ones that have good plots are good stories, but none are "Where Eagles Dare", and REALLY not "The Bourne Identity". There are some very good ideas in here, but they're still small. I don't remember Travis McGee too well, but these all feel better than that, but not as good as Maclean, Ludlum, etc]
[Also: why I could never be a writer: one of them has two movie quotes. I couldn't write a novel without having A LOT of movie quotes--I can't hardly have a conversation without using movie quotes, so there's no way I could write a book without them.]
Tuesday, January 03, 2017
Number 200.
Blog number 200. And it's a game blog :) (ok, technically I've only *released* 196; four drafts are pending, perhaps forever, not clear they are topics that can really be discussed)
Witcher 3.
These guys love their mo-cap and their cutscenes. Much of which leads to things I don't like.
They want you to play the game their way, which is not how I want to play these games.
If you want that, to the point that you are going to force me into it, just make a cutscene I can watch without participating. Better still, say so up front so I can skip the game entirely.
Things I like about this game:
It's gorgeous. Probably the best-looking game I've played. Elder Scrolls 6 will look at least this good.
Saves are right. Lotta folks fail on this one.
Things that annoyed me about this game:
The need for mo-cap everywhere, and the idea (like in the Batman games) that what I want to look at most is the mo-cap, and that hyper-realistic is the goal of games. Mo-cap is not the be-all/end-all in games.
The cutscenes that go on forever.
The large amount of pointless profanity.
All the apparent prostitution--was there really that much of it in the past? Walk through Novigrad and count the various prostitutes--it's a lot.
The movement that is scripted. The problems I had over and over about UI control over what I was doing--most of the times I got killed were keystroke failures because I felt my ability to control Geralt was constrained. I use a wireless mouse and keyboard. They are slightly laggy, this causes trouble. Example: you are too close to an opponent, you automatically go into a crouch and slow down--no, I want to run, not creep.
Being unable to use a real bow and arrow. That little crossbow you have is just about pointless.
Having to play as Ciri once in a while without having much practice at it, and her controls are for completely different abilities. And her only health recovery is to run around out of reach. And when the movement controls force those crouches...and she has no armor...and she has no food/etc for health recovery...
The fact that combat does nothing for your Level-up advancement, only quest completion does that.
The fact that quests need to be worked on when you're near the same skill level, else they aren't worth much in XP points. You wait too long and their value drops to one single XP.
You can't drop a quest. Several times where that was really the better solution, esp once the XP had dropped to be worthless.
All the quests that are about finding diagrams for better gear are a waste of time--the gear isn't better. Even the master-crafted stuff; when you finish with Hattori, he makes a freebie for you. It was 3 levels behind what I was already using. Boring--it should scale exactly to where I am.
The 40-mph wind that never stops.
Potions are incomprehensible. And look largely useless. I have yet to use one.
Magic that is relatively useless, and way to weak to do much for you. Part of the story in this game is that some large-ish faction is trying to eliminate all of it. OK by me.
The local "economy", which is pretty feeble. Why is that this is so common in games? All the Bethesda stuff has this problem until the mods get made that fix it. (Remember Morrowind? That was the worst. You could easily find Daedric items that were so high-priced no one could buy them from you. Even after I found several mods that boosted merchants and made more of them, it was still possible to come back from a dungeon crawl with so much stuff that you'd have to drop a bunch on the ground, where it would sit forever. You want the merchant to have cash again? Sleep 24 hours. How many times are you going to do that when they have 5000 gold and you have 150,000 of items?)
Witcher 3.
These guys love their mo-cap and their cutscenes. Much of which leads to things I don't like.
They want you to play the game their way, which is not how I want to play these games.
If you want that, to the point that you are going to force me into it, just make a cutscene I can watch without participating. Better still, say so up front so I can skip the game entirely.
Things I like about this game:
It's gorgeous. Probably the best-looking game I've played. Elder Scrolls 6 will look at least this good.
Saves are right. Lotta folks fail on this one.
Things that annoyed me about this game:
The need for mo-cap everywhere, and the idea (like in the Batman games) that what I want to look at most is the mo-cap, and that hyper-realistic is the goal of games. Mo-cap is not the be-all/end-all in games.
The cutscenes that go on forever.
The large amount of pointless profanity.
All the apparent prostitution--was there really that much of it in the past? Walk through Novigrad and count the various prostitutes--it's a lot.
The movement that is scripted. The problems I had over and over about UI control over what I was doing--most of the times I got killed were keystroke failures because I felt my ability to control Geralt was constrained. I use a wireless mouse and keyboard. They are slightly laggy, this causes trouble. Example: you are too close to an opponent, you automatically go into a crouch and slow down--no, I want to run, not creep.
Being unable to use a real bow and arrow. That little crossbow you have is just about pointless.
Having to play as Ciri once in a while without having much practice at it, and her controls are for completely different abilities. And her only health recovery is to run around out of reach. And when the movement controls force those crouches...and she has no armor...and she has no food/etc for health recovery...
The fact that combat does nothing for your Level-up advancement, only quest completion does that.
The fact that quests need to be worked on when you're near the same skill level, else they aren't worth much in XP points. You wait too long and their value drops to one single XP.
You can't drop a quest. Several times where that was really the better solution, esp once the XP had dropped to be worthless.
All the quests that are about finding diagrams for better gear are a waste of time--the gear isn't better. Even the master-crafted stuff; when you finish with Hattori, he makes a freebie for you. It was 3 levels behind what I was already using. Boring--it should scale exactly to where I am.
The 40-mph wind that never stops.
Potions are incomprehensible. And look largely useless. I have yet to use one.
Magic that is relatively useless, and way to weak to do much for you. Part of the story in this game is that some large-ish faction is trying to eliminate all of it. OK by me.
The local "economy", which is pretty feeble. Why is that this is so common in games? All the Bethesda stuff has this problem until the mods get made that fix it. (Remember Morrowind? That was the worst. You could easily find Daedric items that were so high-priced no one could buy them from you. Even after I found several mods that boosted merchants and made more of them, it was still possible to come back from a dungeon crawl with so much stuff that you'd have to drop a bunch on the ground, where it would sit forever. You want the merchant to have cash again? Sleep 24 hours. How many times are you going to do that when they have 5000 gold and you have 150,000 of items?)
Monday, January 02, 2017
Post election blues.
It went about as I expected. I could tell at 8pm that Hillary was going to lose. Except that she didn't. But she did. (What was the final vote/point spread? About 2%, wasn't it? Just about what I called it for months ago)
What happens in Presidential elections?
The thing to understand there is that polling fails to tell the correct story. It just tells a story, probably a little closer to being the story pollsters want told.
What really happens: Look at who was elected President since WW2. What's the common thread to (nearly) all of them?
We do NOT elect "Washington insiders" to be President. Except Johnson, who was elected in 64 really as a continuation of JFK as a sympathy vote. And Nixon. And we all know how that ended. Otherwise: Truman. Eisenhower. JFK. Carter. Reagan. GHWB. Ok, GHWB was kinda insider, really got elected on being Reagan 2.0. Bill Clinton. GWB. Obama.
Really, mostly those guys are "outsiders". We don't elect "insider" presidents. So on that measurement Hillary wasn't ever going to win--she's as "insider" as it is possible to get. And sure as hell Trump is as far from being an insider as anyone could get.
Look at who the losers were. Mostly Washington insiders.
And now the Republicans are four state legislatures away from achieving absolute and permanent control of the country. That could happen in 2017, and then Obergefell will fall. Roe v Wade will fall. Etc.
What happens in Presidential elections?
The thing to understand there is that polling fails to tell the correct story. It just tells a story, probably a little closer to being the story pollsters want told.
What really happens: Look at who was elected President since WW2. What's the common thread to (nearly) all of them?
We do NOT elect "Washington insiders" to be President. Except Johnson, who was elected in 64 really as a continuation of JFK as a sympathy vote. And Nixon. And we all know how that ended. Otherwise: Truman. Eisenhower. JFK. Carter. Reagan. GHWB. Ok, GHWB was kinda insider, really got elected on being Reagan 2.0. Bill Clinton. GWB. Obama.
Really, mostly those guys are "outsiders". We don't elect "insider" presidents. So on that measurement Hillary wasn't ever going to win--she's as "insider" as it is possible to get. And sure as hell Trump is as far from being an insider as anyone could get.
Look at who the losers were. Mostly Washington insiders.
And now the Republicans are four state legislatures away from achieving absolute and permanent control of the country. That could happen in 2017, and then Obergefell will fall. Roe v Wade will fall. Etc.
Blogger and cookies
Appy polly loggies to folks who are now getting the "popup" warning about cookies at the top of the page. EU laws require this. Blogger here does it for me automatically, which is good for me, and bad since it's annoying for you.
If I could control it, there'd be zero cookies. But it's automatic blogger stuff, esp since Google now owns blogger, for advertising reasons.
Gad.
If I could control it, there'd be zero cookies. But it's automatic blogger stuff, esp since Google now owns blogger, for advertising reasons.
Gad.
Thursday, November 10, 2016
New job
Gad. I almost got forcibly retired a month ago. Previous employer been having trouble all year about keeping me billable. Multiple hiccups caused me to be on overhead almost five months.
At my skill/experience level, that's expensive for them, so in October I went on unpaid LOA. That's a gamble by everyone that work is going to show up. My suspicion was not, so I didn't wait around much.
Now don't get me wrong, here...it's not that I *wanted* to get a job again. I'd have rather retired officially, but I can't quite afford that yet (recall that a move is occurring) until I sell the old house--once that's done I can retire when I feel like it.
New job is forcing a 25% pay cut on me, tho. That stings a bit. Again, once the old house is sold, that won't matter too much. But still...
That said--new job is properly interesting. Have a software AND hardware problem to solve. And multiple installations eventually, altho not too many. [Later: weird prime contractor goings on--this is dead.]
And its a really different tech area than I've done before, which means new learning and challenges.
[Update: it's a tiny business, maybe 10 employees. Luckily, a couple of them are fans of ethnic foods, as I am, so there's a small crew for lunch daily. That hasn't happened in >8 years. Yay!]
-----
While I was on LOA I started building the barn. Regrettably that's Plan C. Plan A was someone else builds a metal building. Plan B was someone else builds a wood building. Plan C was I built the wood building because I can't afford to pay anyone else; of course in the end that means I can say "I built it". It also means that if it falls down "I built that". So I've been getting a crash course in construction on this. Mistakes so far are minor, other than the weird need for after-the-fact anchor bolts into the concrete foundation. You really want to do that when its poured. Now I have to drill for them. If I had to do it over again, I'd go with cinder block walls, pay an expert to do that.
[Update: the walls went up in Nov. The roof trusses went up after xmas. The metal roofing went up a few days later. I am not the monkey I used to be for climbing on that stuff. Not quite done as of Jan 1, but not too much left. Eventually I'll put solar panels on it, probably 3kW.]
-----
Much later: turned out this job was really a bad idea. 11 months after I started it, and not quite six months after it ended, I *STILL* do not have a W2 for 2016. I am not sure if that equals stupid incompetence, criminal incompetence, or both, but it's damn sure incompetence. Some of the payroll taxes weren't even paid to the IRS. That's borderline criminal incompetence.
And there were never any paystubs I could fake/create a W2 from. So I have no info about withholding.
I may be having to sue them here shortly.
At my skill/experience level, that's expensive for them, so in October I went on unpaid LOA. That's a gamble by everyone that work is going to show up. My suspicion was not, so I didn't wait around much.
Now don't get me wrong, here...it's not that I *wanted* to get a job again. I'd have rather retired officially, but I can't quite afford that yet (recall that a move is occurring) until I sell the old house--once that's done I can retire when I feel like it.
New job is forcing a 25% pay cut on me, tho. That stings a bit. Again, once the old house is sold, that won't matter too much. But still...
That said--new job is properly interesting. Have a software AND hardware problem to solve. And multiple installations eventually, altho not too many. [Later: weird prime contractor goings on--this is dead.]
And its a really different tech area than I've done before, which means new learning and challenges.
[Update: it's a tiny business, maybe 10 employees. Luckily, a couple of them are fans of ethnic foods, as I am, so there's a small crew for lunch daily. That hasn't happened in >8 years. Yay!]
-----
While I was on LOA I started building the barn. Regrettably that's Plan C. Plan A was someone else builds a metal building. Plan B was someone else builds a wood building. Plan C was I built the wood building because I can't afford to pay anyone else; of course in the end that means I can say "I built it". It also means that if it falls down "I built that". So I've been getting a crash course in construction on this. Mistakes so far are minor, other than the weird need for after-the-fact anchor bolts into the concrete foundation. You really want to do that when its poured. Now I have to drill for them. If I had to do it over again, I'd go with cinder block walls, pay an expert to do that.
[Update: the walls went up in Nov. The roof trusses went up after xmas. The metal roofing went up a few days later. I am not the monkey I used to be for climbing on that stuff. Not quite done as of Jan 1, but not too much left. Eventually I'll put solar panels on it, probably 3kW.]
-----
Much later: turned out this job was really a bad idea. 11 months after I started it, and not quite six months after it ended, I *STILL* do not have a W2 for 2016. I am not sure if that equals stupid incompetence, criminal incompetence, or both, but it's damn sure incompetence. Some of the payroll taxes weren't even paid to the IRS. That's borderline criminal incompetence.
And there were never any paystubs I could fake/create a W2 from. So I have no info about withholding.
I may be having to sue them here shortly.
Odd trouble with Apple Mail
Various Mac users in the extended family. Have been for years (since the late 80s for me).
So I've a lot of experience with nearly every version of OS Apple has ever produced.
My mom bought a new Macbook in the summer. Her old machine was getting flaky, it was like 10 years old, so not a huge surprise.
Her old OS was 10.4, new OS is 10.11 (El Cap).
She's using Apple Mail. I have occasionally used that in the past, but only on my Powerbook laptop, and even then only on vacation, where email need was limited at best.
Mom's email flakes out regularly, refusing to send to the SMTP server. So I have gotten a lot of "tech support calls" from her about this, and I haven't really been able to solve it. Have spent time on the phone with her ISP, and with Apple, trying to figure this out.
IT SHOULD NOT TAKE AN ADVANCED DEGREE(TM) TO FIX THIS.
Except that apparently it does. Pay attention to get yours.
So here's what is going on (Apple guy didn't know this stuff, ISP guy hinted at it):
Apple Mail ("AM") auto-configures an account for you based on an email address you give it when you first start it up, and you can add more later that will also auto-configure. OK, that's friendly, you don't have to be an expert on setup to get going on your brand-new machine.
AM now knows how to handle additional mail flavors, so you can do IMAP as well as POP. These two things aren't the same however, so it's interesting that it auto-configures for you. SMTP has gotten fancier over the years with security settings, and that's where the problem starts.
The long-term problem is that it continues to try to auto-configure for you--any time there's a glitch between your machine and the server, it attempts to re-auto-configure the entire account. This is a thing that AM didn't used to do, so it took me a long time to figure it out.
Well, the odds of that working right are probably slim. Fortunately, it looks like you can turn this off, which is probably the right thing to do immediately. There's a check-box on your account settings about "auto-configure" that you really want un-checked.
The problem mom was experiencing is that the auto-configure was going from port 587/password/SSL to port 25/MD5/SSL, and the ISP just doesn't do that. And AM wouldn't let go of it most of the time. The ISP does not change it settings. Not ever. Yours doesn't either.
And this "re-auto-configure" would take place any time there was any kind of comm hiccup between AM and ISP/SMTP server. This was, I believe, the real problem. Mom's ISP is just not able to keep up with its workload, then there are comm-channel hiccups, if you try to send email during one of those hiccups it tries to reconfigure the comm scheme by choosing some other settings, that fails because the ISP only uses the one group of settings
It seems like sometimes it would recover ok (like the settings got changed back ?!), outgoing mail would finally transmit, and then later there'd be another hiccup, outgoing mail wouldn't go out, and this would last for hours or even days.
So what you need to do is turn off the auto-configure-settings on your email accounts. Once you have the right settings, don't let AM change them again.
A few weeks after that discovery I found the help web-page on the ISP's own site that explained this whole things with pictures and red circles over the naughty check-box.
---
What's also interesting here is that I still have an account with that same ISP, for a few more months. I don't use AM, I use SeaMonkey (altho not for much longer, as it's degraded, because it's a Mozilla product, (see other blog on that topic)). SeaMonkey is a whole different program, doesn't do this auto-configure at all. And I'm not using the same program settings anyway--I use the POP service, weaker security, etc., and virtually never have trouble at all--certainly nothing like what mom has had.
So I've convinced myself that it's this auto-configure that starts with what WAS once good settings, and gets stupid about them, and doesn't recover.
So turn that off. Bad dog.
So I've a lot of experience with nearly every version of OS Apple has ever produced.
My mom bought a new Macbook in the summer. Her old machine was getting flaky, it was like 10 years old, so not a huge surprise.
Her old OS was 10.4, new OS is 10.11 (El Cap).
She's using Apple Mail. I have occasionally used that in the past, but only on my Powerbook laptop, and even then only on vacation, where email need was limited at best.
Mom's email flakes out regularly, refusing to send to the SMTP server. So I have gotten a lot of "tech support calls" from her about this, and I haven't really been able to solve it. Have spent time on the phone with her ISP, and with Apple, trying to figure this out.
IT SHOULD NOT TAKE AN ADVANCED DEGREE(TM) TO FIX THIS.
Except that apparently it does. Pay attention to get yours.
So here's what is going on (Apple guy didn't know this stuff, ISP guy hinted at it):
Apple Mail ("AM") auto-configures an account for you based on an email address you give it when you first start it up, and you can add more later that will also auto-configure. OK, that's friendly, you don't have to be an expert on setup to get going on your brand-new machine.
AM now knows how to handle additional mail flavors, so you can do IMAP as well as POP. These two things aren't the same however, so it's interesting that it auto-configures for you. SMTP has gotten fancier over the years with security settings, and that's where the problem starts.
The long-term problem is that it continues to try to auto-configure for you--any time there's a glitch between your machine and the server, it attempts to re-auto-configure the entire account. This is a thing that AM didn't used to do, so it took me a long time to figure it out.
Well, the odds of that working right are probably slim. Fortunately, it looks like you can turn this off, which is probably the right thing to do immediately. There's a check-box on your account settings about "auto-configure" that you really want un-checked.
The problem mom was experiencing is that the auto-configure was going from port 587/password/SSL to port 25/MD5/SSL, and the ISP just doesn't do that. And AM wouldn't let go of it most of the time. The ISP does not change it settings. Not ever. Yours doesn't either.
And this "re-auto-configure" would take place any time there was any kind of comm hiccup between AM and ISP/SMTP server. This was, I believe, the real problem. Mom's ISP is just not able to keep up with its workload, then there are comm-channel hiccups, if you try to send email during one of those hiccups it tries to reconfigure the comm scheme by choosing some other settings, that fails because the ISP only uses the one group of settings
It seems like sometimes it would recover ok (like the settings got changed back ?!), outgoing mail would finally transmit, and then later there'd be another hiccup, outgoing mail wouldn't go out, and this would last for hours or even days.
So what you need to do is turn off the auto-configure-settings on your email accounts. Once you have the right settings, don't let AM change them again.
A few weeks after that discovery I found the help web-page on the ISP's own site that explained this whole things with pictures and red circles over the naughty check-box.
---
What's also interesting here is that I still have an account with that same ISP, for a few more months. I don't use AM, I use SeaMonkey (altho not for much longer, as it's degraded, because it's a Mozilla product, (see other blog on that topic)). SeaMonkey is a whole different program, doesn't do this auto-configure at all. And I'm not using the same program settings anyway--I use the POP service, weaker security, etc., and virtually never have trouble at all--certainly nothing like what mom has had.
So I've convinced myself that it's this auto-configure that starts with what WAS once good settings, and gets stupid about them, and doesn't recover.
So turn that off. Bad dog.
Friday, October 07, 2016
New SF reading
The end of 2015 there was this new show on SYFY called The Expanse. Based on some books I had not heard of or read.
So recently I've bought the books and read the first three, started the fourth.
Well...you know how this general sort of thing goes, it applies to music as well...every so often you make a discovery of a new artist whose work knocks your socks off. Ozric Tentacles was like that, Lana Lane was like that, Klaus Schulze was like that, ELP was like that...
Peter Hamilton was like that 15 years ago. Ron Goulart and PG Wodehouse were like that 35 years ago.
and The Expanse series is like that too. There's nothing in there that you haven't encountered before if you've been reading SF for a while. I've been reading SF since the late 1960s, so I've read it all. But The Expanse is like all those individual things rolled into one.
It's politics, except on the interplanetary scale, but not interstellar scale. It's got your kinda-typical hero, serious bad guys on a scale and detail not usually covered in SF, it's got classic space opera goings-on, unseen and incomprehensible aliens, artifacts left behind by those aliens that are either mega-nifty or mega-dangerous or both, spaceship battles...
I was impressed. So I'm reading the 4th one, bought the 5th, and awaiting the 6th.
I liked the tv show, but it was well-nigh incomprehensible without the books, and I think missed some episodes, making it REALLY hard to understand. And it was incomplete; the first tv season maybe covered the first half of book one--and THAT wouldn't have made sense without the rest of the book.
[Update: halfway through book six, not sure I can go on. SPOILER: Naomi's son decides it's cool to effectively destroy mankind on mother earth. Not yet clear how many people he murders by dropping asteroids on us. Hundreds of millions. Needs some necromancy, so he can be executed, then resurrected and executed again, at least once a day until the sun goes cold. All because he had some abandonment issues, and a manipulative daddy.]
---
So this all brings to mind something else. SYFY seems to have changed their game plan ~2 years ago and has stopped making those complete trash low-budget things they were doing for so long. And now we have some far-better-production-values-and-budget shows getting created. OK, and silly stuff like Sharknado.
I like this too. SYFY had devolved into too much fairly bad stuff. Well, it still has some fairly bad stuff, but Killjoys, Expanse, Childhood's End...now if they'd just drop WWE and Ghost Hunters and that kind of dreck. There's lots of stuff better than that they could re-run, and heck they could run those old cheesy 50s monster movies too, and all the star treks, etc. The least of which is better than the low-budget crud they put on.
So recently I've bought the books and read the first three, started the fourth.
Well...you know how this general sort of thing goes, it applies to music as well...every so often you make a discovery of a new artist whose work knocks your socks off. Ozric Tentacles was like that, Lana Lane was like that, Klaus Schulze was like that, ELP was like that...
Peter Hamilton was like that 15 years ago. Ron Goulart and PG Wodehouse were like that 35 years ago.
and The Expanse series is like that too. There's nothing in there that you haven't encountered before if you've been reading SF for a while. I've been reading SF since the late 1960s, so I've read it all. But The Expanse is like all those individual things rolled into one.
It's politics, except on the interplanetary scale, but not interstellar scale. It's got your kinda-typical hero, serious bad guys on a scale and detail not usually covered in SF, it's got classic space opera goings-on, unseen and incomprehensible aliens, artifacts left behind by those aliens that are either mega-nifty or mega-dangerous or both, spaceship battles...
I was impressed. So I'm reading the 4th one, bought the 5th, and awaiting the 6th.
I liked the tv show, but it was well-nigh incomprehensible without the books, and I think missed some episodes, making it REALLY hard to understand. And it was incomplete; the first tv season maybe covered the first half of book one--and THAT wouldn't have made sense without the rest of the book.
[Update: halfway through book six, not sure I can go on. SPOILER: Naomi's son decides it's cool to effectively destroy mankind on mother earth. Not yet clear how many people he murders by dropping asteroids on us. Hundreds of millions. Needs some necromancy, so he can be executed, then resurrected and executed again, at least once a day until the sun goes cold. All because he had some abandonment issues, and a manipulative daddy.]
---
So this all brings to mind something else. SYFY seems to have changed their game plan ~2 years ago and has stopped making those complete trash low-budget things they were doing for so long. And now we have some far-better-production-values-and-budget shows getting created. OK, and silly stuff like Sharknado.
I like this too. SYFY had devolved into too much fairly bad stuff. Well, it still has some fairly bad stuff, but Killjoys, Expanse, Childhood's End...now if they'd just drop WWE and Ghost Hunters and that kind of dreck. There's lots of stuff better than that they could re-run, and heck they could run those old cheesy 50s monster movies too, and all the star treks, etc. The least of which is better than the low-budget crud they put on.
Job Hunting
egad. it's job hunting time again. I am tired of this...it's not quite retirement time, altho it's close...
Earlier this year was my 40th (yes, 40) anniversary of when I started writing computer programs. Jan 1976. So I've been at it a while. And I'm very good at it.
My employer is not so good at getting new business, these days. Result: a year ago I had a project I was running. That collapsed in Feb due to a mgmt error re funding, and some customer error that we got blamed for also re funding; I had no idea anything was wrong until mgmt said "everybody stop charging this project today." In the spring I wrote a proposal for something new, that dawdled along until late Aug while the customer kept trying to get us to cut our price (while the scope and certainty of failure got larger), and we finally had to say no we aren't going to do this. Then I helped write another proposal that would start Oct 1, and we lost that on price to another group that is going to fail to perform by virtue of having to put really cheap (i.e., inexperienced) staff in 90% of the positions.
And now there's nothing else coming up for me. That's THREE fails this year. So my employer is going to have to lay me off in the next few days. I've been asked to give numbers for doing some contract work. I've never done that before...
So now I'm trying to figure out how to become an actual contractor.
Had an interview today at lunch with another employer just 3-4 miles from my old house...that'd be convenient for a while...we didn't talk about my planning to move and sell my old house in a few more months. I didn't think that was a good topic for this first meeting :)
I'd rather just retire, but I can't afford to do that until after the old house gets sold.
Yesterday I was at the new house. Because I was in the basement, I counted just how many model railroad structure kits I have to build...it's about 500, which means that if I build one a month I'll die before I get too far...one a week takes a decade to complete, and there's not way the bigger ones are only going to take a week--nor would I want them too, lest I be making mistakes all over.
Which means I need to get busy building these things...i.e., I gotta retire.
Which i can't quite afford to do. I gotta figure out how to work remote some of the time, how much to bill for that, etc.
----
Next day: agreed with my employer to take a 30-day LOA. Now I can build my outbuilding!
Earlier this year was my 40th (yes, 40) anniversary of when I started writing computer programs. Jan 1976. So I've been at it a while. And I'm very good at it.
My employer is not so good at getting new business, these days. Result: a year ago I had a project I was running. That collapsed in Feb due to a mgmt error re funding, and some customer error that we got blamed for also re funding; I had no idea anything was wrong until mgmt said "everybody stop charging this project today." In the spring I wrote a proposal for something new, that dawdled along until late Aug while the customer kept trying to get us to cut our price (while the scope and certainty of failure got larger), and we finally had to say no we aren't going to do this. Then I helped write another proposal that would start Oct 1, and we lost that on price to another group that is going to fail to perform by virtue of having to put really cheap (i.e., inexperienced) staff in 90% of the positions.
And now there's nothing else coming up for me. That's THREE fails this year. So my employer is going to have to lay me off in the next few days. I've been asked to give numbers for doing some contract work. I've never done that before...
So now I'm trying to figure out how to become an actual contractor.
Had an interview today at lunch with another employer just 3-4 miles from my old house...that'd be convenient for a while...we didn't talk about my planning to move and sell my old house in a few more months. I didn't think that was a good topic for this first meeting :)
I'd rather just retire, but I can't afford to do that until after the old house gets sold.
Yesterday I was at the new house. Because I was in the basement, I counted just how many model railroad structure kits I have to build...it's about 500, which means that if I build one a month I'll die before I get too far...one a week takes a decade to complete, and there's not way the bigger ones are only going to take a week--nor would I want them too, lest I be making mistakes all over.
Which means I need to get busy building these things...i.e., I gotta retire.
Which i can't quite afford to do. I gotta figure out how to work remote some of the time, how much to bill for that, etc.
----
Next day: agreed with my employer to take a 30-day LOA. Now I can build my outbuilding!
Monday, August 29, 2016
Presidential Election 2016
This has certainly been the craziest election season. End of August now. Trump is possibly the worst candidate who's ever run. Hillary has some massive negatives (whether true or not). Either side should be able to slam-dunk the other, but it ain't happening.
Why?
Hillary is polling ahead, although not excessively so. Do the polls tell you much? Those involved certainly think so, but there are some spectacular failures in the not-too-distant past.
You can readily find speculation that there are a lot of R people who will secretly vote for Hillary but not say so in advance. And that there are R people who are saying now that they won't vote for Trump.
I suspect that this is wrong. I think that what's likelier is that people who have always voted R will do so again, because once they are in the voting booth, they will simply be unable to vote for her. Trump gets the same voters Romney did. All of them.
So those non-crazy Trump voters...what are they thinking?
Voting for Trump is a protest vote. Simple as that. It doesn't matter one bit about whatever his crazy statements are, that's not important...what is important is that he is so non-politician that he will really shake things up.
I know about protest voting. I voted for Ross Perot in 1992. Ross would not have been that good a President, he was a little wacko, although not like Trump. I knew that Ross wouldn't win, but I didn't like GHWB or Bill C.
(aside: recall 1991: Gulf War 1. GHWB handled that well, although you could argue that he should have rolled on to Baghdad anyway. By late 91 he had the highest approval rating a President ever had, like 93%--he could have achieved ANYTHING. And he wasted it, because he had no vision. And when he was running again the next year "I'd like to be there to handle whatever comes up" was his reason for running. Brilliant. Doofus.)
So all the questions today on the D side about "what are these Trump voters thinking?" They have misunderstood completely. It's about protest, nothing else is relevant. Need to shake up Washington really bad. Trump will certainly do that, Hillary will not.
Of course Trump's crazy supporters want all non-white people booted out of the country. Or eligible for target practice, like in "The Purge". As though that will fix anything. As though the white folks who don't have a job right now would take a suddenly vacated job being done by someone brown.
So time for the inevitable prediction: well, several of them.
Option 1: Hillary 50, Trump 48, Johnson1, Stein 1.
Option 2: Trump 50, Hillary 48, etc.
Option 3: Hillary 60, Trump 30, Johnson 5, Stein 5.
I think option one is the likeliest. I think option 3 is least likely--Trump's "floor" as it is called, is not the 28% you can read about, it's more like 46%. All those Rs who've said they won't vote for him are lying, to themselves and to everyone else.
Option 3 happens if all those who were R but say they will vote D actually do so. I find this unlikely, but if the "women who vote for Hillary because it's the first chance [only chance] they get to vote for a woman" do in fact vote for her, I think Hillary gets 52%
Remember what happened in 2008 when the first black man was a candidate. Lots of votes for him for just that reason. He didn't have the negatives.
I also think:
Warren 65, Trump 25, Johnson 5, Stein 5.
Elizabeth Warren has the positives without the negatives, and picks up the Bernie voters. She crushes Trump. But it'll never happen...she's too old for a retry in 8 years.
Why?
Hillary is polling ahead, although not excessively so. Do the polls tell you much? Those involved certainly think so, but there are some spectacular failures in the not-too-distant past.
You can readily find speculation that there are a lot of R people who will secretly vote for Hillary but not say so in advance. And that there are R people who are saying now that they won't vote for Trump.
I suspect that this is wrong. I think that what's likelier is that people who have always voted R will do so again, because once they are in the voting booth, they will simply be unable to vote for her. Trump gets the same voters Romney did. All of them.
So those non-crazy Trump voters...what are they thinking?
Voting for Trump is a protest vote. Simple as that. It doesn't matter one bit about whatever his crazy statements are, that's not important...what is important is that he is so non-politician that he will really shake things up.
I know about protest voting. I voted for Ross Perot in 1992. Ross would not have been that good a President, he was a little wacko, although not like Trump. I knew that Ross wouldn't win, but I didn't like GHWB or Bill C.
(aside: recall 1991: Gulf War 1. GHWB handled that well, although you could argue that he should have rolled on to Baghdad anyway. By late 91 he had the highest approval rating a President ever had, like 93%--he could have achieved ANYTHING. And he wasted it, because he had no vision. And when he was running again the next year "I'd like to be there to handle whatever comes up" was his reason for running. Brilliant. Doofus.)
So all the questions today on the D side about "what are these Trump voters thinking?" They have misunderstood completely. It's about protest, nothing else is relevant. Need to shake up Washington really bad. Trump will certainly do that, Hillary will not.
Of course Trump's crazy supporters want all non-white people booted out of the country. Or eligible for target practice, like in "The Purge". As though that will fix anything. As though the white folks who don't have a job right now would take a suddenly vacated job being done by someone brown.
So time for the inevitable prediction: well, several of them.
Option 1: Hillary 50, Trump 48, Johnson1, Stein 1.
Option 2: Trump 50, Hillary 48, etc.
Option 3: Hillary 60, Trump 30, Johnson 5, Stein 5.
I think option one is the likeliest. I think option 3 is least likely--Trump's "floor" as it is called, is not the 28% you can read about, it's more like 46%. All those Rs who've said they won't vote for him are lying, to themselves and to everyone else.
Option 3 happens if all those who were R but say they will vote D actually do so. I find this unlikely, but if the "women who vote for Hillary because it's the first chance [only chance] they get to vote for a woman" do in fact vote for her, I think Hillary gets 52%
Remember what happened in 2008 when the first black man was a candidate. Lots of votes for him for just that reason. He didn't have the negatives.
I also think:
Warren 65, Trump 25, Johnson 5, Stein 5.
Elizabeth Warren has the positives without the negatives, and picks up the Bernie voters. She crushes Trump. But it'll never happen...she's too old for a retry in 8 years.
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