One year ago today: August 17, 2025, will not increase.
Five years ago today: August 17, 2021, 10,000 contractors.
Nine years ago today: August 17, 2017, back in Montana, sigh.
Random years ago today: August 17, 2016, define ‘stupidity’.
Yo, did I wake up feeling defeated. As evolution has it, the cure for that is coffee. Add some sticky rice and I was on my feet by noon. Still shaking off the fog, a call to Tennessee has me propped up. I mean, I’m going back to sleep until noon. Due to semi-popular request, here is the bottle of extra dark soy sauce I mentioned. I did not know so many have never seen it. See, I do value your loyalty to get you close-ups of such terrifically important things. My air conditioner, which has been on steady for two months, was off during my trip last week. Now it will not turn back on full blast. These and more PPPs to follow, I am sure.
Immediately thereafter, I made up a huge batch of fried rice. JZ was a short order cook, makes each plateful special. Not me, I’ll make up ten pounds a batch and freeze it ahead for a week. I did not leave the big bag of sticky rice behind, it is here, everybody else can go get their own. It is called glutinous rice in translation so there’s all you need. And yes, I like curry, which I associate with Thailand, never India. Even the masala I prefer is from Africa.
Tired enough to put everything on hold, I watched some documentaries. One that got me was the Soviet T-35 I’ve mentioned before. A behemoth for its time (1933), it followed a doctrine not common in Europe, the “breakthrough” tank. It had five turrets and no intercom. The commander in the cupola faced an impossible task trying to control this. The main shortcoming at that time was mechanical failure. If you know what to look for, you can see pieces of the tank that fell off during the early retreats of 1941.
Then, four hand-written letters to my dwindling core circle of life-long friends. I’ve been invited to an extra neighborhood Festus meet-up tonight. I’m too pooped, so tomorrow at regular time is all I can manage. Think I’ll just sit here a spell. I watched a BBC documentary about the Boer War that tried to portray it as a valiant British struggle to free blacks from slavery and champion their rights for representative government. And the Brit government now really hates Musk. He’s publishing their requests for censorship on X.
Something else that doesn’t fit the narrative is the concept that the farmer “steals” his land if he plows it There is probably no arable spot on Earth that somebody didn’t at some point graze his horse or ox on it. Does herding a goat over a patch of ground make it yours? On the other hand, does plowing it? History shows that the first cities arose only after grazing land was cultivated, making the food supply stable enough to make the place worth protecting. Was it this protecting that led to ownership disputes,
The Boers arrive and see nothing because the natives are not there at the moment. They plant a crop and next summer the native shows up with his herd and says that land is mine. Oooh, that sounds a lot like Palestine. Careful about taking sides, for it is evident the land that is cultivated is far more valuable than as pasture. Using land is not the same as improving it. Orchards are generally worth more than [the same acreage of] forest.
The original Doc Holliday.
(Glenwood Springs.)
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
I not only stayed put, I did not build any boxes. I know you are proud of me but that is as close as I ever want to get to being a hotel desk clerk. It’s my frame that’s weary, not my brain. So I’m taking a short look a the Arduino stab at standardizing FPGA, those field programmable gate arrays. It’s chip full of the logic gates used to create computer chips. But the gates are not arranged for specific tasks lie your CPU or math chip. You program the gates—and this suffers from the same development crap as all such devise. Too many of the coders are idiots who do not think ahead. The results are idiotic and incompatible.
Up to now, I thought the FPGA’s advantage was you could reprogram the gates. The videos say no, the gains are that the chips are super-fast and they can act in parallel. So most of your videos and music devices use gate arrays. There are two languages for most of these, I will take a look now, but I sense this is a daunting task. Nonetheless, it is only a matter of time until the primitive A.I. functions out there discover the power of parallel processing. I would like at least an inkling of how they go about their business.
I’ve now read my first code block of VHDL, the gate language used by the US military. It is fairly self-descriptive but has a rotten vocabulary. It could have called this first example “array” an AND-GATE. Because that is what it is. Instead they call it the “architecture RTL” or something, I’m not ready for this. I do spot a lot of the code seems to concern controlling time while the commands themselves are simple imput/output.
ADDENDUM
Today’s primo event didn’t happen. The conference call with Caltier did not go through. The company has to see the Reb’s number, they will not answer (take messages) from my phone, which is also blocked. (I have not had botherations with robocalls in years.) However, the end of this month has been mentioned as a deadline, and I went over the entire set of records I have on the company, as I usually do before each call. It’s almost as if I know they don’t have the time, or inclination, to do that.
What I noticed is a new field has appeared on our account listing. It is for redemptions, lists the correct amount, and flags the transaction as “pending”. This is acceptable. They cannot really backpedal now without losing face, I hate to say. But pending is something we can use here to assuage our own wolves.
