Month: April 2025

That New Car Feeling

Well, a portion of the inheritance from my parents arrived. I gave myself a small amount and the wife. Money that wasn’t spoken for in other ways.

The last few times I’ve needed a rental car, I’ve gotten a current version of my Toyota Tacoma. Every time I came away wishing I had a new truck.

Then a few days after getting back in my truck, I would realize that I didn’t want a new Truck. What I wanted was the new radio/head end.

So that’s what I got. A serious upgrade, It is an Alpine unit with Android Auto. I will be able to get in the truck and when I turn on the unit, it will hook up and give me navigation, calls, and music. Life is nice.

And for much less than a month’s payments on a new truck.

Boy they last a long time

In 1967, my parents bought a VW Microbus. It had hauling capacity that a standard station wagon did not. It was the equivalent of today’s mom van.

At the time, most cars were getting an astonishing 5 to 7 MPG. The VW got 20MPG. Given the amount of travel we did, this likely made a difference.

They gave me that car when I turned 16. I drove it until 1987 when I traded it in.

At the time I traded it in, it was on its third engine, its second gas tank, it didn’t have a working speedometer. The floor was nearly rusted through. Hell, it was rusted through. The aux. heater hadn’t worked in years. The main heater wouldn’t even defrost the windshields.

The bumper was a replacement that my brother wielded up out of diamond tread.

In short, it was at the end of its life. A year after I traded it in, I saw somebody driving it around town.

My truck is 15 years old. At 15 it is in better condition than that VW was at 10. It is still on its first engine. There is no rust on it. I expect it to keep going for at least another 5 years.

Lawfare

We keep moving closer and closer to the administration telling the courts to pound sand until the Supreme Court Rules.

It is sickening how inferior courts can find their way to always rule against trump.

A stat I heard was that between 1900 and 1999, there were 22 nationwide injunctions issued. There were 87 issued against Trump in his first term.

I believe I heard that there have been 30 so far in his second term.

People Fall For This?

I had numerous ads pop up because I purchased some computer stuff direct from China. Would you believe that you can buy a 2023 GMC Sierra for only $1,500? Sounds too good to be true.

Looking at the listing, they only accept payment via Western Union or wire transfers. Yeah, too good to be true.

And This

A friend ordered a DVD he had been searching for over the last 5 years. It arrived. New In Box.

Except it was just the box and book. No DVD. Amazon seller who was long gone by the time my friend received his package.

Amazon is covering the costs, but still…

Tariffs

I spent the last two weeks adding tariff processing to a B2B e-commerce website. The Canadian was just frustrated at the extra work for him and having to finally track tariffs. He had just been eating the cost of tariffs for years, a part of doing business.

In the meantime, I’ve been told that Trump’s tariffs are going to cost me thousands of dollars per year.

I’ve watched videos of leaders in other countries say, “We aren’t going to take this from the USA!”

One article pointed out that Vietnam has tariffs on the $10B they import from the US. Trump has put tariffs on the $150B we import from Vietnam. Isn’t it stupid that he did this to them?

Question of the Week

If the United States putting tariffs on imports is so bad, why is it good when other countries put tariffs on our goods.

What do you think of this entire tariff thing?

Watching The Supreme Court is always frustrating. There is a tendency for things to take a long time.

David Snope filed a petition for writ of certiorari on September 23, 2024. This will be the third or fourth time he has requested a writ of certiorari from the Supreme Court.

It has been granted once, the ruling of the Fourth Circuit court was vacated, and the case was remanded back down to the Fourth for a do-over in light of Bruen.

In November 2024, we were hoping that this case and Ocean State Tactical would both be granted cert. It did not happen.

If cert had been granted by January 16th, the case would have had oral arguments in the fall, with the opinion issuing in August.

As things sit, we might not hear the outcome of this case, if granted cert, until the fall of 2026.

But there are things afoot here.

First, the court heard Bondi v. Vanderstok and published their opinion on March 26th. This was not a direct Second Amendment Challenge, it was more of an administrative challenge. We did not win. Both Alito and Thomas dissented.

Mexico’s lawfare case was heard. We will have an opinion on that before the end of the 2024-2025 term. This is a case where the Supreme Court can slap down the lower courts for abusing the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act.

Snope is in regard to Maryland’s “assault weapons” ban. It is one of the many cases where the inferior courts have said things of the sort of “well, some arms aren’t arms under the protection of the Second Amendment.”

Another case, with a docket that looks almost the same, is Ocean State Tactical challenging Rhode Island’s magazine ban. Here, the inferior courts have declared that magazines aren’t really arms under the Second Amendment.

A third case has shown up on the radar.

Antonyuk II is a Second Amendment challenge to New York State’s Bruen tantrum response bill.

The heart of this is New York designating almost every part of the state a sensitive place. Even though Bruen explicitly said that the state couldn’t declare Manhattan a sensitive place, just because there were cops and people there.

All three of these cases are being discussed by the justices, again, this Friday. If we get lucky, we will hear some movement on Monday.

At this point, my tea leaves are missing, my crystal ball has clouded up, and the wife won’t let me sacrifice a chicken to read its entrails.

I haven’t a clue what the justices are going to do. I am holding out hope.

The art of the emotional appeal, aka “emotional blackmail,” is usually mastered by around age 3. The first time your child’s chubby little hands rise up and they pout, saying, “Pweeeeeze?” you can feel it, that tugging of the heartstrings. As responsible adults, it’s our job to teach our offspring (and local offspring in our vicinity) that you can’t get everything you want, and sometimes the answer is going to be no.

Saying no isn’t something that comes easily to the current crop of newly minted adults out there. Those who fall between the ages of 25 and 35 seem to have no concept whatsoever of “no” or “FAFO.” They’ve essentially never “found out” about anything, because they so rarely hear the word no.

While I don’t always put a lot of stock into certain theories of civilization, there’s one going around that seems to have at least some grasp on reality.

I don’t know if the dates are accurate, but it does seem to be grounded in factual research. Excuse the article I pulled it from; it was the only one with a decent enough graphic explaining it. The article is horrid, poorly written (imo), and not well grounded. But the theory that Ingraham’s study is based upon is real, and not too bad. If you want to really go down the rabbit hole, check out this post by Noema. You don’t have to do that, though. The graphic does a fairly decent job of making it easy to understand.

The general idea is that society, civilization as a whole, goes through these multi-stage cycles that last somewhere between 180 and 280 years in length. This is borne out by history, which does indeed seem to follow such cycles. They’re not perfect, but they are present, and they can be seen quite clearly. Drop in the history of Greece, and it fits. Rome, it fits. Early China, it fits. And so on.

The theory, followed through for America, states we’re in the end stages of one complete cycle. This isn’t too difficult to believe, considering we’re 248 years old as a country. Things were bound to break. After all, no one had previously attempted to run a country under a President, an elected official, prior to America. Our Constitution was radical in the most vast understanding of that word. The fact that so many other world leaders are now attempting to use our methods to run their countries is a testament to how well it has worked.

The thing is, though, I believe our Founders knew it wouldn’t work forever, as given. That’s one reason why they created the Constitution. It was created in such a way as to allow We The People to change and ratify it, as we became better as a People, and as we matured as a country.

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Love it or hate it, project management is a thing. It has to be there. If you don’t think it is there, you are just doing it badly.

Project Managers are a different kettle of fish. Some need to be boiled alive. Others can just dance on hot rocks. And a very few can sit at the big boys’ table.

I’m coming off the end of a rush project that was big. I had to take a customized system and add tariffs to it with about 14 days from concept to deployed. More than a little to get done.

When I started programming, I had a choice of an 8080 with a 24×80 character display, or a 6502 with a 24×40 character display.

When I was introduced to JOVE, Jonathan’s Own Version of EMACS, I fell in love with it. Multiple views into the same file, the ability to copy and paste from different files or different places in the same file. And auto indentation.

Powerful stuff for the time.

My fingers worked will with vi and later vim because I played Nethack and before that, Hack. The programs had a particular key set for moving the cursor based on the key caps of a terminal type used at MIT.

The author had never seen a terminal without arrows over the J, K, H, and L keys. To give you an idea of how ingrained those are, I had to fire up vim and tell my fingers “down”, “up”, “right”, and “left” to record the keys for this sentence. My fingers know, I don’t.

Besides jove, I learned emacs. Emacs is my programming editor. It is what I use when I need to write a lot of code or text. With modern computers, it starts just as fast as jove ever did on a 68020 class CPU.

The problem we had was keeping track of what needed to be done or fixed. This might start off as a document, written with jove in troff. This could be fed to different processors to create PostScript files to be sent to our printers.

Later, some of us used LaTeX for the same thing. Your “design document” was a separate file that was “fixed” before you started coding. These documents never contained more than brief pseudocode and discussions of algorithms.

As you were coding, if you discovered something, you created a comment and marked it. The two most common marks were, XXX which meant that the code was broken in some way, but it didn’t need to be fixed now. All XXX marks had to be addressed before the code could be released.

The other mark was TODO. This was working code but needed some features or extensions added. These did not need to be fixed before release.

In general, we used grep to find all these markers in a list of files. It wasn’t difficult.

The small program I’m working with has some 250k lines of code. After 3 or 4 years of supporting this site, I would say I’ve looked at every line of code in the system.

Finding every marker in 4100 files across 1200 directories is a pain.

Enter Kanban

Kanban is a project management tool. The concept is easy enough to do with sticky notes and a white board or notes with push pins on a larger bulletin board.

Today, the normal Kanban has 4 columns to hold cards. The cards are labeled, “backlog”, “To Do”, “Doing” or “Working”, and “Done”.

When you create a card it goes into the “backlog” column. These are issues or tasks that have no resources assigned to them.

Once per week, there is a meeting of the workers and the project manager. In this meeting, the project manager evaluates the cards that are in the “Done” column. If they are truly done, then they are removed from the board and added to the QA project.

Cards that are in the working column stay in the working column. Cards that are in the working column can be moved into the backlog column if some other card blocks them.

For example, if you have a card that says, “Put new tire on left front wheel” it cannot be worked on until the card that says, “Purchase a new tire for the front left wheel.” Until the purchase card is completed, you can’t work on the installation card.

If there are any resources (workers/developers) that think they are going to need more tasks to work on, the project manager will take cards from the backlog column and move them to the To-Do column.

When a worker requires more work, they move the card from the To-Do column to the working column. When they complete the card, they move it to the Done column.

I’ve used Kanban in the past. It never really appealed to me as it didn’t feel any different from the old ways of doing things.

For this latest project, I used my Kanban board.

Instead of putting markers in the code, I opened a new issue. That issue just went into the “backlog” column. I could tag the issue as a bug or a feature. I could indicate that cards were blocked. It was faster to create the issues/cards than to make entries into the files and then try to locate them later.

Today, I’ll be looking through anything in the QA column and writing unit or web tests for them. I’ll also be doing a QA across the site, to add to the project board.

The biggest thing for me was the ability to visual see what still needed to be done.

Conclusion

Good tools make the work go faster.

You may ask yourself, why is Allyson posting up songs from 1967 that weren’t even popular back then? Listen to the song. Sure, it’s a song about Snoopy. No question at all.

It’s more than that. I’ve been listening to bunches of OLD music (defined as pre-1970s, thank you very much… you know, EARLY 20th century) of late, and this one really struck me. On the surface, it’s just a silly song about Snoopy, our beloved cartoon dog. The lyrics aren’t particularly smart, but they scan nicely and the song is fun to sing.

But the Red Baron was a real person, and he really did take down 80 aerial combatants in 1917. Of course he wasn’t stopped by Snoopy; his plane was shot down by a combination of RAF pilots and Australian ground gunners. He was killed by a single bullet, and went down near Vaux-sur-Somme, France.

So why this silly song? Because it harkens to a time when this country actually cared about its position in the world stage. If the actions of Hitler in the 30s and early 40s were to happen today, we would do nothing. Today’s generation isn’t interested in fixing those kinds of wrongs. To misquote Karoline, the people in France would be speaking German. We can see this all around us. There are plenty of places where heinous things are going on, and we’re just not involved anymore.

I’m not sure we should be, because America managed to get itself listed as the world’s police, and that’s not a good thing. But at one time, when we stood up the enemy nations cowered with fear. Today, they just shrug and go back to messing with little girls and silencing women and killing the innocent.

There is hope. With Trump currently in office, military enrollment is up, exponentially. We see world bullies quietly standing down and skulking off to the shadows once more. The question is, can we keep it up? There is hope, but it’s going to take more than Trump’s four years in office to make it real.

I want to live in a world where we can make slightly off color jokes about stuff, and have folks chuckle. Most of the music I’ve listened to in the last five days would NEVER be permitted on the radio today. Too sexist, too racist, too … whatever. But they’re fun, and light, and frankly, no one gets hurt by listening to them.

So here’s to a world where we can cheer on Snoopy, and be proud of our troops, and stand up for freedom in our country… and then, when we’re in a better place at home, for freedom elsewhere.