Chris Johnson

I’m up at the Fort with Ally and my wife. They are having a show and tell.

She picked out the garb to wear, and I have my black felt hat.

Originally, I intended to do some wood working, but that is currently on hold until I get some raw lumber.

The lathe needs bracing before it can be put into use. We could just use 2x4s, but that wouldn’t look very nice.

My goal is to bring up a 4 or 5 foot length of Oak from the woods. It will be heavy.

That will be fed through my bandsaw to make some rough blanks. The blanks will be taken up to the fort to be hand planed and turned into braces.

So… What will I be doing up there today?

I will be combing wool and spinning it. I have my wheel up there to use, but it is likely I’ll be using something a little older. Some 100+ years older than mine.

I am also hoping to learn how to process flax into fibers for spinning. It is an example of something I have knowledge of but no skill.

The next project is to make an inkle loom. My fine felt hat is too boring, even for me. I want a hat band. That requires me to make a hat band.

To make the hat band, I will need some sort of loom. I’ve decided to use an inkle loom. I could spend dollars to buy one, instead I plan to make it.

There will be some shortcuts used. The intent is to use the modern jointer, plainer, and lathe to make the components, but we will be starting from a log in the woods.

The threads for the hat band? Those are what I will be spinning. My wife will be dying some of the thread, I will have to decide on colors.

I hope that some of you make it out to the Fort this weekend.

These are people you should know about. They are often the people to put together the NPC videos of all the MSM saying the same thing of the same scripts.

They are also the people who provide the positive vs. negative percentages for MSM.

Biden Lashes Out After Judge Pauses His Executive Order Rewarding Long-Term Illegal Aliens with Path to Citizenship https://t.co/8Tha4Bzny3

— Media Research Center (@theMRC) August 29, 2024

Damn that guy is a good shot. pic.twitter.com/BPsscZDgQy

— Defiant L’s (@DefiantLs) August 29, 2024

This is mostly to test the autopost to Twitter/X

There is this interesting point where you realize that you own a data center.

My data center doesn’t look like that beautiful server farm in the picture, but I do have one.

I have multiple servers, each with reasonable amounts of memory. I have independent nodes, capable of performing as ceph nodes and as docker nodes.

Which took me to a step up from K8S.
Read More

Image from Sheep To Shawl Competition

First published in 1912, the conceit of John Clayton still flows through the veins of modern men (and women).

He was sure that his “superior knowledge” would prevail over his lack of actual skills.

Does he know how to make cordage? He makes their first shelter with rope left by the mutineers. He did not know how to make cordage.

He protects himself and Lady Alice with the rifles and pistol. He has no way of making more cartridges. When his supply is gone, there is no more. He just has a fancy stick.

I have extensive knowledge about many things. That doesn’t mean I have skills in all of those things.

I know the basics of long-distance shooting. I don’t have the skills. That means my shots will be well within 200 yards. Yes, I consider 200 yards to be close in.

Did John know how to make clothing? How long is the clothing he has going to last?

Can he make thread? Can he make a drop spindle? A spinning wheel? Can he collect fibers and turn that into yarn and then turn that yarn into clothing?

One of the skill contests that happens in many places, a few times a year, is sheep to shirt.

A team will be set up and at “go” they will shear the right number of sheep. While that is happening, they second team will be cleaning the fleece.

After the fleece has been cleaned, it will be spun into thread. There are always multiple spinners. As six to twelve doing the first spinning. Those are either spun to make stronger two or three-ply material.

While the spinners are spinning like made, the weavers are creating the warp. This is the process of taking the thread and wrapping it around pegs to organize the threads and to make loops that are the same length.

The longest warp I’ve done was about 18 yards.

Once the warp is prepared, the loom needs to be warped. This is the process of passing each thread through the reed and then through the heddles. The warp is then tied to the back roller and the warp is then pulled to the back of the loom.

More thread is put onto bobbins and then one person starts weaving. All of that to make a few yards of cloth.

Having made the cloth, a new team takes up sewing everything together.

A good team can do the entire process in 12 hours or so.

Did John have any of those skills? I have all the skills except for shearing and the cutting/sewing of the final product.

I have knowledge of how to shear. I don’t have the skill to do it. Nor do I have the tools to do it.

Part of preparing is learning how to do things.

So here’s another example. Making soap. My wife makes soap. I have the knowledge of how to make lye from hardwood ash. The question is: Do I have the skill to make lye?

Currently, the answer is “no”. I’ve tried, and failed. I’m not sure why.

So my answer was to buy large bottles of Sodium Hydroxide. 5Kg is #34.50 and 50lbs is $78.00. I can make pounds and pounds of soap from that much Sodium Hydroxide.

Yet, there is still a problem, Mixing Sodium Hydroxide with water is an exothermic reaction. This means the stuff gets HOT.

To make soap, you need the temperature to be reasonable.

We had the knowledge, but the last time my wife taught a class, she wasn’t prepared for that exothermic reaction. We had to use an ice bath to cool it down.

There are many skills you require. You should be looking at skills to live comfortably.

The question of the day for you, you have a spinning wheel, you have the wool, you have the loom. What is the fastest path to a shirt, gloves, socks, hat?

There are always songs that stay with us forever.

My first year at University, I was amazed at how many concerts and shows were held on campus. Over the time I was there, I was able to see off Broadway productions of Cat and A Chorus Line.

In addition to plays there were the concerts. And they weren’t little names.

Harry Chapin gave a concert every year.

When my roommate tried to get me to go, I begged off. I was studying for a test or some such thing. That was a mistake.

A few months later, Harry died in a car accident.

Having been introduced to Harry, I purchased many of his albums on CD and nearly wore them out.

I’ve already written about Sniper.

I listened to the following song, and it felt like it was telling a part of my story.

My father was in the Navy, he would deploy for 6+ months every few years. He worked a lot. When I was old enough to actually do things with him, he was CO of the base, which left him little time.

His support was always there.

He and mom delayed moving to their dream home after he retired to allow me to complete high school in the school I started.

They left at the end of the school year, I went to Europe for a trip, came back to the states and spent the summer staying with a friend and working.

From there, it was straight to University. I went “home” for Christmas and the summer break.

That was the last time I lived with my parents. Every other summer, I was at school or working. Or both.

So when I heard this song, it hit me hard. My father has always been there for me. As much as I needed. He was the strength behind mom. He was.

And I was the selfish son who couldn’t make time for him.

https://youtu.be/RWdTWuZAA7A

So I told him this song was so meaningful to me because I wasn’t making time for him and I never had.

He heard the other side and felt like he wasn’t there for me.

I hurt him. I regret telling him about “Cat’s In The Cradle”, but at the same time, I hope he heard that I felt I hadn’t been there for him.

Today is different. It is challenging to put into words what is different. I know what has changed, but finding the words is difficult.

More than 36 years ago, I was sitting in an operating room as a doctor was cutting my wife’s belly open. I was in scrubs, looking and feeling out of place.

I had informed the doctor ahead of time that if there was a choice to be made between saving my wife or my child that my wife would take priority.

My child was six months early. She is now a successful mid to upper manager in a large corporation.

My second set of children came before my oldest graduated from middle school.

Today, my youngest children, twins, start classes at University.

The house seems quiet. Their spoor is being quietly removed from the public areas, reviling my mess/spoor.

I have been informed that there will be cleaning done. That I will be moving my “stuff” out of common areas and into my areas.

I’m both sad for the silence in the house. I’m also at a loss. This is the first day in over 36 years when my children were not a major part of any decision I made.

People get very upset when they go to visit Amazon, Netflix, or just their favorite gun blog and the site is down.

This happens when a site is not configured with high availability in mind.

The gist is that we do not want to have a single point of failure, anywhere in the system.

To take a simple example, you have purchased a full network connection to your local office. This means that there is no shared IP address. You have a full /24 (255) IP addresses to work with.

This means that there is a wire that comes into your office from your provider. This attaches to a router. The router attaches to a switch. Servers connect to the server room switch which connects to the office switch.

All good.

You are running a Windows Server on bare metal with a 3 TB drive.

Now we start to analyze failure points. What if that cable is cut?

This happened to a military installation in the 90s. They had two cables coming to the site. There was one from the south gate and another from the north gate. If one cable was cut, all the traffic could be carried by the other cable.

This was great, except that somebody wasn’t thinking when they ran the last 50 feet into the building. They ran both cables through the same conduit. And when there was some street work a year or so later, the conduit was cut, severing both cables.

The site went down.

Read More

I’ve been deep into a learning curve for the last couple of months, broken by required trips to see dad before he passes.

The issue at hand is that I need to reduce our infrastructure costs. They are out of hand.

My original thought, a couple of years ago, was to move to K8S. With K8S, I would be able to deploy sites and supporting architecture with ease. One control file to rule them all.

This mostly works. I have a Helm deployment for each of the standard types of sites I deploy. Which works well for me.

The problem is how people build containers.

My old method of building out a system was to create a configuration file for an HTTP/HTTPS server that then served individual websites. I would put this on a stable OS. We would then do a major OS upgrade every four years on an OS that had a 6-year support tail for LTS releases. (Long-Term Support)

This doesn’t work for the new class of developers and software deployments.

Containers are the current answer to all our infrastructure ills.

Read More