Chris Johnson

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.

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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.

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One of the hard things to accept is that so many inferior courts think that when a case is vacated and remanded, it isn’t for good reason.

The courts speak in polite ways. You don’t call out a judge for being an idiot. No matter how often they open their mouth to remove all doubt.

In Bianchi, the Supreme Court granted cert, vacated the Fourth Circuit’s judgement, and remanded it back to the Fourth Circuit for a do-over.

If my boss comes to me and tells me that I got it wrong, here is the documentation, read the documentation and do it over, right. I’m going to read that documentation.

If that documentation suggests that I’m right, I know that is the zebra in the herd of horses. Why? Because my boss told me to do it over.

If I read his documentation, use it to reason to the same method/result, I’m making a mistake.

Unfortunately, our court system doesn’t allow an easy method for an inferior court to say, “I’m too stupid to understand what you said, what does this line mean?”

One of the cases that was before the Supreme Court before Rahimi was U.S.A. v Jackson. It was not granted cert until after Rahimi was decided. At that point, the case was granted cert, the Eighth Circuit’s opinion was vacated, and the case was remanded back to the inferior court with instructions to “do it over, follow the documentation in Rahimi”

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We are watching The Inside Man. They have a version of this which I wish I could find.

Regardless, a powerful message.

This case involves California’s one gun per month infringement.

On Dec 18, 2020, nearly 4 years ago, Michelle Nguyen and others filed a complaint against Xavier Becerra, the Attorney General of California asking for injunctive and declaratory relief.

Because this happened before the Bruen opinion issued, it is couched in terms of Heller and levels of scrutiny. Remember, arguing that interest-balancing was wrong was a losing argument at that time.

They claimed that their rights were being infringed because “arms” is plural and limiting the purchase of guns to just one per month is singular. Thus making the law unconstitutional, on its face.

This case was a series of motions and counter motions. Both parties trying to limit what the other party could present as “evidence”. On Dec 6, 2023, three years after the case was filed, a motion hearing was held. This is the place where the parties argue why their motions are better before the judge.

On March 28, 2024, the court issued its judgement. This brings this case to completion at the district level.

The court found for the plaintiffs. The good guys. The court issued an injunction against California Penal Code §§ 27535 and 27540(f) as violating the Second Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment.

Knowing the state would appeal, Judge Hayes put a 30-day administrative stay on his ruling. This is perfectly normal.

The state filed their appeal the next day.

The Ninth Circuit administrative panel, continued its unbroken record in Second Amendment cases, issued a stay pending appeal.

Appellants have established a sufficient likelihood of success on the merits of this appeal and made a sufficient showing on the relative equities to justify a stay pending appeal.

This is pure spite. The Supreme Court has said, on multiple occasions, how the Winter’s factors are to be addressed. First, the merits of the case, second that irreparable harm, third the balance of equities, and finally that the injunction is in the public interest.

The order by the administrate panel did not address the merits of the case. This is an instant showing of a rogue court.

If the case is a civil rights case, and the party seeking the injunction is likely to win on the merits, the analysis is over. The denial of a civil right is “irreparable harm”. The balance of equities always tips to the party being irreparably harmed, the public has no interest in enforcing an unconstitutional law.

Thus, this admin panel did a crackerjack job of ignoring the law.

The administrative panel issued their stay on April 24, before the administrative stay expired.

The case is then calendared to be heard by a merits panel.

That took place on August 14th, 2024. It was a complete disaster for the state.

There are more than a few channels that have done reviews of the oral arguments.

So how bad were the arguments by the state? Their stay pending appeal was reversed.

The order (Dkt. 9) granting Defendants’ motion for a stay pending appeal (Dkt. 3) is REVERSED. Before: Owens, Bade, and Forrest, Circuit Judges.

It took the merits panel less than a day to issue the order reversing the stay pending appeal, in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

This is a good time to buy stock in heater vendors in hell, it has done froze over.

Americans know pasta. We eat tons of it every day. Of course, most of that is pretty boring or down right nasty stuff that comes from a box.

I know that my childhood was replete with box after box of Kraft’s Mac and Cheese. Bring your water to a boil, dump in the box of elbows. Cook until “right”. Drain the water, add butter and milk. Then add the powdered cheese.

The American “Alfredo”. Yes, it is as cheap and nasty as it sounds. And American’s seem to love it.

As a cheese wanna-be snob, I order Parmigiano Reggiano DOP every few months. Much better than the powdered stuff in a can.

So why and article on Pasta? Because I like to make my pasta by hand. Well, I call it that, but it wasn’t really “by hand” per the definitions that the real snobs use.

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