Chris Johnson

My office chair has been failing for about a year now. The gas tube gave up the fight. The left armrest had cracked. And the entire thing had become one uncomfortable mess.

As somebody who sits in front of his computer for many hours per week, this was unacceptable. Worse, it was painful to sit for more than about an hour. After an hour, the discomfort was making it difficult to program or get other work done.

I bought a new chair. I’ve spent the last couple of hours sitting in it. There are different issues, but mostly it is me getting used to the new chair. It is nice to have my eyes at the correct level for my screens.

Auburn Duck Race

This is an event that Ally has been attending for a few years. She dresses in period garb, does a cooking demo, and sells her cookbooks. Normally I drive her out to the event, drop her and her gear off, head home, and then go and pick her up after the event.

We were both uncomfortable with her being in a crowd after what happened to Charlie, so I went along and stayed. SIG P365, two spare magazines, truck gun briefcase.

Nothing happened; we had fun, plenty of people, some book sales. I got to see one of my clients in person and met his family.

Shit Talk from Leftist

I had mentioned to Ally that the amount of Trump and right bashing on the Reddits had gone down. I spoke too soon. It is still full of hate and evil.

She’s right! Donnie started this!

J6 was the most violent thing in living memory. That’s the problem; MAGA lives in a completely different reality from what is actually going on. They don’t have the mental capacity to apply critical thinking skills, they just ride on hatred and lies.

I think I’m going to have a “speak out” day once a week.

The Most Terrifying Force of Death

Please don’t wake the man who wants to be left alone.

Charlie

As of Thursday night, they still do not have the shooter in custody. They have confirmed they have good video of the shooter. They believe they have his firearm. A Mauser in 30-06. They have released an image of a person of interest.

There are statements being presented as fact that the cartridges had things written in them indicating a trans or antifa motivation. This has not been confirmed by official sources. The different media reporting this might very well be circle sourcing.

Iryna

It has been 20 days since she was murdered. The look of stark fear in her face after she was stabbed is burned in my mind. I am waiting for the trial to end to find him sentenced to death.

Networking

It’s working. Shhh, don’t spook it.

Race Conditions

In computer science, a race condition is when two threads act on the same value at the same time, with the results of one thread being overwritten by the other.

Consider a database with a value in it; call it the number of visitors to the site. Simplistic code would read the data from the database, increment it by one, then write it back to the database.

This works if there is only a single thread. But if there are two threads, between the time one thread reads the value and writes it back to the database, another thread reads the same value. The value will be incremented in the database by one, when it was supposed to be incremented by two.

In this simple case, we can use a monoatomic action to do the operation: UPDATE options SET value=value+1 WHERE key='site-counter'

This SQL statement reads, increments, and writes the results back in a single operation.

The other method is by using a transaction. db_start(); $row = db_query("SELECT * FROM options WHERE key='site-counter'"); $value = $row['value']; $value += 1; db_query("UPDATE options SET value=$value WHERE key='site-counter'"); db_commit();

The framework I am using uses a crass and simplistic ORM (object relationship model). You don’t normally access the database directly. There is no method to start a transaction using the ORM. This would not be an issue except the framework actually has a critical section where a race condition can exist and is being hit on a semiregular basis.

And my last explanation to the client, this being the fifth time she’s asked what this thing is happening, was met with “I don’t speak your language. When will it be fixed?”

Question of the Week

What is the most touching thing you’ve seen since Charlie was assassinated?

Ally is in tears. I’m angry. I haven’t been this angry since somebody tried to take my kids from me 15+ years ago.

We are seeing a breakdown of our societal norms. We are no longer a high-trust society. As the Magic Eight Ball used to say, “All signs point to yes.”

My father used to say that he was made colorblind by an act of Congress. By this he meant that as an officer in the US Navy, he was legally bound to ignore race when interacting with those that reported to him.

In my entire life I believe I’ve only seen one reaction from him or my mother that was race-based.

In 4th grade I asked my parents if my friend from school could come over. They agreed. The parents were in contact with each other, and Mom and I went to pick up my friend.

He climbed into the car, and we had a great playdate. Afterward my parents said something about, “We weren’t expecting a black kid.”

In all my descriptions of my friend, I never mentioned his race.

I feel like I remained colorblind until middle school. In high school I was exposed to N* for the first time. They enjoyed picking on the white kids. They were crass, rude, mean. I hated the bus ride, I hated school, and I hated everything to do with the N*s. But here’s the thing: I use that word today; I didn’t at the time. Those monsters destroyed my opinion of black people. It took years before I recovered.

I did recover. I was able to look beyond race and judge people by their actions. I didn’t see racism until I was at University and was introduced to the term “Oreo” by a friend. He was describing how N*s described him.

Even when I was living with Section 8 people, the people were people. The N*s dealing drugs across the street from me and my family? Not so much.

The other day, an evil monster with black skin was riding the light rail when he decided to murder a young white woman. He took a lockblade from his pocket. He opened it. He then prepared to leave the car at the next stop.

As the train stopped, he stood, took a step to his right, leaned forward, and stabbed Iryna 3 times, murdering her before walking off the train saying, “I got that white girl.”

I have been seeing videos claiming that Iryna deserved it, because she was white. There are images out there of this evil black monster with a crown on his head and red glowing eyes praising his actions.

And I’ve seen videos made by blacks calling the white people that refuse to sit in front of them “racist.”

I’m sick of it. I’m sick of being told that I’m evil and uncaring and attempting to silence people who are saying everything they think out loud and in public.

I’m not willing to make a fuss or call them on their hate-filled screeds. It isn’t worth it.

Charlie was willing. Charlie was very good at it.

He would debate anybody who came to talk with him. Ben Shapiro is good at winning debates. He isn’t nearly as good as Charlie was at bringing people to the right.

Ally watched more of Charlie than I ever did. I didn’t watch because I can’t stay that calm in the face of such idiocy.

Today we lost Charlie.

And I’m scared. There are people from the middle that are running from the far left loons as fast as they can. They aren’t conservatives, they are not right leaning, but they sure as hell aren’t with them.

I don’t know who shot Charlie. I’ll wait to find out. I am passing judgment on the reaction of the “left.” I’m passing judgment on the rhetoric of the left, of how they constantly use the language of violence against the right.

I don’t hate them; they are not worth my energy. They say they hate me.

What am I scared of? I’m scared the light switch has been flipped in far too many people.

The left treats violence as a dimmer switch; they turn it up until it starts to look like it might be too much, then they turn it down. They use it to keep things at a low boil without things boiling over.

Unfortunately, the response isn’t on a dimmer switch. It is on a toggle switch to 20,000 volts.

It is the people who are comfortable taking 300 yard shots with Grandpa’s old hunting rifle.  It is the people who walk into a place and understand egress planning as well as sight/shot lines. It is people that respond without thinking to threats as if they had been in dance class together.

These are the people who go silent while they make target lists. These are the people who will spend the time and effort to plan every part of their operation to the final degree.

And that target list is huge. It would include people who wouldn’t dream they would be on someone’s target list.  They are just a talking head on MSNBC or CNN or any of the other outlets that spew hate and lies. It includes all the low-level politicians who aren’t relevant enough to be on a target list.

There is a powerful scene in Unintended Consequences where two hunters are out deer hunting. They look across the river into the backyard of a politician. They decide that they want to become part of the resistance.  So they line up to take the shot, just as if it was a deer. It was an easy 250-yard shot.

They then just walked out of the woods, another pair of hunters.

How many opportunities will present themselves over the coming months to people who have had the switch flipped?

I pray for all of you to do the right thing. Stay strapped; keep your head on a swivel. Stay away from stupid people. Stay away from stupid places. And don’t be there at stupid times.

Charlie Kirk has died. I’m more than PISSED.

I am so angry right now.

Keep your head on a swivel. Stay strapped.

I read Reddit because there are some useful groups within. Mostly technical. Unfortunately, like most social media, the woke left has taken over large swaths of the site. I recommend CourtListener.com to anybody who is interested in following court cases. I’m acquainted with the leader of the Free Law Project, who runs CourtListener.

In other words, I’ve had multiple personal conversations with him. Even going so far as to talk about Second Amendment issues. He is a “good” person, but he is driven by feelings of conservative evil. They dropped their X account because of Elon’s “Nazi salute” and only use BlueSky for social media announcements.

That is the sort of thing that drives many Reddit groups. A level of TDS and hatred of all that is not lockstep leftist talking points.

When I heard about the Claremont school district (SAU-6) having a budget shortfall of over $5 million, I read some articles. Every article rapidly descended into hate for Republicans, Trump, and anybody to the right of Marx.

These postings were in the New Hampshire sub-reddit. Since I read one article, the algorithm gave me more. Which led the algorithm to recommend r/messachusetts. Which was pure leftist drivel and a constant stream of hate.

The article that led me here was a picture of a new ICE vehicle. Since it was new, there was hate about that. They hated on the fact that the car wasn’t a beater. They hated on the paint job. They hated on money being spent on ICE and not burnt at the stake of “ending homelessness,” “universal healthcare,” “low cost healthcare,” and anything else they could think about—free housing, free transportation, free everything.

About every 10th comment was, “Did you report it to LUCE?”

From context, I knew LUCE had to be a group actively involved with protecting criminals.

And of course they are. “Think you see I.C.E. in your area? Call: 617-xxx-xxxx”. They have operators ready to take calls and texts in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Haitian, Creole, Mandarin, “and more to be added!”

Their entire media presence is built around conflating immigrants with criminal aliens. They talk about the evil of Trump and his plans. Of attempting to install fear in the “immigrant” community.

They are absolutely tone-deaf to what we on the right are thinking about dealing with.

Here we see a criminal animal sitting behind an immigrant. The immigrant had a job, was well-liked in the community, and was on her way home from work. She was killed by the criminal animal who had been released multiple times for multiple felonies.

She is an immigrant that we, on the right, support. She seems to have done everything correctly to enter and stay in the United States.

I will say that I had originally written that the animal that murdered Iryna Zarutska was a criminal alien; it turns out that he is just an American born animal.

As I get older, I find the songs I once sang along to have a different meaning and a different feel.

Is he really singing about his nanny sexually abusing him “before he left his nursery?”

The battle is real, at least in my head.

My physical network is almost fully configured. Each data closet will have an 8-port fiber switch and a 2+4 port RJ45 switch. There is a fiber from the 8-port to router1 and another fiber from the 2+4 to router2. Router1 is cross connected to Router2.

This provides limited redundancy, but I have the ports in the right places to make seamless upgrades. I have one more 8-port switch to install and one more 2+4 switch to install, and all the switches will be installed.

This leaves redundancy. I will be running armored OM4 cables via separate routes from the current cables. Each data closet switch will be connected to 3 other switches. Router1 and two other data closets. When this is completed, it will mean that I will have a ring for the closets reaching back to a star node in the center.

The switches will still be a point of failure, but those are easy replacements.

If a link goes down, either by losing the fiber or the ports or the transceivers, OSPF will automatically route traffic around the down link. The next upgrade will be to put a second switch in each closet and connect the second port up on each NIC to that second switch.

The two switches will be cross-connected but will feed one direction of the star. Once this is completed, losing a switch will just cause a routing reconfiguration, and packets will keep on moving.

A side effect of this will be that there will be more bandwidth between closets. Currently, all nodes can dump at 10 gigabits to the location switch. The switch has a 160-gigabit backbone, so if the traffic stays in the closet, there is no bottleneck. If the traffic is sent to a different data closet, there is a 10-gigabit bottleneck.

Once the ring is in place, We will have a total of 30 gigabits leaving each closet.  This might make a huge difference.

That is the simple stuff.

The simpler stuff for me, is getting my OVN network to network correctly.

The gist, I create a logical switch and connect my VMs to it. Each VM creates an interface on the OVS internal bridge. All good. I then create a logical router. This router is attached to the logical switch. From the VM I can ping the VM, the router interface.

I then create another logical switch with a localnet port. We add the router to this switch as well. This gives the router two ports with different IP addresses.

From the VM I can ping the VM’s IP, the router’s IP on the VM network, and the router’s IP on the localnet.

What I can’t do is get the ovn-controller to create the patch in the OVS to move traffic from the localnet port to the physical netwrok.

I don’t understand why, and it is upsetting me.

Time to start the OVN network configuration process over again.

It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving person. The story:

At a Phillies game, the batter hit a home run to the center field grandstands. A gaggle of people were there attempting to catch or get the ball. A father picked the ball up off the ground, took it over to his son, and placed it in his son’s glove.

Standard feel good moment at baseball games. The sort of thing that leaves a lasting memory for a young man.

Except these aren’t normal times.

Karen took offense because the ball had touched her fingers. In her mind this made the ball hers.  She came over to the family—father, son, and mother—and got in Dad’s face, screaming at him that the ball was hers. Dad argues for a moment, then takes the ball from his son to give to the lady to make her go away.

This was on the big screen and broadcast on NBC. She was instantly Internet Famous.

The team saw what happened, and a rep came over to give the kid a different home run ball and some other stuff. After the game, the family was invited to meet the players in person, where the son was able to get his home run ball signed.

Nice outcome.

How famous is she?

Well, she got booed out of the stadium. Other fans berated her. And the Internet did its thing.

She has been identified by name. My unconfirmed information is that she is a teacher. Again, unconfirmed, her Facebook feed and the school’s Facebook feeds have exploded with people expressing their displeasure with her attitude and behavior.

Maybe she will be a little less self-entitled in the future?

Ally posted about the difficulty in saying no. I read her article and found that it didn’t really hit home with me.

Not because it was written badly. It was well written. But it just didn’t connect. I know I am good at saying no.

In a resource limited situation, hard decisions need to be made. Some of those decisions will be life or death in nature. We need to think about those today. If you can convince yourself that you are capable of saying “no” in those situations, then you are a stronger person than I am.

To help prepare myself, I run different situations to decide what I am willing to do, what I must do, and what I can’t do.

Let’s take a simple one: a couple that knows you but whom you don’t know stops at the red line and places their newborn child there. They yell up to you, “Please save our child!” before turning and walking away, in tears.

They aren’t asking for help for themselves. They know you will say “no.” Instead they have left an innocent at your doorstep.

You have the following choices:

• Do nothing until the baby dies of exposure or is killed by something.
• Take the child into your care, reducing the supplies your people are depending on, adding a drain on your people’s resources.
• You kill the baby outright.

What do you do? Is it an easy choice? It isn’t easy for me to choose. I also have to deal with my family. How will they respond? How will I say “no” to them.

An even simpler example of this is personal. I have been saying “no” to pets since before I got married to my current wife. I have allergies that are not helped by animal fur. So they ask for a dog; I say no. They ask for a cat. I say no. They get a rabbit and have it in the house before I can say “no.”

How do I say “No” now that the animal is in the house? That was 5 rabbits ago. Three of them passed after expensive vet bills. My kid is at college, my wife attempts to care for one of the rabbits, and Ally cares for the other. Regardless, it didn’t matter that I said “no”; they just ignored me.

Will you be able to kill that baby when your spouse is in tears begging you to bring the innocent child into your care?

Here is a different one. You are out on a scavange hunt. You have taken one of your neighbor’s kids with you. You have been working with this family to the joint benefit of both groups.

During the hunt, the kid is badly injured. He is unlikely to survive his injuries. You have limited choices:

• Do you put yourself at risk to drag/carry the kid back to home base, knowing he might die in the process or bring the raiders down upon you?
• Do you leave him there to die?
• Do you leave him there, book it for home base, and hope you get back to him before he dies?
• Do you use your medical gear to make him comfortable, knowing that gear is never going to be replaced?
• Do you kill him to put him out of his misery?

Now compound this with having the neighbor with you. He is begging you to save his kid, to do risky things, to use your resources to save his kid. Can you still say “no”?

How about this one? Your kid is injured. They are dying. There is nothing you can do to save them; the most you can do is extend their life, and in doing so, use irreplaceable supplies, and they will be in pain the entire time.

Are you willing to kill your child? Are you willing to let them suffer? Are you willing to kill your group in six months for another day with your child?

I know that I don’t want to make that decision. I know that my wife would hate me if I didn’t do everything in my power to save my child, damn the costs.

If you think you can say “no,” then I don’t think you have thought about the hard choices. I agree with you; you are good at saying no. You are likely better prepared to say no than most people. Now stretch yourself and find scenarios where it would be difficult to say no. Scenarios where saying no is the right choice, but you will be hated by your loved ones for making that choice.

Then look me in the eye and say, “I can say “no.”” without having that niggling feeling in the back of your head that maybe there will come a time when you wont.