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Ceph For The Win?

One of my Ceph nodes had started acting up. It would stop responding, and I could get no network traffic to it.

It is a truly headless server. My only input was the power button. Which sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t.

After the third time the node went offline, I put a monitor on the node and got to see it die.

It limped along for a few more days before I remembered I had hot-swappable cabinets and moved the large drives to a different node.

Ceph is now rebalancing the cluster by moving 24+ terabytes around. It should finish in a couple more days. The cool factor is that nothing that depends on the Ceph cluster noticed. It all just works.

I would be replacing the dead node, but other work is interfering.

New Work

I’m in the process of bringing on a new client. It has been an interesting 48 hours. My first task has me busy for the next 4 days, if their networking team can get their network configured correctly.

They depend on Linux for several servers but have had nobody with Linux skills in their IT department for many years. Troglodite to the rescue.

I love this stuff. Doing emergency fixes faster than most other people can even evaluate the problem is where I shine.

Democrats AWOL

In a move that reminds me of pickup baseball games of my youth, the Dems of Texas were losing, so they kicked sand on the plate, grabbed the ball and bat, and took off for the hills.

Being Dems, this wasn’t “I’m taking my ball and bat and going home.” No, it was “I’m stealing your ball and bat and taking off with them.”

The governors of New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, and other Democratic strongholds are threatening to redistrict to remove Republican districts.

This would be a real threat, except that these states already did it. There are no Republican representatives from Massachusetts.

Ebay is an illness

So there are three or four planes you need for hand processing wood.

You require a smoothing plane, a Stanley #4. You require a jack plane, a Stanley #5. You require a jointer, a Stanley #7. And you should have a fore plane, a Stanley #5 with a wide mouth and specially shaped iron.

• Veritas #4: $290.00
• Veritas #5: $389.00
• Veritas #7: $459.00
• Veritas #6 Fore plan: $346

I’m not about to add those up. I’m lucky in that I already owned the #5 and #7.

eBay has Stanley #4s for around $50 plus shipping. Stanley #5s are going for $25 to $50. #7s are a bit more, in the $70 to $125 range.

Wooden planes are even cheaper.

I need to stop spending any time on eBay.

Diets

The weight is slowly coming off. It working for me. I just need to keep up the exercise part of the diet.

Question of the Week

What incident sticks out in your mind where you were told that there was a difficult problem and you gave the simple solution?

To give an example. I once interviewed with one of the big three automakers. My friend had gotten me the interview.

The interview went well. They explained the project I would be working on. They explained how hard the problem was that I would be working on.

I received permission to use the whiteboard and sketched out my proposed solution.

A few days later I received an apologetic phone call from the project manager. Seems that my 15-minute whiteboard session had provided them with the solution they needed. They had completed the project and the project was being shut down. The position they were going to hire me to fill was gone.

I moved the site to a new server. It appears to be more responsive.

On the downside, I don’t know if the citeserver is still working, and I have a server that has decided to kick the bucket.

Why is it so slow?

I wish I knew. There is a fast server running nothing but Ceph and MariaDB. It is connected via 10 Gigabit to the backbone. It is running on NVMe.

That’s not a bottleneck.

The container is running on a nice fast computer with plenty of memory, 10 Gigabit networking, and multiple CPUs running at 98% idle.

That’s not a bottleneck.

I’m done. I know you are done too. We’re moving to a different server in a different data center. You won’t notice the downtime because the server is so slow today.

I’m spoiled

I can go to Amazon and order something; it will be here the next day with free shipping. I order from some place apart from Amazon, and they want me to pay shipping.

If something goes wrong with an Amazon shipment, they have it fixed in a few minutes.

Powdered Paint

With the way my woodworking is going, I expect to need to put a finish on some items shortly.

Earlier this week, I used a 1-pound cut of shellac with a Tried and True beeswax and boiled linseed oil finish. That came out very nice.

On Wednesday I tested out a dark 2-pound cut of shellac on pine. Oh my, that is beautiful. I’m going to make some beeswax, carnauba, and olive oil paste polish over the top. I just have to make it.

But the fun thing that arrived Thursday was milk paint.

This has very period colors. I’ve used it in the past. That was a product by General (I think) which I applied with an HVLP sprayer. It did a fantastic job of covering with a dull finish.

Those shelves have stood up to abuse above the washer and dryer. The remarkable feature is that the paint never gets tacky, unlike latex paint.

The new paint comes in powder format. You mix it at a one-to-one ratio. Unfortunately, the person who wrote the instructions didn’t specify if it was 1-to-1 by volume or by weight.

I’m going with volume because the instructions have far too much “until it looks good” and “semi-melted milkshake consistency.”

The colors look very period. Next week will be a test week for painting.

Shellac or paint first?

Research and still more research.

Unfortunately, the seller is happy with “just use my product.” I’m not a fan of putting paint straight on softwoods directly.

So what comes first, a few coats of shellac to create a smoother surface or paint only, or paint then shellac to seal it, followed by wax?

The good news is that almost any finish will work over de-waxed shellac.

SCOTUS: One Little Phrase

In Rush v. U.S. Jamond Rush was found to be in possession of an unregistered short-barreled rifle. He is making a facial Second Amendment challenge to 18 U.S.C. §§ 5841, 5845(a)(3), 5861(d).

A petition for writ of certiorari was filed June 6, 2025. On June 13th, the government said they would not be responding.

This is “OK” for the new DoJ. They aren’t fighting the petition, nor are they attempting to get the case heard.

SCOTUS has distributed the case for conference on 9/29/2025.

Yesterday, The Court added this short phrase to the docket: Response Requested. (Due September 2, 2025)

This is a big deal. It means that the Supreme Court is asking the Trump Administration if the Trump Administration wants them to hear the case.

Given what we have been seeing out of the Trump DoJ, this is likely a very good thing.

With the OBBB having passed and the reason for SBS, SBR, AOW, and Supressors being on the NFA gone, this could be the end of the NFA for these types of items, or for the NFA as a whole.

We will keep watching.

Question of the week

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. — William Shakespeare, Macbeth.

The one thing that keeps disappointing me with this administration is the lack of arrests and criminal cases being filed.

I have held DoD clearances. I had to take yearly classes on how to handle classified material. I know that Hillary Clinton broke the law in her handling of classified material. She should have been charged, arrested, prosecuted, found guilty, and then spent time in prison.

The fact that she is still walking around without any consequences upsets me.

I was hoping that we would see several high-level people being perp-walked over the Epstein files. It hasn’t happened (yet?)

Now there is another dump of data exposing criminal actions on the part of multiple players.

Q: Do you think anybody will be going to trial over any of these criminal actions? Do you think anybody will see any prison time for their criminal acts?

DoJ is Pro 2A?

In a strange twist of events, the federal DoJ has filed multiple briefs with the Supreme Court supporting the Second Amendment-protected rights of The People. Amazing!

They have also done things at the circuit court level to close out future attacks on the Second Amendment.

It is a great time to be alive.

Sharp Yesterday Means Dull Today

My progress as a woodworker has been frustrated many times. The most common frustration? The tool is no longer sharp.

Yesterday, I was fitting the bottom to my tool tote. I’m sweating like a pig. It is dripping onto my glasses, making me even more misirable.

When I came in for a break, I told Ally that this is the first time I wished I was using my power tools. With very little effort, I could have set up the table saw and fitted the bottom in just a few minutes. Planing the ends flat and with the correct angle was painful.

Then, for grins, I pulled the blade out of the plane, did a hand touch-up, and then put the iron back in the plane. What had been a fine sawdust became end-grain shavings. Not more than 10 minutes later I had a great fit.

What Do You Mean Rip Cut Saws Rip Boards Better?

There is a scary moment when you first modify a tool to “fix” it or make it work for you. I think my first time was when I cut the shank of 3/4″ to JT-3 from 3″ to 1.5″. It worked perfectly, but cutting a piece off my new adapter? That was scary.

Modern handsaws are basically shit. Most people don’t know how to use them. Most people won’t even bother to learn how to use them. Most people would consider it too much work.

Older saws can be had for a reasonable price, but they are not ready to use.

The reason that new saws are so bad is that they are designed to do everything and to leave the best edge possible.

You can find old saws with 4 Teeth Per Inch (TPI). It was seldom that you found an old saw with more than 10 TPI, with a few being 15 TPI.

There is a good reason for that: the coarser the pitch, the faster the saw cuts.

Saw teeth have several parameters to them. The TPI, the angle of the tooth, the set, and the shape of the tooth.

When you crosscut , you want to sever the fibers. This requires a knife-like action. This is accomplished by putting a cutting edge on the saw tooth, alternating teeth. This cuts the wood fiber before removing the waste.

When you are rip cutting, you do not need that knife-like action. What you want is a chisel-like action. This is accomplished by having a 90° angle of attack that shears the fibers under the blade.

Modern saws are marketed to do both. They have a crosscut grind to the teeth, and they have a high TPI count. They do not do either type of cutting “well.” They do both adequately.

Thursday I took a new saw blade and “sharpened” it. That is to say I reshaped the shape of the each tooth to be that chisel profile. Then I tested it.

In soft pine, a full stroke was cutting somewhere between an inch and a half and two inches. Three or four times as well as it was cutting before the reshaping.

Obama Fights Back

The Obama sycophants, on command from the holy one, have stood up and screamed that the referral that Tulsi Gabbard made to the DoJ is just a distraction.

The argument is something like Trump is in the Epstein files. He doesn’t want you to know what we all know, that he is a kiddy diddler and a rapist. This referral is just to distract the MAGAots.

How do we know? Because Trump said he wasn’t in the files. He is lying.

How do we know he is lying? Because he was lying in his first term.

How do we know he was lying in his first term? The media told us so.

How did the media know he was lying? Because Trump always lies.

You can’t make this shit up.

Epstein

The world turns; now the Democrats are demanding the files be released.

There is a huge issue with the files, and every Democrat who is listed in the files will scream it to the skies.

The chain of custody has been broken because untrusted agents could have modified the content.

The files have been in the Biden DoJ for 3 or 4 years. Who had access, who could have modified the content, and who could have added or removed content? None of that can be trusted today.

For the Democrat caught with his pants down the same will be said. They will claim that the Trump Administration modified the content.

Obama Has Immunity!

Did he order these things done as part of his duties as the President of the United States?

No? Then he doesn’t have immunity.

Question of the week

Are you going to keep your Sig P320? Sell it? Buy them as they flood the market?

Site Display Issues

Somehow how, some way, my theme was lost. I’ve reset to a working theme.

It is loud, it is in your face, and it looks like 100 other sites. I do not have the time or energy to put it all back right now. I’ll be working it over in the coming weeks.

Woodworking

It is difficult to know or anticipate what you don’t know. I like to anticipate; I sometimes fail.

Right now my hands are scratched and bruised. My thumbnail is a beautiful shade of blue and black.

I’m currently working on flattening the benchtop. This consists of using the smoothing plane to take down local high spots. Then use a straight edge to make sure that you have a flat surface from side to side. Then you use winding sticks to make sure your top is not twisted.

My top is not yet smooth, much less flat, much less without twist.

On the other hand, there is no noticeable difference in moving from board to board.

Up coming woodworking projects

I intend to make a wood journeyman’s tool tote as my first action. I intend to pick up my wood at a local sawmill. 4/4 rough-cut pine.

If I can find some 6/4 or 8/4 cherry, I’ll pick up enough to make a rabbet plane and a router plane.

Vehicle Issues

I drove home from the autoshop today with a lighter wallet and a much cooler cabin. The bearings on the A/C condenser went out.

If I were the only person to drive my truck, I would have ignored it for a while. But I am not. So, I got it replaced. The issue is that it is too easy to turn the A/C on. All it takes is pushing the A/C button OR turning the knob counterclockwise.

We Must All Watch the Same Videos, Read the Same Articles

There are days when I finish writing an article and then watch a video that covers the same issue. Sometimes I learn more, and sometimes it feels like they are responding to the article I have not published yet.

In the Sotomayor situation, I was pleased to watch two videos where the presenters quoted nearly the same things I did. All of us pointing out that Sotomayor is an agenda-driven rogue justice.

Question of the Week

When I was a kid, people would buy a car for cash every couple of years. A car loan for 48 months was almost unheard of.

Today, I’m seeing people taking out 6- and 7-year loans on a vehicle.

How long do you expect your cars to last? My truck is 15 years old; it needs bits and pieces to be fixed or replaced. I expect to get another 5 years from it.

My first car, a 1967 VW Microbus, was traded in on a 1987 TransAm in 1987. I expect my cars to last 10 to 20 years.

SCOTUS

Trump keeps winning at the Supreme Court. There was an 8-1 opinion in his favor this week. With only the DEI Hire dissenting.

Violence In the Streets

There were two events where armed terrorists decided to shoot at federal agents.

Compared to the Dallas, TX, shooter a few years ago, this is barely making a ripple in the news.

Stay strapped. Keep your head on a swivel. Stay out of stupid places at stupid times with stupid people.

Evil

The flash floods in Texas and New Mexico have claimed multiple lives. Parents will never see their children alive again.

There are far too many people in the socials going, “Good, they deserved it.”

These people are evil. They sicken me.

TDS, Lies

People have been blaming Trump for the tragedy in Texas. I’ve heard that it was Trump’s fault because the fully manned weather service was not properly staffed. That he defunded the early warning system. That he hasn’t gone to Texas, like Biden went to NC.

Except that Trump was in NC before Biden. Trump has been in contact with the Texas state government. He has offered all help possible, and the federal government had responded, was rescuing people within hours of Trump learning of the tragedy.

These people are nearly evil. If they had the brains of an amoeba, they would be evil.

Safe Travels

My wife has returned from her vacation. Happy dances throughout the house.

Sharpen That Tool

Wednesday, I was cutting a mortise. Because of the style, I cut two partial cross cuts, then knocked out the waste. This created a mortise that was intentionally to small.

The mortise is then trimmed to size with a chisel. While this started fine, it really wasn’t working as I expected.

Thursday, I needed to finish trimming those mortises. Before I did that, I ran the same chisel through the sharpening pattern.

When I went to cut that end grain, the chisel shaved a piece so thin I could see through it.

I need to spend more time keeping my tools sharp.

Shortly, I will need to plane the top of the frame flat. This will require me to use the jack plane or joiner plane. Before I do so, I’m going to spend still more time making sure those plane irons are razor sharp.

Woodworking Tools

The tools you need to make tools. My workbench frame is nearly completed. I am currently adding bracing. But I can clamp boards to the top of this frame to do work.

Planing a short piece of lumber flat two days ago took about an hour and was a chore the entire tim.

I clamped a board to the top of the frame with a plane stop in it. With this in place, it took just a few minutes to smooth and flatten a brace. This workbench is a good height for me, and it is a joy to work on.

Question of the Week

When you look in your holster drawer, what brand of holster do you see that you should not have purchased?

What holster brand have you found to be good for you, and why?

We have decided to give away some cards!

The first 20 people who send a mailing address to us at info@troglodite.com will receive 15 cards via USPS first class mail.

Depending on demand, we might ask for a donation to cover the costs.

Thank you!
Chris, Ally, and the rest of the team

Trump Wins, Again

My hope is that in 10 years, my grandchildren can read about the 12-day war. Read how the man who did not want to be president became president and brought peace to the middle-east.

President Trump played better than anyone could have expected. And it started on the 20th of January.

When Trump took office in 2016, he was a businessman. He knew that even if it was a hostile takeover, you kept the top people. Everybody wanted things to work. They might hate your guts, but they wanted things to work so they could continue to take home a paycheck.

The government is not like that. Trump was sabotaged before he even took office. People he trusted shouldn’t have been trusted. People he wanted in his team were forced out. The swamp creatures latched on, the media tried to destroy him.

In some ways, losing to Biden is one of the best things that has ever happened to this country. Trump 2.0 is so much better.

Trump started this term as if he were a Democrat. He fired everybody who wasn’t on his team. He is still working on that. And it worked.

He got people in as directors and at cabinet level that believe in him and believe in his vision.

There were no leaks about the bombing attack. None.

D.C. has been a cauldron of leaked secrets since I was a child. Most of those leaks served Democrat interest.

After the attack, there was a leak. A highly placed source, or a person with access to high-level intel, leaked part of a BDA. They seemed to have omitted the part where it was a preliminary BDA with low confidence.

A day later, Trump declared a ceasefire between Israel and Iran. When both parties tried to “empty their tubes” he slapped them both down.

As I write this, there does not seem to be any more exchanges between the two major parties.

In The Supreme Court

Trump keeps winning cases that get to the Court. Sotomayor, Brown, and Kegan keep writing dissents.

It is important to note that the agenda-driven justices have not yet written a single thing about the merits of the cases that are being brought to The Court. It is all about waiting.

As far as I can tell, everyone who is not a sheeple knows that the Trump Administration is going to win these cases.

The leftists don’t care. For them, it is the cost to the Trump Administration and delay, delay, delay.

If these cases were to proceed through the courts as the leftist want, Trump will be out of office before they are resolved.

Consider Duncan, which was filed in 2016. The case went through the District Court, through the merits panel of the Ninth Circuit, through the en banc Ninth Circuit, through a motion for writ of certiorari, was granted certiorari, the Ninth Circuit’s opinion was vacated, the case was remanded to the Ninth, which remanded it to the district court, where another full finding of facts, post-Bruen, won, was appealed to the Ninth, was taken by the original en banc panel, against Ninth Circuit policies, the district opinion was vacated and remanded for final disposition, and is now seeking certiorari for the second time before the Supreme Court.

Nine years! I could easily see rogue inferior courts dragging out cases for years and years.

Regardless of the agenda-driven justices, the Supreme Court has handed out win after win to the Trump Administration.

Truck Sounds

Wednesday, I drove the truck 50 miles or so. It had this really weird sound.

That sound was silence.

It turns out that there really was a second bearing going bad, or which had gone bad.

Because my dude is cool, I was able to observe the work done on my truck. Watching the mechanic use the same methods that I was questioning was nice. On the other hand, watching him do some things just blew my mind.

Even when the metal does not rust, two metal parts in close contact will stick. The axle on the passenger side of the truck was seriously stuck to the hub. It took some heavy work with a 5 lb sledge and a punch to break the axle free.

Jess picked up the air chisel, put a punch in it, walked over to the axle and triggered the air chisel. That axel backed out almost instantly.

Doh, I have that tool. Never even occurred to me to use it.

The cost of the hub for the driver’s side was $10 more than I would have paid at the local shop. With his profit built in, having him (shop owner) source the hub didn’t really cost extra.

It turns out that the job I wasn’t willing to do, replacing the bad flex brake line in the left rear, was a simple job of unscrewing the hose from the two hard lines and replacing it.

I saw that and was irritated that I didn’t do that work myself. Easy, right?

That was, until I saw, as part of the miscellaneous shop items, two new lengths of hard line. Jess had to replace the hard line after they failed while replacing the flex line.

The truck is good for a few thousand more miles.

Stock Market

On the first two days the stock market was open after the start of the 12-day war, my accounts dipped, hard. It was extremely scary.

So I dropped another chunk of money into the market to make some purchases.

As of last night, the market has recovered everything from that dip and a bit more. I expect to see it go up again today.

Woodworking

I’ve started making my workbench. Instead of pulling out the chop saw, I set up a pair of saw horses and used hand tools. I don’t think I’ve ever made cleaner cuts by hand. After 58 years of using handsaws, I might actually have learned how to do it.

One end of the bench has been glued and screwed, and I’m working on the half lap braces. This is my first half lap.

It is finished, the fit is good, as long as I don’t want the other end to touch the opposite leg. I’ll have to refine the joint tomorrow.

Tools

I haven’t been able to find one of my marking gauges. The one I did find didn’t work for me.

The nice option was the 3/4 wide chisel I pulled off the wall. It was properly protected by a cap. It was properly sharpened and worked perfectly.

The other side of this was finding out that I seem to have let somebody borrow the 1″ chisel. How do I know? Because there are chips in the cutting edge. It looks more like a saw blade than a chisel.

It is going to take a bit of work on the grinder to get that edge back. Thank goodness for slow speed 320 grit diamond wheels. Without a grinder, it would take hours to recover that edge.

Oh, those bench chisels are the cheap box store chisels, they are Marple’s.

I now have a “working” No.4 Stanley. I have one of unknown condition of the same general size, and one that seems to be junk. It is nice to have the tools I need.

Question of The Week

How concerned were you that we were about to get stuck in another war?

Netting

2.5 nets completed. The first net will be used to practice repairs because I made a few mistakes. The fix? Cut the bad part out and tie in a new section. Easy.

The second net had no glaring errors. Mostly knots that did not get set perfectly and using a sheet-bend to tie on more line. The correct knot to use is a water knot. It has one section of whipped cord at the top for a handle. Future round nets will have a wooden handle, which I will turn.

The third net is a rectangular net. It is around 4 ft deep and is currently around 3 ft wide. The target size is 4 ft by 8 ft. I’ll turn it into a gill net by adding weights and floats. Then pictures and it will never be used in NH. Gill nets are not allowed in my area.

Django and Bootstrap

Refactoring is fun. Learning new stuff all the time. I am so glad I have an expert to help me with the bootstrap stuff.

Iran

Initially, I was concerned about getting sucked into a war with Iran. I no longer believe that will happen.

There is no need for boots on the ground. We can accomplish all that is needed by putting warheads on foreheads.

And, it looks like Israel will continue to be the point of the spear. Dropping those warheads.

If we do need to send the Boners in to deploy a few GPU-57s, that is still not boots on the ground.

The Market

We received the first part of our inheritance earlier this year. Some money went to fun stuff. Most of it went into the market. All of my kids’ money went into the market.

It turned out that the ‘savings’ account at my local bank was paying 0.01% APR. Not a way to make money.

I’m using one of the automated investment accounts. You tell it what your goals are. It buys the right things. If it decides it is time to get out of that security, it will sell. It will buy when it thinks it needs to.

Since I invested our money, we’ve had a 3.6% return on investment.

Last Thursday, Israel dropped warheads on foreheads. On Friday, the market responded. In the course of a day of trading, we lost about 40% of what we had made.

On Monday, there was a slight recovery.

Tuesday, saw another dip.

Wednesday saw more recovery.

I expect there to be more instability in the market over the coming weeks. War makes investors nervous.

Here’s the thing, I still have the same amount of cash available to me to use instantly.

I can convert the securities into cash and withdraw the money at any time.

Or I can just leave it the F. alone. Which is what I will continue to do.

When the market goes down, that’s when you should buy.

Car Parts are Here!

That cursing you hear is me working on the truck. All the parts arrived safely, yesterday. I have all the tools I need to do the installation.

My only concern will be knocking the wheel bearings off. Hopefully, that will not be too difficult.

I have decided to leave replacing the brake calipers to the shop. It isn’t that I can’t do it, it is that I hate bleeding brakes. This way, I end up with the best of all worlds.

The shop will have to pull the wheel and calipers. Disconnect the calipers and put in the new ones. They then get to bleed the brakes, but they have the brake fluid, they have the vacuum bleeding system. They have the multiple people ready to do the right thing.

This is low cost and sounds like the right path to me.

Question of the week

Which caliber have you taken up, bought gun and ammo and maybe reloading dies, which you later decided was a bad choice, and why?

Which caliber do you want to explore?

For me, the caliber that I have had second thoughts on is 7.62×39. I have one rifle in that caliber. I have limited ammunition in that caliber. And the gun would likely pass for “new” if I tried to sell it.

I’ve been thinking of something like .17HMR or one of the long-range calibers in the 30-06 class.

Ok, maybe something like the Savage Arms Revel Classic in .17HMR

Snope and Ocean State Tactical

This was a real bummer. We couldn’t get four justices to vote to grant cert. Thomas wrote a powerful dissent.

Unfortunately, if the Supreme Court is only taking two or three Second Amendment cases per term, they will be picky about which cases they take.

I believe that Thomas and Alito want to take every Second Amendment case which allows them to correct the inferior courts or to advance Second Amendment jurisprudence. If I were on the court, I would be the same way.

I believe that if they are being told, “You only get three Second Amendment cases in the 2025 term.”, then it is better to pick cases that advance Second Amendment jurisprudence over just slapping down the inferior courts.

Let’s face it, the Fourth Circuit was told they got it wrong in Bianchi, they then heard oral arguments in front of a three judge merits panel, then took the case en banc before the merits panel released their opinion, then decided they got it right the first time.

For different reasons, mind you, but they always get the same result.

S&W v Mexico

And just in time, a 9-0 opinion from the Supreme Court which advances Second Amendment jurisprudence. Congress passed the PLCAA to protect the firearm industry. PLCAA is designed to stop frivolous lawsuits against those involved with firearm sales, distribution, and manufacture.

There is a very tight exception, which is if the sued party aided, abetted, or committed an actual crime.

Kegan said that this case should have been dismissed at the outset via PLCAA. That third-party actions which are illegal is not the responsibility of the defendants. She went on to say that sales and advertising does not confer responsibility. And that making items that are attractive to third-party evildoers does not confer responsibility.

This is a case that will be used to stop lawfare suits before they begin.

Remington

An asshole killed his mother, stole her Bushmaster AR15, went to a school where he was known, entered the building and killed children, teachers, and staff(?).

Because Connecticut doesn’t allow for armed teachers in the classroom, they had no way of stopping this monster.

The usual suspects then got the parents of some victims to file a lawsuit against Remington. They filed against Remington because Remington had purchased Bushmaster. This lawsuit falls square in the PLCAA protections.

The plaintiffs (bad guys) alleged that Bushmaster had violated CT law by creating advertisements that appealed to bad actors. This violation of the CT law would pierce the PLCAA protections.

The CT supreme court ruled that there was not enough evidence to decide, and allowed the case to go forward.

Remington appealed to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court denied their petition.

This is not unusual, the case was still in an interlocutory state.

The battle went on and on. Remington went out of business. The name was left with ???, the insurance companies cut a deal with the parents to make the suit go away.

This has emboldened the blood vultures to continue to file lawfare suits whenever there is a mass shooting.

Uvalde

An asshole entered a school in Uvalde, TX. He shot multiple children and adults.

The cops stood around with their thumbs up their collective asses in a circle jerk for over 40 minutes.

A group of border agents rolled up, stacked up, and ended the standoff with a good school shooter. I.e., the shooter is dead.

The usual blood vultures lined up to get parents to front another lawfare attack.

I do not know where that case currently is.

If it is still active, I expect the defendants (good guys) to file notices on the docket pointing to S&W v. Mexico, and that should bring that suit to an end.

Good Teachers Have Skills…

I was at The Fort at No 4 on Wednesday. It was a good group of homeschooled children.

There was one student that was a little mouthy and it changed how I dealt with him.

I have to do better. Even if he and I were cool, it wasn’t cool. As the adult, representing the Fort, I must do better.

It sometimes sucks learning new people skills. No, it always sucks learning new people skills.

Hard Things Made Simple

My entire computing career has been at the bleeding edge of technology. Even when it wasn’t, it was doing things that nobody else had done. Of figuring out how to do something with little guidance.

Back when I was babysitting Cray super computers, there was another site that wanted to upgrade from the Cray specific operating system to Unix (SYSV/UNICOS).

These people were performing cutting-edge research in the medical field.

This type of upgrade is normally a two-week project if pushed but normally three weeks.

I did three one-day prep visits to the site, then did the complete upgrade over a three-day weekend, finishing 20 hours earlier than we expected.

Was this cutting edge? Not really, I just knew it had to be done and did it. My boss’s boss’s boss was there, he kept pizza and coke-a-cola in the ready room and took notes.

One of the difficult things I’m learning is that if it is a hard problem, it is likely somebody else has already published a solution. Go find it.

This just happened to me with Django content Types and generic foreign keys. Sigh, I wish I had known about them 7 years ago.

New Skills

I’ve taken up net making. I’m likely to finish my first round net today. Too many people are telling me that learning a new skill in a couple of days is not reasonable.

Question of the week

What is one skill you would like to learn in the next year?

What is one skill you would like to master in the next year?