General

A person I like to call my friend, Miggy, recently put his life at risk in a situation where it is not obvious what the risks are.

His article, Proper Tooling Makes Things Easier, shows how easy it is to do things that look safe, but are not.

His problem was that he needed to get under his riding mower to work on the blades. Not a huge issue until you start to look at the requirements for that lift.

The first thing we notice is that he has done an accurate assessment of the load. “Less than 2000 pounds, or 1 ton.”

A one ton chain host will give him the lifting ability he needs.

The next question is, where to attach the chain hoist. This is our first sketch issue, he attached it to a ceiling joist in his garage. These are normally 2×8 but can be as small as 2×6, if they do not carry a load. They are normally in tension to keep the walls from spreading.

A better option would have been to run a beam across multiple joists and then attach the hoist to that. This is an opinion, I would need to verify before doing. There are other issues at play. Using multiple joists will spread the load and make for a safer lift.

Having gotten the chain host in place, he now had to attach the mower to the hoist. He used ratchet straps.

These use flat webbing with a reasonable rating. Unfortunately, these can lose much of their rated strength just by tieing a knot in them. I seem to remember that it is as much as 50%. I, personally, would never use a ratchet strap for a lift that had safety implications, like laying under the lift.

The basket hitch he used is close to a 30° lift. This does not derate the line.

My small lifting straps are 24 ply by 2 inches. The vertical lift is 11,000 pounds. In a 30° basket hitch, it is still 11,000 pounds.

The next issue is his safety. He stated that he had car jack stands under there. This is the scary part for me.

His image showed the jack stand almost completely extended. This means that any lateral movement might cause the jack stand to shift or tip over. This is a scary, scary place to be when the heavy thing above you starts to come down.

My armchair, back seat, Monday night quarterbacking suggests that it would have been safer to transfer the weight to jack stands, as low as possible. Then do the work. It might even have been possible to use cribbing under the unit.

Regardless, I’m happy he was able to safely perform his repairs.

The stories

When I was 18, I was helping my brother pull the engine from a VW. This is a simple procedure.

Disconnect the throttle cable, disconnect and plug the gas line. Remove the rear bumper and deck. Deal with the electrical connections to the engine.

Once that is done, you have to remove four 17 mm nuts. These nuts go on four studs with a half moon to keep them from spinning.

I was the guy under the car. I could do the two bottom nuts myself. Then I would have to reach up, blindly, over the transmission bell housing, find the studs. My brother would then reach behind the fan housing, get a socket on the nut and remove it.

Reaching the studs and nuts was done blind. You can’t see them from there.

Once those nuts are loose, the engine is hanging on its crankshaft. So before you get there, you put a jack under the engine to support it.

When everything is ready, I hold the engine from below, my brother grabs the tail pipes, and then we gently pull the engine out.

Being health young men. Bro was working at an iron works, making parts for bridges. I was riding my bike many miles a day and doing Kendo and Judo. We were in reasonable shape.

On the count, bro pulls, and I guide and apply pressure to move the engine. The engine comes out a good six inches, knocking the jack over.

So there we are, Bro holding up his half of the engine by the tail pipes, me under the engine doing a bench press with no ability to extend, and the engine about 5 inches above my nose.

At this moment, dad, who had been watching from the garage steps, pipes up to give advice.

I have never been prouder of my father than at that instance. I said, “Dad, be quiet. Bro and I have this.”

Dad stuttered, got up and walked into the house.

“Bro, on three we are going to put the engine back. I’ll lift, you push, it should just slide back in. One, Two, Push”

And that engine was back in place.

We reset and pulled the engine with no issues. But it was hairy there, for a minute.

Second Story

My friend was visiting a mutual friend. In their finished basement, they had some furniture hanging from the ceiling.

These were smart people. They understood that threaded eye screws could pull out or unscrew. Instead, they drilled through the joist and put a thorough bolt in place.

All the math was mathing so they didn’t think anything about it. My friend asked them if they had considered dynamic loads. They went “oh shit”

An hour later, all the hanging furniture had been removed. It turns out that the fixtures they were using were not rated to support the dynamic loads of people just plopping into the hanging furniture.

Have you ever found yourself in the position of wanting to tell a friend about the Vine of Liberty, but you didn’t have anything to write on? Well, we’ve designed some business cards!

These are standard sized business cards, vertical rather than horizontal. The cards are matte, with a very soft finish that allows the plain white back to be used for jotting down phone numbers or notes for your friends. The front includes the URL for the blog, plus a QR code that brings them right to us.

I do not know what the S&H will be just yet, and it will probably change depending on where the cards are going, but if you’d like to order cards, drop me a line at m.allyson.szabo@gmail.com and I’ll be happy to send you some. Payment can be made via credit card (I can issue an invoice), or you can use Paypal or otherwise arrange things with Chris.

And thank you to ALL of you, for making this blog a place that I love to read and to write for. I hope you’re all having an awesome summer!

There are people who blame their actions on “The ’tism’.

I had not heard this term until recently. My oldest son is “on the spectrum.” He barely functions, not from emotional out bursts, but because he just isn’t mature enough.

My youngest son is also “on the spectrum”, he is high function, going to collage, doing well. His issues tend to be socal in nature. In other words, he has not had much success in finding new friends.

My youngest is also on the spectrum. She is very high functioning. You would not suspect she is autistic when interacting with her. She is social and she makes friends.

I was born before the great “autism” hunt. I do not have an official diagnosis of autism. There are many indicators that I am autistic.

A side effect of this was I was able to teach some of my coping methods to my children, to help them.

What does this have to do with making friends?

It means it is hard. It takes an effort.

What you might consider to be a friend is unlikely to be a friend in my eyes.

Just because we are co-workers, and we are friendly with each other, does not mean we are friends.

Most people would have no difficulty in ticking off a dozen friends. Maybe even a dozen close friends.

I’ve had 4 true friends in my lifetime. Two of them were good friends. I say “were” because one is dead, and I am out of contact with the other.

Of the other two, one I have not seen since I left high school. The other is in prison because he is a kiddy diddler.

One I thought was a friend decided that anybody who supported the Supreme Court’s Dobbs’ opinion was no longer a friend to her. And later went as far as to say that anybody who voted for Trump was not a friend and could just fuck off.

Ally tells me that there are people attempting to be friends. I can almost see it, but I don’t feel it.

In 2008, Obama was running for office. It is the moment when I felt my country start to fracture. Friends were starting to turn on each other in ways I had not seen before.

I went to speak to a black co-worker. “Who are you voting for?” “Obama”, “Why?” “Because he’s black.”

Anybody who expressed any hesitation or discomfort about voting for a one—term senator from Illinois, who’s most common vote was “Present” was a “racist”.

It was that bad. Since I was working in a deep blue state at the time, I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t care who they were voting for. I wish they had better reasons than “He’s black.” It was their choice.

Oh, it wasn’t just the black co-workers, it was all the lefties.

How did I spot a lefty? Those were the ones openly talking politics, expressing their opinion about anyone who wasn’t voting for Obama.

From that moment on, I have been called racist, for my beliefs, constantly.

Look at Rep. Hunt. Now there is a black man. I like him. Why? Because he echos my beliefs. He stands up for America.

Now compare him to the half white Obama.

Obama’s mother was white, his father was black, he’s brown.

He ran as a black man. So what?

If every single person of color had voted for him and every single white voted against him, he would not have become the President of the United States. A majority of the people of the United States decided that he was a better man to be president than McCain.

For the next 8 years, I wasn’t allowed to say a negative thing about my President. To do so was to “prove I was racist.”

When Hillary ran for President, I suddenly became misogynistic. No change of my positions, just a different candidate by the Democrats.

And every lefty screamed at me that I was a bad person if I didn’t support every belief they held.

There was a TikTok sketch Ally showed to me. A woman says to her Republican friend that she is leaving the GOP.

Her friend responds with, “I’m sorry you feel you need to leave. We’ve been friends all our lives. You will continue to be my friend and are welcome here, anytime.”

The sketch then changes to a woman leaving the Democrat party. “I’m leaving the party. They just don’t match my core beliefs. You’ve been my friend all my life. You will still be my friend.”

The remaining Democrat woman turns to the first and, with a sneer on her face, “I’m not friends with Nazis”

That is what my life felt like during the Obama era. It was worse under Biden.

Our friendships became defined by our beliefs.

Going out in public, I would hear leftists yapping about how anybody who wasn’t like them was horrible, evil people. Nasty labels were everywhere.

I’ve seen “DemocRAT” from time to time. I’m “MAGAot”, a “fascist”, a “racist”, a “white supremest”, and every other nasty label you can think of.

Those people won’t speak with me. They can’t handle being asked for examples. They can’t handle being called on bullshit. They can’t be bothered to verify any of the narrative they spout with no evidence to back them.

I’m sorry for Ally.

She is a good person. We are good people. If you are in need, we will do our best to help you. When a “co-worker” had an emergency, she didn’t ask, “What are your politics? I only help good people.” No, she opened her pantry to them. She did it with no expectation of anything.

When they tried to repay her, she said, “Pay it forward.”

Well, they did pay it forward. Until they had to treat people by what they do instead of what they were told they do.

Make sure you keep your friends close. Make sure they know you are friends.

Stay strapped. Keep your head on a swivel. Don’t be in stupid places at stupid times.

Israel is in the process of turning Iran into an ashtray, like Jimmy Carter, may he burn forever in hell, should have in 1979.

Unfortunately for Israel, they have to do it with conventional weapons.

The normal blood vultures are out in force, screaming about Israel is killing babies.

Unfortunately for us, this raises the possibility that Iran will activate terrorist cells in the United States (and other countries) to attempt to harm us. Keep your head on a swivel.

Here, in my sleepy little rural town, the mostly peaceful protesters are planning to riotprotest this morning and afternoon. I’m hoping they stay on the peaceful side of things.

We are not in the town center, but we are on one of the main roads leaving downtown. Yes, we call the two traffic lights, “downtown”. The rifles will be loaded and ready. The LBV will be out and ready.

Just because you live in a small town that is patriotic doesn’t mean that you won’t see protests. At issue is the high probability of outside agitators being bussed in.

Keep your head on a swivel.

If your particular state requires a permission slip to exercise your rights, attempt to get one. And make a decision, which is worse, to be carried by six or judged by twelve.

Final note. Before you put that firearm on your hip, decide if you are willing to take a life. If you are willing, in what circumstances? I re-evaluated my principals after I watched the George Floyd video. My initial response, when watching the video, was “I’m glad I wasn’t there, I don’t know if I would have killed the cop or not.” Today I know that the cop was in the right.

1. There will likely be runs on banks, grocery stores and gas stations no later than Monday.
2. Make sure your fuel tanks and propane bottles are topped off TOMORROW, meaning Friday (I’m writing this at midnight Thursday night.)
3. If you need groceries, get them TOMORROW, Friday!
4. Get some cash out of the bank and keep it on hand.
5. Traveling, especially air travel, should not be considered for the next week or so, until we see how this goes.
6. AVOID CROWDS AT ALL COSTS!
7. Above all, stay alert! Don’t assume or take anything for granted. If you see something that looks out of place, don’t ignore it, let someone know.
8. Some of you carry guns, some of you don’t. Right now would be a damned fine time to start!
9. This is in addition to the preparedness items that you should already have. If you haven’t started preparing yet, you’re too late, forget it.
10. I hope I stayed up until 1am writing all this for nothing, but I don’t think so. If it doesn’t apply Saturday, it might apply next week, or a month from now. But be assured, your efforts will not be wasted!

Minor edits for formatting and suggested grammar fixes.

My internal infrastructure is getting better and better. Unfortunately, it is still not stable enough.

The router is having issues with memory. I need to add more memory to fix the issues. The problem being that I need to take the router out of production to do so. I’ve not been willing to do that.

The symptom is that connections time out. The fix, restart HAProxy.

HAProxy forwards traffic to the ingress service. This should be running on multiple servers, but it currently is not. There is an issue which I have not resolved where communications from the second ingress service gets lost, leading to the gateway not responding.

This means that when the server that runs the ingress service has to reboot, all ingress stops.

The network is broken into segments, each segment is on a different subnet. Ceph prefers to be on a single subnet.

My solution was to use OpenVSwitch to create a virtual network for Ceph. This works great!

This adds a dependency on OpenVSwitch, which should not be an issue.

The underlaying physical network depends on good routing. The reason I don’t use static is that some nodes have multiple paths and I want there to be multiple paths for every node. This adds a dependency on the routing stack.

Free Range Routing, or FRR, is the solution. It supports OSPF, which is the correct routing protocol for internal routing. It just works.

Unfortunately, FRR and the Linux kernel will stop talking to each other. When this happens, we lose routing of the physical networks.

When we lose routing on the physical network, the OpenVSwitch network stops working.

If the OpenVSwitch network goes down, then the different Ceph nodes can’t talk to each other.

All of this is to say, I’m sorry for the issues you have been seeing with this site. Thank you for hanging in there.

I had to find the sick FRRs and restart them. Once that happened, everything came back to life.

I was in 2nd grade when I decided I was going to make a table and chairs. I had watched my grandfather make things. It couldn’t be that hard. With my mother and grandparents providing the material, I made a table and chair.

It was a success. Was it sturdy enough for an adult to stand on? No. Regardless, for a 2nd grader, it was very much a success.

As a 4th grader, I watched my father rebuild the engine of our VW Microbus. He used the original “idiot” book to do it.

From my father, I learned how to break concrete, how foundation forms were put in place, how concrete was poured and how to frame in a room. When I say, “I learned”, it means that I had my hands on the tools doing. I had the blisters to show for it.

A few years later, 6th grade or so, I purchased my first motorcycle. When it needed work, I am the one who tore it down and rebuilt it. And then got it back together and running.

That was my success. My father didn’t lay hands on that motor or motorcycle. It was mine, and I was going to do.

Did I mess up? You bet I did. I don’t remember the failures because they were mine. I learned from them. Then I went and tried again. Today, 50 years later, I can still hear the sound of that MX-80 screaming back to life.

My parents let me own my failures, they let me own my successes. They never stole my success nor my failures from me.

Years passed. It didn’t matter what it was, I was willing to try. I was willing to fail. I tried learning how to draw. I spent four months drawing hands. In the end, I decided that I preferred photography.

When my brother and I needed to work on the VWs, we pulled the engines ourselves. We could tear down and rebuild an engine on the side of the road. How do I know we can? Because we did. It was in a gas station parking lot. Bro and I pulled the engine from the VW, tore it down enough to get to the broken, removed and replaced the broken part. Put the whole thing back together and put it back into the bus.

We did it between 1700 and 0200, then we drove another 400 miles the next day to get to my grandparents.

“Can do” isn’t the correct version of our attitude, it was more like, “We’ll make it work.”

Today, children aren’t allowed to fail. Even in simple things. My son made a wonderful meal the other weekend. I was asking him what went into it. We are about done, but still discussing things, when my wife pipes up to tell me a spice that was in the meal.

I knew it was there. I wanted my son to tell me. She stole his success.

I’m lucky, my kids do know how to succeed because they also know about failure.

My second wife refused to try new things. She explained the reason thus:

As a child, her mother would look at what she was going to attempt to do, then her mother would tell her, don’t bother to try, you can’t do that.

How can you succeed if you don’t try? How can you fail if you don’t try?

It is said that Edison said, “We didn’t fail, we just learned another material that doesn’t work as a filament.”

We learn so much more from failure than we do from success.

Consider a class of 20 students. We can fit a bell curve to those students. There will be a mean and standard deviation for those students. From that, we can determine which will get As, Bs, Cs, Ds, and Fs. It is standard statistics.

We do this by using an instrument to measure something about those students. If we have an instrument that gives every student a 100%, we know nothing. That instrument is useless.

We want an instrument in which nobody gets 100%. At the same time, we need to be careful of the outliers on the high end. If you have somebody who gets 100% on a test where everybody else is getting 50% or lower, you can’t design your test/instrument to have the outlier get a 95%

One of the interesting things my mentor taught me about digital cell phone communications is that the protocols strive to match a 90% raw error rate. If the error rate is higher than that, the phone uses more power to get a cleaner signal. If it is better than that, the phone reduces power until it is running at that 90% error rate.

At 90% error rate, the algorithms can repair the damage and give a perfect digital signal.

If we were running at 100%, we would never know when we were using too much power.

We live in a society where the ego of a student is much more important than long-term success. We give out participation awards. We have games where we ‘don’t keep score.’

There is an old joke: A man walks up to a baseball diamond where some kids in a youth league are playing. He asks one of the fathers/couches, “What’s the score?” “We don’t keep score. We play for the joy of the game.” One of the kids yells over from the dugout, “We’re ahead 5 to 3.”

My children know that if they ask for feedback, they will get honest feedback. If they don’t ask, they will get a proud parents’ response. My kid’s friends know the same.

It also means that when I give out a “well done”, it means something. My kids know that their mother will always praise whatever they do, no matter how bad it is.

“Everybody makes mistakes!” is something I’ve had shouted at me.

Yep, that’s true. But not everybody learns from their mistakes. You cannot learn from your mistake if you don’t know you made a mistake. You can learn from your mistakes if you’re not allowed to make mistakes.

I’m learning how to turn wood. I’ve learned not to stand in front of the work when I first apply the cutting tool. Why? Because that damn bowl coming off the spindle at 1300 RPM HURT. I’ve learned a little.

I have seen some people decock the hammer of a firearm with their thumb between the firing pin and the hammer. I thought it was stupid. It is how I do it now. I had the hammer slip one time with a loud bang when the hammer stopped moving. It will not hurt all that much to have the hammer fall on my thumb if it stops a round from going “that-a-way”.

It is easy to see how stealing their successes can be bad. Stealing their failures is worse.

Have you read the Constitution? Do you know what it says?

The fourth article reads, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of our youth to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

That isn’t what you read?

This is from an image in the Library of Congress. It is a reproduction of the original Bill of Rights, as proposed. Articles 3 through 12 became the first 10 amendments to our Constitution.

For many young people, it might as well be 一個受到良好管制嘅民兵，對自由國家嘅安全係必要嘅, 人民持有同攜帶武器嘅權利唔會受到侵犯。 It is just noise to me. I’m sure that somebody can translate it back to English, but it will lose something in the translation.

There are many people that can no longer read cursive. It is not taught in most schools. The purpose of cursive was to increase the speed that you could write. My son’s legal signature is block letters.

It falls in the same category as counting change. Try this experiment, buy something, then pay in cash, but hand them change to make it a nice return. If the bill is 7.12, hand them 12.12 and watch them try to refuse the extra $2.12.

If you force them, they will be surprised when the cash register tells them to return a $5.00 bill.

I talked about the educational industry replacing words. Pupils became students became learners.

Everybody gets a participation award.

Today, everything is digitized. Photos can be manipulated/faked. Videos can be made by AI from a prompt. People have lost the ability to think critically.

My wife has difficulty in assigning value to different sources. Add to that, her ability to pick up a scary phrase from the talking head and not know the context means that she has difficulty discerning what is likely true, and what is likely not.

Tina Fey said, “I can see Russia from my house.” and today, most people attribute it to Sarah Palin. And if you point out their air, they can tell you that they have heard and seen Sarah say it.

We are on the cusp of losing our history. Words change meaning to fit the wants of those defining it.

It is hateful to speak the truth. So don’t speak it. Nobody else is saying these things, you must be wrong.

Every one in the MSM is saying it, it must be true.

The Supreme Court said this about that. Oh, have you read the opinion? What, it wasn’t an opinion? What was it? Oh, it was an administrative stay.

Did you read the bill? No? Then you don’t know what it says or means.

And, as one lawyer put it, we don’t know what a law means until the courts tell us.

NAZI used to mean a particularly nasty form of socialism. Today it either means a particularly nasty form of socialism, or it means somebody the left doesn’t like.

I just want a win that lasts for more then 24 hours.

I am NOT a good source of information about the HPA. I’m not even sure the “A” stands for “Act”.

That said, repeating what I’ve read and heard from people I respect and follow:

The HPA removes suppressors from the NFA. This means they are no longer regulated under the NFA. No tax stamps, no registering them, no “extended” background check. No need for chief law enforcement permission. That is all gone.

The GCA would still consider them firearms and require a 4473 to purchase them.

This means purchasing a suppressor becomes just as easy as picking up another Glock or Sig.

State laws might (will) vary.

If the Senate were to pull the HPA or there are not enough votes, then the HPA can go away, but there is still an amendment to reduce the cost of registering from $200 to $0.

All the rest of the bullshit remains, but that $200 savings isn’t something to stick your nose up at.

I’m eagerly awaiting the day when I can start experimenting with cans. Of course, there is a boat load to learn about making a suppressor, I’m not sure how a booster works.