Today my father passed. He was missing his wife, Prue, of 64 years. For the last 4 months, since her passing, he has been asking everybody that talks to him if they have seen Prue.
I believe he is in a better place, with his wife, young and joyful, once again.
While at the Fort, one of the visitors to come through, was from Australia.
I wanted to break out into songs from Men At Work, but restrained myself.
During our conversation, we were talking about the nasties that live in Australia.
Of course, there were the spiders. We agreed that spiders were worse down under.
We agreed that koala bears are cute to look at but nasty, vicious animals if they aren’t drugged.
She explained that the big red kangaroos are nasty critters. They will lean back on their tails, then kick out with their legs in a way that will knock a strong man down.
The little gray ones are not as nasty.
Another thing I didn’t know, was that kangaroos are extremely destructive to crop land. They will eat a field bare.
This led to a discussion about the definition of varmint. I am not a lawyer, so check the regulations where you are before you depend on some random guy on the net.
It is my understanding that farmers are justified in removing destructive varmints. So when that cute deer is eating your crops, they are not deer, they are a varmint that can be removed. Same with several other animals.
Which led her to talking about American’s having guns. I described the lever actions over the sofa. Bear, Deer, Raccoon and Squirrel rifles. Or in gun culture language, 45-70, 30-30, .357 Magnum, and .22LR.
While we agreed that there were some nasty faunae in Australia, she felt that bears were worse. She wanted that 45-70, “Bear Rifle” if she was going walking in the woods of New England.
For me, the most interesting part was getting to ask her about the gun confiscation.
It was obvious that she had been asked this before. She started by trying to answer for the group. Not herself. I had asked her explicitly about her opinion, not the opinion of others.
She explained that she had turned in their rifles. Not because the state knew that she had the rifle, but because she and her family were afraid that somebody would snitch on them.
Once the guns were collected, crime started to go up. She wishes they still had guns, envoys the gun culture of America. And of course, strongly suggests that we not give up our guns.
These are people you should know about. They are often the people to put together the NPC videos of all the MSM saying the same thing of the same scripts.
They are also the people who provide the positive vs. negative percentages for MSM.
Biden Lashes Out After Judge Pauses His Executive Order Rewarding Long-Term Illegal Aliens with Path to Citizenship https://t.co/8Tha4Bzny3
— Media Research Center (@theMRC) August 29, 2024
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.
My wife is a teacher. She is a darn good teacher. She has a couple of masters, is working on another, besides having a bachelors. She is constantly doing continuing education classes.
For years, I would talk about The Teachers Union in a negative light. She took that as a personal attack because she is a teacher.
When I was just entering 1st grade, they had just started a new language curriculum. It was a five-year plan. The gist was to move students through the k-12 process cleanly and with a good foundation.
At the end of first grade, we moved to Wisconsin. In Wisconsin, most kindergarteners arrive knowing how to read. I didn’t know how to read as a 2nd grader.
Later we went through “new math”. It did not bring much to the table. It did make it extremely difficult for parents to assist their children.
The Education Industry had managed to drive a wedge between children and their parents. Parents were made to look stupid because they didn’t know the new math methods.
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We live in a strange world. There is so much information at our fingertips that it is almost impossible to comprehend just how much of an information age we live in.
I’ve talked about this in the past, my mother was a telephone operator, as was her sister. They worked in a large town in Wisconsin.
There were two T1 trunks heading towards Chicago and two T1 trunks headed west towards Minneapolis. This means they could have a grand total of 96 long-distance calls going at any one time.
The grand total of the bandwidth for the town was 6.176 Mbit/second. That was it.
In the early 90s, we were mostly using 10base2 and 10baseT connections. That is, 10 Mb/s. The actual throughput was closer to 5 Mbps. So, about the same bandwidth as the entire town.
We were pleased when we upgraded to 100baseT. We were also using 125Mbps fiber connections. We actually had more network bandwidth than disk bandwidth.
Today, most of my boxes, at the office/house, are 1000baseT. I’m in the process of upgrading the infrastructure to 10Gbit/second. This isn’t for the servers, most of them will continue to be 1Gbps connections, but the inter-switch connections will upgrade to 10Gbps.
Why is this of any interest? Why am I doing this? Simple, I currently have 70 TB of storage at the home. This is about to get to nearly 100 TB. There will be 5 servers with 24 TB of disk each, 2 servers with 12 TB of disk. Those servers need to be able to move data very rapidly. The bottleneck has become the network, again.
This storage is for every movie I ever purchased plus daily backups, plus more software than I can shake a stick at.
Each of the primary servers cost $300 to stand up. $100 for the computer, $200 for disk drives. The other servers are multipurpose, so they have more CPU and more memory.
For you, old folks, you might remember the encyclopedias of your youth. This was the single largest collection of knowledge we knew. The Encyclopedia Britannica was 32 volumes in size. It was released on a two CD version. Each CD held 750 Mbytes of data.
1.5 GB total.
That encyclopedia would consume 0.00101725% of my storage. And I’m small compared to the bigger boys out there.
All of this is to say, there is nothing that has ever been digitized that doesn’t now exist somewhere on the Internet. Storage is cheap.
If you have ever sent a “dick pic”, it is on the Internet, somewhere. If you have ever sent a “bra pic”, it exists. It doesn’t go away.
If you have ever written a comment or posted an article, it exists, somewhere.
There are entities whose entire business model is to scarf every last byte from the internet.
To quote a great philosopher, quoting some stranger:
A First Principle is that two things can be true at the same time.
I can be fat and I can be old. Both are true, at the same time.
Next, who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?
50 years ago, a picture was worth a thousand words, and it could communicate truth where words could lie.
This was never “true”, it was just believed. Photographers have been doing “touch up” of photos since the earliest days. Some of that involved painting directly on the plates, other times it was more extensive.
It got to the point where people were building composite photographs, showing things that did not exist.
This painting caught my eye when I saw it in the National Gallery. I took a picture of it, then had a correspondence with the Gallery because I could not find it in their gallery.
The reason is that the painting doesn’t belong to the Gallery, so it is not in their gallery. This was explained to me, and then the very nice lady explained that this painting was a “fake”.
It was fake in that this particular scene never took place. This is not the artist adjusting the setting or anything like that. The artist was known to make quick sketches of interesting people doing interesting things. Or just interesting things. He would then create a composite image from those sketches and, from that image, paint something that wasn’t “real” but it wasn’t truly fake, either.
I expressed it as “The Photoshop of 1846”, to which she agreed.
We have become much more sophisticated. We even have a word for those manipulated and faked images, they are “Photoshopped”.
We see, and most of us recognize, the manipulations that are used on the cover of magazines. We notice it when things “just don’t look right”.
One famous example was the Vogue cover featuring Cindy Crawford. The magazine had “erased” her mole. She got upset and said that her mole was part of who she was.
I spent years working on Computer Graphics, making very high-quality renderings with no real images involved. At one point, one of my teammates was giving a presentation to some brass. He was talking about how we had managed to make our trees look more realistic.
As he was speaking, he was clicking through different images of a real place. Well, the digital elevation map, as we rendered it, with our fake trees planted where the trees were in the real location.
Not a single pixel of the images shown was real. It was all computer-generated images.
After about 15 minutes of the talk, somebody with brass on his shoulders stood up and said something like: Enough, I’ve been to there, I know what it looks like, I want to see your images.
Our fake images looked enough like the real thing that an intelligent guy, with stars on his shoulders, that he was looking at real images.
Those images took days to model, weeks of programming, hours per image to render.
Today, you can ask an “AI” to create an image for you, refine it, then push it out as real. The image will often be a composite of many real images or sub-images.
Photoshop actually has “smart fill” and “smart erase” that are designed to use AI to “seamlessly” fill areas of an image or erase areas of an image.
What 20 years ago took a team months to accomplish, a troll on a media team can accomplish in minutes.
It has gotten to the point where people can create an AI movie by creating the proper prompts.
Some AI-generated images are easy to detect. A Tuesday Tune I posted had visuals created by AI. Not my doing. Some guns were absolutely mind-blowing. The cylinders with 8 chambers, each chamber looking like a keyhole. It was fun, in its obvious errors.
We had the period of time when people were getting multiple rows of teeth, or hands with six fingers, or a dozen other “standard” errors. It was fun to pick out, or down right terrifying, depending on your view point.
Can we trust our eyes when we watch a video? We know some ways that things are faked. But this new technology is going to get better, harder to detect. We are already long past, “Pictures, or it didn’t happen”. We are rapidly moving past, “Video, or it didn’t happen.”
Dad is in long-term care. He will never return to the home he shared with his wife, my mother, for the last 20+ years.
Last week was a hard trip to say goodbye. He was in good spirits and doing “ok”. He is not nearly as sharp as he was a couple of years ago. He has had one major cardio event, and they think he is having mini-strokes.
He remembers that his wife is dead, then 5 minutes later starts asking if we have talked to her recently and know how she is doing.
He remembers her going into the basement at our family goodbye to mom. That was about 6 months ago. He does not remember her ever coming back upstairs.
He has conflated an event with my eldest daughter and his wife to think mom borrowed some money from him to buy a car and left him.
It is easier for him to believe that she left him, than that she is dead. I wish I could believe she was still alive.
But that is boring stuff.
The more interesting part was that we were tasked with helping to clear the house. My youngest coordinated with “The Cousins” to make sure all the grandchildren got a fair share and what they wanted. When we arrived on Wed., they were there.
They went into a search and divide mission, which was cool to see. What was even better was the lack of anxiety or conflict between any of them.
After the work was done, I had the pleasure of working with one of my nephews. He is interested in picking up his first EDC pistol. He is very down on “small” pistols. That was until I showed him the P398 to show him that it works very well as a pocket pistol.
That started to change his mind, but then he got to try the 1911 for size. That he liked, even though he felt it was a bit heavier.
He got to look over and handle the AR15 platform.
The conversation then turned to Mom and Dad’s views on guns.
Dad was never “anti-gun”. After he was exposed to CNN and the constant Republican’s are bad rhetoric, he changed his opinion from “2A” to “you don’t need a …”. At the end, he was no longer pro-2A and felt that universal background checks, LCM, and “assault weapon” bans were ok.
He never pushed back on me about my very PRO 2A opinions. It was something we didn’t discuss when he was able to discuss.
One of my tasks is to evaluate and rescue every piece of data he has on his computer. This meant collecting all the external drives, the main desktop computer, the two husks, the external drives, the USB cards. I think I have all of that.
In the process, I was down under his desk taking things apart, and I turned and looked at the mid-shelf of his desk.
I’m looking at the back strap of a Glock like pistol.
To say I was a bit surprised would be a serious understatement.
I take the pistol and bring it out to inspect, automaticity going through the clearing operation.
The slide doesn’t run. There is no safety keeping the slide from moving. The weight is wrong.
I drop the mag and only then realize it is a BB gun.
0.177 steel balls.
Mom hated the squirrels in the bird feeders. She must have gotten tired of the lack of results from airsoft and upgraded to this thing.
The next time somebody says, “It was only a BB gun.”, I will remember this instant. There is no way in hell I would have let a bad guy point that thing at me. There was no way to know it was “just a BB gun” from the muzzle end at 5 feet.
I started caring about computer infrastructure in the early 1980s. We feed our computer via punch cards, 9 track tape, and a few dozen hardwired terminals at 4800 baud.
We upgraded our network. We got our IBM 3090 on BITNET. I learned more about networking.
We upgraded to 10base2 when our Sun 360s arrived. More and more of campus had Ethernet.
When I arrived in Maryland, I was babysitting some Super Computers. There were nearly 1000 computers hooked up to the network. Most of those were running some variation of Unix.
To keep all of those machines up-to-date took a highly skilled team of system administrators. They handled all the machines on campus except for the Super Computers, which my team took care of.
If they needed help, the team could call on my Mentor’s team. His team was part of the group of people that defined the Internet. Yes, really.
That support team spent about 25% of their time caring for around 800 Unix machines. They spent the other 75% trying to care for the Apple’s and Microsoft machines. The workload was getting greater and greater as more and more Microsoft and Apple machines came on campus.
By the time I left, they had to increase the size of that support team from two skilled workers, to four skilled workers. 2 of them did nothing but Microsoft support.
The number of Unix boxes increased and still was taking less than 20% of the teams efforts.
I wish that was still the case.
There are 15 shooting sports in the current Olympic Games:
The pistol and rifle are .22 Caliber, the trap, and skeet are 12gage. The air pistol and air rifle fire 10 mm projectiles.
In reading the rules, they talk about how the shooting jackets are padded to reduce recoil.
How would they deal with the recoil from a 30-06? It boggles the mind.
The rapid shooting requires 5 rounds on target from low ready in 4, 6 and 8 seconds.
Jerry’s 6, reload, 6 in 1.9 seconds would likely break their heads. Of course, they are looking for accuracy rather than speed. Jerry puts all of his rounds in the A box, that is different from the ISSF target.
The 10 Ring is 100 mm in diameter with the inner 10 being 50 MM, the outer ring is 500 mm. They define a miss a bit differently than we would at “9.7”.
Regardless, there are still real rifles at the Olympics.