• Christmas is past for another year. It was better than expected.

    Watching movies with the family was good. My wife insists on “A Christmas Story”, as it is her favorite. I picked “Red One” on a recommendation from Scott Adams on X. The final movie was “A Christmas Story Christmas”.

    This last hit a bit hard.

    Regardless, friends came through, and we were able to give back to our friends.

    My wife’s best friend’s husband passed earlier this month. We had her over for Christmas Eve dinner (tacos) and Christmas Dinner (Turkey with fixings).

    Our tradition is to go around the table and each person gives thanks for something that happened that day. Sometimes it leads to discussions, sometimes it is just a little thing, “Thank you for a dinner, I really like.”

    The goal is to stop perseverating on the bad that is happening around you, the things that are getting you down, and to acknowledge, to search for, the good that you have.

    My friend from the NVL called on Christmas Eve. That was a good talk. The only bobble was when he let his distrust of Elon slip out. We have agreed not to talk politics. We are still friends.

    My best friend died in November 2000. I don’t think I ever recovered from that day. He was not only my friend, he was my mentor.

    He was the first person I met that could program better than I could. He was a better man than I, by far.

    I found myself competing with him in programming to be better. He never competed with me. He just won. After a while, it stopped being a competition and became a lifelong friendship.

    Through Mike, I met Max. Max called me on Christmas Eve. Talking to him made me feel better. Friends can do that.

    So on this day, after you have finished with what’s under the tree, had the first of a week’s worth of leftovers, take a moment to reach out to a friend and let them know what they mean to you.

            

  • First off, Merry Christmas! If you’re on the blog on actual Christmas morning, go open presents! Read this later. *grin* I’ll be doing the same, because I’m writing this in advance, so that I don’t have to look at the blog today. There.

    Right… last week the Continuing Resolution was supposed to pass. All 1500 pages of it. Musk made We The People aware of it, and We The People made the decision to call our politicians to say HELL NO. Those 1500 pages were not passed. I considered that incredibly positive. And then I heard the commentary from the Left and others:

    “House Republicans have been ordered to shut down the government. And hurt the working class Americans they claim to support,” Jeffries posted on the social platform X. “You break the bipartisan agreement, you own the consequences that follow.” (1)

    “They come in and undermine us two days before the government shutdown deadline?” she asked. “That doesn’t seem like, at all, a good way to do business.” (2)

    “I thought it was a reasonably good compromise,” he added. “The problem was one or two people in our conference, instead of just opposing it, had to go out and demonize and distort things, provisions in the bill.” Republican Rep. Kevin Bacon (3)

    There are bunches of other comments that made me wince. One senator I caught a clip of basically said that because We The People chose to tank this pork-ladened CR, we were snatching disaster relief from the Carolinas and elsewhere. That one made my blood boil. Biden just sent a billion to Africa. We HAD money to take care of our own, and Biden and his people sent it elsewhere. Coming in at the last second and tacking aid onto a CR that’s meant to keep the government running is just trashy.

    There is a LOT going on with all this. The bottom line is, we want to see an end to the bloat in Washington. That means that a lot of Democrats and probably quite a few Republicans are going to get their panties in a wad. I am really okay with that. I’m okay with anything that reduces the size of government. Here’s the thing… our Founders never imagined career politicians like we have today. They couldn’t have. It’s so against their beliefs, because it essentially mimics the aristocracy in Britain. That’s exactly what they were trying to avoid.

    So… Trump and his team have come in, and they’re up to making changes. To the people who’ve suggested Trump is overstepping by attempting to lead the country now instead of waiting for January 20th, I say, “At least *someone* is attempting to run the damn country. Biden sure isn’t.”

    (more…)

            

  • Here is hoping that the happy man in the red suit brought you all you wish.

    More importantly, I wish you health and happiness in the coming years.

    -Chris

            

  • So far it is only Gray v. Jennings, but it is still early.

            

  • For those of the Jewish faith, I want to wish you a happy Hannukah. May your latkes be delicious, may your oil last all eight nights, and may the darkness of the year be driven away by the light of the candles. 🙂

            

  • We, at Vine of Liberty, wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

            

  • Okay, I made these because they seemed funny and amusing, and very retro. I am making more because they’re also easy and REALLY yummy. They also have a lot less sugar than some of the cookies I’ve seen out there, which is nice. This is based on an early 1970s Jello recipe.

    Ingredients:

    • 4 cups sifted all-purpose flour
    • 1 teaspoon double-acting baking powder
    • 1-1/2 cups butter (room temperature)
    • 1 cup sugar
    • 1 package (3 ounces) jello gelatin, any flavor
    • 1 egg (room temperature)
    • 1 teaspoon vanilla

    Preheat your oven to 400°F. It doesn’t take long to pull the cookie dough together, so you should be ready about the time it comes up to temperature!

    Sift your flour and baking powder together. I don’t normally do that, but because these are technically spritz cookies, the dough is supposed to be very soft. Sifting helps the dough come together the way it should. If you don’t have a sifter on hand, pour your flour and baking powder into a strainer and tap the side of it until all the ingredients fall through.

    In a separate container, cream your butter. If you’re doing it by hand, you can use a fork or whisk, and work it. I recommend using a stand mixer, however. Using the wire whisk attachment, whip the butter until it’s soft and fluffy. At that point, add in the sugar and Jello packet, about a quarter cup at a time, creaming it well after each addition. This makes the dough very light and fluffy, which is necessary. Add the egg and vanilla, and continue to beat well.

    Jello cookies with “snow”

    Gradually add in the flour mixture, and ensure that  you mix well enough that the dough is smooth each time before adding the next portion. About half way through the process, if you’re using the whisk attachment, you’ll want to switch to the paddle attachment on your mixer. The dough gets a bit thick, though continues to be light and fluffy.

    There are two ways to make the cookies. They both start with lining two or three baking sheets with parchment paper. Do not grease them.

    For shaped cookies, force the dough through a cookie press. Decorate however you wish.

    For round cookies, use your hands to make inch-wide balls of the dough, and place them onto the parchment paper. Lightly grease the bottom of an appropriately sized glass or cup, and press gently into the dough to make it into a circle. It ends up looking almost like a wax seal, to be honest. Again, decorate as you wish. This is the method I used, and I put on sprinkles to most of my cookies. I just shook them on, then pressed very gently with clean hands to seat the sprinkles into the dough. I also did one batch with “snow” on top, by baking them and adding powdered sugar AFTER they came out of the oven but when they were still very hot. To do “snow” you add a tablespoon of powdered sugar to a small sieve and then tap the side of it over the cookies. The sugar will fall through and dust the top of the cookies. You can even use pre-cut shapes like stars and trees to decorate with “snow”.

    Bake your cookies for 13 to 15 minutes, or until they’re golden brown at the edges. They can be frozen, or they can be stored in a loosely covered container.

    Notes:

    I used orange jello for my first batch, and the result was very tasty. The “snow” batch had a sort of orange creamsicle flavor to it, and the rest it was hard to taste the jello. The color definitely comes through, though. I also used margarine for my cookies, since I can’t digest dairy. They turned out just fine!

            

  • I own a pocket watch. It is beautiful, but I don’t use it very often.

    I know that I own a couple of watches. One of them is a battery powered solar recharging thing.

    My standard “watch” today is my cell phone.

    When I was in high school, I was very interested in accurate time keeping. As was my father.

    This meant that we would call the “time” phone number to set our watches, at least once a week.

    My grandfather had a “railroad watch”. This was a wristwatch that was approved by the railroad for time keeping. It was approved by the SooLine for use as a time keeping device. Amazing, until that model of watch was approved, the railroad required the use of pocket watches.

    This was because a level of accuracy was required that only pocket watches or well regulated wristwatches could maintain.

    The big thing in my youth were “quartz” watches. Instead of using a tuning fork or a mechanical balance/regulator, they used the vibrations of a quartz crystal to keep track of the time.

    What this meant was that you had devices that were now able to maintain the same wrong time over an extended period of time.

    The user had to set them correctly.

    As an example, for years, maybe even to today, my wife would set her car clock (and many other clocks) 10 minutes fast. “So she would be on time for appointments.”

    I set my car to my phone’s reported time.

    One of the fun things that I did as a kid was to call up the Naval Observatory to get the current time. This was reported from their atomic clock. One of the most accurate time keeping devices in the world.

    Accurate Time

    Many protocols require accurate time. It is wonderful that you have a time piece that is accurate to within 1 second per year, but if it is reporting the wrong time, it is not particularly useful to the protocol.

    What we want, is to know what time it is right now, and then to set our time to that.

    We get the current time from a known, accurate time source. Today, that is often GPS satellites.

    If you have ever wondered how GPS works, it works because your device knows where each satellite is at any instant of time. Each satellite transmits its ID and the current time. Over and over again.

    That is all they do.

    And here is the magic, if your device knows what time it is, and it knows where the satellite should be at his time, it can calculate the distance by comparing the difference in time.

    If you are directly under a GPS satellite, it takes about 67ms for the signal to reach your device. From this, we can use the speed of light to figure out the distance traveled. Then some simple math and we know the location of your device.

    We can also get accurate time by listening for the atomic clocks via radio. If you know where you are, and you know where the clock is, you can calculate the delay between the atomic clock and your device, then match your device to the atomic clock.

    Today, when people want to use that type of process, they use a GPS device and get the time ticks from the device.

    How long did it take?

    This is where it starts to get complicated.

    The standard for communications with a GPS device is 4800 or 9600 baud across a 3 wire serial connection. The protocol, the text being transmitted, specifies the time when the last character is transmitted.

    That data is being received. Your device is processing it. Your device takes a certain amount of time to process the record it just received. It takes time to process that record. All of that is latency.

    If you do not know the latency in your device, you do not know what time it is. For grins, just think of that serial link being 300,000,000 meters long. That would put a 1-second latency by itself.

    There are ways of calculating the latency, but I do not remember what they are.

    Latency is the important piece of information.

    Calculating Latency

    Many network people have run ping. It is a tool for testing reachability and latency between your device and some other device on the Internet.


    ping -c 5 8.8.8.8
    PING 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8) 56(84) bytes of data.
    64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=1 ttl=116 time=11.1 ms
    64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=2 ttl=116 time=11.1 ms
    64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=3 ttl=116 time=11.6 ms
    64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=4 ttl=116 time=11.1 ms
    64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=5 ttl=116 time=11.0 ms

    --- 8.8.8.8 ping statistics ---
    5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 4004ms
    rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 11.022/11.179/11.616/0.220 ms

    This is a test from one of my faster machines to a Google DNS server. This tells me that it takes 11.179 ms to reach that DNS server. Testing to one of my network timeservers, the average is 78.094 ms.

    This means that the time reported by the timeserver will be off by some amount. In a simple world, we would guess that it is 1/2 of 78.094.

    But, I use NTP. NTP does many transmissions to multiple timeservers to discover the actual time. It is reporting that the latency is 78.163512 ms. A little more accurate. It tells me that the dispersion is 0.000092 ms.

    How does it know this? Because of many samples and because of four different time stamps.

    When my device sends an NTP request packet, it puts the current time in it. When the server receives the packet, it puts the current time in it. When the server transmits the response, it adds the current time again. Finally, when the reply is received, the current time is added to the packet. This gives us four different time stamps from two different sources.

    We compute the total latency via mine(R)-mine(S). We know the processing time by server(S)-server(R). The difference between server(R)-mine(S) and mine(R)-server(S) as the symmetry between the two paths the request and response traveled.

    From these values, we can calculate the network distance, in seconds, between us and them.

    Assume we transmit at time 0(M), it is received at 100(S), the response is transmitted at 105(S) and we receive it at 78(M).

    How can we receive our reply before the server sent it? Easy, we have to different views of what time it is.

    The latency is 78. This means that the halfway point was at 38. It took 5 to process the reply and get it on the wire again. If we do simple stuff, this means that our time is off from their time by 67.

    But we can do better. By looking at the reported latency between the two legs, we can actually calculate how long it took for us to receive the reply.

    NTP uses multiple timeservers to get a consensus as to the time. It monitors each timeserver to determine which one jitters the least.

    All of this means that we can have very accurate times.

    And having accurate measurements of the time, NTP will calculate how much the computer’s clock drifts over time. It will then modify the clock rate in parts per million to get the drift as close to zero as possible.

    This means, that the longer your device runs NTP, the more accurate it becomes.

            

  • In two days, we will get our next cup of tea leaves.

    On the 16th, Gray waived the 14-day waiting period for distribution of Petition. They requested that the case be distributed for the January 10th conference on December 24th.

    They did, indeed, get their reply in on time. Amazing how the good guys get their paperwork in on time while the state, with nearly infinite resources, is forever requesting extensions.

    What does this mean?

    As of the morning of the 21st, all three Second Amendment cases seeking cert are now fully briefed. Two are at final judgement and the third is about preliminary injunctions, so being in an interlocutory state is not an issue.

    We have three cases teed up and ready to go.

    All three cases are simple cases if the Court follows their own president.

    Are “assault weapons” arms under the Second Amendment? Yes.

    Is this a gun ban case? Yes.

    Is this class of arms in common use for lawful purposes? Yes.

    Done.

    Are “large capacity magazines” arms under the Second Amendment? Yes, but with a bit more language. Magazines are to arms as ink is to free speech.

    I this a ban on a class of firearms? Yes.

    Is this class of arms in common use for lawful purposes? Yes.

    Done.

    Is a violation of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution a violation of a Constitutionally protected right? Yes.

    Done. Irreparable harm has been committed if a Second Amendment protected right is violated.

    Gray’s response points out that there is a circuit split. It points out that a violation of any constitutionally protected right that cannot be fixed with money is irreparable harm.

    Prove it!

    The state is arguing that the plaintiffs (good guys) “…failed to prove they will more likely than not suffer irreparable in jury while proceedings are pending.”

    The petitioners (plaintiffs and good guys) did make a showing that they were suffering irreparable harm. They argued that violation of intangible Second Amendment rights is irreparable harm.

    The state argues that they didn’t even try to prove irreparable harm. They counter with the proof is that it is irreparable harm because it is a violation of a Constitutionally protected right.

            

  • Yesterday was a good day. But you don’t want to hear about nerd rants.

    I took my wife to the hospital for minor surgery. It was successful, and the patent lived.

    There are hardly any places in this state that are “gun free zones”. Post offices, courts, and jails are the limit, as far as I know.

    While schools are “gun free zones”, the law says that if you have a permit to carry, you can carry in school zones.

    Certain parts of court buildings are gun free zones. When I went to support a friend, I was in the court building, carrying. There was a metal detector between me and the courtroom, which was a true gun free zone.

    Post offices were made “gun free zones” when a postal worker went bonkers and killed some of his coworkers. Under leftist logic, that means that The People need to be disarmed when entering postal property.

    Postal property including the parking lot.

    This is being challenged in court.

    If you look at the image, you will notice that there are no references to any legal documents.

    For example, the signage in Massachusetts has “G.L.C. 266 § 120” on it. New York’s signage says it is a felony and “Penal Law § 265.01-D, Penal Law § 265.01-E”. Texas signage says, “Pursuant to section 30.05, penal code (criminal trespass), a person may not enter this property with a firearm”.

    The sign on the hospital? No such verbiage. That is because it does not have the force of law behind it.

    In my state, a NO GUNS sign doesn’t mean anything.

    If the owner of the property discovers I’m carrying, they can have me trespassed. That’s it. It isn’t the sign, it is just their right as a private property owner.

    They can trespass anybody they want for any reason.

    It is nice to live in a free state.