Last week it was turkey. This week, I’m sharing my favorite side dishes that I use in a perfect Thanksgiving Feast!

Mashies

Mashed potatoes are a definite requirement at any Thanksgiving feast. The easiest way to make delicious mashed potatoes is to cut them into about inch square cubes, and boil them until they’re soft but not yet falling apart. Mash with whatever masher you have on hand, adding in a minimum of a tablespoon of butter per potato in the mix and drizzling in milk or cream (or in my case, oatmilk) as needed to bring them to the right consistency for you. I like my potatoes a little lumpy, but everyone else likes them creamy, so I tend to whip them very fine. Serve them with a slight well in the top, filled with a pad of butter and a sprinkle of salt and pepper. They don’t need anything else!

Bread Stuffing

Stuffing is a constant battle in my household. We have several recipes we like, but I’m going to share my Hungarian grandmother’s recipe, because it’s my favorite. This was named “Song Stuffing” by one of my kids, because it contains parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme… but we adults call it “Heart Attack Stuffing” because of all the yummy fatty goodness inside it. It’s also a great way to get liver into your kids, because they’ll never know it’s there until they’ve fallen in love with it. It’s how my Nagymama got me to eat liver!

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Sunday was supposed to be the day I migrated a couple of machines. I have a new physical device which is described as a Level 2 switch with SFP+ ports.

The idea is to replace my small mixed routers, 2 SFP+ ports plus some RJ45 ports with either a L2 SFP+ only switch or an L3 SFP+ only routers. This allows me to move some servers around and to increase the bandwidth from nodes to the backbone.

The switch arrived with a nice little instruction manual which claims I can find a web interface at 192.168.2.1 while the website claims there is no management interface.

Plugging it into an Ethernet port with an Ethernet SFP module gives me nothing on 192.168.2.1 and nothing on 192.168.2.x/24 but for my machine. It looks like it is unmanaged.

This means, it should be a simple plug in replacement for my tiny switch, giving an upgraded data path to the backbone.

It didn’t work.

So now I have to do some more testing. I’ll figure this out, one way or another, but it is another bottleneck in my path to full conversion to fiber from copper.

My mentor, Mike, use to say “There is always a bottleneck.”

What he meant by this, was that for any system, there will be a place which limits the throughput. If you can find, and eliminate, that bottleneck, then you can improve the performance of the system. Which will then slam into the next bottleneck.

Consider this in light of traffic. It is obvious to everybody, because it happens every day, that traffic does a massive slowdown just past the traffic signal where the road goes from four lanes to two. That is the point which we want to optimize.

The state comes out, evaluates just how bad the bottleneck is. The money people argue, and 15 years later they widen the road.

They widen the road between the first and second signal. Traffic now clears the first traffic signal with no issues.

And the backup is now just past the second signal, where the road narrows again.

We didn’t “solve” the bottleneck, we just moved it.

With computers, there are many bottlenecks that are kept in balance. How fast can we move data to and from the network, how fast can we move data to and from mass storage, how fast can we move data from memory? These all balance.

As a concrete example, the speed of memory is not fixed at the speed of the socket. If there are more memory lanes or wider memory lanes, you can move data faster.

If you have a fast CPU, but it is waiting for data from memory, it doesn’t matter. The CPU has to be balanced against the memory speed.

My mentor was at a major manufacturer, getting a tour and an introduction to their newest machine. He had an actual application that could also be used for benchmarking. One of the reasons it was a powerful benchmarking tool, was that it was “embarrassingly parallel”.

In other words, if it had access to 2 CPUs, it would use them both and the process would run twice as fast. 8 CPUs? 8 times as fast. Since the organization he worked for purchased many big computers (two Crays), and he was the go-to guy for evaluating computers, his opinion meant something.

He ran his code on a two CPU version, found it adequate. Requested to look at the actual designs for the machines. He spent an hour or two pouring over the design documents and then said.

“We want an 8 CPU version of this. That will match the compute (CPU) power to the memory bandwidth.”

The company wasn’t interested until they understood that the customer would pay for these custom machines.

Six months later, these 8 custom machines were in the QA bay being tested when another customer came by and inquired about them.

When they were told they were custom-builds, they pulled rank and took all 8 of them and ordered “many” more.

What happened, was that my mentor was able to identify the bottleneck. Having identified it, he removed that bottleneck by adding more CPUs. The new bottleneck was no longer the lack of compute power, it was memory access speed.

The Tight Wire Balancing Act

I deal with systems of systems. It is one of the things that I was trained in. I.e., actual classes and instruction.

Most people have no idea of how complex a modern Internet service is. I.e., a website.

This site is relatively simple. It consists of a pair of load balancers sitting in front of an ingress server. The ingress server runs in a replicated container on a clustered set of container servers. The application has a web service provider that handles assets and delegates execution to an execution engine.

This runs a framework (WordPress) under PHP. On top of that is layered my custom code.

The Framework needs access to a database engine. That engine could be unique to just this project, but that is a waste of resources and does not allow for replication. So the DB Engine is a separate system.

The DB could run as a cluster, but that would slow it down and adds a level of complexity that I’m not interested in supporting.

The DB is then replicated to two slaves with constant monitoring. If the Master database engine goes offline, the monitors promote one of the slaves to be the new master. It then isolates the old master so it does not think it is the master anymore.

In addition, then non promoted slave is pointed at the new master to replicate.

I wish it was that simple, but the monitors also need to reconfigure the load balancers to direct database traffic to the new master.

And all of this must be transparent to the website.

One of the issues I have been having recently, is that in the process of making the systems more reliable, I’ve been breaking them. It sounds stupid, but it happens.

So one of the balancing acts, is balancing redundancy against complexity, against security.

As another example, my network is physically secured. I am examining the option of running all my OVN tunnels over IPsec. This would encrypt all traffic. This adds a CPU load. How much will IPsec “cost” on a 10 Gigabit connection.

Should my database engines be using SSD or rust? Should it be using a shared filesystem, allowing the engine to move to different servers/nodes?

It is all a balancing act.

And every decision moves the bottlenecks.

Some bottlenecks are hard to spot. Is it a slow disk or is it slow SATA links or is it slow network speed?

Is it the number of disks? Would it be faster to have 3 8TB drives or 2 12TB drives? Or maybe 4 6TB drives? Any more than 4 and there can be issues.

Are we CPU bound or memory bound? Will we get a speedup if we add more memory?

Conclusion

I ave so many bottles in the air I can’t count them all. It requires some hard thinking to get all the infrastructure “right”

One of the most difficult tasks economists have is to judge the cost of things. If I’m paying $3/dozen for eggs and you are paying $1/dozen, do your eggs or mine cost more?

This gets even more complex when you start to consider currency differences.

When I’m discussing past prices, I like to convert the cost at that time to hours of labor. How many hours of labor does it take to purchase this item.

In 1976-77 A brand new Apple II would run you around $900. Today, I can put together a similar class of computer for around $1000. CPU, Memory, Disk, Motherboard, and case. In 1976, that $900 was somewhere around 150 hours of my labor, call it 4 weeks of full-time labor.

Except that I was only working part-time. This means that my actual cost, saving everything, was going to be around 10 weeks.

Today, that $1000 computer is going to cost me less than a week of labor, ignoring taxes.

The problem with using hours of labor to compare costs is that the value of your labor varies greatly. At the time, I was working in a computer store, the first in the state. My friends were flipping burgers. I was making twice as much per hour as they were, sitting in front of a monitor typing.

Whose labor value do we use? When comparing my grandfathers’ salary, I used historical records for machinists, which he was. As a skilled laborer, he was paid much more than the average.

In 1986, to try to give people a more innate sense of how much the cost of living varied from location to location, and from time to time, The Economist published the “Big Mac Index.”

Why would an index based on a fast food restaurants’ menu item be of any use?

The answer is one of consistency and inclusion. If you were to compare a generic “hamburger” from location to location, you would get wildly changing values. That could be because of the cost of the burger to the restaurant, or the hamburgers could be different. Does one have a slice of American cheese on it and the other premium Swiss? Is one made from grass fed organic ground beef and the other from Sysco’s finest? Is one burger 4oz pre cook weight and the other 2oz?

It makes a difference.

A Big Mac is standardized everywhere. That stupid jingle is correct for every Big Mac ever made. McDonalds even standardizes the amount of sauce that goes on each sandwich.

This means we are comparing apples to apples. Or, in this case, burger to burger.

The second part is inclusion. We know what goes into each sandwich. Those base ingredients are source relatively locally.

While the restaurant might be buying their meat from McDonalds, they are buying it from a location nearby. This means that the transportation expenses are in the price of the burger. This means that the cost of meat is in the price of the burger.

The cost of each item that goes into the burger is included in the price it sells for.

There is a cost of doing business, insurance, property tax, rental costs, undocumented payments to government organizations and NGOs (bribes), heating, cooling, building maintenance. These costs are all rolled into the final price of the sandwich.

The final cost is that of labor. If the labor market is strong, workers will be making more, if it is weak, labor will be paid less.

This also accounts for the cost of living in a particular area. In a location where it costs more to live, the workers will want more money per hour. While people in lower cost of living areas might want the extra pay, they are not going to get it.

I interviewed for a job in California once. As part of the interview process, they flew me to San Diego for a week. I spent the week house shopping and interviewing. I finally found a home that I was willing to live in.

Even though they were going to almost double my current salary, I would not have been able to afford a house in San Diego. I turned the job down.

Using a Big Mac equivalent, we can get a better idea of what the true cost is for different locations.

In Hawaii, the price of a Big Mac is $5.31 while in Mississippi, it is $3.91. This implies that it costs more to live in Hawaii than it does in Mississippi.

As a final thought on the Big Mac index, I remember McDonalds advertising that you could buy dinner for a family of four for $5.00 and have change.

That isn’t the case, anymore.

There’s a difference between thriving and surviving. I notice a trend among those who call themselves preppers. There are two sorts: those who are prepared to simply go on living, and those who prepare to survive the apocalypse. The first sort have plans for growing food, hunting, trapping, collecting water, providing continuing light, creating electricity in small amounts, and a lot more. The second sort treat it like it’s a weekend warrior camp where they get to play commando.

I am among the first group. I hone my skills so that I can thrive, rather than survive. Yes, survival is important in the early days of any disaster. You have to make it through the mud slides or tornado or tsunami or whatever it is that went boom. The bottom line is, surviving is the easy part. Either you survive, or you don’t, and the answer to that question is going to come up pretty quickly. No matter how much you prep, there’s always going to be some kind of emergency that you didn’t think of that could wipe you out. Thriving, though… or, as I like to call it, “living,” is what it’s all about.

After whatever immediate circumstances mess up our civilization (because let’s be serious, the Earth, our world, is going to go right on spinning in space… unless the emergency has to do with Vogon Constructor Fleets, but that’s another matter entirely), we’re going to want to focus on getting things built into some kind of new normal. I’m one of the type of folks who hope the new normal isn’t like the old normal. I’d like to see less government, and more growing of food. But that’s me.

How do you prepare to thrive? Well, you get your life together in such a way that a disaster is only a momentary blip. I’ve chosen to do this by studying how medieval and early Colonial people survived in some of the most terrifying circumstances they’d ever encountered. I don’t need to re-invent the wheel, after all. I can see clearly how they did it. And then I practice those skills, over and over again.

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Our Next AG?

You have to wonder if Matt knew how much push back there would be? Regardless, he functioned as a fabulous stalking horse.

Network Nerding

So when is a cluster not a cluster nor a cluster f___, nor a f___ing cluster?

When you are talking about OVN/OVS.

OVN provides for a clustered database. This is what is used to control the OVS network mesh. The clustered database should exist on 3 or 5 different nodes.

The OVS network mesh is a collection of individual nodes, running a virtual switch, that are meshed via tunnels. This is not a cluster.

A network node requires OVS-switchd and a copy of the local OVSDB. That’s it.

If you want OVN over the top, you need to add ovn-controller to the node, which talks to the OVN database cluster and the OVSDB.

Once I got that through my dense head, this stuff started to make sense. I’m now to the point where I can bring up a 6 node system, 3 OVN controllers and 4 network nodes in just an hour or so. And it all just works. I’m busy finishing some documentation that I will publish.

50,000 Words

Ally has been going great guns on her next cookbook. November is national novel writing month.

The goal is to write a 50,000 word first draft or part of a first draft in the month of November. You can then edit, add to, or finish your novel over the coming months.

I’m proud of her. This will be the 5th year, I think I have that right, where she has made her 50,000+ words for the Month of November.

Lever Guns

I love my lever guns. Has anybody had hands on the new “modern” lever guns? By modern, I mean a lever gun firing a modern caliber out of a box magazine.

Conversations with friends can be difficult. One of my friends is burdened by the inequity of the world.

Because he is conservative and a strong supporter of the Second Amendment, his issues with inequity are putting him in serious mental anguish.

What Has Been

You struck out, westward, when you found a place to your liking, you made it your own. This included clearing the land, building your home, cultivating your ground, hunting, and surviving.

If you were lucky, you might find an abandoned homestead to take over. You paid for that home with the sweat of your brow. Nothing was easy.

In other cases, you might be close enough to civilization that you could purchase your home. Be that the wood to build it, or the house itself. You could also buy a house from the previous homeowner.

As time went on, the areas around the towns became more built up. The houses within the towns became more valuable. People invested in their homes, making them still more valuable.

Still, it was almost always a buyer’s market.

With vast amounts of “free” land, land was cheap, if you didn’t want a big house, your house was cheap too.

When you start seeing more expensive homes, they were passed down from father to son, as was the land. The family’s wealth was tied up in their land.

It’s NOT Fair!

But that means that those who came first got it easy! They got it cheap! There’s nothing left of ME!

My grandparents bought their home in the early 1900s. If I recall correctly, they paid around $5k for it. According to the googler, the average house price in 1929 was $6k. In 1929, my grandfather was likely earning about $1700/year. So a house would cost about 4 years worth of labor.

My house cost about one year of labor, the year I bought it. My house is actually cheaper than my grandfathers house. And my house is huge in comparison.

My grandparents, with their three daughters, lived in a two bedroom, one-bath house. There was a living room and a dine in kitchen. There was a full, unfinished basement. My grandfather built the detached garage later. It had a massive porch that extended the entire width of the front.

Grandpa added a back porch that was closed in to make it 3.5 seasons. Oh, there was a big mudroom off the back entrance.

When we were looking at houses, our minimum requirement was two full baths, four bedrooms, large kitchen, dining room. What we ended up with was larger than that. And it was still cheaper than my grandparents’ home.

It is fair.

But they didn’t have to pay as much!

It is all relative. My grandparents didn’t spend as much on entertainment. When they did go out, it was often very cheap dates. A nickle movie with popcorn and a soda was a 1/2 hour of labor. A movie with popcorn and soda is about 3/4 of an hour of labor today.

My friend wanted to buy a house for 2 years of labor, while having “needs” that would cost him 5 to 6 years of labor. And being upset.

His argument is that if they people that had come before were to stop being “evil” and “greedy”, there would be more houses.

The issue is that the housing market is currently a seller’s market. The demand is higher than the supply. This means that sellers can demand more money. When they get to where they are going, they will have to pay more as well.

Listening to people dancing at the “profit” they made selling their homes on Monday, and bitching about how unfair it is on Friday when they have to pay more for a new home, makes me giggle. I feel for them. I don’t understand why they don’t get it.

If we were just to…

We have a small lot, for the area, which backs on a few acres of forest. I do not want somebody to build a house right behind us. My options are to purchase the property behind us, risk it, or get the government to zone the land to stop new building.

I would like to purchase the land outright. That would be the best option for us. The risk is fairly low, there isn’t much demand for new housing in our area. But going to the zoning board…, now there’s an idea.

The wonder of the zoning board is that you can often convince the zoning board to put limits on the uses of property to protect the community.

We will zone land as noncommercial to keep traffic out, we might zone an area for single family dwellings to give people a sense of space and property, we might zone an area for high density housing or even trailer parks.

Zoning laws help protect the community from things like semi-trailers driving down the road in front of your house. The government put a US highway through my grandparent’s town. It was the street in front of their house. When they moved in, the road was a tree—lined boulevard. The first time I saw it, it was a four lane road with street parking on both sides and big rigs running through town all day and all night.

Occasionally, we find zoning laws designed to protect our farm land. The farm up the road was on the market for 10 years. Nobody was willing (or able) to buy it. In the end, they were able to sell off about 5 acres of the 100+, which became 3 lots with big houses on it.

Zoning laws kept that farm from becoming a huge apartment complex, or a subdivision.

If we were just to allow people to build as many houses as densely as they want, then house prices would be low enough for me.

Conclusion

I’m wealthy, by world standards. By world standards, I’m part of the “1%”. Then again, so are you.

The people of the United States are unbelievably wealth. The poorest of the poor in America are obese. They are not starving. Some might be hungry, but they are not starving.

I’ve been in section 8 housing to service computers. At a time when large, flat screen TVs were running 1000 to 2000 dollars, they had three.

When I was in high school, at one bus stop the “poor” kids would get off, they would run into their tar paper shacks. These were the kids who got to go to gym class as their first class. So they could use the showers.

They were so poor that they didn’t have enough running hot water for showers. I don’t know if they had showers in those shacks.

I do know that there were always two or three late model Cadillacs in the driveway.

The “poverty line” for the United States is higher than the average income of most countries in the world. Even some 1st and 2nd world countries.

If what you want as a home isn’t here, you need to look further afield or change your specifications.

Crying over what has been isn’t going to change anything.

Complaining that the people with wealth are “greedy” and “evil” isn’t going to change anything.

If it is the government standing in the way of lower costs, then we can get the government out of the way. That doesn’t mean that all zoning laws are bad, some might be.

In general, being upset that some people have things you want and are unwilling to give it up, or are willing to fight to protect their property or the value of their property, is only going to make you mad.

Stop stressing over what others have. Take stock of what you do have and give thanks.

@notmelissavitelliKeep melting down

♬ original sound – MelissaVitelli

This couple is part of the reason I found the LGB community on the Right. The lady in the back is the Trump person, and the one talking in front is her wife. Her wife did not vote for Trump. Her wife, however, is not an idiot.

The reason I’m posting this because this is how it’s supposed to work. You can vote differently, think differently, even have different values (to a point), and still be loving partners. For a very long time, I did not back anything Right… and my partner still loved me. I still loved him. Now I have one partner who’s very Right, and one who’s moderately Left, and I love them both. It helps me hear outside my echo chamber, among other things, and it also makes it very clear to me that we often have the same goal but with different ideas on how to achieve them.

Those who’ve chosen to end relationships over Trump winning are also choosing to enact the stupid Handmaid’s Tale stuff. They’re feeding right into it. They are training themselves to REact rather than to act. I find it difficult to watch. I also find it rather disgusting to watch women cut off their hair or say they’re going to purposefully gain weight “to be unattractive to men.” Excuse me, but there are women out there who have lost their hair because of disease, who have no choice of the matter, and they are still beautiful. There are women who are fat and they are beautiful. I’m fat, and I’m beautiful. 🙂 Those women who are doing the 4B movement are just douches. It’s horrendous, and so against every single thing the Left purports to be for.

Monday, I had an opportunity to visit the SIG Academy/SIG Experience Center.

In the late 70s, I had a chance to visit NYC for the first time. That feeling of awe, looking up at the skyscrapers. Trying hard not to have pidgin droppings fall into our open mouths.

That is sort of how I felt walking into the building. I spent a long time in the museum portion of the building. I was surprised at the lack of firearms from the 1700 and 1800 hundreds. Starting in the 1900s, they had a presence.

One of the people who worked there was willing to discuss the things that are coming out of SIG for the military. One of the coolest is their short stroke piston operated rifles. Using a new caliber, they are getting good velocity out of shorter barrels.

I want one of those belt feed rifles. They might be out of my price range.

Part of the coolness factor is that with the dual action bars with the short stroke piston, they don’t need buffer tubes. This allows for true folding stocks. Or, something that was just FUD sick.

They took this beautiful action and shoved it into a plastic “hunting” rifle. No pistol grip. No buffer tube. It doesn’t look like an AR platform in any way, unless you shove a 30 round magazine into it.

I’m hoping for a version is 7.62×521(Win .308). That would be a nice rifle. No scaring the mundanes, packs a punch, light weight and reliable.

Unfortunately, I got to looking at the display case full of pistols…

Wouldn’t you know it, a cute little black guy followed me home.

Now, I’m a firm believer in my 1911s. I love the feel of them. I love shooting them. They are tack drivers.

I think I’ve found a new love. The P365 x macro.

This guy fits my hand perfectly. It doesn’t point exactly like the 1911s, but close enough. The grip size is perfect, if it wasn’t, you just replace the back strap. The gun comes with three different back straps.

The one I took home has an external safety, this is to standardize my manual of arms.

On Tuesday, I went to the range and put rounds down range. FUN!!!

I have three plates set up. 1/4 torso behind a round gong and a 1/2 torso to the side. One of my drills is to hit the head of the target hiding behind the gong, then hitting the 1/2 torso to the side, then back again.

With 17 rounds in the magazine, the grip wasn’t double stack wide. It performed admirably. From first to last round, it was consistently ringing steel.

The only downside is the magazines. You will want to use the loading tool to help load the magazine. Even with the tool, getting rounds 14 through 17 into the magazine was a pain. In some ways, it reminds me of loading the M3 grease gun magazines. Heavy springs to push those rounds reliably all the way.

The other thing is that I don’t like the bright orange followers in the magazines. I haven’t looked, but I’m pretty sure I can find replacement followers.

Now for the next bit of coolness, this thing has a drop in FCU. It is the FCU that is the registered firearm. This means that you can pay once for the FCU, then have multiple frames that you can put the FCU into.

Want a sub compact? Buy the frame, barrel, and magazines, you are good to go.

Want a full size? Buy the frame, barrel, and (maybe?) magazines, you are good to go.

I am going to add more SIGs to my collection.

Two is one, one is none. Have more.

Image you are a school bus driver. You’ve just picked up a load full of elementary school students to take them home.

And they start singing “Joy To The World.” Every. Single. Day.

That is how we tortured our bus driver.