Month: October 2019

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Happy whatever the hell this holiday was…

This used to be a perfect holiday when I was a kid.

It provided a great respite from the first month of school and made things bearable. the three day weekend was so welcome, but of course I had to deal with some teacher that wanted to give us homework which I always put off until Monday night.

I suppose old habits die hard. It appears that Ive done the same thing with this blog post.

But at least I odn’t have to worry about a teacher being upset that I didn’t do my homework.

I do however need to pound the pavement for s new job as soon as possible.

Im beginning to think that I’m not going to have the opportunity to get away for any time at all. Not cool, but I may not have any choice in the matter, the way things are going.

But it was a nice holiday weekend, if for nothing else than me not having to go anywhere or interact with anyone.

I hope everyone’s weekend was a nice one.

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PG&E Makes Northern California like a third world country

Purge anarchy 0In an effort to curb wildfires, PG&E started shutting down the power due to high winds in Northern California.

It may take them up to 7 days to restore power to the affected areas.

SAY WHAT?

How about PG&E simply fixing or maintaining their equipment? Oh Right… They’ve filed for bankruptcy because of all the law suits from the last major fire that they were apparently responsible for. Uh, what the hell is going on here? They didn’t have to kill the power in the 70’s, 80’s or 90’s so what’s changed?

Could it be that in order to keep profits and executive salaries high they’ve skimped on maintenance? Could it be that zoning and over development have created a situation where too many high tension lines have been run out to places that are inaccessible and therefore not easily maintained?

I’ll admit that I think it’s funny as hell.

Rickandmorty ep210I’d love to see San Francisco and Sacramento plunged into darkness. Both bastions of insanity could do with a nice long dark wake up call.

How would all the electric cars be recharged? OMG it would be a disaster and people’s cell phones have to be recharged. What? no computers, internet, streaming services? You mean we have to, gasp… talk to each other face to face?  After the first night it would probably look like something out of The Purge.

And why would it take up to 7 days to restore power?

All PG&E is doing is shutting down the grid.  Assuming no damage, shouldn’t it be a simple matter of resetting the system and powering it back up?

Of course, while the power is down maybe PG&E should use the time wisely to make routine repairs and improvements. However, doing that would require planning and certainly overtime pay. Since they’re in bankruptcy it’s unlikely that there is a lot of cash for the overtime, but I’ll bet the top executives are still getting their obscene paychecks.

The mental image of Silicon Valley, San Francisco, and Sacramento residents having to resort to cooking fires while living in their million dollar homes tickles me to no end.

But we all know that isn’t what’s going to happen. In fact here is the outtage map.

It’s mostly the people who can’t afford to live in the cities who are being affected. You know, the workers that have to get up at 4am to get ready for their commute of 2.5 hours to work. Then they’ll have to deal with streetlights being out and signal lights not working, when they finally do get to work the odds are pretty good they’ll have some jerk supervisor that chastises, or outright punishes them for being late.

I guess my point is that instead of PG&E killing the power, they should be working to make sure that the power lines don’t come down in the first place. 

But California is apparently fine with being plunged into the dark ages. So long as Silicon Valley, San Francisco, and Sacramento don’t go dark. 

I could make a killing selling flint knives and stone clubs.

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New OS… New features and challenges

macos catalina large.jpgMaybe I am a fanboi.

Apple released Catalina yesterday and I upgraded my computer immediately.

Still having some issues that I’m ironing out, but generally speaking the upgrade went perfectly.  I’ve continued the job search without missing a beat and have been taking breaks from the job search to tweak little settings here and there.

Stability and speed are good and some of the newer features I’m liking, while others just seem to be (at this point) a little more complicated than they need to be.

Part of that may be a learning curve in that I’m reaching for things where they were and not where they are.

I thought I’d eliminated all the 32 bit applications from my system a while ago, but I was wrong. Catalina found several apps that were still 32 bit. Thankfully I don’t use them very much so it’s not “Mission Critical” For me to jump right on replacing them.

There is one that may be a stumbling block but i’m probably going to be able to Create a VMware environment for that one. Although when I went to see if there was an update, I found that the company is only just now working on a 64 bit version and then I realized that my copy of the application was 3 years old with no updates since I purchased it.  Really???? Come on guys, it’s not like you didn’t have time to prepare.

The last of the backups is nearing completion. There are advantages to having multiple backups, But the disadvantage is that you have to update multiple backups and that can be time consuming. This is especially true if one of your backups is a little on the large size and the system decides that it needs to thin it out. Grrrrr.

In any case things are progressing as they should.

On to the next challenge.