Author: wwducat

About: Writer, Technology guy, Photographer, Possibly EX-Software QA Engineer, Worker Bee. Interests: SCUBA, Working out, Friends, New Views, New Vistas, Photography
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The Calm before the storm

So, today dawned bright and beautiful. The temp never dropped below freezing last night so I was able to remove the glacier that had formed on the rear deck.

That is a priority for my safety and Jesse’s since he often leaps before he looks. I’ll grant you that the look on his face when he can’t stop on the ice is funny. But he’s still growing and I’d like to prevent him straining his hips or shoulders with a fall on the deck, or worse yet a tumble down the stairs.

After I finished that chore, we went for our morning walk.

I figured it was a good time to tease you skiers. Conditions are pretty good right now the snow isn’t too packed and you can’t beat 40°F.

I should caution you… Before you grab your gear and come running up the mountain. First off it’s very windy. Second off by 7PM it’s supposed to be snowing. “Great!” You think. Uh not so much, before the snow it’s supposed to be raining. With the already icy conditions adding rain means that the roads will become like greased glass. Then the snowfall prediction is anywhere from 11″ to 17″ altitude dependent.

This means that chain requirements will be in force, and low slung vehicles probably won’t be able to make it up the hill. This storm is supposed to last into Saturday and I’m sure that the snow plows will be doing their best but turnouts may be blocked off by piles of snow so you won’t be able to pull off the road to put your chains on even if you’ve got ’em. Those little cable things are probably not going to cut it either.

I’m guessing that the I-15 will be closed at some point during the storm and that Sunday the roads up here might be passable. But do you really want to spend 5 hours sitting in traffic so that you can ski on crowded slopes, or play in the snow for a few hours, then spend another 5 hours getting home so you can go to work on Monday?

I didn’t think so…

As for us locals, we’ll we’re all making runs to grocery stores and picking up stuff that we’ll need to hunker down. We’re doing errands and trying to take care of little things before the storm hits.

I’m heading out myself in a few minutes to join the fray.

I’ll leave you with these peaceful pictures so you’ll know what you’re missing.

Yeah, I’ve got a bit of a cruel streak.

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Contrary to what you might think…

This is not a picture of an unhappy dog. This is a picture of a dog who’s been outside in 15 inches of snow and is looking for something else to get into.

I’ve never had a dog that loved the snow like Jesse. All my previous dogs enjoyed the snow, but after 1/2 hour or so they were ready to come in, get a treat, get warm and snooze.

That is not the case with Jesse. He comes alive in the snow, it’s all a game and he’s more than content to be outside for hours on end. He digs, rolls, has zoomies, plays with toys, and then curls up watching the world from one of his favorite spots on the decks or near the front gate.

Today is a little different in that he’s not wanting to come in. The last couple of snowfalls haven’t been that impressive. Just a couple of inches and while he’s enjoyed himself he’s been just as happy inside as out. Today on the other hand it’s 29°F and the snow is deep. He’s preferred to be outside running around and when I’ve offered to let him in, he’s just looked at me and run some more.

That’s a good thing because he’s not getting his usual 3 miles of walking today. He’s built for the snow, and plows through it like it’s nothing. I on the other hand, don’t do well in deep snow.

This photo is of the snow we woke up to this morning. 15 inches. We’d already cleared 3 to 5 inches off the decks and the driveway on Saturday. So out in the yard where he’s playing there’s probably at least 18 inches of snow, and the trail that he and I walk every day is going to have at least that much.

I don’t do very well in snow that’s above my knees.

You can see how deep it is in this picture, after clearing the drive and part of the street.

The weather report says that we’re to expect heavy snow and perhaps even thunder and high winds into Monday.

This blog will post automatically early on Monday. I’m writing it on Sunday Morning.

This morning we had power glitches and I’ve had to shut down some of the devices on my local network. With the predicted high winds and snow I’m writing ahead in case the power goes off on Sunday night.

I must admit that the snow is pretty. I wish I wasn’t the one out there clearing it and that the roads were clear. On the other hand, We haven’t had any snow players today so it’s been a quiet Sunday for a change. Saturday morning, I looked out in my front yard and there were complete strangers tromping across my front lawn to pose for pictures and movies on my wooden bench. I ran them off. It is just unbelievable what people think is okay just because there’s snow on the ground.

Coming back from a walk with Jesse, a guy asked me if I had a lighter. He was parked in the yard of a house for sale and wanted to build a fire… On the lawn! I pointed out that he and his party were on private property, that I didn’t have a lighter, and generally speaking folk in these mountains take a very dim view of open fires.

His response, “Yeah I know it’s private property but we weren’t doing anything.”

Then why do you need a lighter???

One of my neighbors came around the corner on an ATV. He’d been using a blade on the front to clear the street . He stopped and told me that he’d had a lot of success for the first time he’d tried the blade.

We chatted a bit and I pointed out that it was great that our street was clear but that we might regret it because of the jackass snowplayers having access to our yards and driveways.

It was at this point Mr. “Have you got a lighter?” decided to pack up and leave.

It could have been that my neighbor and I was chatting about jackass snowplayers, or it could have been that my neighbor has a very nice confederate flag on the front of his ATV.

Perhaps Mr. “Have you got a lighter?” decided that our neighborhood wasn’t to his liking.

Don’t know, don’t care!

Then there were the morons that decided to have their wedding in the snow just off HWY2, (The main road into town,) they thought nothing of blocking the road with their wedding guests and cars. 3500 People in the town were going nowhere, including EMTs!

Apparently, that didn’t even occur to the thoughtless bride and groom. After all… It’s was their day. I couldn’t help but wonder if a snow wedding was the brides way of telling the groom what their marriage was going to be like. You know… Cold as Ice!

In all though, the day was pretty snowplayer free. Turns out, the reason was that there was a 7 car pileup on Highway 138. I guess that put the kibosh on all the other dingbats getting up to the mountains on Saturday.

Sunday has thus far been pretty clear too. Chain requirements and CHP inspection points will do that…

We’ll see what Monday brings.

If there’s power, I’ll update with Monday’s events.

01/27/2021

I missed the update I promised. Between snow clearing and trying to entertain the dog it’s been a busy couple of days.

Monday was a grey and cloudy day. It was bitterly cold, windy and the main focus was just trying to get the driveway, decks, and walkways clear.

Tuesday was bright and sunny it was still 29° F but bearable as long as you stayed in the sun. So later in the afternoon I took the dog for a walk.

As you can see he was very happy to be out of the yard and having a more routine day.

I should note that he’s prancing on a ridge of rocks. In reality the snow on either side of the ridge he is walking on is quite deep. Above my knees in many cases and were it not for the sledding path made by some of the local children It would have been a miserable slog for me. As it was I got a heck of a workout. Jesse did too and I think part of his happiness is that he remembered the rocks under the snow and wasn’t buried up to his shoulders in fluffy dry powder.

This is not to say that he wasn’t snow diving on a fairly regular basis. There were a couple of snowbanks where he jumped as if he was planning to land on top and then look like king of the hill. Things didn’t go as he planned. Instead of landing on top of a solid bank of snow, he disappeared completely.

I was standing there with a leash disappearing into a snowbank making it look like I was walking a snowbank instead of a dog. After a few seconds, Jesse would explode out of the top of the snowbank, so now it looked like a small volcano. Then he’d do this goofy bunny hop to get clear of the snowbank, once clear he’d come running over to me with that laughing look he gets.

It wasn’t until we got to the bottom of the hill that he started to act tired. He’s strong but even for him pushing through deep snow is a lot of work. We walked back up the hill at a slow but even pace and Jesse was pretty much right by my side. He’d occasionally bury his head in the snow trying to catch some illusive smell.

When we got back to the house, Jesse attained his “King of the Hill” Status in our front yard.

The snow pile in the yard is about 8 feet tall but is made up of fairly hard compressed snow because it was piled there by the snow blower.

Tonight, Wednesday we’re expecting more snow going into Thursday and Friday. At this point none of us on the street are sure where we will pile the additional snowfall.

8 feet is about as tall as the snowblowers can pitch the stuff. I suspect that after the next waves of snow, I’m going to have to use a shovel to redistribute the existing pile more evenly over the yard.

That should allow us to clear the driveway and our section of the street again. Then it’s fingers crossed that the next 10 days provide us with warmer temps and sunshine to clear the ice patches.

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Conspiracy Theorists Huh?

I saw this little gem in a Breitbart post located here. I don’t always agree with Breitbart but I applaud them sticking to their guns and calling ’em like they see ’em.

For the better part of a year, We’ve been told that the COVID-19 rates were increasing at alarming rates. Indeed in some places there have been hospitals that were overwhelmed but this hasn’t necessarily been a nationwide phenomena.

When emergency hospital ships sit idle in harbors waiting for patients that never come, and tent wards costing millions are set up in parks and hospital parking lots then dismantled without ever being used, that suggests that something isn’t as the powers that be, would have us believe.

When I personally know of two emergency room nurses who applied / volunteered to help at the height of the New York hospital overflow and they were turned away with no explanation, I start thinking something smells funny.

When Doctors questioning the efficacy of tests, are silenced, when acclaimed researchers have their papers on the utilization of the PCR test as a diagnostic tool are censored, when nurses send unused tests to labs and have them come back as positive, and citizens who were scheduled to take the test for COVID-19 but missed the appointment were subsequently notified that they’d tested positive…

Well then SOMETHING DOWNRIGHT STINKS!

When everyone who asked questions or disputed the accepted narrative, from medical professionals, to the creator of the PCR test itself, to politicians, or anyone else, is labeled a conspiracy nut, then I suddenly find myself standing at the beach after a red tide. (Picture a beach covered in dead fish rotting in the sun on a still July day!)

Now, it looks like perhaps all those people questioning the PCR testing who have been labeled conspiracy nuts may have been correct.

The WHO (World Health Organization) issued an information notice specifically about the utilization of the PCR test to determine if someone does in fact have COVID-19.

Here is the link to the WHO notice .

The notice basically states that if someone shows a positive result in one test, a second test should be administered. Ideally with a test from a different manufacturer and that observation of the patient’s symptoms, if any should be used as well for a final diagnosis.

Generally speaking, if a person shows positive on one test but has no symptoms then do another test to see if the first test is in error.

Most PCR assays are indicated as an aid for diagnosis, therefore, health care providers must consider any result in combination with timing of sampling, specimen type, assay specifics, clinical observations, patient history, confirmed status of any contacts, and epidemiological information.

WHO Information Notice for IVD Users 2020/05

So from the comment above, they are suggesting a return to good medicine where the Doctor makes the diagnosis, not the lab and not a single hastily administered test.

The WHO also makes reference in the article to the number of iterations the PCR test is allowed to run, when they talk about manually applying the positive threshold. There are a number of reports that speak to iterations in PCR testing. It seems that if you allow PCR to run long enough you’ll always come up with a positive result. In a way that makes sense based on my limited understanding of how this test works.

So what does this mean to the average person on the street?

Well you may have been tested and you may have been exposed to COVID-19 but you may not actually know your status because the testing methodology was flawed.

In fact in the SARs epidemic they also used PCR testing but they used it then, the way they’re saying to use it now.

Funny how the WHO suddenly “remembered” how the testing should be done isn’t it?

Funny how medical professionals were censored for questioning the way testing was being done, isn’t it?

What this is likely to do is reduce substantially the daily number of cases. COVID-19 will fade into the woodwork just like SARs did. It will become a non-issue. If the testing, done appropriately starts coming back with fewer and fewer positives, all this insanity may have been a tempest in a teacup.

Normality will return, and 8 months from now people will be going on about their business with or without having been vaccinated.

But the politicians have learned just how compliant people will be in a “Medical Emergency”.

This is not to say that some people didn’t die from COVID-19 or related issues, they did. But for me it brings into sharp focus that all may not have been as it seems.

Every year thousands of people die from complications related to the Flu. We never paid it much mind, it happened and it was tragic, but generally we accepted Flu as a average thing.

This year, the Flu has been a non-issue and you’d be hard pressed to find any statistics on flu deaths this flu season.

It’s just one of those things that makes me say Hmmm.

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It’s been 10 days or so since Parler was taken down…

I’m sad to see it go, but I was able to go cold turkey from social media.

I know the good folks at Parler are working hard to get the site back up, but I’m questioning if I’ll return to any social media.

I maintain Linkedin only for job stuff and don’t interact on the site too much. I’ve never been comfortable with HR departments searching for social history, and Linkedin just makes it easy for them to judge you based on an arbitrary set of nebulous criteria.

I’ve been enjoying my HAM radio much more than social media anyway. There was a gentleman the other day who described HAM as the original social media and I think he’s right. The focus is much more local (although with radio sometimes you can get astounding distances, depending on conditions in the upper atmosphere.)

I’ve been catching up on local events in my immediate area. Figure about 100 miles or so. There are ways to get much farther reliably due to a network of specialized radio systems placed on mountains throughout the country or countries across the planet.

These systems are not funded by government, they’re generally free to use, and are funded by the good will of HAM operators and HAM clubs. Sure, using them is a little more difficult than clicking “Tweet” on your phone, but it does provide a bit of a barrier to the riff raff.

Since Parler was taken down, I switched on my radio and discovered there’s a mountain lion wandering through the town I live in.

Social media on a global scale wouldn’t have necessarily warned me about that. The lion has been seen in multiple locations and appears to be looking for food. The general warning is to make sure that you keep an eye on dogs, cats, and children, even in a fenced yard.

That’s good to know! Especially since Jesse and I sometimes take early morning walks and we’re generally on trails in the forest.

Were I in most any state but California, it would be appropriate for me to be armed while out on a walk in rough areas. Most of those other states would look at being armed as a prudent precaution. But California is so damn twitchy about guns, they’ve made it so that you can’t defend yourself against apex predators, (Human or Animal).

In my local area, there are bears, bobcats, coyotes, rattlesnakes, and as stated, mountain lions. Any one of which could attack if it perceived you and your dog as a threat. This is particularly so if you were to come around a boulder or through a stand of trees and surprise them.

California would prefer to clean up the bloody mess and airlift your body out, rather than allow you to have a fighting chance. Many Californias would shake their heads and tut, tut, your foolishness in being out of the oh so safe, city.

Many of them would say you got what you deserved for being in the wilderness in the first place. That’s one of the weirdest things about living here. Lots of Californias ask, “why would someone have been out in the forest?” I ask, “Wasn’t the person armed and prepared?”

Californians live under the constant threat of sudden destruction from an Earthquake, or a fire, but they are astounded that anyone would want to live where hurricanes or tornados may occur. I actually prefer hurricanes or tornados because you can see them coming and get the hell out of the way. Earthquakes provide no such warning. Fires, you can avoid if you know where they are.

I guess it’s just preference.

Oddly, social media rarely provides any real time useful data about disasters. It’s almost always after the fact. I’ve always assumed that was because of internet outages.

That is why I took the time to get the HAM license, and with recent events, I’m considering taking my license to the next level. This would open my ability to communicate on a wider range of frequencies legally.

Note I said legally. I could talk on those frequencies now, but I’m a law abiding citizen and believe in obeying rules which have a logical purpose and provide a clear benefit. Radio rules typically fall into that category.

There are a lot of other rules that I disagree with because they don’t seem to have a basis in common sense, logic, or science, and simultaneously don’t provide a clear benefit.

Parler was uncensored. Twitter and Facebook are very censored and not in a consistent way. Parler was/is about protecting the First Amendment. Twitter and Facebook say they are proponents of the First Amendment but demonstrably are not.

Parler was taken away from all of us by people that don’t believe in free speech and had the will and capacity to effectively silence a large percentage of Americans. If some people choosing to use Parler were offended by what they read or saw, they had the option to never go back to the Parler site.

But these people, who choose to be perpetually offended couldn’t abide differing opinions. They demand conformity of thought. I suspect that in time they’ll demand conformity of race too, since everything in their world revolves around racial identity politics.

On the radio there is no race. Only the content of your words. If you’re not good at putting your thoughts into words there’s no-one that will stop you from saying something but you might find yourself talking to dead air. Other people listening may simply find another channel, you know, old school… Don’t like what you’re hearing turn it off…

More people need to learn that.

Our house has been remarkably quiet over the past 3 weeks. We both tired of the news, we got tired of Hollywood celebrities shooting their mouths off in hateful tirades about Trump and frankly it’s made it so that watching their movies aren’t that enjoyable. Even music is only turned on when we want to listen to something particular. It’s tougher to relax or suspend disbelief so you can just enjoy the music or movie.

We’re hoping that in time as we distance from this season of chaos we’ll be able to enjoy these things once again.

In the mean time, from the radio chatter I’m hearing, we’re not alone. It appears that streaming movies and music over the fiber network here has dropped off significantly in our local area. But the Library is seeing a slight uptick in usage.

Something else I’d never have known from just social media. But it was on my HAM Radio this morning.

I’ve been listening to a bunch of local HAMS who get together every morning over their first or second cup of coffee.

They just get on the radio, and chat about local stuff. The weather, someone older who needs a little help with a project, the community center asking for books to lend, issues with snowplayers, and when the next community meeting is. The day after a community meeting, someone will summarize what was covered for those that couldn’t attend. It’s nice and somehow comforting.

Perhaps it’s time for us all to act more locally, and stop paying attention to the collective idiots who have found voice in social media. Maybe we should be more concerned about the people in our local area who are trying to do the right thing, and could use actual hands to do work that makes our community better?

It costs you nothing to comment on troubles in another state. But when you comment about something locally, there’s a certain expectation that you’re willing to put your money, or sweat equity, where your mouth is.

I suppose that too is old school…

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I’ve been putting off this little project…

Several months ago I got a nifty server. 5 drives, I configured it in a RAID array with two drive redundancy.

For those of you that think I just spoke Greek. I didn’t. Simply put, I have a server with 5 hard drives that work as a set. Any two of these drives can fail without me losing all the data stored on the server. I can pull the bad drive out, replace it and tell the server to fix the problem. A few hours later the server will be back up to full operating speed and while it’s fixing the problem, I still have access to the data.

Anyhoo, I’ve been meaning to put the thing on the shelf in my wiring closet. It will be protected and I won’t have to worry about the dog bumping into it when he comes in to the office to ask me to play. He doesn’t just ask, he’s a bit aggressive about it. He’s a dog… He doesn’t understand that some electronics are fragile and don’t like being bumped around while they’re running.

So I decided the other day, that the time had come. I’ve been putting it off because 1) nothing with computers is ever as easy as it seems. 2) I knew there was a rats nest of cables I’d have to sort through. 3) The other half had to get a new computer (The second hard drive in 6 months failed and I didn’t really want to mess with it.

I start shutting things down. Then I started pulling unused or un-necessary cables out of the wiring closet. I finally got to the point where I could route power and network cables and encountered a major problem.

The cables I wanted to run were too thick to run them the way I’d done in the past. I’m standing there holding a shelf in my hand thinking, “Well damn, this isn’t going to work.”

Then I remembered my nifty new RYOBI tools in the garage. I knew I had a 1″ hole bit in a bit set I’d recently purchased. I take the shelf downstairs and grab the new drill and the bit set. That’s when I noticed that I’d also gotten with the set, 4 different sized hole saws.

OH Goody! I’d wondered what I’d use those for and now I know and have a good excuse to boot.

I set the 1.4″ hole saw on it’s bit, locked it down and fit the assembly in the chuck of the drill. 10 minutes later I’ve got two beautiful holes in the shelf right where I need them. The drill didn’t even breathe hard.

I was standing there looking at my work, for the briefest instance I considered where else I might need a convenient hole. Thankfully something in my brain hit the emergency stop on that thought process!

I put the tools away without drilling anymore holes. I patted the new drill appreciatively and put it back in it’s case.

I suspect that I’ll be drilling and cutting some things in the near future as I run antenna cables for the HAM rig. (Yeah, that’s another project on the list. I need to get some better antennas and get them installed so I can get out a bit better. HAM is another of those hobbies where getting a new radio just leads to a bunch of supplementary purchases.)

I head back up into the house, shelf in hand and put it back in place. The cables routed easily and I was able to put the power cabling through one hole while putting the data cables through the opposite end of the shelf. That keeps potential interference from power away from my data. As I’m standing there on the ladder I was thinking, “I’m a moron. I should have done this exact thing years ago! I’d have saved myself a lot of aggravation over the years.“

I put the server in place, and powered everything back up. Simple and it’s a nice looking installation.

Well, that chore done… I turned my attention to another round of data recovery. That was 48 hours of pure hell. Thankfully, my computer is fast, my network is fast, and I’m pretty good at this sort of thing. Corrupted backups and a person who has no concept of a data storage plan, not withstanding. Recovering data is just plain tedious in the first place. Not having specific documents stored in logical folders to assist in targeting the important stuff makes it very frustrating.

So to any of you out there who just spatter documents and files anywhere and everywhere on your computer. I’ll give you this advice. If you value your relationship, tell your techie other half what is most important, and keep the booze coming. One other thing, move your files into some kind of logical order to start with!

As it turns out, the backups were corrupted from the previous three hard drive crashes. The other half hadn’t done any organization after any of those crashes. In fact, after me telling them that the backups were corrupted, they kept using them anyway, compounding the problem.

With 10 Terabytes of storage available, the other half had also not copied the important files out to the server for redundancy. Sigh… and I’m the bad guy for being pissed off about it.

Mischief managed. The other half is running on the new computer. The server now has copies of all the files I recovered in a non-backup related directory and there’s a duplicate scanner running on my computer looking at that directory eliminating duplications and preserving edits in chronological order. When that’s done the files will be moved to a directory structure where Documents, Spreadsheets, Presentations, Photos, Music, Musical Scores, and other files will each have their own directory path.

Now to create a scheduled process that updates those directories once a week from the other half’s computer. As things stand right now, I burned 4 Terabytes on the server in recovery. I’ve got the other half sorting through tons of their own shit to figure out what is important and relevant to keep.

Just punishment, I think.

When they’re done with the space, I’ll be able to delete the corrupted backups (Hanging on to them for the moment in case I have to dive in to find some super important thing I missed. Then the recovered directories (except the one I’m processing) will be gone. I’m not going to be surprised to see about 2.5 – 3.5 Terabytes suddenly be available again on the server.

While I’m at it, I may go out and access one of my really old archival backups to consolidate more storage. I can move the files and documents to the main server in my home folder and then delete the old archive backup too. Then I’ll keep only the important stuff that provides history back to 2008 when everything was destroyed.

This has been my week, I hope your’s was better and in the midst of all of this I’ve managed to apply for jobs… Not that anyone is responding to my inquiries.

But I’ll keep at it.