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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Lately things around the house have been breaking…

Most of the things have been plumbing related, which I hate.

The most recent breakdown came as a bit of a surprise. My primary NAS drive has decided to take a dump. 

We use this drive to serve up movies, and store important documents. It’s also used as a share point for things that I help the other half with, music, videos, web sites, etc.

I’ve been noticing little things lately when accessing the drive, but didn’t really think much about it. In retrospect the drive was telling me something was wrong.

As the issues and errors accumulated I started re-evaluating the entire storage method. After doing a lot of research, I’ve decided to go with a RAID array.

The unit i’ve settled on is relatively inexpensive, but seems to provide a lot of bang for the buck.

Configuring it will take some time and the unit may have a steep learning curve. The advantage is that I’ll have 16TB of storage when it’s fully configured and that storage provides 2 hot swappable drives.

That means that up to two drives could fail and the entire 16TB would still be recoverable.

My current situation is a single drive and I have no idea how much data I’ll be able to recover.

What I’m doing may be overkill but I’d like to not have to worry about it for the next 5 years.

I’m also leaning more toward doing gig work and having a ton of space to work with would be a big convenience.

I expect to be locked into some form of digital prison for at least the next week while I bring this puppy online.

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Had one of those Ahah moments

Well not so much an ahah moment as a weird train of thought. Yeah, if you’ve read any of this blog over the years, you’ll know that I’m sometimes prone to them. (Now… Be Nice. After all, no-one is forcing you to read it.)

It started as I was catching up on the news.

I know, that was probably a mistake but there I was, reading various articles talking about defunding the police.

Several images really caught my attention. Specifically those photos where protesters were right up in the faces of officers. I thought to myself, “I couldn’t be an officer.”

Which led me to the unconstrained train of thought leaving the station on Track 9.

If we get rid of the police, then I’m going to be responsible for my own safety. In fact, everyone will be responsible for their own safety. What does that actually mean?

In my case it would mean that any threat would be terminated instantly. Someone gets up in my face… I don’t know what their intentions would be. How crazy are they, will they continue to escalate, do they pose a realistic threat?

My logic is simple. There are too many variables to calculate. Logically the solution is to terminate the problem before it grows worse. Put the threat down, so they don’t get up again.

Which means, if I were an officer I’d be under constant investigation for excessive use of force. As a citizen, caught in a world of insanity without police protection, well lets just say my ammunition bill would increase dramatically.

Without police who would notice that my body count was increasing exponentially? Without police, what would stop me carrying a sidearm in public? There’d be no-one for the various anti-gun “Karens” to call to enforce the gun laws.

Karen: “Oh My God! There’s a man carrying a gun in public!“

911: “We’ll send our thoughts and prayers Ma’am but you’re on your own.”

Who knows? Maybe defunding the police wouldn’t be a bad thing. Imagine all the good that could be done, starting with the wholesale slaughter of the shittier elements of the nation. It could be a good thing, in the short term. It would be ironic if ANTIFA was obliterated by their efforts to get rid of police.

Longer term, it would be bad. Various countries, including ours, have, throughout history settled arguments, legal issues, even insults, by duel. Most countries decided to come up with laws prohibiting such things, and created enforcers charged with keeping the peace. Those enforcers are known as police officers.

I suppose that bodies started piling up and posed a health hazard, perhaps it was just a hazard to everyone’s sense of smell. For whatever reason, societies decided that issues would be settled in court. Which spawned the profession of attorneys at law. (That has since gotten out of control and when police are defunded, it may be that the Attorneys are the first against the wall during the first Purge.)

Just imagine what happens when there are no police and no consequences.

Picture the riots of late, only accentuated with the staccato of gunfire. Or you can just read the Monday morning news out of Chicago. Imagine all that systemic hatred and racism allowed to go from a controllable simmer to full blown boil.

Picture what that will look like…

It was at one time common for bored Highschoolers to drive by gay bars throwing rotten eggs and rocks at patrons of gay bars. The police generally looked the other way. More recently, there was the “knockout game” which was anything but a game for the victims, what happens if that develops into the “shootout game”?

Imagine that mentality in an urban setting. Armed teenagers going on “Hunting Parties” in various neighborhoods looking for trouble. Remember no consequences, right? Or again, you could just picture Chicago on any Saturday night…

If someone walks up to me on the street and starts screaming that I should repent or kneel for my supposed white privilege. I’m going to assume they’re out of their minds and terminate the problem just like I would a rabid dog.

Lets face it, the majority of the people screaming that kind of thing are white people, so it’s not like there’d be much of a racial component. Aside from the obvious stupidity of, “Apologize for the color of your skin,” which I find interesting. If you had the balls to say something like that to a person of color you’d expect to get your lights punched out.

I think the folks screaming to defund the police departments, really need to think about what they’re saying. As soon as the police are spread too thin, these same people will be complaining that they’re not safe, and wondering why that is.

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Have I mentioned that I hate doing Plumbing?

We replaced the kitchen faucet about a month ago. We went the whole route, had a plumber come in and do the job and everything.

Yesterday, I washed my hands at that faucet and turned the water off normally. No problem… A few minutes later, the other half turned on the same faucet and got only a trickle of water from both the hot and cold setting.

It looked like the water had been turned off. But the other faucets in the house were still working fine. Hmmm.

A bit more diagnostic work, a phone call or two, and it looked like the new faucet had something wrong with the cartridge. Cartridge? What cartridge? What is this, a printer?

A replacement cartridge was going to take an indeterminate length of time to obtain as this particular faucet wasn’t normally stocked at Lowes. We’d ordered the unit from Lowes but it had taken 5 weeks to get here. Doing the math, if they couldn’t get us an entire faucet in a timely fashion, who knows how long it would take them to get a part to us. Meaning that without the piece, we wouldn’t have a functioning kitchen sink for as long as it took them to get the part to us. This was clearly not gonna fly.

Okay… I make a run to Lowes and purchased a new 3x more expensive faucet from local stock. Now the problem was installation. I get home and open the box. reading through the instructions it doesn’t look too hard. Ahem!

I go get the tools, pull out the crap out from under the sink… (Don’t judge, you all have crap under your sinks.) then thread myself through the maze of dishwasher, garbage disposal, reverse osmosis, drain pipes, and hose connections for the existing faucet.

The goal I’m seeking is in the form of two small valves hidden in the far recesses of this labyrinth. The first of the valves I encounter is the Hot water inlet. I turn the valve easily to the off position. Further on in my journey, I find the Cold water inlet. It’s almost unreachable and is firmly locked in the “On” position and there isn’t enough room to get a tool into the space to turn it off. Attempting to turn it by hand does nothing but tear up my knuckles.

Ugh! The only option is to turn off the water to the entire house. Fine! I unthread myself and return to the real world of light and being able to stand up without having my back bent 90° the wrong direction. (The latter, took some time reminding me that I’m not as young as I used to be.) I tromp down stairs into the far reaches of the basement and turn off the main valve.

I tromp back upstairs to rethread myself under the sink. Part one of the replacement procedure is to unscrew the lines from the existing faucet from the inlets. Part one goes okay, dripping water everywhere of course. Part two is to reach up into the narrow space between the sink bowls to get a screwdriver into two small screws so that I can remove the bracket that will allow removal of the faucet assembly. RIGHT! To get the longest screwdriver and my hand into the space so that I can twist the screwdriver is a near Sisyphean task. Eventually, after much counting to 10 rather than letting my true thoughts on the matter be known to the entire neighborhood I’m successful.

Next comes the interminable unscrewing of the bracket down the mounting pipe. Job done and I’m ready to remove the weight and the retractable sprayer assembly that’s a simple two screw affair. The problem comes when I need to remove the hose loop. so that I can pull the whole assembly up through the top of the sink.

Yeah, the mounting hole in the top of the sink is too small to pull a looped hose and the feeder lines up through it. The looped hose has a disconnect on it that is completely non functional without some kind of special widget. I’m seriously thinking about just cutting the hose. I don’t want to do that because this is a one month old faucet and I’m returning the sucker.

I note that the hose is compressible and reason that if I can get one of the feed lines through the hole then I should be able to get the rest through. After some gentle persuasion, (Alright, you caught me. Brute Force!) The whole assembly pulls out and I dang near tossed it through the ceiling.

YEA! I take the new unit and drop its hoses and pipes through the hole and consult the installation guide. The gasket is still sitting in the box. Okay I should have consulted the manual a tad sooner, but better to have figured this out before I bolted everything into the sink.

I pull the hoses back out of the hole, put the gasket in place and thread it all down the hole again.

Now comes the hard part. Threading myself back through the labyrinth of pipes and crap to put the mounting plate and bolt onto the pipe that mounts the new faucet to the sink. The manufacturer does provide a nice tool for tightening the bolt in tight spaces. Mounting complete I’m patting myself on the back and thinking, “That was easy,” then happen to notice two things.

One, the fittings on the new faucet are female. So are the fittings on the hoses attached to the water inlets. Hmmm. This is a problem.

Two and more significant is that the fittings on the inlets are 1/2 inch and the fittings on the hoses to the new faucet are 3/8 inch. OH SHIT! This is why I hate plumbing. There are no standards. Why the hell are there no standards?

Time to head to the local hardware store to see if there is an adaptor to address this kind of issue. Grrrrr! The local guy at the hardware store is helpful and laughs with me, not at me, saying that this is why he hates plumbing too. He casually reaches to a hangar on the display next to him and pulls out a package that contains exactly the two parts I need. He smiles and says, “Happens all the time.”

$7 later I’m heading back home to complete this damn installation.

Old connections removed, new adapters installed. Sprayer hose threaded, weight attached, and I’m ready to turn the water back on. With fingers crossed I turn on the main and run back upstairs from the basement praying that there’s not water spraying all over the place.

God must’ve smiled on me. Everything was dry. New faucet installed! Whoo Hooo!

While I was at the local hardware store, UPS delivered part of the other half’s birthday present. A brand new iPhone SE 2. This gift is early, I decide to unbox it anyway because We’ve only got 14 days to decide if we’re going to keep it.

I’m not going to worry about setting this up tonight. I’ll save that “Fun” for tomorrow, A nice quiet Saturday morning.

The other half is seriously resistant to change. I’ll get up early tomorrow and set up a workspace with my Goal Zero battery pack on the dining room table. With it, I can provide power to the old iPhone and the new iPhone without having to be tied to a wall socket.

Then I’ll walk the other half through the setup process in a calm logical way where we can work without scrambling over each other to see screens.

Hopefully this will not result in a fight.

Pray for me…

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Practically overnight my cucumbers sprouted.

IMG 1420Yippee!

I was getting worried.

So now I have lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, and squash. All working toward harvest day.

Now if only I can get the carrots and bell peppers to make an appearance. The carrots are in fact sprouted, but they’re developing at a slow pace. just a few little green threads at this point. The peas have also sprouted another week or so and I’m going to have to come up with some kind of trellis for them.

It’s nice that amidst all the insanity that some things are constants. Gardens still grow and puttering around in the yard in the early morning brings me a great deal of calm and pleasure.

Next on the agenda is the front yard. Over the past few winters, a lot of the landscaping has taken a big beating and I’ve lost a lot of the plants that brightened up the yard at this time of year.

I’m hesitant to put in too much because who knows what the county will decide is “BAD” to have in the yard this fire season. I don’t want to invest a ton of money, time and water only to have some asshole tell me that X,Y, or Z is a fire hazard. 

But I’m thinking about cheap color at least until the fall. It would give me some pleasure and brighten the place up a bit.

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“Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it?”

“That’s what is to be a slave.” – Roy Batty Blade Runner.

Now we’ve all had a taste of it. What have we learned?

The vast majority of people in the USA haven’t actually been slaves. Yet there are a lot of folks who’d like to enslave us all. These people don’t care what your skin color is. They want you enslaved in a system. Their System.

These are the people that want you to be dependent on their largess. They offer bright baubles of technology, healthcare, entertainment, etc. then make us feel “less than” if we’re unable to afford those baubles.

They offer us a daily dose of fear via the news, & commercials. “More terrifying moments of unrest today in Minneapolis. The President today said, ‘insert daily out of context statement here‘ does this statement mean the end of America? See our report at 11. Suffering from Kidney Failure? Are you going to die? Try our new drug, if you can’t afford it (The implication is your insurance is bad, or you don’t make enough and are therefore ‘less than’) contact us and we’ll help pay your bill.”

They keep us apart by instilling mistrust in each other. “It’s white oppression, it’s black criminality. It’s racist, that person is a Nazi. Wear a mask, don’t wear a mask, wear a mask as a symbol of solidarity, You should wear a mask because you never know who might be carrying a virus. Black Lives Matter=Good speech, All Lives Matter=Bad speech, ACAB (All cops are bastards), Why are the police not stopping this looting?”

With each new presidential administration, there are people who are “Right” and people who are “Wrong” the actual facts of the administration’s accomplishments or failures notwithstanding. The “Right” and the “Wrong” people flip based on how the media presents a particular narrative.

In simplest terms, we’re always being manipulated by headlines, soundbites, and glamorous ads showing us things that a great many of us can’t afford. The ads implicitly extol the virtue of working harder to make more money so that we can afford these pretty things. The thing lots of people miss is that all of us working harder, generates more tax revenue that in turn, fuels the system.

The same system that locks us in our homes, costs us jobs, and vilifies individuals who after doing the math, decide that feeding their families is worth the risk.

That same system almost deifies individuals in protests that devolve into rioting and looting. It makes a sick kind of sense. Either situation creates an “Enemy” that can be pointed to, now or in the future, to maintain the cultural division.

As long as the American people are fearful and divided, the powerful can do as they please in plain sight. Who will question the national guard being brought in to quell riots? Who will question another lockdown because of a spike in Covid-19 cases?

Social Media was supposed to help level the playing field allowing people to communicate with each other directly, expressing thoughts and beliefs freely without bias, other than those biases the people brought with them.

As Social Media blossomed, controls were put into place to silence dissent. Those controls started out innocently to prevent blatant racist and hate from spilling unbidden onto computer screens. Those controls quickly escalated into full blown censorship.

The implied reason for that censorship is that “average people” are unable (too immature, or too stupid) to process dissenting opinions without experiencing angst. Therefore it is assumed they need to be protected from free thought, instead of exercising the freedom of simply choosing not to view items which are offensive to them.

Mind you, what one may find offensive, others may find informative. With censorship instituted on social media no-one has to decide, and everyone is once again placed in a bubble of docile safety and conformity.

Safe, in that bubble, they’re not troubled by dissenting opinion and not forced to think for themselves or form their own opinions. The narrative of those in control is preserved and the correct “Group Think” is doled out 200 characters at a time, by sanctioned influencers.

How are sanctioned influencers picked? They’re approved by Twitter checkmarks and number of followers. An influencer with a large number of followers and a check mark is seen as someone “In the know“. They remain a blessed influencer as long as they maintain the appropriate narrative.

However if an influencer goes off the reservation or someone speaking counter to the narrative, (There are always a few allowed, to maintain the illusion of Facebook or Twitter’s impartiality,) becomes troublesome. Their follower count mysteriously decrements. Their coveted Twitter Checkmark is removed, they end up in “Twitter Jail” or their messages simply vanish, and finally they are banned outright. These people still have online presences, they’re just on other platforms with lower brand recognition.

Platforms like GAB aren’t allowed to post their applications on Google Play or the Apple App store. Other platforms like Parler are allowed to have Play Store or Apple App store presences for the time being.

This speaks to the tight integration between Google, Apple, and the group, or groups controlling the narrative. Not only are specific people exiled from Twitter and Facebook, their ability to be seen by the masses is limited by the corporations who provide the dominate operating systems for smart devices as well.

Isn’t it odd that nudity, violence, and graphic sex is allowed on a platform like Twitter and freedom of political messages is not? Even odder is that Apple and Google provide access to an application which can present these images while at the same time denying access to alternate applications which are largely politically conservative in nature. The only difference being that Twitter filters out comments that present dissenting political opinion?

Isn’t this exactly the kind of thing that is never supposed to happen in a free society?