Year: 2020

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 “You were so comfy I had to come bug you isn’t a valid excuse, human, but the head pats are welcome.”

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 So of the various ways that Windows NT pisses me off, one is networking.

Years of roaming between my home and work networks never made my Debian partition miss a beat. But with the Windows partition, it often decides to give me the finger.

Home/DHCP and Work/Static shouldn’t be an issue, but however I’ve managed to achieve the state (more than once) it decides that Work/DNS servers should be used in place of Home/DHCP lease. Which of course means pain in my arse.

The various methods of stabbing NT’s network stack with a spork through netsh and ipconfig didn’t help me, or I’ve never learned more useful pressure points. Regardless the applied settings don’t match what I’ve tried to configure on the connection nor the adapter through both the modern and old interface.

What finally works is this: https://superuser.com/a/1464468/295120

Hunted down the entry that corresponds to my pain woe and purged the value of ProfileNameServer for both tcpip and tcpip6. Vola the mother fucker switches back to the DNS in my DHCP lease.

Sigh.

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 On the way home I had a scathingly brilliant idea. Combine the leftover noodles from last night’s garlic/olive oil/cheese plan with spinach and beans.

Willow and company were just sad that they didn’t get any of the chicken. Although they were happy for the beef / gravy chaser I set out for them, lol.

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Relative intelligence: they are full of treats and napping; I haven’t even had lunch yet.

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Whether I spend it on gaming, or programming, or anything else. I find it’s a fairly narrow window betweent hat point where the dogs start deciding it’s time for bed, and they decide me getting on the computer before bed isn’t a valid excuse for it being too early for bed.

Shortly after Misty’s nightly meds the dogs usually want to get ready for bed. When they decide if I’m not in bed yet there’s going to be treats to pay is rarely long after :/.

Actually Willow always kind of wants treats but she knows after bed her odds of success go waaay down.

On the flip side in that narrow window for getting things done, I’ve got speakers and some nice music on the Country Jukebox. But of course it’s long past the point of going to bed before the dogs get anymore antsy, lol.

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 Willow’s way of spending the afternoon was very smart and wise.

Her opinions on not getting to go for another walk, and that this “Rain” I speak of, is a poor excuse is a different matter altogether.

On the flip side she’s cute and comfy. And the whole tribe offers to taste my food for me….

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Japan’s amazing healthcare system summed up in photo of hospital bill for father’s heart surgery

With or without my health insurance: I rather imagine that my perspective would be somewhere between dying in the street, and thanking god we don’t have debters prisons per se. Considering how things worked out for my father in the ‘80s, I’m sure that anything involving the words heart and surgery have even worse price tags today.

There’s plenty of good stuff about living in America. The cost of our healthcare isn’t typically on that list.

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While I’m not a big fan of musicals: when Netflix suggested musical remake of The Producers, I filed it as “Yeah, I oughta get around to watching that.” Glad I did.

Early segments such as the beginning with Max and Leo aren’t my cup of tea. The more theater oriented sequences made me wonder if there is such a thing as a Mel Brooks I wouldn’t like. But by the time Will Ferrell and his favorite pigeon popped up, I was pretty sure it would be worth watching. Actually that pigeon might of been mye biggest laugh during the whole film, lol. Later on the choice of a more on stage style proves rather appropriate for many reasons.
By the time the opening night ends, and Franz shows up to shoot Max and Leo: we’re firmly in ROFLMAO territory all the way to the end. Nathan Lane’s performance was especially stellar throughout.
I find the whole concept terribly amusing. Two fools trying to make a play so bad that it has to flop, and boy howdy did they pick an idea for that plan. It’s actually a tougher sell that anyone would invest in their cockamamie play than it is that someone would actually make a flop with the intent to cook their books. But of course despite intentionally doing everything wrong: it somehow goes horribly right, and they’re all screwed, screwed, screwed. Hahah!
Plus it’s kind of a sweet that they manage to make fun of the old Nazis along the way. I can easily imagine some evil bastards rolling over in their grave at what a farcesical thing they made.
Makes me remember a quote I came across some years ago: “If you stand on a soapbox and trade rhetoric with a dictator you never win…That’s what they do so well: they seduce people. But if you ridicule them, bring them down with laughter, they can’t win. You show how crazy they are.”
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The new 2020 iPad isn’t enough for Zoom school

Pretty sure that every time I’ve seen a review of the new iPad pop up there’s been three consistent complaints from reviewers:

  1. Same old design 
  2. 32 GB storage 
  3. Single user.
Personally, I think the complaints are overrated.
On the hardware front: I’d say if it isn’t broken, why replace it? The physical design is no less awesome or crappy than it was years ago. Just now you’ve got sexier models available for twice the price tag!
On my iPad Pro there is usually thirty some gigs of storage usage. At the same time it usually recommends I let it deep six a dozen or so gigs of stuff. Considering the base iPad costs a lot less, and offers even more storage (still for less) as an option: that’s pretty swell for the cheapest iPads.
The place where I nod my head in agreement however is USB-C. I’m hoping that as SoCs trickle down the fruit company eventually goes USB-C all the way. Even if it lead to a Pencil that just replaced the charging connector: I’d call it a win.
For the most part I think iOS has deserved it’s criticism over the years. Slow, terribly slow evolutionary pace but pretty good results. I personally care much more when it comes to the tablet front since my tablet vs phone usage is something like 90% vs 10%, lol.
At this point it’s fair to call iPadOS a multitasking OS. Both in the technical sense, and the user capabilities. Just not as ironed out as what you’ve been doing on your PC since the late ‘80s, lol.
What I find intriguing is the rice of reviewers moaning about iPadOS being a single user operating system.
That iPads are expensive is a given. That outfitting an entire family with Apple products is comically expensive is only avoidable by not doing it. But we still live in a world where sharing computers isn’t as typical as it once was.
Once upon a time: computers were so crazy expensive that time sharing was a key. There were reasons you ran a bunch of terminals to tens of thousands of dollars of equipment, and PCs costing several grand were a joke.
Today your wrist watch probably has more computing power than the old time sharing systems. Yet most people tend to operate as either one PC per person or with a device in a shared location. Ya know the whole P in Personal Computer?
Multiple user accounts on tablets are kind of attractive from the idea of leaving a tablet in community areas with no specific user. But do you really want to pay that much for a dedicated coffee table or kitchen ‘puter?
Tablets like phones tend to be pretty personal, single user devices. Much like DOS PCs of old the reason to share tends to be purpose deployed rather than intent designed.
Plus if you’ve been bitching and moaning that Android tablets are shit and never get updates for so many years, you probably shouldn’t complain about how many years before the cheapest iPads and your old hand me downs are good enough for your kids 😅.
Real people tend to be more pragmatic than nitpicking reviewers and tech blogs. And yes, sometimes you should consider price a driving factor.