Porchside Musings.

 When I first joined the Lab, the rules for holding a Q clearance included searching your background for anything that might leave you vulnerable to blackmail. Understandable, since a person might be forced into revealing classified information. Character flaws included illegal drug use, various crimes, and being a homosexual. That last rule had a lot of history to it, notably the story of Alan Turing. A few years later came the phenomena of political correctness sweeping the Lab.  Suddenly I had a number of coworkers that were gay and lesbian. The notion that I had to think a certain way was disturbing. Personally, I accepted gay and lesbian lifestyles as long as no one tried to hit on me and I didn't have promote sexual activity. Which is the same standard I held heterosexual individuals to - keep your preferences in the bedroom, not at work. Toward the end of my career that political correct mentality morphed into a more dark mindset. The Lab, with support from the Dept of ...

 I've been watching as a number of new politicians have taken office in New York City, Portland, and elsewhere.  Calling themselves Democrat Socialists , they have demonstrated some beliefs that place them more in the Marxist circle. Recently a platform statement came out for this so-called Democratic Socialists of America . Reading through it I truly wonder how anyone espousing those beliefs can legitimately earn sufficient votes to win a major office, much less serve as a street-sweeper in a one-horse town? First off, they want to eliminate the US Senate. Then place the Executive Branch and Supreme Court under the remaining US House of Representatives. So much for independent branches of government as well as checks and balances. You might as well rename the House to the Politburo.  The Justice department would prosecute based on political theory, not statute. Court rulings would be subject to the whims of the ruling party. Justice would soon decay to lynch-mobs, ...

New Year's came and went. Unfortunately not without a mass-killing. In New Orleans a man plowed his truck through the crowd before emerging from his vehicle firing a gun. Law enforcement on-site did reply back rapidly, killing the perpetrator. FBI officials initially called this a terrorist act. Now one official has  labeled this just the act of a lone wolf. Once again the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security are gaslighting the American people, just like those statements that " The border is secure. ". A man with radical mindset loads a vehicle with IEDs, flies a ISIS flag, then roars off to kill as many innocents as he can. In Israel, that would be a terrorist act. Why don't we call it what it is? Fear. Officials are unwilling to face up to the fact they failed to prevent the attack.  By quickly labelling the killings as done by a lone wolf they don't have to investigate and prosecute the support structure that converted this man into a killing machine f...

 It's been a busy couple of weeks recently. There was an attempt to assassinate former president Trump. Amid mounting pressure, President Biden quit his reelection effort. Vice President Harris is now the Democrat candidate for that office. Ukraine forces have crossed into Russia near Kursk, making substantial gains. It was a minor miracle that Mr. Trump survived the attempt on his life. The shooter was nearly at point-blank range for the AR-15 he was wielding. My observations on the matter... After the attempt and subsequent killing of Thomas Crooks, his parents seem unemotional. Your son tries to kill a nationally known figure, then is shot dead by a counter sniper, and you just go "oh well"? The detachment shown is striking. The shooter was alone on that rooftop. However I'm not convinced Crooks planned this attack by himself. Somebody managed to radicalize this man enough to want to assassinate a major political figure. Where did he get the idea of using drones, r...

My last post was so full of darkness, I hate to follow on with another sad article. Life does not always allow for happy moments interspersing the less happy. For countless years ( honestly, I can't count this time in the morning ) I have been engaged in a hobby project writing a fairly massive software library of routines for use in adventure and combat simulations I call Zulu. When I started the project way back whenever I did weeks of research trying to determine the " best " game engine to use. Factors like ease of use, rendering quality, support, and cost all were gathered, then ground in the number-cruncher to determine a winner. In the end, Unity3d was the clear winner. In the last two weeks Unity announced a series of changes to its Terms and Conditions including how it charges for applications built using Unity that put a huge burden on developers, especially the smaller groups.   Th...

One of those telling moments in history was August 25, 410 AD . That morning the citizens of Rome looked out at the Visigoth forces of Alaric as defenses failed and thousands of Visigoths poured though the breach. Thus began the sack of Rome.  For three days the Visigoths plundered the former capital of the Roman Empire. Rome would never be the same again. It was the  End of Western Civilization . Old symbols come crashing down.                                                                                                                        The Visigoths had already taken 2-1/2 tons of gold, 15 tons of silver, thousands of fabric, and 2-1/2 tons of pepper during a siege two yea...

 I thought I'd share some useful info for home computers. Sometimes your internet access may seem sluggish, it just takes forever  to get to websites. But once there things are snappy. It's not the network per se, it's DNS - the magic that takes your requested connection name and turns it into the an IP address that can be then used to connect to. Your service provider may have a DNS server that is overloaded, in turn giving you poor lookup speeds. Normally the location of the DNS server is set for you automatically at boot time and almost universally it's a machine owned by the IP provider. There may be dozens of them, each serving a small chunk of their network. Which is great for them, not so hot if that server taking your requests is not doing too well. If you are up for doing a little magic you can bypass the automatic setting for DNS and put in your own entries. There are a number of big DNS servers out there that available for open use. I use the pair offered by ...