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 ...

It's been a while since my last post. For a number of reasons I had gone to ground. Taking shelter for a moment. First among those reasons is the increasingly intolerant attitude held by those who lean toward the Left, both those in government and individuals I happen to know. Say or do something that they don't like and they'll bury you with accusations of being a White Supremacist, a Fascist, or more specifically a Nazi. Name-calling is hurtful enough even when it's not true, but now a number of these folks are using insidious ways along with those labels to create far worse things. Like doxing, throwing a red-flag - claiming you're going to shoot up some place ( never!! ), triggering a law enforcement investigation, or tainting your online reputation records. Some will defend those activities with the religious zeal of witch hunters while others will bizarrely claim they were "just having fun". You have to worry not just about yourself, but your family...

Today I went through the first stage of two surgeries to have cataracts removed and the lenses replaced. It's a common procedure, with most if not all patients experiencing a dramatic improvement in their vision, along with a very low complication rate. Despite that I had a lot of anxiety coming into this. Not about the procedure itself, but how well I would see afterwards. Would I be able to read a computer's monitor screen well enough to still write code? Could I find and hold on a target well enough to make those tiny groups of holes I pride myself on? Being a believer in not internalizing stress, I wrote to a number of friends, mentioning the surgery, the fact I was somewhat worried about it, and throwing a joke or two around as levity - I tend to use humor to counter stressful situations. One reply I received shocked me with the words "shut up" and "stop whining". I certainly had not been whining about eye surgery. Given the number of times this person ...

It's been over a year now since COVID-19 made it's first appearance on the world stage. And like a bad guest it's overstaying it's welcome. Through mutations, pools of the populace resisting preventative treatment, as well as an annoying ability to re-infect some folks this bug keeps defying the expert's expectations. Or are they experts? In order to be qualified as an expert you have to possess advanced knowledge on the matter. While the people who have been making frequent appearances before the press are highly trained scientists and physicians, they have little to no prior background with this virus. For all their degrees and years running this program or that they really are in the dark about how this bug operates. The guy at the podium is making a lot of guesses, perhaps well-grounded, perhaps not about what is going on and what to do about it. Meanwhile public officials had to do something. In the name of public safety a vast array of policies, regulations, a...

George Santayana said, " Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it. " He implies that historical events are cyclical, often due to people failing to learn from the mistakes others had made. If so, the people involved must have been been remarkably stupid. We're going through a cycle now and true to form people are being stupid. France 1788, the Ancien Régime  is having a grand old time. After all they're not common folk. They're above those swine, not even subject to the rules they impose in some cases. A year later the aristocracy was literally running for it's life as mobs overthrew the ruling class, frequently sending nobles to the guillotine. The executions became so common it was treated like daytime TV. Children would play, women calmly knitting as the blade plunged down. Today we are again experiencing a separation of privilege, but there are no aristocrats around. Instead there are members of the legislative and executive branches that...

Some time ago, I and one of my extended family got into a heated verbal exchange. For reasons I don't comprehend, she has become a very outspoken critic of the current president. Anything wrong in the world is his fault, he needs to be replaced as soon as possible, etc. Her actual words were even more strident, but this will suffice. Part of the diatribe naturally touched on alleged racism, followed by the whole shtick about White Privilege and then the shocker - she no longer trusted me because I am Caucasian and voted for the current president. I was and still am deeply hurt by that declaration. There is nothing that can said or done to alter those views. I have argued online with the likes of Flat-Earth and other deniers - never managed to convince one of their grievous errors. If you're gullible, listening to those folks seeps into your brain like some ancient war-gas - poisoning your thought process so thoroughly that you don't even realize how badly you've been b...

  Now the end of August, thankfully both political parties have now had their conventions, a pair of far more mind-numbing events than usual this year. Normally one at least has the actual nomination vote to watch with those over-inflated declarations of the grandeur of one's state before a delegate submits the vote count from their state to be tallied. What made those micro-speeches fun were two things.... First he/she was in all likelihood suffering from the mother of all hang-overs after a week-long binge of cheap booze and partying hardy away from work and family. Which made his/her staid deliver to the cameras one heck of an acting job. Second, the odd little bits of trivia they were boasting about were for the most part actually true. Not that anyone else cares that much about Illinois, the folks who live there consider these factoids very important. What was to be avoided were the headliner addresses. Delivered by either a war-horse or sometimes an up-and-comer, these often ...

This year we experienced a pandemic, the first since 1918 the experts say. People were told to stay inside their homes, avoid getting too close to others, and wear masks when having to travel outside. A lot of authorities saw fit to impose measures not everyone felt comfortable with. Restaurants, pubs, bars closed. Then most businesses shut down. The economy ground to a standstill. But this plague kept marching on, new cases and sadly new deaths. People failed to understand, they had the 1918 Spanish Flu in mind. Given how COVID-19 can spread, how deadly it is in some cases, how effective the countermeasures were they should have been looking at 1665 London, the year of the Great Plague. People then tried quarantines, social isolation, sterilized money, even wore masks. All for nought. Some religions refused to comply with the emergency regulations. Members of those groups were hit hard, some even were accused of deliberately spreading the infection. Today the urban areas in the US wor...