hellsop

hellsop @ 2017-07-14T14:11:00

2017-07-14T19:11:17Z

Quick afternoon bit of digging. Tesla Model 3 will get to the 200k sold cap that starts ramping down the tax credit around the end of the year. So anyone buying before March 31st 2018 will get the whole tax credit. That MIGHT go all the way to June 30th. But it would take Tesla failing to meet production targets that Elon Musk has already outlined *or* holding back cars from buyers in the US by shipping cars for sale overseas instead so that the 200,000 mark lands in January instead. Maybe they could stockpile onshore, but how many people that would otherwise get Model 3s for Xmas would be happy to know that their car purchase is delayed a month so that someone else can get a bigger tax credit?

In any case it's likely the full tax credit will likely be gone by June end, and if you're not in the first 100,000 (more likely about 85,000) cars, your tax credit will be reduced to $3750, and if you're not in the first 150,000 cars, it'll be $1875 or nothing.

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hellsop @ 2017-03-31T10:18:00

2017-03-31T15:19:00Z

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hellsop @ 2017-03-24T14:04:00

2017-03-24T19:11:51Z

Spam entires for the week...

( Read more... )

Didn't realize that toenail fungus was such a hot spammer topic...

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hellsop @ 2017-02-13T08:30:00

2017-02-13T14:30:57Z

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hellsop @ 2017-02-07T12:00:00

2017-02-07T18:09:14Z

Since this server move started in the beginning of November. Or rather, it was unceremoniously announced that we'd no longer be welcome in the Dallas Innovation Center might be more correct, my gut said "This will take two weeks, once we have the new machine to put it on."

It took ten weeks to get the new server. That is an anguish that is behind us now.

But we got the new server in my hands on Feb 2. I've been working on it steadily ever since (nominally three work days but a bit padded for "start things that will take a long time" when I finish) so it's probably been more like four days of productive work.

I've gotten the new user IDs set up. I've configured the database manager. I've done test restores on the two smaller databases. I've gotten the ETL software configured. I've gotten the two big ETL projects test-imported and checked. I'm transferring some of the bulk files now. It might not finish in exactly two weeks from the second, but it'll probably finish by the 18th. And I've got through the end of the month to finish cleaning up anything I forgot about.

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hellsop @ 2017-02-04T16:04:00

2017-02-04T22:11:09Z

Made some tasty potatoes.

dice 4 potatoes
1/2 cup diced onion
1 c diced ham

Fry above in 1/4c oil in a skillet until potatoes are soft.

Season with thyme, ground coriander, salt, pepper, and a dash of cayenne.

Drain oil from pan, toss with about 2 tbs lime juice.

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hellsop @ 2017-01-29T19:03:00

2017-01-30T01:03:03Z

"Ah, you know the type. They like to blame it all on the Jews or the
Blacks, 'cause if they couldn't, they'd have to wake up to the fact
that life's one big, scary, glorious, complex and ultimately
unfathomable crapshoot -- and the only reason THEY can't seem to keep
up is they're a bunch of misfits and losers."
-- A analysis of Neo-Nazis, from "The Badger" comic

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Miwaukee Journal Sentinel asked readers how they would resolve Wisconsin's Road Funding Issues

2017-01-26T19:49:24Z

As a terrible, "tax and spend liburral", my approach would be balanced.

The state gets approximately $4 billion per year from its transportation-related use-related fees, the registration fees and fuel taxes. Those are the ones that are proportional to the roads.

I'd raise vehicle registrations: I'd raise car registration fees by $5, Truck registrations (to account for greater weight) by $10. Cycle and trailer registrations I'd leave alone as having much lower impact on roads overall. This will provide approximately $39-40 million in additional revenue per year, presuming that we don't lose many registrations over such a trivial increase. That's about half the shortfall over the ten year period under discussion.

This leads us to the GLARING problem of fuel taxes. Wisconsin has not adjusted fuel taxes in nearly a decade, while the even moderate inflation over the same period has increased the prices of things about 20%. So I propose immediately increasing Wisconsin's fuel tax by 20% now (which will result in an increase of five cents per gallon, remember, so not much impact as it sounds), and further adjusting the rate annually to correspond with inflation so that we don't have to discuss this again every few years.

Additionally I'd add a $20 surcharge for hybrid and electric vehicles to reduce the loss of fuel tax revenue due to increased efficiency of these vehicles. I do not have a figure for how much revenue this would bring in, but to reassure the hybrid-driving public, I will note that this is about the tax revenue from 65 gallons of fuel at current fuel tax rate, and if hybrids save approximately 25% of burned fuel, then about 9000 miles or more will represent the hybrid saving the owner money. Electric vehicles escape all fuel taxes and trade them for sales taxes on the electricity they use. At this point, there's few enough electric vehicles that the amounts are small, but it at essence it DOES represent tax money diverted from the transportation fund to the general revenue fund, so as electric vehicle adoption ramps up, this will probably need addressing and adjustment. (I have ideas for this as well, but that's probably out of scope for a "letters to the editor" situation.)

Thank you very much for the opportunity to communicate this to willing ears. Certainly the governor isn't.

Peter H. Coffin
Milwaukee, WI

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hellsop @ 2017-01-25T20:20:00

2017-01-26T02:21:28Z

Wow....

The determination to stick to the narrative is... mindblowing.

www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/01/25/we-asked-people-which-inauguration-crowd-was-bigger-heres-what-they-said/

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It's been a rough year for hardware

2017-01-24T00:57:40Z

At the beginning of the year, the Chromebook Flip flipped out during an update and refused to get from power-on self-test to actually loading the OS. It took four tries and five days to find someone at ASUS's help desk that knew how to correctly push the "Generate RMA" button. Then a week to ship it to California, two days in Receiving, four days of "repairing" and now it still says it's being repaired but someone generated a FedEx tracking number to send it back under, so I'm presuming that's happening shortly. That'll be another week until it arrives, probably.

Yesterday evening, Disc 3 in the Network Storage box crapped out. I'd been lax about getting the emails working properly since recovering from the fire, so it hadn't been and I missed about three weeks of it saying "Uhm... This drive's getting a little dodgy." "Uhm, remember that drive I was worried about? It's there's a lot of errors now." "Hey, that drive's dead. Data's still okay for now, but I can't take another of these without a problem." So I found a drive that's likely to work that Amazon could ship same day and cost $70. That's plugged in now and resyncing and is about 22% done. Nothing fussy about ReadyNAS devices, though. Open door in front, unlatch drive sled, pull drive, replace drive in sled with four screws, insert drive sled back where it came from,. And because the idea that Linux stuff never needs reboot is a damnable lie, reboot the thing, whereupon it said "Oh! You fixed the disk! Lemme fix that back up! Oh, and by the way I found a firmware update I need that I didn't tell you about because I haven't rebooted in a while."

(I know Linux servers theoretically never need reboots short of kernel changes, but honestly, there's just things that just quit working if it's been more than like half a year. Or 16 million seconds or something. )

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On Snowflakes

2017-01-23T01:14:18Z

The insult, this season is "snowflake".

Its use is that the "snowflake" is consummately unsubstantial and will wither and melt under the least heat or pressure.

This is, it seems, kind of a new usage in the universe of denigration and insult. I suppose it could have been used such before the current political susurration, but it wasn't much. Most of the usage I recall was along the lines of the use in Fight Club, where it was used like this:

"Listen up, maggots. You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else."

Uniqueness and individuality were the concepts there, not delicacy.

I've read claims that we shouldn't use the term, because it was what educated blacks were called before the civil war or it was what slaveholders were called because they valued white lives more than black. I've read similar claims that it was a name Nazis called Jews in the 1930s, so we shouldn't use the term for t hat reason. I've spent no little time researching this to the small ability I have from here, and I can't find a shred of credible evidence to support either. What I do find is people claiming we shouldn't use that term for those very circular reasons (mostly published in the past couple of days) and a few "Urban Dictionary" level of credibility sites giving derivations that claim various things, including that it was a reference to the Star that Jews were forced to wear and that the ashes of bones looked like snow. But nothing there that I could confirm as being older than even a year ago -- all undated or recent pages.

The case with "educated negro" is slightly better, but it still doesn't seem to be actual history. Where it does show up, though, is the nickname for Corporal Searles, a Boston-raised and educated black man in the Union army in the 1989 Civil War film Glory. The other definition, as a white who values white lives more than black, haven't found anything except recent claims of that use.

Anyone got anything concrete to link to about any WWII or Civil War period use from better than hearsay source?

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hellsop @ 2017-01-14T21:30:00

2017-01-15T03:31:07Z

Some anime focus on odd things. Noir is famous for it's firearm details. Angel Beats has music performance. It's not a great part of the story, but it's clear that the animators took INCREDIBLE pains to get the performance of music exactly right. Drum kits have the RIGHT number of drums, hit in realistic ways, for the sound accompanying. Guitar strumming and fingering is equally accurate. Pretty much everything else is amime-trope standard with the traditional overdramatized everything that never happens in real life, but as soon as the BAND plays, it's a whole different style, so accurate it looks rotoscoped.

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hellsop @ 2017-01-02T09:11:00

2017-01-02T15:15:39Z

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hellsop @ 2017-01-01T20:53:00

2017-01-02T02:54:04Z

"Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow."

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dinner.

2011-12-14T00:48:22Z

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Dinner Goo

2011-12-11T23:50:03Z

2 lbs of Yukon Gold potato diced

Throw into a microwave-safe casserole, salt liberally, cover and zap for 10 minutes stirring midway through.

1 lb carrots diced
1/2 lb onion quartered and sliced

Stir into casserole. Zap for 10 minutes more, again stirring half way through. Preheat oven to 400F.

1 lb ground beef

Brown in skillet and season with

salt,
garlic powder
chili powder
2 Tbs tuong ot toi

Stir into veg and and pop into oven for 40 minutes. Let stand for 5-10 minutes before serving with the cheapest Chateau Plonk you can find.

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hellsop @ 2011-12-11T10:37:00

2011-12-11T16:43:25Z

You know, one of the problems that I have with "new media" is that I really want to read things. I'm reluctant to pay attention to anything that comes from TED because it's all video and I won't want to spend the time to listen to it and watch the slides over someone's shoulder, instead of reading it as text, and glancing at pictures in sidebars. Reading lets me pace on my own. I can breeze through the introductions and background, slow down for difficult content, nearly instantly go back and refer to something from a previous sentence or paragraph. It's not convenient to do that in a video or audio stream at all. Parallel to this is a peeve about all the "photos" that are really nothing but text content. But instead of making the words work with the text that is, they're in an image, often out of focus, and carrying literally a thousand times the bandwidth baggage.

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Amtrak 40th Anniversary Train

2011-12-04T17:04:02Z

Pictures here: http://www.ninehells.com/zenphoto/2011/Amtrak%2040th/

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