California leads the way...

California leads the way ... in government-mandated employee leaves of absence...

Debbie and I are working hard...

Debbie and I are working hard...  Hard physical work, for a change.  We have several largish trees planted right next to the house.  They are so close that they pose a hazard to the house, and our insurance company (rightly, I think), insists that they be removed.  Yesterday Debbie and I took down the first one (a Norway Spruce, my mom thinks); it had a 7 inch trunk.  This morning we took down a second Norway Spruce, this one with a 6 inch trunk.  Armed with a chain saw, loppers, and a pruning saw we chopped them up into bite-sized pieces, loaded them in the pickup, and carted them off to a brush pile we're accumulating.  Now we're sitting and resting up, preparing to take down the largest of the three (a juniper of some kind).  This one has a 12 inch trunk, so there will be considerably more wood in it...

Cute? Check.

Cute?  Check.  Cuddly?  Not so much...

Busy day yesterday for us...

Busy day yesterday for us...  Debbie and I were running all over Cache Valley, meeting with our flooring guys, our painters, our cabinet makers, and with some paint color experts.  Then we went grocery shopping!  We were very tired by the time we finally got home – but then we took a drive up into the Wasatch Mountains, the base of which are just a mile from our new home.  We drove through an elk preserve (Hardware Ranch) and beyond into the National Forest.  It was our first visit into the Wasatch Mountains after the snow melt, and it was beautiful.  Spring is springing: the first grass shoots are emerging, the streams are engorged, and you can see it won't be long before things start blooming...

Speechless, I am...

Speechless, I am...

Weird people...

Weird people...  An interesting article that actually is about weird people.  No, I'm not the subject of it.  Though perhaps I should be :)

SpaceX gets injunction prohibiting ULA from buying Russian rockets...

SpaceX gets injunction prohibiting ULA from buying Russian rockets...  I wouldn't have expected them to win this injunction, but they did.  SpaceX now has the chance to compete for the deal...

For 20 years now...

For 20 years now ... I've been saying that magnetic tape data storage is going to die, imminently.  I've always been wrong.  Now this – and I may be even wronger...

Geek: co-routines and state machines do basically the same thing...

Geek: co-routines and state machines do basically the same thing...  I've never had occasion to investigate co-routines, as I've never written programs in a language that supports them intrinsically.  But as I read this article and thought about it, I realized that my implementations of state machines in languages like Java, C, or assembly were basically indistinguishable from a co-routine implementation in the same language.  So ... languages that intrinsically support co-routines are actually also intrinsically supporting state machines.

State machines are one of my favorite programming techniques for dealing with a messy real world with minimum complexity.  This makes me want to investigate Ruby – and nothing else I've ever read about Ruby did that :)

Ukraine: it's on...

Ukraine: it's on...  I can't help but be reminded of the run-up to WWII, specifically Hitler's deceptions and subsequent invasion of Poland.  I also can't help but worry that the West's non-support of Ukraine will lead to further “explorations” by Putin.

Only time will tell.  The choices now are Putin's, as the West has already decided to leave Ukraine to its fate.  What will Putin do?  Will he back off, worried about the reactions from Obama, Merkle, et al?  Or will he sense opportunity and start the troops rolling into eastern Ukraine?

My bet is on the latter.  I'd love to be wrong...

The Debbie has arrived!

The Debbie has arrived!  That is all...

You wanted the truth. You'll take abashed silence...

You wanted the truth.  You'd take abashed silence...  Ace, at his best, on the latest Benghazi wrinkles...

Good advice...

Good advice...  Things to do before publishing something on the web.  I try to do these things before posting on my blog here, though I don't always succeed...

The absurdity of LinkedIn...

The absurdity of LinkedIn...  That site is really starting to tick me off with their aggressive marketing of their premium services.  Several times now, after being bombarded with stupid efforts like this one, I've been tempted to simply delete my profile there...

Geek: useful lifetimes of cryptographic hash functions...

Geek: useful lifetimes of cryptographic hash functions...  Sobering table for secure systems implementers...

Nazi Germany's Type XXI submarines...

Nazi Germany's Type XXI submarines ... advanced, but too late to have any effect on the war's outcome...

Peaks made of ice...

Peaks made of ice ... in the rings of Saturn.  Captured by the magnificent robotic explorer Cassini.  Click to embiggen.  Awesome!

Estimating the value of π...

Estimating the value of π ... with 200 shots from a Mossberg 500 pump-action shotgun!

Many moons ago, when I was much younger and even more inclined to waste my time on something fun, I ran a slightly different Monte Carlo estimate of π.  That version used a box of 500 straight pins and a grid of lines drawn on paper.  As I recall, the estimate I calculated was less than 1% off the actual value of π...

Actual ObamaCare enrollment data...

Actual ObamaCare enrollment data...  And it's not good, just as many of us suspected.  Key points:

• 33% of people who signed up have not paid, and therefore aren't actually enrolled.  That 8 million you heard about?  Not so much...
• 31% of the people who actually enrolled (and paid) are under 35 years old.  The target was 50%.  This is precisely what the insurance companies were afraid would happen, and it means that the largest goal of ObamaCare – getting young people enrolled – has failed.  Why?  Because 34% of people under 35 were already insured before ObamaCare.  The slight difference is actually a decrease from pre-ObamaCare figures.  Epic fail.

“I miss having freedom of speech.”

“I miss having freedom of speech.”  That's Scott Adams, who is censoring his own blog posts from fear of online reprisals from (generally left-leaning) web sites.  He's vulnerable to this because he's a celebrity; he has good reason to fear economic damage from them (by, for example, managing to get his cartoons dropped from newspapers).  He doesn't propose any particular solution, but rather is simply telling his readers what he's doing, while bemoaning the fact that he feels compelled to do it.

It's a classic free speech issue: our Constitution allows us to speak freely, but there is no guarantee that we can do so without negative consequences.  I'm glad to see that Scott didn't propose curtailing the free speech of others to allow his own free speech to be free of consequences – that's the traditional stance of the left, with their attraction toward laws preventing offensive speech.  Scott implies (though he doesn't directly say it) that he'd like to have a way to sue the trolls who actually lie about him (libel).  That's an especially challenging thing in the anonymous world of the Internet, where it may not be possible to know who is saying something – though this sort of thing isn't actually new to the Internet; newspapers have published anonymous letters to the editor for centuries.

I've never heard a good solution for this problem.  Every solution I've ever heard proposed is fraught with either free speech issues or legal morass issues...