richardf8 | Reading

mark posting in

Happy Wednesday!

I'm taking search offline sometime today to upgrade the server to a new instance type. It should be down for a day or so -- sorry for the inconvenience. If you're curious, the existing search machine is over 10 years old and was starting to accumulate a decade of cruft...!

Also, apparently these older machines cost more than twice what the newer ones cost, on top of being slower. Trying to save a bit of maintenance and cost, and hopefully a Wednesday is okay!

Edited: The other cool thing is that this also means that the search index will be effectively realtime afterwards... no more waiting a few minutes for the indexer to catch new content.

thewayne

If you're into older rock, Dave Mason is a name a name that you'll either recognize right off the bat or you won't. But when you hear the people whom he's worked with, and what he's done, then you start to wonder if you haven't heard of him.

Here's the first two paragraphs from the Variety obit:
"Dave Mason, solo artist, a founding member of the band Traffic, writer of the classic rock songs “Feelin’ Alright” and “Hole in My Shoe” and sideman to the Rolling Stones, George Harrison and Jimi Hendrix, has died, according to an announcement from his publicist. He was 79.

Mason was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame with the other original members of Traffic in 2004. In the 1970s he enjoyed solo hits with “Only You Know and I Know” and “We Just Disagree,” and over the years he also performed or recorded with David Crosby, Graham Nash, Michael Jackson, Cass Elliot, Leon Russell and others."

Let me repeat some of those names. A founding member of Traffic. The Rolling Stones. George Harrison. Jimi Hendrix (he played 12 string guitar on All Along The Watchtower). Crosby and Nash. Michael Jackson. Momma Cass. He also was a member of Fleetwood Mac. Feelin' Alright was not a hit for Traffic, but it pretty much launched Joe Cocker's career.

AND inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

A singer, writer, and performer. Triple threat. Definitely a formidable and accomplished artist. Cause of death was not released, though two years ago he cancelled a tour due to unspecified heart issues.

A great one has taken his final bow.

https://variety.com/2026/music/obituaries-people-news/dave-mason-dead-traffic-feelin-alright-rock-hall-fame-1236727460/

deckardcanine

Keith Laumer's first Bolo collection is surprisingly thin, unlike the fourth Bolo anthology by other authors. It consists of only an introduction by Jack Campbell, a brief "history" of the AI battle tanks, and six stories of 10-41 pages published between 1960 and 1976 (not presented in chronological order). When I found it in a Little Free Library, I figured it was the best way to get acquainted with Laumer.

( Cut for length )

My next novel is Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor. That'll add geographic diversity to my readings.

thewayne

"I think it's time [the pope] starts to get questioned. Donald Trump takes questions all the time. Nobody gets to ask the pope a single thing. And I think it's time and I would like to offer myself as the person to go interview the pope. I think I'm uniquely qualified. I studied Latin, theology, went to Catholic Church for 12 years."
-- Sean Hannity

And you've been spreading lies and distorting news for 27 years on Fox. You may have studied it, but clearly you didn't absorb it and don't practice it except possibly in a superficial way.

And perhaps the brain-dead POTUS does take questions all the time. He deviates and avoids answering them at all costs, insults those who asks them, and lies to avoid any possibility of accurately answering them. You really can't compare him to the Pope. And if you think you can, then your much further gone than I thought.

I expect people ask the Pope questions on a regular basis. There's a difference between asking a question and questioning the basis of their reasoning, which is what you want to do. You want to ask entrapping questions, "gotchas", to score points with the MAGA base and prop up your boss in the White House. There's no way you want to honestly debate theology because you'd be left a charred pile of ash.

deckardcanine

The Internet quips about carcinization,
Where critters evolve to have crab body plans.
"Will we become like that?" "We already have:
We lost tails, can walk sideways, and grip with our hands!"

Biologists' standards, of course, aren't that simple.
A crab needs a carapace flattened and broad,
A flat and bent pleon, and sternites fused into
A wide sternal plastron. And yes, that sounds odd.

The point is, it's happened five times that we know of.
Quite likely a sixth involves cycloids, extinct.
The versatile plan lets crabs go where the prior
Crustaceans could not. Perhaps that's how they're linked.

But lest you believe it's the ultimate body,
Decarcinization occurs even more.
My takeaway: Nature rewards flexibility,
Letting us change for whatever's in store.

deckardcanine

Thea Guanzon does not have her own Wikipedia page yet; only her first novel does. I chose it from a list of recommendations because I tend to like romantasies but had read very few, and some weren't straight enough for my taste. There was also the aforementioned intrigue of a Southeast Asian influence, but that's apparent only in the frequency of major storms.

( Cut for length )

Up next is Bolo: Annals of the Dinochrome Brigade by Keith Laumer. I've waited long enough for this.

thewayne

Well, it's not a cool function, it's an option on a function. Specifically, the Weekday function.

I'm finishing up our taxes. Normally I'd finish them in February or March, but it's been a heck of a few months. One of the things that I do is dump all my prescription drug purchases into a spreadsheet and calculate the day of the week, so I can take a mileage deduction on my state taxes for weekend pickups since I'm not working those days.

Nevermind whether or not we're going to dinner or a movie....

Anyway, the function ends up being:

=IF(WEEKDAY(A1,2)>5,42,"")

A1 is my date field of when the transaction takes place. By default, i.e. without a number changing the day of the week for the date the starting DOW is Sunday = 1. By supplying the 2, you're telling Excel that Monday = 1, therefore if the DOW is greater than 5, it's Saturday or Sunday, therefore the weekend! If that's true, plug in 42 (round trip to Alamogordo and back), otherwise make it a blank cell.

Five trips for an additional 210 miles, at $0.21 per mile towards my state taxes! I have to manually eliminate dupes for multiple transactions on the same day, being multiple drugs refilled and picked up at the same time.

I use spreadsheets a fair amount, but not for anything particularly complex, just as a general purpose tool, so I was kinda chuffed to find this. The question is whether or not I'll remember it for next year!

deckardcanine

I used to declare I had Asperger’s syndrome.
That’s no longer clinically done.
It isn’t distinguished from autism spectrum
Disorder; the two things are one.

At first, I resisted the change, as “autistic”
More often applied to extremes.
Some “mildly” autistic behavior was stuff
That I’d never do even in dreams.

The pediatrician Hans Asperger lost
Popularity several years back,
In light of a claim that I won’t spell out here,
But it seems an untruthful attack.

Regardless, I’ve come to accept DSM
Terminology lately in use.
It’s not like I always tell people I have
ASD for a lazy excuse.

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

I keep forgetting to post about this: we've been troubleshooting the "missing notifications" problem for the past few days. (Well, I say "we", really I mean Mark and Robby; I'm just the amanuensis.) It's been one of those annoying loops of "find a logical explanation for what could be causing the problem, fix that thing, observe that the problem gets better for some people but doesn't go away completely, go back to step one and start again", sigh.

Mark is hauling out the heavy debugging ordinance to try to find the root cause. Once he's done building all the extra logging tools he needs, he'll comment to this entry. After he does, if you find a comment that should have gone to your inbox and sent an email notification but didn't, leave him a link to the comment that should have sent the notification, as long as the comment itself was made after Mark says he's collecting them. (I'd wait and post this after he gets the debug code in but I need to go to sleep and he's not sure how long it will take!)

We're sorry about the hassle! Irregular/sporadic issues like this are really hard to troubleshoot because it's impossible to know if they're fixed or if they're just not happening while you're looking. With luck, this will give us enough information to figure out the root cause for real this time.

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richardf8

The Reform Baal Teshuvah

March 2025

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Page generated Apr. 25th, 2026 02:00 am

Ranting and Raving

Reading

Search maintenance

RIP: Dave Mason, 79

Book Review: Bolo: The Annals of the Dinochrome Brigade

Doonesbury Say What

Carcinization

Book Review: The Hurricane Wars

I just found a cool Excel function!

Purgin' "Aspergian"

The case of the missing notifications

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March 2025

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