Winter? I Miss Global Warming Already!

They had to go and screw it up. The planet was gettin' warmer and I was good with that; I figured by the time I was ready to retire to someplace warm, I'd be living someplace warm already.

But nooooooo. Turns out they cooked the books and now we've got this:

.DISCUSSION...
IR SATELLITE IS SHOWING THE STRONG LOW PRESSURE SYSTEM THAT
WILL BRING BLIZZARD CONDITIONS TO PORTIONS OF THE PLAINS AND
MIDWEST IS CURRENTLY CENTERED OVER THE DESERT SOUTHWEST.
AHEAD OF IT...SNOW IS FALLING OVER MOST OF THE CENTRAL PLAINS.

That's from NWS's "Discussion" page. The forecast? Cold, wet and windy today. Tomorrow, the fun starts:

.WEDNESDAY...WINDY...CLOUDY. CHANCE OF RAIN UNTIL MIDDAY...THEN
CHANCE OF SNOW IN THE AFTERNOON. HIGHS IN THE LOWER 40S.
SOUTHWEST WINDS 20 TO 30 MPH SHIFTING TO THE WEST 30 TO 35 MPH IN
THE AFTERNOON. GUSTS UP TO 50 MPH. CHANCE OF PRECIPITATION
50 PERCENT.
.WEDNESDAY NIGHT...WINDY. MUCH COLDER. MOSTLY CLOUDY THEN
BECOMING PARTLY CLOUDY. LOWS AROUND 15. WEST WINDS 20 TO 30 MPH.
GUSTS UP TO 45 MPH DECREASING TO 35 MPH AFTER MIDNIGHT.

From the 40s to the teens in under 12 hours. Rain changing to snow, which (IMO) makes ice a good possibility. Some of the other models are calling for winds well over 50 mph but NWS's meteorologists are cautious gamblers. Most of the Midwest is gettin' this, so it's not like it's just me -- but is it really coincidence this happens right after the wheels fall off some of the strongest supposed evidence for anthropogenic global warming?

I think not! (She says with crazed self-assurance).

...You fetch the pitchforks; I'll warm up some tar and make torches, too. This can only be those AGW guys tryin' to retaliate from their hilltop castle labs and we don't have to stand for it! ;) *
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* For the humor-impaired: go watch Frankenstein. Or not. Yes, yes, of course, I truly am a mindless peasant, whippin' up a mob. Suuuuuure. Wanna cookie?

Sunday Dinner

We had corned beef and cabbage! And microwave-baked potatoes.

The corned beef was corned beef; if you start with the good stuff and can manage to simmer rather than boil, it's mahvelous! The taters were taters. Mmmmm, spuds.

But the cabbage...! I didn't want to boil it. Boiled cabbage suits me fine but the aroma tends to linger. Fried, on the other hand, that's kinda good.

Stared with bacon; I had one big strip, so that's what I used. Fry it up, set aside, examine pan. Bit shy on grease, so I added a dollop of olive oil, got the pan good and hot, added a pinch of red pepper flakes and dropped in about half a head of cabbage, cut into medium-sized hunks, over which I had sprinkled a couple big pinches (call it half a teaspoon) of sugar; I used turbinado sugar but whatever. Stir-fried it until it was gettin' bright-colored, then added a leek (cut in quartered discs), five of those pre-peeled snack carrots (julienned) and half a red bell pepper, chopped up; tossed a healthy sprinkle of sesame oil (ymmv) and a dash of black pepper and another pinch of sugar on it, fried a bit, decided it wanted a splash or two of cider vinegar, and stir-fried 'til the leek was translucent and the cabbage was just browning a little in spots. Took it off the fire, crumbled the bacon back in and mixed well.

This made a wok-ful of the stuff. Is it good? I went back for seconds. Tam finished hers and asked for seconds with a slice of corned beef still on her plate! Yeah. It's pretty good. Not bad for starting with a head of cabbage and whatever else was in the fridge.

Winter Comes To Roseholme Cottage

It snowed. Tam got the first snow photo posted; then again, she still treats the stuff as a delightful novelty. One of us doesn't commute. Guess who!

(Those aren't chimeneii, they're open-air atomic reactors. As far as you know. Actually, they are planters-to-be, or so I am told).

A Housewife Could Practically Use It

"The MAC-10 was designed so that a housewife could practically use it!" Um, yeah, well, if the rate of fire were lower and the blame thing was a bit easier to hold, she could actually use it, and so could soldiers, too.

Found on a nifty site selling nifty Lego™ guns, the "housewife" line is in all likelihood one of those lost-in-translation glitches.

A real bad glitch that could have been worse: gettin' SWATted for havin' a Lego™ gun. Ooopsie?

(Uncle already linked to the Lego™ SWAT™ incident but, enh, too good to pass up).

More Moronic!

It must be Henry H. Goddard's birthday or something:

How about a FedGov workshop on openness...that's closed to the public!

It really is true: to work in Washington is to bugger logic and the higher up you are, the buggier it gets. The current Administration, then, is something like those giant dragonflies from the Time Of The Dinosaurs, dipped in rosin and administered* sideways.
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* Hunh! So that's why we use that word to refer to a particular set of Executive Branch chessmen!

Morons: How Not To Sew Leather, Despite Expert Advice

Look, leatherwork is just plain slow. If you're good at it, especially if you have your patterns already and a proper machine for sewing, it's only a bit slow. If you don't do it very often, your workshop is a shambles and you're hand-sewing, it's unbelievably slow.

I'm slower than that but I can do it. I like to do it, when I can find the whacking great chunks of time even a slipshod job requires. And I have, by gosh, studied up.

Here's a tip from the pros:* You don't sew across the width of a load-bearing strap. It's like the perforations in a postage stamp: rrrrip! Plus, the load's on the thread; the more loops of thread between the two parts, the stronger the connection will be. The fix is to do a long, converging pattern, pointing away from the stress point. Yep, those shield-shaped terminations on the straps for your saddlebag buckles are not that shape just for decoration and if they are also sewn straight across, you didn't get what you paid for. Properly done, there are more stitches to carry the load and the grain of the leather isn't as stressed.

I have owned all manner of purses, from fashion items to serious carry-purses made by well-respected holster companies. Most have been leather and every last one of them had the straps sewn right across. Many have failed at just that point, too. You can go shop fancy-name bags and 99.99% of them will have the straps sewn right across. Hey, here's a wild idea: charge me a buck more and do it right for flippin' once!

In my closet, I have all or nearly of the parts for Al Stohlman's "Super Gadget Bag," a pocket-laden purse of the sort that appeals to me, all cut out and ready to sew. It's about time I did some more with that.
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*Al Stohlman, a born teacher and skilled leatherworker. Between the linked book (The Art of Sewing Leather, you should go to Tam's Amazon link and buy a copy already) and both volumes of The Art of Making Leather Cases, if you don't end up learning a little, you're either unteachable or you're Al Stohlman. He and his wife and occasional co-author Ann ought to have statues to them someplace, or at least carved-leather portraits. It turns out the Universe may be just a tiny bit more just or fair than you have suspected: you'll find the Stohlman Leather Museum and Gallery in Fort Worth, Texas!

Finally, A Solution!

(Found via Mike Flynn) The Dutch are worried: it seems euthanasia's not being offered to the mentally ill nearly often enough or easily enough and that's just wrong.

Gee, remember when The Netherlands was overrun by cruel, horrible fascists who, among other hideous injustices, euthanized the mentally ill and the handicapped, 'cos some lives were not worth living?

"Lebensunwertes Leben," horror to public policy in three generations -- Action T4 for the 21st Century!

One generation learns the hard way, the next forgets and the third reboots with minor changes, over and over.

10 KILL "UNWORTHY"
20 STOP KILLERS
30 VOW NEVER AGAIN 'this will fix it!
40 GOTO 10

D00d, I think there might be a bug in your code. And for once, it's not just that frikkin' GOTO statements are never good idea.

(Reminds me of the first time I used a BASIC Stamp on a project: no line numbers! Had to call up subroutines by name, utter heresy).

Saturday

...And I've been in to work once and will be returning later. Little electrical power issue.

Tam mentioned my typewriter collection in passing and the reason I started it. I already owned typewriters -- a nice Royal seen here eons ago, a Corona 3 portable and a newer Olympia -- but when I realized "keysnippers" were real and they were trashin' entire machines for some play-pretties, I decided I'd better look for and buy any typewriter I really wanted; there are a lot more more craft-types out there than typewriter fans.

And likewise my collection of tools, telephones and radio items, even books: it's the stuff I really wanted. 'Cos you can't really count on somebody else preserving it for you. If you want to keep an item around, if you want to preserve a skill or an art or a technology, then you better do it. Nobody's gonna do it for you, even if you manage to get a law passed mandating it.

Happy, Happy Morning

Woke up with a killer one-sided headache/earache. I have these all the time; I have had since 1996 and the cause is...dunno. Possibly triggered by some dental/sinus issues long since resolved but after spending years and tens of thousands of dollars on highly qualified specialists, high-zoot imaging, multiple surgeries and the Very Best drugs, I'm over hunting it; it just is. It's a part of my universe as dependable as sunrise.

But dang, some mornings are unbearably bright. I've taken three ibuprofen (an hour ago) and the sound of typing is still like being jabbed with a knitting needle. Several fine bouts of vertigo, too, which I try to experience as bonus freefall time without the bother and expense of chartering a big airplane.

And to add to the joy? Why, I've got to go get my teeth cleaned this very morning.

Won't. that. be. fun.

I Am Deeply Suspicious

...Of this bunch of fear-mongers. They've been running ads on the local TV stations, ads that look like trailers for Soylent Green, warning of horror an' violence if we don't all turn off the fridge, the furnace, the TV (?!!!), give up clean water an' go live in mud huts, eating only what we can grow usin' our own excrement as fertilizer. Otherwise, they warn, after Glow-ball Warmening, we'll all be livin' in a Third-World hellhole!

H'mmm. Not seein' the difference, except maybe in one of the latter I could lay hands on an AK-47 more easily, which might help when the colander-wearing hordes try'n take the last of the bacon.

Tracking back, they're an arm of ASP, an acronym that sounds like baddies right straight out of a James Bond movie -- no, make that Matt Helm.

And at ASP HQ, who do we find on the Board? Why, look, it's Gary Hart (former Democrat Senator from Extramarital Dating), John Kerry (D-Mass, "The Deerstalker"), Richard L. "Security Leak" Armitage (nominally Republican), Nelson Cunningham (of the Clinton Administration Cunningham), Brigadier General Stephen Cheney of the Marine Military Academy (a Marine?! Another Clinton-era Washington guy), Lieutenant General Daniel Christman (former director of the Kimsey Foundation) and so on and mostly-Left so forth.

If I don't sound impressed, it's because I'm not. I haven't found the Joyce Foundation connection yet but I wouldn't be surprised if there is one. ASP is another partisan effort, using fear to sell ever-growing government encroachment upon people's lives and freedom. By linking the spectres of terrorism and "global warming" (Heloooo, Medieval Warm Period anyone? Bueller?), it looks to me that they hope to create fear all across the political spectrum and use it to manipulate public opinion. They are the New Carpetbaggers, demagogues of the most despiciable stripe. I hope you're not falling for their miserable fnords.

It. Does. Not. Work. That. Way.

GPS: I keep stumbling over this in books, films and on The TV and not only is it jarring, it's gonna get some tenderfoot killed dead if they don't knock it off.

A GPS device knows where it is (if it can receive signals from enough of the satellites). It cannot tell others where you are. Can not.

There is no transmitter in your handheld or dash-mounted GPS. It's not talking to the Global Positioning System Satellites; all it does is listen to them and then do some math. (As far as I know, the only people talking to GPS birds would be DoD and last I knew, that was in the form of admin-type stuff not in-the-field position info).

That said, there are ways to hang additional hardware on the GPS device and use that to send the GPS position to others; hams have been doing it for years. But it takes a transmitter and most of 'em are power-hungry. It is limited to the range the combination of frequency, power, antenna system and propagation conditions permit.

Your cellular telephone can be tracked back to the particular cell it is in and if your phone includes a GPS receiver, it can send that info, too. This is smaller and more power-efficient than the APRS alluded to in the previous paragraph but if you're in an area where there is no cellular coverage, oopsie! She no work.

(Update: Joe Huffman on phone tracking, privacy and how caution and even paranoia can't stop stupidity).

And again, the first thing is the GPS receiver has to have a lock on enough of the GPS satellites to be able to figure out where it is; in tunnels or between tall buildings, it may not work so well. Or at all.

So, writers, will you please, pleeeeeeeze stop breezily tossing "GPS tracking" into your work in the form of Character holding up GPS Receiver and remarking, "They can track us with this," 'cos they can't. Now, that iPhone you've been taking for granted, on the other hand....

(Side note: the slick way to write this for most adventure-type apps is to use a transponder, something that is polled and spits out the current or last-known-good GPS position, suitably flagged. This is economical of batteries, plausible, and darned hard for anyone who doesn't know how to poll it to locate using normal bug-hunting tools. For extra credit, use some form of decent data encryption and/or spread-spectrum; it can easily be about celphone-sized).

(P.S. GPS receivers can be spoofed. It's a neat trick. Uncle Sam knows how and he's not talkin').

News Salad

- Tiger Woods: The Accident: Day Whatever. Holy howling hell, give it up. If this had been a middle-class couple in Sandusky, OH, it would have not even made the papers.

- Anthropogenic Global Warming Fraud Revealed: Keep at 'em! The other side is not giving up and their agenda is clear. At this point, AGW is repeating the "cold fusion" mania, from the rush to replicate shaky results through the point at which the wheels start to fall off while True Believers yet cheer. Never forget, bad science is bad enough but bad policy based on bad science is far, far worse. "Wrong" isn't so terrible a thing in the Mechanik Arts when all that comes of it is you learn a lot of ways not to make a light bulb; "wrong" stinks on ice when you use it to make everybody use crummy light bulbs.

- They Snuck Into The White House: Big effing deal. They also went through a metal detector; once in they refrained from pulling glass knives and turnin' the joint into an abattoir. And they found a nasty hole in the security setup. Personally, I think The Gummint should give them both medals and then have 'em shot at dawn, but I'm sentimental like that.

- Obama Ramps Up The War In Afganistan: Yeah, like that's a surprise to anyone not on the far Left of his own party? The older I get, the more I'm liking Green Glass Diplomacy: bomb 'em flat or stay home, pick one. They tell me it's not practical. (And so what if the last guy to conquer the place was Alexander the Great, while later and with better weapons the British Empire and the USSR foundered in the attempt -- did they have the Audacity Of Hope? I think not! "Most hopeful quagmire evar!" Feh).