At least. the ones on Twitter. Google Chrome can’t find them.
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You can comment here or there. This is also mirrored on Dreamwidth and Facebook.I just found out has died. I am so sad. BB2 and I had many debates and I’ve always respected him.
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You can comment here or there. This is also mirrored on Dreamwidth and Facebook.The US Dollar dropped below 0.92 CHF (Swiss Franks), yesterday. It is still there this morning at 0.918 CHF. In a way, that’s a hidden inflation. A McDonalds burger costs over 8CHF here, that’s over $8 for a burger that costs under $2 in the States, even at California prices!
On other fronts:
My Electric Vehicle study got bogged down in research. Many electric vehicles were announced this past quarter and from all the major manufacturers. Many of the releases were game-changing. No, not for the better but they do change the matrix; for the worse.
The recent quake in Japan is causing a re-evaluation of Nuclear Power plans. This isn’t good either. Two huge political issues are coming to a head Global Warming and Energy Production. Fundamentally, Green Peace and others want us all to reduce our CO2 production1 but they also want to eliminate Nuclear Power as an option. The unannounced elephant in the room is global food production, which needs energy and land2 . That is yet another thing changing the matrix. The thing is if; we cannot generate CO2, we cannot build nuke plants, and renewables aren’t there either then; How the Fuck will we generate the power to grow and process the 70% more food that we will need by 2050?3
The Greens smugly sit back and smile when asked this question, leading one to think that they confidently expect the rest of us to off ourselves in the interests of the common good.
The world is not headed to a nice place and it’s our own stupid fault.
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You can comment here or there. This is also mirrored on Dreamwidth and Facebook.Every major push, be it code or prose, leaves me in a “What the fuck do I do now?” state.
Come on! It’s not like I don’t have a bazillion things to do, is it? I have four other books to finish, plots to plan and an article series to write that I am already behind schedule on. I also have some sys admin stuff that I need to get to and about a ton of stuff to get out here from California. There is no shortage of work. Yet, hitting yesterday’s milestone is making me feel like I was left in the lurch, like I just lost my job. It’s crazy.
No, I can’t work on that book anymore until I get it back from the editor. Yes, I’ve been jamming on the book since December. The goal is to get something ready enough to submit to an agent. I’ve been working fairly continuously at it since then. Yesterday was a major milestone, one step closer to getting the damned thing out there!
I’ve felt like this before, over major code projects. After such enormous effort, the finish is almost anti-climactic. It leaves me feeling off-balance like, having the big rock that I’ve been pushing against suddenly removed without warning. It’s unnerving. 
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You can comment here or there. This is also mirrored on Dreamwidth and Facebook.A little late as usual. My birthday keeps getting in the way of these 
First comes the new year and three days later, I clock up another year, my 57th.
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You can comment here or there. This is also mirrored on Dreamwidth and Facebook.Still in Coppet,CH. The in-laws are now down in Aigues-Mortes because it’s warmer down there (7C v. –4C here). We stayed here to house-sit for a few days and will be going back on the 28th.
Zhinn is having a wonderful time even if it is damned cold outside. This is good as he isn’t completely an apartment cat. He’s now a 6 kilo adult male athletic Tabby that keeps himself amazingly fit. He’s also turning out to be a pretty good mouser. Although he gets fairly disappointed when the new active bat-toys break. He keeps bringing them to me for repairs. He did that with sparrows for a while too but gave up on them because they break too easy. He is now easier on the mice and voles, even letting a few voles get away.
Zhinn is the sort of cat that will not eat raw meat. We get him the gushy food with veg in because that is what he prefers. He prefers it to the point that he picks out the veg first. Strange cat, that. Obligate carnivore? Yeah … sure. The only way he would eat a mouse is sauté in butter and garlic. Zhinn likes burrito filling, chili, curried anything, cheddar cheese, cooked turkey (new discovery, that), gushy food with veg in it (mostly zucchini, peas, and carrots; try to get your child to each much of any of that), shrimps in butter and garlic, sardines, tuna, and grilled chicken with lots of paprika and cayenne. He otherwise shies away from most human prepared food, straight all-meat cat food, and any form of raw meat. We definitely have a strange cat here however, his coat is gorgeous so the diet must be okay.
The night before Christmas Eve, I finally got around to rebuilding Goshawk. Goshawk was my main Web Applications Server for years but it’s always had this memory problem that required me to reset it at least once per week. Last month, right before NaNoWriMo, it finally died due to a corrupted boot sector. There is a long story behind Goshawk but Ï plugged in a spare 30GB PATA drive and installed a new Win2K server OS, leaving the old drive in place, as a slave.
Due to the fact that Goshawk was a Domain Controller on my Active Directory Domain, it’s sudden demise left an orphaned object in the AD which I couldn’t assign to the resurrected Goshawk. Therefore I took the expedient of naming Goshawk to Gyrfalcon instead, and will delete the old Goshawk objects later. The really weird thing is that the memory glitch seems to have gone away, or is successfully hiding from me. In either case, that’s a task necessarily left until I finally get back to Nyon.
Yes, my VPN setup is working really well from here in Coppet. It was a PITA to initially setup but I am very glad that I did it. I have a 300GHz, host (Eagle) that is dedicated communications controller, with RADIUS, MS RSA, etc. It’s not much of a host (slow) but that’s all it does and has been working reliably for years (I think of Apweiler fondly for sending me that old motherboard).
Anyway, the new year’s acommin’ and I hope that it treats everyone well. From here, things have a much better chance of looking better than worse. Keep working at whatever is working for you, mitigate your losses as best as you can, and don’t take on any risks that you don’t have to. There are still economic storm clouds on the horizon, both here in Europe and in the US.
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Have a happy …
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