The Contenders

There isn't much to differentiate between most of the forty-fives in GURPS terms.

Just adjust the shots, weight and reload times, really.

Oh, and prices...

That Reminds Me

I really wish someone would make a damn clone of the Finnish AK.

The scanty few Valmet imports are breathtakingly expensive.

C'mon PSA!  Get on it!

Hakkaa Päälle Bitches

Putin has threatened vague bad consequences to Finland and Sweden should they seek to join NATO.

Putie, Baby, Finland beat Russia every time it attacked without US material support.

But, what if they take you at your word?  Now.  While you're all distracted?

Can you shift your forces back North in time while still making sure Ukraine doesn't bite you in the ass?

What if Sweden joins in.

They've been fed up with your incursions into their waters with your submarines for years.

I think they've got the sand to seriously fuck up that giant naval base you've got up there.

Just sayin'.

Besides, both these nations are bug-fuck nuts.

Never fuck with crazy, Vlad.

Good Shoot

 Pasco Theater Shooter Not Guilty.

Here's An Idea

If China goes for Taiwan we should reunify Korea.

Make them react to us for a change.

I'm Old Enough To Remember

Remember when it was Kiev not Kyiv?

Peking not Beijing.

Saigon not Ho Chi Min City.

Bandar Shapur not Bandar-e Emam Khomeyni.

Salisbury not Harare.

There's many others.

I Dunno What They're Doing

In my quest to replace The Precious I've been tracking a particular '49 Chevy Styleline DeLuxe.

The car is at a local branch of Streetside Classic Cars.

It's as original as you want such a car to be.

The big changes are an r134 AC system (essential for Florida), 12v electrical system, electric fan for cooling and auxiliary gauges added.

It appears to be a straight, rust-free restoration running the original 216 stovebolt and three-on-the-tree.

I've been watching Streetside Classic Cars relist this thing for a month.

It's not bidding over $12k and that doesn't make reserve.

They list it as a classified ad with "make an offer" active and end the ad early to relist it as an auction minutes later.

I think they're in violation of ebay's terms of service because they are required to respond to my offer, even if they end the ad early.  My offer got no response and they ended the ad early to relist as an auction.

I don't know what they're up to, but selling cars doesn't appear to be what they do.

Dim Recollection

I remember in a way-back...

Ukraine was petitioning to join NATO.

Russia wasn't happy about that, Poland had just joined...

In the talks something to the effect of, "you have to stop actively antagonizing the Russians, you know," was stated.

"Why would we stop doing that?" was the crux of their reply.

For me that was a headdesk moment and foretold what is happening today.

Ukraine and Russia were going to have this war eventually, and letting Ukraine into NATO or the EU would just drag everyone else in like WW1.

What's surprising is none of Europe, NATO or US aligned ourselves to send troops in the event of an invasion.

Not Mutually Inclusive

I hear that Putin is calling the leadership of Ukraine "neo-nazi" and Zelenskyy is countering that his government cannot be neo-nazi because he's Jewish.

While that's a damn good defense against the charge of being a nazi, it's not air tight.

Nothing about National Socialism demands antisemitism.

It's entirely possible to be full on fascists without being antisemitic.

Italy did it, for example.

Antisemitism is a common feature of fascism, but not an integral part.

All that said, I have no idea if the accusation of nazism is true or not.

Considering the accuser, probably not.

Neither side in this is particularly saintly.

If we're going to be slinging comparisons to nazis, we need to point out that Hitler invaded a couple of places on the pretext of protecting German descended peoples living there.

Putin is explicitly doing that.

Pot, Kettle, similarly dark shades.

Armed

 

I don't know what he's planning here, but...

WAR!

I always wondered what the average person felt like when Hearst started publishing headlines about USS Maine blowing up.

Yellow journalism is alive and well in America today!

And here we were worried it'd died.

Rejoice!

Compliance Test

The Lovely Harvey is a senior-manager of the department that does the "this call may be monitored" stuff.

She regales me with stories of the stupidity her fellow employees do on monitored and recorded phone calls.

Car salesmen would listen to this shit and be horrified at the ethics on display to make a sale!

One of the departments in her company is being reorganized and an entire job title is being eliminated from on department.

There's opportunity to move laterally for most of them, and a chance to move up rather than be laid off.

The chance to move up means taking a "compliance test".

It's 20 questions concerning what's allowed and not allowed of the people on the phones.  16 of them are so fucking obvious that even I got them right.  The other four are part of the everyday work her company does, so any employee on the phones should be familiar with what the answers should be (and even I got two of them right).

You need to get 18 out of 20 correct and she says that it's commonplace for them to get fewer than 10.  (Remember, I managed 18 out of 20 without any training at all.)

Did I mention that everyone taking this test received training on the answers and receives periodic refresher training?

There's just no excuse for these people to not know the answers... yet...

I Love A Happy Ending

Guy, a convicted sex offender no less, shoots a deputy and while on the run breaks into some random citizen's house.

Random citizen shoots him dead right there.

U-S-A! Flor-I-Da! U-S-A! Flor-I-Da! U-S-A! Flor-I-Da!

Yikes!

Because of the impending delivery of my new bed, we're looking to rearrange the bedroom.

I have three short book shelves and would like to consolidate them into a taller and wider single book shelf.

I am not prepared to sell a kidney to get it.

Found It!

When Willard started loaning guns for the .45 Comparison, Marv wondered about the "45 ACP revolver" Willard was known to have.

Willard indicated that he was "pretty sure" he knew where it was.

He was not even close!

I was moving things around in MY garage and noticed a gun rag where there shouldn't have been one.

When I grabbed it to move it to where such things are kept, I noticed it seemed a bit on the heavy side for an empty gun rag...

Shown in the picture above is the contents of that empty rag.

It's been here since we did the .45 Colt v .45 ACP comparison way back in... so long ago I can't remember the post let alone when!  We might not have even made the post.

At any rate it's been here and it's been safe.

What missing that hurts is an Astra 600/43 in 9x19mm WITH holster and spare magazine.

As you can see, it's been on my workbench as recently as July 3, 2017 and at the range on August 9, 2017.  After that, we lose track of it.  I think it got left with Willard's shooting gear in the back of the Endeavor.  I don't think I ended up with it here.

I will keep looking.  I didn't expect to find a S&W revolver here.

Can't Sleep Clown Will Eat Me

I am now well enough that moving at all doesn't hurt.

That means I can sit, pain free, in more than just one position.

That creates the illusion that I can move without pain.

WRONG!

The pain that's left is VERY sharp and only when I extend or bend too far.

My body has taken the lack of pain as a signal to try rolling over in the recliner I've been sleeping in.

Guess what this leads to!

Extending and bending too far.  That wakes me up but good.

Giving Up iTunes

On both Android and Ubuntu if my downloaded song from iTunes is a .m4a file it's got DRM and won't play.

If the song is a .m4p it plays just fine.

Fortuneately, most of the music from iTunes is DRM free, but you'll need to address the ones that aren't. 

If you ripped the songs from a CD then you will have a DRM free version of the file, either mp3 or m4p.

Amazon sells unrestricted .mp3 files which also play just fine.

Or you can hoist the Jolly Roger!

Two

 It is 0222 22Feb22.

Why I Don't Have Solar Panels

This bullshit aside.

Let's say I buy enough panels and storage that I don't need a connection to the mains.

There's a law what says that my house in uninhabitable if it's not connected, and I have to pay a minimum fee to the electric company even if I'm not using any electricity from them.

They are slowly, but surely, raising the minimum fee.

We have, as a given, stated that I have enough solar panels and storage to run my place without the mains connected, that means that I don't need the mains... but they are hooked up anyways.

A storm blows through and the mains are severed!

No problem, right?  I have enough panels and storage to go without them, right?

Nope.

Not unless I paid almost five times as much for the panels and storage and didn't take advantage of any of the incentives or breaks to get them.

Because it's illegal to install a simple, automatic, switching system that prevents my panels and storage from back-feeding the mains in the event of a black-out.  BUT ONLY IF I TOOK ADVANTAGE OF THE INCENTIVE PROGRAMS!

You read that right.

Even though I have a fucking power plant on my roof, it's useless unless a power plant miles from here is making power that reaches my meter.

Now, if I decided to buy an emergency, whole-house, natural gas fueled generator that simple, automatic, switching system comes with it.  Why?  Because such a switch is required by law for every power generation system EXCEPT solar in Florida.

Solar is a con, and I'm not quite sure who the con is, but I'm damn sure who the marks are.

Speaking Of Open Source

Having spent a not inconsiderable sum on music at iTunes, I was reluctant to abandon a platform which played those songs.

Because Apple has been fairly proactive in getting the artists to agree to unlocking the DRM, most of the music is playable with Rhythmbox on Ubuntu.

Sadly, that's not all of my music.

Happily and sadly, Amazon is perfectly willing to sell me the missing songs in unrestricted mp3 format.  The sad part is buying the songs again.

There's a lot of music I've paid for multiple times.

Vinyl to cassette.

Cassette to CD.

CD to digital.

And now... digital to digital!

CDs lasted the shortest.

Vinyl is restricted to my childhood.  I don't think I even owned a record past the age of 12.

8-track was fewer than a dozen tapes and mostly because the stereo my mom bought had a player.

Cassettes were my mainstay for near 20 years.

CDs had just started to supplant the tapes when Napster hit.

Since then we've been getting our tuneage exclusively online.

Don't Throw Me In The Briar Patch

The overpaid babies of Major League Baseball are threatening a walkout if their extortion is not acquiesced to.

Go ahead and walk you fucking parasites!

And I hope that you starve too.

My only worry is that the larger parasites, the team owners, won't also starve.

They have their own worries about their teams.

The threat of leaving town if they don't get new palaces to baseball isn't working like it used.

The Tampa Bay Rays keep making this threat about leaving St Pete and moving if the area doesn't build them a new stadium.

The voters keep telling the city councils and county commissions that the door should not be allowed to strike them in the ass as they depart because, so far, professional sports has been all costs and no gains with the exception of our NHL team.

Fucking HOCKEY is the professional sport that actually benefits the area overall?

It's not normally popular enough to do that, but it could be a happy middle ground where it's not popular enough to raise crime during home games and the fans aren't destructive after wins.

Who Says I Can't Plan?

I have the 2023 annual ATF pic queued up and ready to go!

I found a lovely lager from Źywiec in the local store and figured an all Polish theme would be great.

The Lovely Harvey helped with composition and provided the cigarettes.

All y'all are going to have to wait ten months to see it unless you're smart enough to figure out where the pics are hosted.

The Path To Open Source

It was Office that did it.

One of the things I am famous(ish) for is a conversion of the original 1984 edition of Twilight: 2000 to GURPS.

First in 3e, then 3e(r) then 4e.

I was happily banging it out in MS Word format and using the rest of Office too.

Then one day I tried to email someone a copy of the conversion and saw how big it had become.

I didn't know how to pare it down, but I discovered why it was so large.

Every single change is hidden in there.  Every change EVER.  It adds up.

I am fortunate that I didn't work from a template or starting with another document in a similar format where someone could back up those changes and see earlier versions of the document.

FuzzyGeff suggested Open Office to replace it.

Once I'd done that I started replacing other MS products.  Thunderbird replaced Outlook.  Firefox replaced Internet Explorer.

And I kept these products when I moved to OSX.

I used Safari for a while, but changed to Chrome and Firefox depending on what was working and what wasn't as web pages changed.

Neo Office replaced Open Office on the Mac Pro as well.  I still use it there.

Thunderbird and Firefox run on Ubuntu.  LibreOffice replaces Neo and Open Offices and documents done in one are compatible with the other two!

The down side is there's a few things I needed to bug a couple of friends to walk me through from the terminal to get working the way I wanted, but nothing terrifyingly hard.

VLC has been running on all my machines for quite a while, it plays movies way better than iTunes for Windows and provides an excellent DVD player for Windows as well.

So far I've yet to see an open source product not do what it said and say what it does.  They also seem more resistant to the idea of feature creep than shit from Apple and MS.

It's also very nice that all of the open source programs I've adopted have been platform independent.  I am not married to a single OS.

Never Run Out Of Material

If all I did was post about every little foible of whatever Windows OS I was running, I would have a daily post and I primarily use Ubuntu and an obsolete Mac Pro!

The Win7 installs are secondary use only.

And I still have something to complain about daily.

Notice that I don't complain about Ubuntu 20.04.3 or OSX 10.6.8?

And this has been true for decades of using a computer for stuff.

I get that M$ needed to crack down on piracy and all, but their activation process is opaque and mercurial.

One machine activated just by clicking the button.  The other needed me to phone the hotline and...

Listen.

To.

The.

Instructions.

Very.

Slowly.

Sads

Today would have been my buddy Ray's 56th birthday.

As you may recall, he died just after Christmas last year.

As with everyone who's preceded me into the void, it's the first few anniversary moments that are the hardest.

But, as long as we remember, they are not truly dead.

Happy Birthday to my Nordic Giant friend, Grog.

Because They Always Have

Anyone who observes history is not surprised that the RCMP went all jack-boot and hoof-trample over actual peaceful protests.

Something the badge kissers constantly miss is the cops are far more The State than they are part of the community or fellow citizens.

When the choice between The State and citizen is presented, they always choose to remain part of The State.

This is a Rule 34 moment.

Beyond a few individuals, who did not affect the outcome even a little, there are no exceptions to the police backing a state which morphs from liberal democracy to totalitarian.

None.

I've always taken the long view here and if The State is my enemy, then all of its agents must be looked at askance at all times.

That means no support for cops, teachers, mailmen, meter maids, etc.

They are, at best, fair weather friends and we rarely get them in fair weather.

Whirlwind

The days have been consumed by locusts lately, leaving no time to do anything that shows up here.

Every day I feel a little better.

Every day I find something I'm still unable to do.

Every day there are fewer things I am unable to do.

I am taking this as a sign that I am actually healing correctly.

Still no decision on the car.

We'd arranged the garage carefully around The Precious and anything longer would be a serious problem now.

All of the cars I've been looking at are much longer.

A 2008 Corvette coupe is 175.6".

The '49 Styleline being shortest at 197".

A 1996 Caprice/Impala is 214.1".

The Caprice PPV is 204.2".

Fuck All That

I cancelled my appointment with the VA.

I can let the do nothing fucks do nothing without me.

Are You Shitting Me?

The local branch of the VA Healthcare system is really pissing me off.

First the dissembling about making an appointment to follow up on the injuries incurred in my car wreck and having to accept the annual check-up that I made a year ago as that follow-up.

A week from today that appointment is.

Today they use their most passive aggressive system of making contact, the MyHealthEVet's secure message system, to tell me that nobody had bothered to schedule the labs last year.

I am getting entirely too fed up with people who don't do anything when I ask them to, but demand that I jump to when they want something.

How Do You Do That?

The upcoming series on Amazon that's supposed to be a prequel to The Lord of the Rings doesn't have the film rights to any of Tolkien's works set before The Hobbit.

Um...

How do you do that?

You pull it out of your ass while carefully avoiding anything actually published about the timeframe you're filming.

Never mind the all-in on minority casting.

I, for one, cannot WAIT for a remake of Chaka Zulu with diversity casting, or watching these fucks squirm when you insist that white people be inserted inappropriately into the story because otherwise they would be unrepresented.

Better yet, let's do a third telling of The Tuskeegee Airmen!

What do you mean they were historically all black?  You complained at the lack of minorities in 1917, which was historically all white.

Goose, have a taste of the gander's sauce.

Perhaps My Fault

Here's the whole laptop saga.

In 2015 I got a Lenovo T420S to replace my dead MacBook Pro.

The first thing I did was to up the RAM to 16mb and clone the 128gb drive over to a 750gb.  I barely used the original drive.

Later came a 1tb SSD running a fresh Win7 install, then a 1tb SSD running Ubuntu, with the Windows SSD in the removable superbay.

That machine decided that I didn't need to be able to turn off the keyboard light and I got sick of it.  It did this right after JT replaced the CPU cooler and fan, so I suspect we put something back together wrong.

But other than that it runs fine.

The new machine is also a refurb T420S and it was supposed to come with a 320gb drive with Win10 Home and 8gb of RAM.

It actually shipped with a 160gb SSD and Win10 Pro.

I swapped the RAM, hard drive and superbay from the old machine to the new machine.  New machine runs great!

Old machine booted fine with the 8gb or RAM and the 160gb SSD under Win10 Pro, but wouldn't activate.

Fresh install from new download on a thumb drive did not get me any closer to activation.

The old machine is going to become a dedicated host for the Tech2 software to us the VXDIAG dongle to be able to actually work on my cars.

Because that supports both Win7 and Win10, the original 128gb hard drive with Win7 Pro works just fine for my purposes.

I put it back in with a RAM upgrade and the machine is, indeed, happy.

If I had not wiped the hard drive attempting a fresh install on the 160gb SSD, I wonder if would have been fine in the new machine...

Oh well.

The outcome, at the end of the day, is an acceptable one. 

PS: I did not have to jump through any hoops at all to move the Ubuntu drive from one machine to the other.  Free OS is best OS.

Looks Like PPV

It still doesn't speak to me, but it's a decent car and actually something I can afford.

The one I'm prolly going to end up with will need its spotlight replaced.  You have an ex-cop car you need to have a spot.

Windows 7 You Say?

Windows 10 refuses to authenticate.

Even with a fresh install with a known good code.

I still have the drive that came with the machine, so back in it goes!

Mutter Mutter Technology Mutter

I am dedicating a laptop to running the Tech2.

My old one.

I ordered a new one, old Lenovos are cheap, and swapped the drives between them.

Ubuntu and Win7 from the old machine woke up in their new digs and declared happiness and you cannot even tell I am using a new machine (except for the light that illuminates the keyboard is switchable again.)

The machine I ordered was supposed to come with Win10 Home on a 320gb drive.  What I received was a 128gb SSD and Win10 Pro.

Which will not activate.

JT talked me through all of his tricks to no avail.

So, we're downloading a fresh install of Win10 from M$ and seeing if that will work.  In theory I have three valid keys here, one from the laptop vendor and two from other machines which aren't running Win10.

Getting JT to talk me through it was an adventure itself!  My cell carrier decided to break one the towers in my area, putting me "out of range".  Happily I'm a dinosaur who clings to having a phone bolted to the wall.

I Thought The Commenting Rules Were Simple...

Apparently they're complicated because I keep having to delete comments violating them.

They're right there in the block where you make your comment, read them before hitting submit.

I used verbage that any 12 year old can understand.

Avoidance

There was once a time when I used to go to car shows.  At least twice a week and I met with friends and we grabbed a bite to eat.

Then I had a disagreement with one and stopped being friends and I started to avoid car shows so as to not bump into them.

I am finding myself in a similar situation with a couple of the local breweries.

I've had the conflict with a friend on Facebook, I don't want to discuss it further and that leads to me to avoid places where I think I might encounter them.

That's That Then

I've had it with Facebook.

Actually, it's had it with Facebook again.

I managed to shut it off and happily go on with my life for quite a while but got sucked back in.

I'm back to the fed up point and this time I think I will simply let it wither on the vine rather than deleting it.  That will save me a bunch of "where did you go?" conversations.

Everyone notices that you've deleted the account.  Nobody notices that you stopped logging in.

History Of My Name

Angus McThag is not my real name (DUH).

It's my nom-de-blog.

I've been Thag for years and years.  It's my oldest nickname.

Dad was Og and mom was Shad.  This was after the characters in some play or movie my parents saw very near when I was born.

The Angus Mc part comes MUCH later when my SCA persona was Angus MacTavish.

Lots of people knew me as Thag and in the SCA so soon I was McThag.

Hardly ever was I Angus McThag, but I felt silly going by a mononym like a vapid celebrity.

I'm a vapid blogger and we have TWO names!

However, I am McThag and it seems strange for people to call me Angus.

So if you're going to call me familiar, call me McThag.

Kthanx!

Three Weeks

I am in my third week of recovery!

I am much less sore and sneezing doesn't make me feel like I am being impaled on a bat.

Still tired all the time.  Healing takes energy, apparently.

I have to go shopping for a bed soon.

We tossed the well worn and sagging king-size I was sleeping on before for a recliner.  Now I'm feeling better enough to consider sleeping on a bed and I don't have one.

I'm thinking of taking advantage of one of those president's day sales and going smaller than king-size.  We needed the big mattress when Harvey and I slept in the same room.  Our disparate sleep schedules, her snoring and my nightmares changed that.

Full size has proven adequate for a "bit of a cuddle" so I think I'll go that route.

The Woke Just Affects HER Now

Jennifer Sey's ox was finally gored.

Ms. Sey, you were perfectly OK with Levi's liberal positions when it aligned with your positions, so I don't really have a lot of sympathy for you.

Not-The-Bee, welcome to the party.  Levi's has hated us for, literally, decades.  This is nothing new.  They've been anti-gun since 2016, and that was while Ms Sey was a happy employee.

The problem is that companies have committees and meetings about what political stances and messages they wish to project.

How about just making pants?

How did making jeans become something that needed to project a political message?

More to the point, how does alienating, at least, half the potential buyers in your largest market make any kind of economic sense.