Actually it has been for a couple of weeks. I've had a pretty bad case of blogger burnout - there's been a number of blog worthy topics and I just haven't been feeling it.
Meh.
Still, 14425 posts and 54948 comments is pretty decent. Especially the comments.
Thanks to everyone who stops by.
Sometime in the last two or three weeks the odometer here ticked over 20 Million page views. Seems kind of weird that I wasn't tracking that, but whatever. In three months we will celebrate the 18th blogiversary here.
Silicon Graybeard has an interesting theory about all the traffic lately.
This was the best year ever for traffic here: 4.5M page views. This brings the all-time total to 19.5M. There's quite a market for free Internet blather.
And this year's over 1000 comments from you is (I think) also a record. Many thanks to everyone who keeps coming by and especially for commenters.
Top referrers:
If anyone cares, here is a list of the top posts for traffic. It's interesting that most are pretty old:
So a lot of old posts still drawing traffic. It's gratifying to read them and see how well they've held up.
So goodbye to 2025 blogging. On to 2026!
The Register has a good article on the security conferences going on in Las Vegas right now: Black Hat, B-Sides, and DEFCON. The article is very accessible for non-security gurus and gives a really good flavor of what's what in the security research community.
Full Disclosure: I was fingered by SumD00d in the DEFCON "Spot the Fed" contest way back in (IIRC) 2006 when I was at Big Tech Company. I wasn't a Fed, but the experience was fun enough to be memorable.
If you are at least casually interested in what's happening in the Security community, this is a good 5 minute read.
17 years ago I put up my first post here. Around the same time, ASM826 - my brother from another mother - put up his first post on his blog, Random Acts Of Patriotism.
17 years later, we are still here. I almost hung up my blogging shoes but realized that the world needed Dad Jokes. Err, or something.
And ASM826 is still here, too. And a lonely place it would be, too, without him. We both need to do more firearms related posts. Range Reports, that sort of stuff. I shall endeavour to improve my output here.
It's weird that in another year, this blog would be old enough to vote.
Today is the day with the longest period of daylight (in the Northern Hemisphere; in the Southern it's the longest night).
Here in the Sunshine State we're not far enough north to really see much difference. Today's daylight will last 13-ish hours which isn't too noticeable. The reverse is true in Winter, when the daylight only lasts 11-ish hours.
But in Maine where I grew up (pretty close to 45 degrees North latitude) it will be 15:30 hours of light. Mom always hated winter because with only 9 hours or so of daylight it got dark around 4:00 in the afternoon.
But could be worse: Oslo (in the absolute south of Norway) will have almost 19 hours of daylight today. Maybe this is why Scandinavian films are so depressing - winter gives them only 5 hours of daylight.
So enjoy the sun (assuming you don't live in the Antipodes). And be thankful you don't live near Stonehenge. The freaks come out in force today.
Image re-enacted from the Wik
But eventually the sun will go down today (OK, not if you're in Fairbanks). Take us away, Kenny ...
So 2024 closed out with almost 1.6M views, and yesterday the odometer here turned over 15 Million.
Happy 2025 to all, and many thanks for stopping by. This place wouldn't be the same without you.
It's not super hard, you just need some things:
I was part of #5. Been a while since I dug up a stump.
Overall we are pretty pleased with how our preps went. We have a "hurricane kit" which is 3 storage tubs of stuff plus water jugs and equipment like a generator.
I plan on adding a set of tiler's knee pads to the kit for when I have to be on my knees setting up the hurricane shutters. I also think I'll add another 5 gallon gas can, just for an extra window. That will give be about a week of generator time.
I'll also get a one gallon gas can so that I don't have to lift 5 gallons of gas to gas up the cars. I don't like to keep gas around when we don't need it because you have to put in a stabilizer and it still ends up getting gunked up. I just fill up the cars (which keeps me out of the post-storm lines at the gas station) but transferring it to make the lift lighter would be good.
With the water cans we were in good shape, and we filled up the bath tub and washing machine for wash water. I am pretty comfortable that we could have ridden out a week fairly easily, maybe two with our water filters.
I'm thinking about getting Starlink for Internet because that will be back as soon as the storm passes; no linemen needed. The kit is $350 and install is ~ another $350. Not sure I want to spring for that right now.
I do think that a battery radio with AM/FM/Short Wave needs to be an addition to our kit.
I'm shocked at the number of neighbors who had essentially no preps at all. This was maybe a good window into what things might be if something serious happens. Since I'm the guy with the loud generator, this would make me a magnet. Ugh.
Back now - the Internet connection returned from where hurricane Milton blew it away to late last night.
We had a fair amount of damage. We figured we did when we heard the hurricane make weird noises on the roof. Ah, well - Florida. You catch a Cat 5 over your house every now and then.
I'll put up some thoughts later, but the one that really stands out is how I was the only guy with a working generator. Even people with medical devices that plug into the wall didn't have anything. It didn't look like most people did any prepping at all other than grab some extra toilet paper and maybe a case of water bottles.
I'm glad that I went to Home Depot for roof tiles on Thursday afternoon - there aren't any within a hundred miles now. We're newbies in Florida and even we know that was going to happen.
Lots of media huffing and puffing, but not much rain (especially when compared with Debbie last month) and not too bad for wind. Power stayed on the whole time, so yay.
So in lieu of other blog fodder, here's an insanely cool story about a guy who made Linux run on a 1971 Intel 4004 chip:
Hardware hacker Dmitry Grinberg recently achieved what might sound impossible: booting Linux on the Intel 4004, the world's first commercial microprocessor. With just 2,300 transistors and an original clock speed of 740 kHz, the 1971 CPU is incredibly primitive by modern standards. And it's slow—it takes about 4.76 days for the Linux kernel to boot.Linux on 50 year old hardware has got to be some sort of record.
...
While it has no practical purpose, the Linux/4004 project demonstrates the flexibility of Linux and pushes emulation to its limits.
Lots of changes in the last sixteen years. I started blogging because of the Heller decision. The gun control wars continue, but it's an entirely different landscape today than it was then. Good.
I do miss a bunch of the old regular blogs I used to link to - Gormogons, Aretae, Fosetti, a bunch of others. Miguel has now joined them. I can understand the feeling as I came within a whisker of giving up myself 9 or 10 years ago.
It's weird that the blog has been around long enough that it saw Wolfgang's entire life, from when I first got him to that last awful day. I still go back through the "Wolfgang" tag once in a while. He's a dog that is taking some getting over.
The blog saw me move from Massachusetts to Atlanta to Maryland to Florida. That's a lot of moving around in not a lot of time.
And it let me introduce The Queen Of The World to you. She kind of scratched her head at the whole blogging thing at first, but she's the one who suggested I post about film scores and Dad Jokes. I need to do more of both of those.
Because the old passionate topics - gun control, global warming, politics - have gone stale for me. I've said pretty much all I have to say on them, and have come to realize that the world has gone mad and shouting into the wind is just adding hot air to cold. I actually feel better doing Dad Jokes, not getting myself all wound up.
The Queen Of The World has helped here as well.
I emailed Miguel when he hung up his blogging spurs to tell him that I was sorry to see him stop but understood his motivation. He was very gracious in his reply, complimenting my stuff - but I am convinced that my best blogging days were long ago, 2009-2012 or so. That's a decade in the rear view mirror.
So apologies if this place isn't what it used to be. I'm not what I used to be, and that is probably a good thing.
In any case, when I put up my first post, what I did not expect at all was:
16 years
Almost 14,000 posts
Over 50,000 comments (!!!)
Over 14 Million page views (!)
I guess that predicting the future is hard, especially about things that haven't happened yet ...
Anyway, thank you to everyone who stops by here. It's the readers - and especially the commenters - that make this place what it is, and keeps me coming back.
So yesterday had the expected and the unexpected. The procedure itself went smoothly - it was a Mohs surgery, where they shave off layers of skin and then have a pathologist analyze them under a microscope. If there's cancer in the cells, then GOTO 1 and repeat. Keep going until there's no cancer left. Simples.
I assumed (correctly) that they'd numb my ear right up so I wouldn't feel a thing. What I hadn't expected was that I would hear everything, up close and personal. Scrapey-scrapey. Then when they were done they cauterized the area, which kind of sounded like crackle-crackle. And the whiff of black smoke that floated past and the smell of burnt barbecue just added to the whole experience.
Still, it's better than cancer.
My cancer was Squamous Cell Carcinoma, the middle (on the deadly scale) skin cancer. The one you want if you get one is Basil Cell Carcinoma, which doesn't really spread. The worst kind is melanoma.
I had noticed a bump on my ear that didn't go away. I went to the dermatologist after a couple months because, well, it didn't seem like it was improving with age like a fine wine. While I was there I pointed out various other bumps and blemishes which they were unconcerned with, but they told me that they weren't going to let me leave with the thing on my ear. And so off it came.
A week later they called and said that the pathologist had determined squamous, and I had to come back in for Mohs. And none of that waiting six months for the next open appointment slot, can I come in next week?
And so there I was yesterday. Done and cancer free.
What was unexpected was how bad I felt yesterday when I got home. Everything was out patient, and I drove myself. But I kind of felt like I had been run over by a bus. Probably it was something unrelated (summer cold) that happened at the same time. Spent most of the afternoon in bed and crashed early, but feel pretty good now.
Lessons learned:
Skin cancer - hey, it's Florida, right?
I expect this is just going to be a pain in the butt (well, ear) since we caught it early and since it's not the nasty variant. Back later.
We have family visiting, so I've been busy taking grand kids to the beach.
Posting will be light for a couple more days. Go check out the folks on the sidebar.
Borepatch 2, Air impact wrench Cletus 1.
I soaked it good with PB Blaster including underneath the housing that the bolt went into. Let it soak overnight. Got my strongest ratchet and c-a-r-e-f-u-l-l-y used the cheat bar.
Out it came. Yay, me!
Thanks to everyone who left comments yesterday. Still not happy that a one hour job turned into a whole day, but onward!
Working on the Jeep, spinning wrenches. Except the last guy who came near a couple of bolts torqued them down. I even got a cheat bar to get some extended leverage on the ratchet wrench.
Broke the danged wrench. Those bolts don't want to spin.
I have them liberally soaked with penetrating oil, and will see how they are tomorrow morning. I'd hate to have to take it to a garage to get bolts loosened. Sheesh.
Since I have a compressor, maybe I'll just head out to Lowe's and get a danged pneumatic impact wrench. Fight fire with fire. But this is really annoying, turning a one hour job into an all day one, just because Cletus was in a hurry to clock out and drove the bolt down.
Oh, and how do we get to the bottom of who sacked Rome? Better get a 1930s Gumshoe:
Yeah, I did The Queen Of The World as the Queen of the World. And as a mermaid. It's awesome.
Highly recommended.
