Blackcap Blog

Published at 12:21 on 7 January 2022

It’s the officially recommended IDE of choice where I work, so I decide to give Eclipse another try, despite my history of bad experiences with it.

Fairly early on, it hangs. Hard. I kill it, and relaunch. Eclipse proudly announces its workspace is now corrupted, and exits.

So I use IDEA (the allowed alternate) instead. As a bonus, it is more familiar to me, due to sharing a code base with Android Studio. A few days later, I learn that’s what most developers use here. The official encouragement to use Eclipse is mostly a show to keep licensing costs for IDEA down.

Published at 20:39 on 6 January 2022

Biden’s much-belated decision to speak forcefully about the coup attempt a year ago is exactly the sort of thing we need more of. Alas, odds strongly disfavor seeing much more of it. Everything I have observed about the Democratic Party points to its almost total uselessness as an institution when it comes to confronting fascism and preserving democracy.

And lo, in the article linked to above, we see the following: “Biden’s remarks do not mark a permanent shift in strategy about how to handle Trump, according to the president’s aides and allies.”

There really is no plausible scenario for the next forty of fifty years except for the USA to become a fascist state much like Portugal under Salazar or Spain under Franco. That will do the historically necessary task of burning the Democratic Party to the ground. Then, eventually, a better generation of Americans, painfully cleansed of the shortcomings that paved way for Trumpist fascism, can rise and burn the Republican Party to the ground, a task even more historically necessary.

Out of all those ashes there will be hope for something better, but only then.

Maybe I’m wrong. I hope I’m wrong. But all the evidence I see today points to a scenario similar to the above.

Published at 15:47 on 18 December 2021

Why blow a chunk of change on a brand-new camping stove when I already have a perfectly fine old Coleman stove? Two main reasons:

1. I may want to do some short-distance backpacking or medium-distance bicycle camping, and the old Coleman is way too large and heavy to be practical for car camping.
2. CSA certification. The Province of British Columbia can be very strict about its outdoor burn bans. Not any old camp stove is exempt; the strictest burn bans allow only stoves with modern safety certifications.

The second one is the real stickler. The chances are remote of there being any issues, but suppose the worst does happen and my old Coleman stove malfunctions and erupts in a ball of flame that ignites a wildfire. Once the authorities find I am in breach of their regulations, I am suddenly on the hook for the full costs of that fire. Just way too risky.

Although those old Coleman suitcase stoves have a time-tested safety record, a fifty year old stove is just not going to have a modern safety certification. Even if it could pass a modern inspection (and I believe it could) the cost of certifying it would be way beyond the means of an individual. Far cheaper and simpler to just buy a new stove.

Because I dislike the waste and poor cool-temperature performance of disposable canisters, that means a liquid-fuel stove. The Dragonfly is one of the few currently-manufactured (by a well-known, reputable manufacturer, with full safety certification) liquid-fuel stoves that can do more than just a quick boil; its burner is designed to simmer well.

Just did a test burn (if the stove doesn’t work, I want to find out in the garden outside, not in the backwoods). First impressions:

1. The thing is loud. They are called roarer burners for a reason.
2. It is significantly fiddlier than the old Coleman. Both require set-up and tear-down but the Dragonfly requires more of it; it is not as much all in one convenient unit. Part of this is just the price to pay for it being more compact and light-weight.
3. Lighting process is different, but not appreciably more or less convenient than the Coleman one. No liquid-fuel stove lights as easily as a gas kitchen stove (and due to the more complex process of burning liquid fuel, none ever will).

Since it’s just a quick test burn, I don’t have as much to report on how well it simmers, but I’m not really worried about that, either. I did use a friend’s Dragonfly once about five years ago, and from what I remember it simmered just fine. Plus, it has a good reputation for being able to do this.

Why buy it now? Supply chains. Was going to buy one as a birthday present to myself last year, but they were unobtainable, and remained so for months. I would not be shocked to see a similar disruption as the next camping season approaches.

The short summary is that it’s not going to completely replace the old Coleman, but it will be nice to have.

Published at 14:43 on 4 December 2021

It is starting to look as if, contrary to initial expectations, it might actually be a thing. If so, coupled with its hyper-contagiousness, this is only to be expected from an evolutionary standpoint.

If you are a virus, killing your hosts is a bad strategy. You need your hosts in order to reproduce. And if you are a fragile virus with a limited viability (like the COVID-19 virus), you are under the imperative to reproduce or go extinct.

The most successful viruses are the ones that:

• Do not cause severe illness,
• Spread easily,
• Mutate rapidly.

This keeps the virus spreading and freely replicating amongst a large host population. So it would be no surprise if COVID-19 evolved along these lines.

If so, expect it to become much like your typical common cold virus in terms of concern. In fact, it might simply become yet another common cold virus; many colds are caused by coronavirus strains already.

Published at 19:18 on 30 November 2021

So, at midnight local time this morning, Barbados became a republic.

If you are in the USA, you are probably unaware of this fact. If you are in Canada, you can’t escape it. The news media are covering this story over and over and over again. It started a few days before the transition, and continues today, on Barbados’ first day as a republic.

This is obviously quite telling, as though there is presently no serious effort to get rid of the monarchy in Canada, the remarkable degree of coverage of what is an aspect of the internal affairs of a tiny island nation shows that many Canadians are obviously thinking about it on some level.

Published at 07:36 on 28 November 2021

New variants are precisely what one would expect in a world were many are left unvaccinated.

The Third World is precisely where most unvaccinated people are, thanks the the rich nations being unable to agree that it would be a net win to weaken (not abolish, merely weaken) intellectual property laws to facilitate more widespread manufacturing of (and lower prices for) vaccines.

That the new variant was detected in Botswana and South Africa is no surprise. Those are two of Africa’s most developed countries. The variant could have easily evolved in a neighboring, less-developed nation, and only been detected when it showed up someplace with the public health infrastructure to readily detect it.

As with the initial spread of the virus, border controls proved inadequate in preventing its spread. The variant was, however, nurtured by nationalism-driven greed: European nations (and the EU are the real bad guys in this one, the Biden Administration has been much more open to sharing the vaccines) valued their business elite’s short-term gains more than any longer-term benefits to humanity of sharing their vaccine technology more freely.

The one border control that would have probably helped is stricter and more-comprehensive testing of travelers. I expect countries to realize this, and institute such restrictions. It is for this reason that I do not expect the planned relaxing of testing requirements at the US/Canada border to last. I will consider myself lucky if the border remains open to non-emergency travel at all.

But it will all be a very poor substitute for the sort of sharing and cooperation that is really needed.

Published at 07:15 on 28 November 2021

Just in the last day, let’s sum up:

• Now that people are looking for it, the Omicron variant is popping up all over the map.
• Most but not all of those infected with it recently traveled to southern Africa; this means that community transmission is already happening worldwide.
• Most of the infected are symptom-free, meaning that they had no reason to suspect they were spreading the infection and therefore were unwittingly doing so.

And remember, this one is more contagious than the old variants (more contagious than even Delta).

The one good bit of news is that the high rate of asymptomatic vaccinated individuals detected means that the vaccinations do seem to offer a significant measure of protection. If the consequences of an infection are so mild that one does not even realize one is infected, the infection is not really a big deal.

The big worry is that it might be serious enough for enough people that it will create another surge in the hospitals as the new variant spreads.

On the personal front, my big worry is that the US/Canada border might slam shut in the next few days, possibly when I’m in the USA loading another batch of my stuff to take north to Vancouver.

Published at 08:25 on 26 November 2021

The new COVID-19 variant is even more virulent than the Delta variant, which in turn was even more virulent than the original one, which was itself shockingly virulent. Remember, the draconian measures that merely slowed down COVID-19 absolutely crushed seasonal colds and flu.

Add that to how the new variant is popping up all over the place in South Africa, one of Africa’s most developed nations (and hence with one of the largest amounts of air travel to the rest of the world), how COVID-19 has a long incubation period in which people are contagious but symptom-free, and how cases of the new variant have been found not only in neighboring Botswana but in Hong Kong, and there really is only one logical conclusion to be reached.

Hence, my headline choice.

Published at 07:50 on 22 November 2021

So, I try and order a bed online at Ikea. The first thing I notice is that there’s a lot of out-of-stock items. That’s not really Ikea’s fault, though, as supply chains are out of whack everywhere. So I persevere.

Oddly, nothing is asked about delivery scheduling through the entire order process. It’s strange enough that I abandon an order and think about it for a day. I decide that of course they will contact me so that a mutually-covenient delivery time can be arranged, and place my order.

Ha, ha. Big mistake. Rule No. 1 about the retail industry in North America: never, and I mean never underestimate how bad customer service is likely to be. Dead silence from Ikea, other than a generic “your order was accepted and entered into the system, here is your order number” response.

That is, until, get this, 4:57 pm yesterday evening, when I get a text message from Ikea saying that my order will be arriving between 9:00 am and 1:00 pm tomorrow (i.e. today).

I mean, really now, Ikea? You don’t know that most adults work for a living during weekdays and might need something more than zero day’s notice to schedule leave time?

Anyhow, I try going online to reschedule the delivery. Although their main web page claims you can do that, when I bring up my order status, there is absolutely no way to reschedule.

So I try calling them. It is now after 5:00 pm (they texted me at 4:57, remember) and their call center has closed for the day.

I figure their call center is probably in Ontario, so I call at 6:00 am this morning, because that’s 9:00 am Eastern time, and they should be open. My suspicion is confirmed. They dump me on hold and announce there’s a “higher than expected call volume,” which probably really means “precisely the call volume we expected, but since we don’t give a shit about our customers, we don’t care if they sit on hold for most of an hour.” Thankfully, they offer to hold my place in the queue and call me back when I’m near the front. I accept and hang up.

7:00 am rolls around, and no call back from Ikea. So I call them back again. Having just learned from experience, I ignore their offer to enqueue me and call me back and remain on the line. Within five minutes my call is answered.

The agent drops the headset and doesn’t actually say anything for at least a minute, despite my repeated cries of “Hello? Hello?” If they treat their call center employees as lousy as they treat their customers, however, that all makes sense. The agent is probably trying to scam a much needed break. So I stay on the line and eventually she answers.

I am told that, get this, if I reschedule, it will basically be the same process all over again: I will be told at very short notice when I must be there for them, and that will be that. Because, obviously, the customer exists to serve the merchant, and not the other way ’round.

So I cancel my order. And I am sure that is not the end of the story, and I will be fighting to get all of my money back, because it is my experience that a company that has bad customer service tends to have it all the way down.

Published at 07:25 on 20 November 2021

Since I now have a day job, I don’t have so much time to elaborate on issues during weekdays anymore. So let’s elaborate on the Rittenhouse acquittal today.

Yes, I am aware that self-defense law in Wisconsin makes it easy to acquit people in Rittenhouse’s situation. That in no way refutes anything I wrote in my previous post. It merely helps explain how and why Rittenhouse could be acquitted. The how and why was not what I was discussing. I was discussing the message the acquittal sent, and it sent precisely the message I said it did. If you don’t believe me, listen to the fascists who are so happy about the ruling.

The law that enabled the acquittal helps send the message, in fact. It provides evidence that the acquittal was no fluke, and any fascist in a similar situation to Rittenhouse will probably also be acquitted. The law basically says, “open season on Blacks and the Left, go at it!”

Second, just because the law makes it very easy for a white, right-wing jury to acquit a white, right-wing defendant (in front of what appears to be by all evidence a white, right-wing judge), don’t for a minute think this deference would be extended to a Black or a Leftist who brought a gun to a demonstration and shot someone. If the tables had been turned, if Rittenhouse had been Black, odds are the whole thing wouldn’t have even gone to trial: Rittenhouse would have been pursued by, and shot to death by, the cops in what had been ruled a justified use of force. Literally just about everything in recent US history points to this outcome, and only a fool would deny it.

So yes, it is every bit as bad as I said it was earlier, and none of the standard objections based on Wisconsin self-defense law change that. Sorry.