At long last, I have a job. I’ve actually been pretty sure of it for some time, but the process of getting a sure-thing offer has been bureaucratic, so I’ve held off posting about it until it was indeed a sure thing. It’s at a Fortune 500 company, not a startup, so bureaucracy is to be expected.
All my past experience to date indicates there are no truly good matches for me in the high tech world, so I’m not expecting this to be a one. The one time I did find an apparently good match, it didn’t last. Realistically, that’s about the best I can expect from this gig: 2 to 3 years before the level of change accrues to make it no longer a match for me. At the least, I have every reason to expect it will be better than the egregious mismatch that led me to depart from my previous job.
My hope is that will be sufficient time to allow me to pursue opportunities out of the high tech world by then. I was faced with the task of attempting that transition right now, when things are just not quite to the point where I’m financially ready for it. Now it seems I will have time to prepare.
I did get the job by breaking my Taleo rule; even though it was at a firm that uses Taleo, I applied anyhow, because the listing indicated the job was a far better-than-normal match for my particular skill set. I figured that if I took care to use every last buzzword in the job listing someplace in the data I fed into Taleo, I stood a better-than-average chance of getting a phone call in return for my efforts. I didn’t actually bother to enter in my entire résumé by hand, because I could fill out the Taleo forms honestly for my past two jobs and end up using all the required buzzwords.
I figured that the hiring manager would be mostly interested in my résumé, and if my attempt at hacking my way through Taleo was successful, I’d have a later chance to amend that information and make it complete. The cost in time and effort would become worth it once there was a very good chance of being hired if I did so. (The cost in time and effort is not worth it otherwise.)
The moral of the story is that no set of hard-and-fast rules can always be applicable to all situations. One has to have the flexibility to make exceptions.
My start date is Tuesday the 4th. That means it’s time for a combination end-of-summer and celebratory camping trip, starting as soon as possible. I’m about to start packing this afternoon, and plan to be underway after breakfast tomorrow morning.
I plan to visit Neah Bay and revisit Lake Ozette. As the wording implies, I’ve never been to the former place at all, despite long being curious about just what the northwestern extreme of Washington state is like.
Neah Bay was actually the alternate destination for this trip; several weeks ago, when I came up with possible places to visit, the Mowich Lake area of Mt. Rainier came up at the top of the list. However, it’s supposed to be cloudy, rainy, and quite chilly at that altitude for a good chunk of the next few days. The coast will still be damp at times, but I can expect the temperatures to be milder. Mowich Lake will have to wait for another year.
So I’m about to head off. It’s unlikely you’ll see anything more posted here until I return.
Now we move on to one of the other predictions in my earlier post: the stage where the deal makes the world less safe from the risk of war, because it means Trump realizes he was Baby Kim’s rube. Not only that, the deal crumbled at the moment when the noose really seems to be tightening around Trump’s neck with respect to the Mueller investigation, giving Trump an even greater motive towards bellicosity. There’s nothing like war to distract the masses from a domestic scandal, after all.
Tom Nichols doesn’t seem to think this is likely. I wish I could be as sanguine as Nichols on this one. Yes, Nichols is correct in that Trump is no master at quantum multidimensional political chess; events of the past several years have shown clearly that Trump is barely capable of playing political checkers. But Nichols is also a conservative and a member of the defense establishment, which will naturally tend to lead him to turn a blind eye to ideologically (and career-wise) inconvenient insights about ruling classes’ propensity to use war for domestic political purposes.
So while I certainly hope Nichols will be proven correct (and he might be, Trump is definitely incompetent), I can hardly be sure about that.
Analogous to how fascists (and Trumpism is a form of fascism) believe that whatever the fascist leader says is by definition always right, fascists believe that only political outcomes that create fascism can ever be legitimate. Therefore any election that undermines Trump’s power must by definition be illegitimate.
A blue wave election will be said to be the result of millions of illegal aliens voting, the result of foreign collusion, the result of Deep State collusion, or any number of other pretexts. Even if the winners are allowed to take office (and it’s an open question if all of them will be), the resulting Congress, and anything it does, will be “illegitimate” in Trumpist eyes.
The same will apply to any presidential election in 2020 that fails to return Trump to office, or to place Trump’s annoited successor into office. It will be “illegitimate.” Odds are high that Trump will declare a state of emergency and refuse to leave office if he runs and loses in 2020. And that’s if he doesn’t declare one and try to override a Democrat-controlled House or Senate first.
Ultimately, the only solution is likely to be a willingness to fight Trumpism via various means of direct action. For the time, I do plan to support electoral means of reining Trump in, but I don’t expect widespread success.
I’m mainly doing it for sake of argument so that I can confront liberals later with an example of the demonstrated impotence of their chosen method: I chose to suspend my doubts and help you try it your way, it didn’t work, now can we discuss other means?
I only hope that this works. A big part of me worries that liberals are in general so terrified of taking any personal risks that they will by and large opt to choose submission to fascism over struggling for liberty.
Can you see the many parallels between Donald Trump and the regime (first Chávez, now Maduro) that rules Venezuela?
It’s not biased to either the left or the right. The politically deluded on the right will find it difficult or impossible to acknowledge Trump’s misdeeds. The politically deluded on the left will find it difficult or impossible to acknowledge Chávez’s or Maduro’s. It’s an equal-opportunity screen.
If you are not for liberty and against authoritarianism, then you and I really don’t share that much in common, sorry.
If Apple is really going to dump real keyboards, I will stop using their products.
Per the article, yes, Apple’s current keyboards have very little travel. As such, they have very poor tactile feedback and I find them unpleasant to use. I haven’t bought an Apple keyboard for a desktop machine in years, and if I’m using my laptop on a desk, I will plug it into a real (classic IBM Model M) keyboard using an adaptor.
If I’m traveling, I put up with the suckiness, because basically all laptop keyboards suck. The laptop form factor dictates the small travel that makes them suck.
But if Apple makes its laptops emulate the awfulness of a stupidphone, game over. The lack of real keys is one of the big reasons why I refuse to get a stupidphone.
And yes, “stupidphone” is a much more accurate term for the things, considering:
Non-existent tactile feedback, as already mentioned,
Very limited battery lifetime,
Bulky, awkward size,
Poorly-coded, software-based user interface that makes use as a phone more awkward than a traditional cell phone.
I’ve spent much of the summer building an HF portable ham radio station. I chose the µBITX kit from India, with a case from Amateur Radio Kits (also based in India). This was mainly done on the basis of:
Low current draw (particularly on receive), and
Low cost, because money is scarce right now.
The µBITX seemed to satisfy both requirements and still had fairly good reviews. Its biggest annoyance is that the receiver doesn’t have an AGC (so volume varies greatly depending on signal strength) or an AM mode (which limits its usefulness for shortwave listening). All in all, though, it was still a good deal and I am not disappointed with it. For under $200 and some assembly work, I got a decent HF portable rig.
That leaves the antenna. I’ve fought the portable antenna struggle a bit before. My first such purchase, several years ago, was the Buddistick. I was not impressed, mainly because the loading coils are extremely awkward and fiddly to adjust. You must hook one of these special banana sockets onto the coil at exactly the right point, and the tiny hooks that engage with the coil are a pain to both engage and disengage. Worse, you virtually never get the right spot to tap on first try, so you have to fiddle with the darned things multiple times to get the antenna tuned up. So scratch that idea.
I came up with the idea of using a doublet fed by window line and tuned with a balanced-line tuner (the latter item purchased used for about $30 at a hamfest). That idea ended up being dumped (after building and using the antenna a couple times) for a variety of reasons:
Window line is a pain to deal with. It’s stiff, plus its conductors are brittle and fracture easily, plus there’s no good ready-made connectors for them that screw together and resist spontaneous disconnection (a must if the height and distance of the antenna varies due to portable use).
Putting an antenna into a tree is a pain. Antenna launchers are prone to tangle line and get stuck in the tree. Do this twice, and odds are you’ll have at least one headache. Spending hours putting a doublet or a dipole into the trees is a justifiable time expense if the antenna is permanent and going to be used for years. Not so for a portable one that will be used for days or hours.
A doublet cut for the 60 meter band is just under 100 feet (30 meters) long. That’s more demanding of real estate than your typical campsite can offer. And you still can’t use it on the 75 meter band, which is a big minus during a sunspot minimum (and if you’re interested in regional communications).
So enter the random wire. I did end up with an MFJ-971 tuner as a result of my doublet fiasco. Turns out it does an excellent job of matching most random wires as well. And I had the wire from the doublet I could salvage and use for the random wire.
But “random wire” is a misnomer: you won’t always get acceptable results from tuning up any old random length of wire. If your tuner is at the feed point, and your random wire is not even ¼ wavelength long, you will get no current peaks on the wire. This will seriously compromise its ability to radiate. If the random wire ends up being ½ wavelength or a multiple thereof, you will have a voltage peak at the feed point, which will frustrate your ability to feed energy into the antenna, which in turn compromise your ability to make the antenna radiate. One must choose a length which avoids these pitfalls at any frequency of interest. If one also wants to maximize portability, that means you must choose the shortest such length. The exact answer varies, but comes out to somewhere in the neighborhood of 72 feet, depending on who does the calculating, if you want to use all the ham HF bands from 80 to 10 meters.
That leaves the issue of feeding the antenna. The simplest thing is to just use a single lead-in wire. No coax (and no associated losses due to a very poor match between coax and random wire), no awkward, stiff, breakage-prone ladder line, just a nice, simple, inexpensive, easy-to-use wire. But “lead-in” and “antenna” are big misnomers. There is no difference between the two in this case; the “lead-in” will radiate just like the “antenna” does! Connect a lead-in wire to an antenna at a carefully-chosen length, and the length is no longer carefully chosen, and you might be at a multiple of ½ wavelength again.
There’s a simple, elegant solution to that problem: cut a piece of 72′ wire, design an insulator that can hold the near end of it using friction alone, use that for the near-side anchor, and connect the tuner directly to the single piece of 72′ wire. Place the near-end insulator wherever is needed to get the required bit of slack wire to serve as a lead-in. But that begs the issue of designing such an insulator.
This is what I came up with:
I used shock cord because I hadn’t brought enough rope to the test site.
It’s a 1/2″ PVC tee connector. One of the straight ends has been drilled with a 5/16″ hole for passing an anchoring rope through. The wire passes in through the 90° end and out the end opposite the drilled one. Where it enters, it is secured by a No. 4 rubber stopper; as the tension of the wire pulls on the stopper, it will merely tend to pull the stopper in tighter, thus the stopper holds the wire securely.
A random wire requires a counterpoise, of course: there is in reality no such thing as a “monopole” antenna; all antennas are two-terminal devices. What I am doing is trailing a 60-foot wire along the ground, plus using an alligator-clip lead to ground the tuner to my truck chassis.
How does it work? Quite well, based on my initial results. It seems to get out much better on 75 meters than my previous random wire (which was too short to have a current peak). It’s twice as easy to set up as the doublet (only one end must be launched into a tree, not two). It’s shorter than than the doublet, and installs at an angle, further reducing its real-estate demands. It can fit in a standard campsite. Yet despite the smaller size, unlike the doublet it allows me to operate on 75 meters. I noticed no slippage at the near-end insulator, which behaved exactly as intended.
There is a drawback to this design, and it is RF exposure. Because it doesn’t use transmission line to feed the antenna, this design will radiate in the immediate vicinity of the operator and radio equipment. That’s not so big a deal at QRP power levels, but I wouldn’t want to use this design at higher power. Overall, I consider the freedom to use a simpler antenna design to be yet another advantage of QRP for portable use.
Game’s up, goose-steppers. If you waddle like a fascist and swim like a fascist and quack like a fascist, chances are very good that you are indeed a fascist.
Printed plastic “guns” are a fucking joke. That’s because any plastic that a 3D printer can print with is way way way too weak to contain the energy produced by the burning powder sufficiently to impart significant force onto a projectile.
In order to make a firearm, you want metal. Some pieces of steel plumbing pipe from the hardware store will work far better than printed plastic. It’s been possible to make firearms from that ever since hardware stores have been selling steel pipe. The result is called a zip gun.
Read what I posted back in 2013 first (including the linked article) before you run off the rails about either a new level of threat due to unregulated gun ownership or a new level of liberty due to the newfound impossibility of regulating guns.
