Category: Life

Ah, gentle reader; I have been on the alert for the “no truck with” slangism since the 1990s, and I have come across it twice in books I’m reading or I have recently read, one from the 1920s and one translated in 2007 (you’ll see in the book reports, gentle reader, eventually).

But I also want to point out that the inestimable Kim du Toit used the very phrase today:

Needless to say, the U.S. will have no truck with this nonsense — at least, the current generation of U.S. leaders won’t….

Have I ever seen the phrase where someone or something has truck with? No, it’s always the negative.

MfBJN will keep you up-to-date on appearances of this phrase. Check back often!

Not sure why my beautiful wife put Braunschweiger on the shopping list, but Braunschweiger she will get.

You know, we have been married for a couple of years now, and I am seemingly less equipped to read her handwriting than when we were younger. Of course, I have trouble reading my own handwriting at times. But I posit a thesis: Handwriting is used less to communicate between people these days and is more used for only taking notes for one’s self or for making lists. So it’s becoming, generally, less legible for other people to read than it had been.

Ozarks pumpkin harvest is less than normal so far: Late season heat helps pumpkins reach maturity

Ladies and gentlemen, the pumpkin harvest at Nogglestead:

One pumpkin smaller than a baseball. Our watermelon harvest was similar, but apparently the deer have cleared the melon bed pretty good as the autumn has approached. We had one mound of pumpkins, one of watermelon, and four of cantaloupe which did produce three or four melons for us.

The subhead says Late season heat helps pumpkins reach maturity. We had plenty of that. What we lacked for much of August and September was rain which is what fills them.

Overall, the gardens of Nogglestead provided us with about what we could handle, actually, except for tomatoes. I had a couple of zucchini per week for much of the summer from three mounds. I had a late harvest of a pound or two of radishes which was about what I could eat. We had enough cherries to make one pie before they disappeared. We never did get a blackberry harvest suitable for a pie. And I haven’t actually dug out my potatoes yet, so who knows what lies beneath.

The deer, though, made out like the hooved bandits they are.

Thirteen years ago, I said:

I’ve had the shell of that empty Sears monitor sitting on a desk in my garage since then. I haven’t settled on idea what to do with it. Fishbowl? Make it into a fake fireplace-style decoration? I’ve also got the shells of a number of LCD monitors that I’ve planned to put corkboard in or whiteboard cut down from larger ones I pick up, but I’ve not jumped on that either.

So much of the multi-year garage cleaning project is being overwhelmed by the sheer number and volume/cubic footage I have of craft materials of various stripes that I’m not entirely sure I want to give up just yet. I mean, what can I do with the computer monitor shell? I’ve removed the cathode ray tube and electronics. I could, I suppose, make it into a corkboard or a whiteboard using the bezel and scrap the rest. Or maybe look for an LCD screen that fits it which I can put a Raspberry Pi in it for a digital picture frame or something. But it’s not been pressing for the last thirteen years, to say the least.

Pretty sure I did something with the eMac bezel though.

I’ve added a new t-shirt to the CafePress store:

You can order one if you’re so inclined here.

Strangely enough, my CafePress store has proven to be the most profitable endeavor of my “throw it out there” attempts at passive income. I’ve had it since 2004 when I made some off-color bumper stickers and then some political things which never sold. But when I started adding IT things badged with QA Hates You, I sold a couple–especially Project Manager Wall Clocks which have sold enough that I got a check from them back when they were new and which still sell steadily enough to cover the costs of having a CafePress storefront.

The Nico Sez line of apparel? I bought one to see how they would look. I’m wearing it as I type this blog post, actually.

The two apps I have on the app store? I sold one copy of Boxing Drill Companion to someone in Eastern Europe on the day I released it. I sold two copies of Dr. Franklin’s Art of Virtue Tracker: One to my beautiful wife, and one to her mother (who uses it every day, by the way, so: yay(?)). Which is almost $3 in revenue against $99 for an annual Apple developer account.

The books? Yeah, build your brand online didn’t work; not only did I spend $300 for a cover, but I sent out 50 to newspapers, magazines, and bloggers and got, what, five reviews? I’ve sold fewer than 100 copies of it and a handful of copies of the other books, but I’ve done my own covers for the others and have not sent out review copies except to the Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Contest or whatever it’s called. Which might explain one of the reasons that I haven’t written much long form in a while.

And this blog? I think I got a check from Google AdSense once over a decade ago. Against the ever-increasing costs of hosting and, fortunately, no longer the cost of updating the SSL certificate, but, yeah, not a profit center.

With apologies to Stephen Crane, a poem:

A man said to the internet,
“Sir, I exist!”

Maybe I should focus on more Civilization IV. I lose less money that way.

I have said that Nogglestead has the trenchcoat schtick, where you can find anything at times somewhere (in the linked example, I found a jump ring on the kitchen counter that I could use to make a pendant out of an English pound coin).

But sometimes the things one finds are of dubious utility.

I’m on a multi-year project to slowly clean out my garage which is not impassable but is getting there. For too many years, it’s been a life of “clean out the car by throwing things from the car into the mess beside the car” and “just put it down anywhere when you’re done with it” even if that is atop something else just put down instead of away so that after a few rounds or strata of that behavior, you cannot find anything. Or even the multi-year process of cleaning the garage involves taking things from the shelves and sorting them into bins and then determining I need more bins, and then leaving the bins scattered around the floor for weeks until I get additional binnery which I just set down atop other things when I unload them from the car (combining the best from “clean out the car by throwing things from the car into the mess beside the car” and “just put it down anywhere when you’re done with it”).

Also, as I’m culling things, I’m building up a solid bank of boxes of items to donate to charitable garage sales and whatnot (but they only arise once a year or so, so I cannot clear them as they go).

So, basically, I’m moving the clutter and reorganizing it and, once in a while, throwing something out. But not a lot. Maybe a couple of cubic inches every couple of months move to the garbage bin. I even finally discarded the child-sized foam martial arts sparring gear that my boys have not used in almost five years and have since way outgrown. The web-drenched martial arts bags, though, remain on the pile.

Whenever I think about buckling down and doing it, I’m overwhelmed. Which means the “process” is mostly me wandering around and nibbling at the margins. It came to a head Thursday when we had a garage door man in for a bit of repair, and he asked if I had any bolts. Ah, gentle reader, I have several sizes of carriage bolts that I have used, this summer, for repairing my gates–along with matching nuts and washers. But when he asked, I could not find them. Hours later, it occurred to me that I’d used a bucket to carry them to the places where I used them, so instead of looking for them in bins under the piles on the floor, I should have been looking for buckets under the piles on the floor.

So while the garage door man worked, I wandered around the garage, wondering where, again, to begin.

And I began by taking this from one of the built in shelves:

And putting it into a box on the rick of donations that we’ve gathered.

Model rocket wadding? Why do we have this? I don’t remember the boys having model rockets at all, although I don’t remember every gift they received (or even that I gave them) which they might have messed with for a day or so and then set aside. I haven’t seen any other parts of model rocketry in the garage. I just…. don’t know.

So it goes into the donations bin in hopes someone will find a quarter’s worth of use out of it, but….

Well, I wish every decision I had to make was this easy.

You would think it would be just as easy to determine a fate for every pine board that our family has broken in martial arts classes testing over the last fifteen years would have an easy solution, but no. I think I need another bin or two to contain and consolidate the collection. So I will leave them where they are for now.

I don’t want to spoil it for you, gentle reader, but our holiday trunk this year will be used car salesmen. So I have been haunting thrift stores trying to find not only loud sports coats and shirts for our family to wear but also a cheap used Little Tikes car for our tableau.

I went to Red Racks, and I had trouble finding the men’s apparel because it was on the opposite side of the store from the other clothing. As I wandered, I found the toys section and one of the standard orange Little Tikes cars for $20. Perfect! I might be done shopping the first week!

So in my rotation through the store, I found the men’s section and sourced an ugly yellow plaid shirt, and I was passing through the records section on the way to the toys. I half-heartedly flipped through some of them, and as I headed to the toys, some guy was wheeling the car to the cash register.

So I know how this feels.

I cannot tell you how many of these I have seen at garage sales this year because I was not looking for them. Now, I can tell you how many I will see: 0.

Doesn’t help that cross country season runs right up to the Trunk or Treat, and I won’t have much time to crawl yard sales looking. But we’ll think of something else if we don’t find one or two.

Ted Gioia laments the loss of American arts, including jazz music, opera, books, and whatnot from the middle part of the century (Is Mid-20th Century American Culture Getting Erased?), but he says:

When you walk into a library, you understand immediately that it took centuries to create all these books.

Clearly, he has not been into a local library recently.

I suppose university libraries still have old books in them–depending upon how old the university libraries are themselves–but I am pretty sure I have long lamented how few books are in the local library branches here and how many of them are skewed toward contemporary books–and how you would have to order the classics via inter-library loan.

I mentioned when I wrote about recent housekeeping practices at Nogglestead that I dust upstairs every week (fallen to mostly every week) and the downstairs every two weeks (mostly).

But the practices mean that two things are not dusted often at all.

I use Swiffer Dusters for dusting, which comprise a handle and a disposable synthetic feather duster that’s probably coating everything I own with deadly microplastics and probably only knocks the dust to the floor so that the vacuum can redistribute it at a later time. But: When I’m dusting the upstairs, I close the gate to the lower level so I can dust it, and I can reach the large piece of Ethan Allanesque bourgeois art with the extended handle. And when I go downstairs, I stage the box of dusters on the table down there as I go since all the books and videos down there tend to take two or three (or four sometimes on mostly weeks).

So I tend to overlook the light fixture and the Packers objet d’art on the lower part of the stairwell. Probably for months at a time.

So there you go: Should you happen to visit Nogglestead, now you know where to run your finger to embarrass your hosts.

So I posted on LinkedIn yesterday:

Because prompt engineering is nothing to figuring out Infocom’s parser back in the day, much less completing one of their games (which I only finished Deadline using a hint book because I didn’t have the patience to figure out the parser and navigate the obscure challenges in the games).

Facebook memories today coughed up a Zork-themed post featuring two former commenters here from 15 years ago, back when they were reading the blog and commenting here:

I keep intending to clear some space or reconfigure my office desks so I can hook up a Commodore 64 or Triticale’s Commodore 128. I sure was able to lay my hands on much of the Commodore software I still have from, uh, a couple years ago. Just to dabble with it briefly and probably put it away again.

I sent a picture of my youngest in his Hallowe’en costume to my brother. The costume includes a loud shirt and a loud sports jacket, and I then asked my brother if he remembered how we got hand-me-downs from the White family who lived next door to us in the projects. Which was true; I was pretty fly for a white guy as I got not the latest fashion, but the late fashion, which was why I wore bell bottoms in 1981–because they fit, and because Dewayne had worn them a couple years earlier.

“Weren’t they black?” he asked.

I had to set him straight about some of our neighbors and schoolmates:

• The Whites, the Browns, and the Blacks were all black.
• The Sorensons were white.
• The Kolacinskis were yellow.

My brother’s best friend was in the latter family, whose father was obviously of Polish extraction who married a Chinese woman, and the three children looked more Chinese than Polish.

Milwaukee, neh?

It was a time of America being a melting pot, unlike the stew(ing) metaphor that superseded it.

I recently purchased a furniture clamp so that I could glue the seat of a table chair which had split at a seam. Well, I could have glued it, but I needed a furniture clamp to hold it together by the sides, not just the top and bottom.

But now that I have a furniture clamp, I have lots of furniture to glue.

Case in point: The table from the set with the chair which needed gluing had a couple of seams that let go. These were on the feet of the pedestal of the pedestal table, horizontal seams, and both pieces of the split feet remain affixed to the pedestal.

So we took the leaf out, inverted it on a couple of sawhorses (so we would not stumble over it in the darkness), I bought another furniture clamp, and I glued them.

Clamping vertically, that is, to hold the pieces together, was difficult due to the curve of the feet, so they did not end up with a real tight or even even join, but they’re better.

In addition to inspecting the setting of the clamps, Nico really wanted to get into the hollow center of the pedestal–to the point I figured out how I would take the table apart to get him out. In doing so, I discovered that the feet pieces were not affixed with dowels but with bolts, so I could probably have removed them and glued them better apart. If they don’t hold, I’ll do it right the next time.

At any rate, I now have two furniture clamps of different sizes, so maybe I will start constructing fine furniture (although that would require more tools and/or training on my part).

But I can’t help but note that two items from this set have needed gluing this year. So perhaps the glue is hitting its expiration dates in it. Or maybe these pieces suffer extra stress when sliding/moving them since they’re on carpeting and not tile, leading to different torquing stresses. Or both.

So what was my point? Eh, probably “Look how handy I am!” And/or “Look at Nico, doing the sorts of things which have earned him his own Web site.”

Those of you who have followed Jack Baruth for any amount of time know that he is a connoisseur of fine, expensive watches. I am not.

But when my old Apple Watch stopped holding a charge, I thought about whether I would replace it. Mostly for two reasons:

• We’re still running on a lean mixture here until I fill out my work schedule. Or maybe permanently if we get used to it.
   
• I’m thinking about de-MBAing my life a little. I mean, the Apple Watch, even my old one, tracked a whole host of metrics–stand goals, active minutes goals, exercise goals…. All arbitrary and determined by an algorithm I didn’t know. Still, I found myself working to hit those goals even if they didn’t make sense in doing so. Like getting up and walking around the house when I awakened in the night to get a stand hour in case I had a long nap or long meeting later in the day. I mean, I can tell how I’m doing by how I feel and how much exercise I’m getting (currently: not much) by how I feel and whether I have the good muscle soreness or how I sleep at night. So do I need to hit artificial targets determined by Cupertino? Or am I just nerfing on this because I’m not getting my allotment of martial arts classes and gym sessions anyway? Time will tell.

So I dug into my bureau for old watches (including a daddy watch) that I wore before my FitBit… what, seven or eight years ago?

Of course, after that length of time, the batteries were dead. In the olden days, I’d take it to the shopping mall and one of the guys at a kiosk would have sold me a new battery and would have installed it. But if I’m not going to the gym, you know I’m not going to the mall (well, unless it’s an antique mall). So I popped open the backs and got the memory sizes, and…. Of course, I did not have any button batteries of that size in hand.

I mean, I have all sorts of button batteries of various sizes from remotes, children’s toys, and other things, but not for actual watches. But since they’re sold in ten packs on Amazon for $6, I order ten and they linger in my battery cabinet for…. Well, archeologists will eventually have to tell you when they’re done lingering, as I’m unlikely to use them all.

So now, look at la-di-dah me, with two watches from which to choose:

Of course, I only wear the silver one because a brown watchband might indicate I would have to match it with something. And color-coordination in clothing is not a skill of mine.

So now I have 8 more of these batteries in the cabinet. I can take up watch repair (battery replacement anyway). Or, if I live for thirty years, perhaps I can replace the batteries on these watches four more times. And they’ll likely spend most of that time in the drawer where they’ve spent the last half-a-decade-and-more since I don’t wear this kind of watch in the house, and I don’t leave the house all that much.

Glenn Reynolds on his Substack: Report from the Other Side.

Yeah, I’ve been feeling like I’ve been hit with the aging stick myself lately–and I’m over a decade younger than Instapundit. My kids are fixin’ to be adults (the youngest is a senior in high school now). I’m not getting to the gym or martial arts as much as I would like–and it’s not because I’m buried with work. I just can’t be arsed sometimes.

Although, gentle reader, if you’ve been around long enough, you have probably seen variations of this post for, what, ten or fifteen years by now?

I guess it’s just who I am. Probably rooted in the fact that I’m now not long from 60, where so many of my matrilineal family died.

I guess this is the Saturday morning reminder to step away from the computer. And perhaps the housework which fills Saturdays as well.

If you reveal these 3 things in an interview — you most likely won’t get hired, says CEO.

To sum up, the three things are:

1. ‘I want to start my own business someday”
2. you “value work-life balance.”
3. Another thing that should be kept under wraps in an interview — although it’s a common experience with many corporate workers — never say you were let go as part of your company’s recent layoffs.” [I am not sure where the quote actually begins since the paragraph ends with a quotation mark, but there’s not an open quotation mark–ed.]

You know, the first trips me up. I already own my own consultancy, and interviewers will ask if I’ll still do contract work, and I say, “Well….” And I explain how sometimes former clients and friends will ask me for a little help with something, a couple hours a week for a couple weeks, and I’ll take that, but not another full time contract. But the truth does not satisfy them as much as the lies told by people who will actually do just that.

The second doesn’t trip me up.

But I dodged the last when I quit my last full-time job. The company I worked for was absorbed into the parent company, and they let go the operations staff and management and kept the engineers. But they didn’t have any QA engineers, so they were not sure what to do with the two of us. They decided to turn us into full-stack engineers (along with the front-end engineers), but I looked at the collection of 250 engineers brought into the mothership from the other companies, and I knew that somewhere along the line, that number would be trimmed. A lot. So I was kinda given the option of being “managed out”–that is, they would give me a software engineer title (but not the pay, natch) and start the process in motion to let me go, which would have involved writing me up for not being a good software engineer and putting me on an improvement plan (whatever they do in big corporations) that I would not meet and then they would let me go. It would get me a couple extra months pay and maybe an annual bonus, but I said, nah, I have my pride. Which means I can honestly answer that I’ve not been laid off (except for my first job, but that was a headcutting for the stock market move–my manager there worked his network to get me a second job, and he convinced them to hire me even though they’d just hired the two technical writers for their open positions).

But you know what does trip me up?

I am probably too comfortable in the interviews. I overshare stories of my experience, I draw parallels and explain evolutions when they just want me to declare I have such and such experience. And I can be a little glib.

I’d like to try to improve on this, but I have not had even a screener in a while (and that one was to prove that Americans could not do the job). Still, I applied to a couple of interesting-looking jobs today, and I’ve got two active part-time contracts, and I’m making progress on my next mobile app project. So don’t cry for me, Argentina.

Jeez Louise, everyone has been slagging on that imported communist who would be mayor of New York:

One little probably spur-of-the-moment and probably impromptu TikTok video later, and suddenly everyone is Hans or Franz.

I’m not jumping on the bandwagon. Because I tend to plateau around 45. Coincidentally, that’s why I dodge the question when someone hears that I go to the gym and asks me how much I can bench. I can sleep on a bench for hours, I say.

As you might know, gentle reader, I am an intermittent weight lifter and have been a member of one gym or another for most of my adulthood.

I tend to be diligent in spurts, and then slack off, and then be diligent again for a while. Generally, I tend to get to a certain point and then rather plateau before I slack off. And I tend to plateau right around that 45. And then when I come back to the gym after a couple of months of slacking off, I have to start my way back to it.

In a bit of my defense, my workout is not geared to driving toward a big number max for one or two reps. I tend to want to do a lot of reps at whatever weight. So I can do eight or ten at 45. I have gotten back into the habit of starting reverse pyramids there and then backing off the weight by five pounds and doing eight or ten reps all the way down to the bar. Which ends up being, I dunno, a hundred or so reps total. Not 1 at a couple of plates.

I don’t tend to work with a spotter anyway, so I have to make sure I don’t work completely to the point of failure, or I’ll have to hold a bar at the failure point until some stranger rescues me (it’s only happened once, and that was enough).

Bloody hell, I don’t even calculate the max. I just pay attention to how much weight is on one side. Because that’s all I need to remember, not the calculations of what a man I really am.

This is spoken as a guy who went into the weight room in high school and could not lift the bar alone if it had the heavy screw-on collars you never see any more.

So, yeah, not doing some sort of Internet clout dance on this particular instance. And it’s a waste of time to do so.

Well, unless you have blog-inches to fill.

But the guy was not afraid to lie on the bench, knowing his limitations. How many of the ha-ha! crowd would not?