Incoherent ramblings

Brilliant political marketing: in a lawn sign of all things!

September 12, 2021 Incoherent ramblings , ,

I’m not a fan of political signs.  I don’t think they do any good, except to show off tribal affiliations.  Nobody is convinced by a lawn sign, and if reading a lawn sign changes your mind, then you haven’t looked at any of positions of the party.

The argument for political lawn signs must be one of marketing, but I’ve always wondered what the cost benefit ratio for this particularly stupid form of advertising is.  There is no room for any substantive content.  However, I’ve now been proved wrong, by the following sign:

(photo credit to Connor, who took this nighttime drive by in a car, sending it to me figuring I would be amused.)

Year after year, one is forced to conclude that there are no good options in any election, and this sign channels Brewster’s Millions, to point that out brilliantly.

I don’t believe any vote that I cast, assuming I do so, will do any good.  My vote, as always, has no meaning, and serves to perpetuate the fraud that we call democracy.  A small subset of the population will succeed in voting for somebody who has won enough of the popularity contest that they will get to enact their desires to become as corrupt as it is legally possible to be.  Those new corrupt popularity contest winners, will not be anybody’s representative in any real sense, not even to those that voted for them.  That is especially true here in Canada where the party whip rules forbid one’s “representative” from expressing or acting on their perception of their constituent’s desires.

Other than the PPC, here are my voting options:

  • Voting liberal will aid the return of the vapid puppet, “hair-boy Trudeau”.
  • Voting conservative will probably result in a federal clone of corrupt Ontario dictator Rob Ford.
  • An NDP vote is like a vote for a tax hike.
  • Voting green is pointless, as they probably still don’t have a well thought position on anything (in their defence, I haven’t re-read their party platform to see if it has changed.)
  • There is no Libertarian candidate in my riding this year (and there has never been a strong one.)
  • Believe it or not, there is actually a communist running in my riding this year.  How many millions of their own people have to be killed by communists before it is enough to acknowledge by those seeking to resurrect this evil?

It is certainly true that “The other options suck!”

Based on interviews with Maxime Bernier, not any sign, I had planned to vote PPC this year.  They seem to be the only party that is taking a stand against the abhorrent authoritarianism that is running rampant in the name of covid-19.  That should be the only issue people should care about right now, so it is clear how I will vote, if I decide to play the fraudulent democracy game.  I have no optimism that such a vote will do any more good than any previous one that I have ever cast.

Reimaged Windows laptop for dual Windows-Fedora boot.

June 6, 2021 Incoherent ramblings , , , , , , , ,

I used my funky usb-C external drive enclosure to facilitate an operating system switcheroo today.  I wanted to try a Windows/Linux dual boot configuration, something that I haven’t done in a long time.  There was enough room on the original 1Tb SSD, but I’d bought myself a 2Tb SSD for backups (and crypto-mining experimentation) and decided to repurpose that as a replacement drive for my Windows (xpg) laptop.

Since both my new and old drives were both M2 SSD drives, I was able to pop the old drive and put it into my external enclosure.  If I messed up reinstalling either Windows or Linux, then at least theoretically, I could have recovered by just putting the old drive back in.

I didn’t mess up the installation and now have a brand new dual boot configuration with Windows-10 and Fedora-34.  I’ve got WSL-2 + ubuntu-20 on the Windows side:

and a grub boot selector for the operating systems:

and the Fedora-34 desktop configuration for the native Linux installation:

I opted for Fedora over Ubuntu, since I figured both track the state of the art fairly well, but with Fedora I don’t have to keep looking up the dpkg equivalents of the rpm commands I’ve used for so many years and have memorized.

I have a whole bunch of install fine tuning to do still, but have all the bare bones now installed on both sides.

Having an external enclosure for the SSD made migration really easy.  I was able to mount it after my Windows reinstall was done, and just move my old \Users\peete directory.  I’ll have to weed out the bits that I don’t care about, but I’m now ready to blast away the partitions from the original laptop installation, and then use that 1Tb drive for backups and file transfers between machines.

100 pushups a day challenge with my brother

May 12, 2021 Incoherent ramblings , ,

My brother and I have started a 100 push-ups a day challenge, with the goal of at least 100 each day for at least 100 days.  This is our second attempt, as the first attempt fizzled after a week or so (that first start was very painful, and this reboot has been much easier.)

We are now a few days in to this second start, and I’ve managed my part of the challenge, but my brother who doesn’t have a lazy sit-on-his-ass job like I do hasn’t met target a couple of those days:

It’s been at least 20 years that he has been far stronger than me, but those ancient memories of being bested in wrestling and arm-wrestling must still be strong in Erik’s memory!

Second order surface tension

May 9, 2021 Incoherent ramblings , , ,

Here’s a bubble of bubbles, kept from overflowing the edge of the cup like a plain old bubble.

Nice day for a bike ride today

May 8, 2021 Incoherent ramblings ,

I’m not sure how long it took me, but only one person passed me, despite all my fat.  It was a gorgeous day, and nice to get out on the awesome bike that Sofia made me buy for myself.