Another two trucks came into the warehouse today, and one of them had – yes! – The Most Important Device In The Universe on it.
It’s not plugged in, so it might not look like much right now. But trust me – this is truly The Most Important Device In The Universe.
I’ve mentioned that I’ve started working with the Trumbull County Historical Society. I don’t think I’ve mentioned their new project.
John Zabrucki was born in Warren and ran a company called Modern Props that supplied high tech props for science fiction movies. Star Trek, Ghostbusters, Men In Black, etc. He retired last year and donated a few props to the historical society.
11 full truckloads of props.
They’re trying to get a museum going. In the meantime, all of the props need to be cataloged and stored. And guess who volunteered for that?
I’m wielding The Annihilator. No idea what movie it’s from, but when one runs across a box marked simply ‘THE ANNIHILATOR’, one must open said box.
My local brewery is Modern Methods. Their logo is a variant of Warren’s famous Packard Motor Car hood ornament, the ‘Goddess of Speed’:
Last night they were having a promotion for a local tattoo parlor – $50 gets you a beer and a flash tattoo. I’ve never had any, but I figured at this point everything that can sag has already sagged, mom wasn’t going to yell at me, and I didn’t need to worry about work. So:
Hell, I’d never even been in a tattoo parlor. This is The Box. It was clean, friendly, and everyone there thought me getting my first tattoo at 67 was a hoot. Good times!
One of my favorite museums – and one of the best collections of American art in the country – is just a few miles from me, the Butler Institute of American Art. I’m a member and go there often. It doesn’t hurt that it’s just around the corner from a favorite brewery, Noble Creature Cask House.
I went there yesterday because one of my favorite artists, Anthony Benedetto, passed away at the age of 96. I understand that he also sang. He’s got a lovely piece there:
While I was there, I looked around. They were having their Midyear Exibition. One of the pictures caught my eye:
It was taken by my next door neighbor. That’s her husband – and my house on the left.
And finally, something only a geek would notice.
It’s a lovely acrylic, but look at the border. Hm. All numbers above 31 and under 127. I’ll bet…
Yup. ASCII for ‘Women’s rights 2022’.
As promised, more food. Cioppino is one of my favorites, and yeah, it’s probably not the smartest thing to cook or eat in this weather – but my porch herbs are calling me.
Recipe for enough for me for three meals:
Pro tip: Just like chicken noodle soup, I strain with a spoon and store the leftover broth and meat separately. The broth takes forever to warm up; if you do both at the same time your broth will be hot and your meat will be overcooked. Warm up the broth for 5-6 minutes and then toss the meat in for 1.
Rosemary focaccia, from Suzanne Dunaway’s No Need to Knead:
Measure the water into a large bowl. Sprinkle the yeast and stir until dissolved. Stir in the salt and four and stir until smooth. The dough will be wet and tacky. Cover and refrigerate overnight. Remove the dough 2 hours before shaping and let stand in a warm place. Preheat the oven to 500F. Port the olive oil into a cast iron pan and pour the dough into the pan. Brush olive oil over the top and sprinkle the top with 1 t kosher salt and the rosemary. Set aside for 15 minutes. Reduce the oven to 400 F and bake for 37 – 40 minutes until golden brown. Remove from pan and cool on a rack.
New system has been purchased. Details are here, but basically, it’s a
Ryzen 7 7800X3
Gigagbyte RTX4070TI Windforce OC
Samsung E 2TB 990PRO NVME GEN4 SSD
Gigabyte B650 Gaming X AX D5 ATX
and it’s fast as all hell. It’s got the biggest CPU cooler I have ever seen in my life:
I mean, seriously. I tend to keep old computer parts just to document for posterity. This is an advanced CPU:
(well, an 80286). And this is a big fan:
But that thing? That is a
I’m afraid to get too close to it.
Oh. And rather than going to all the places that Parts Picker suggested, I just went up to Micro Center. And it was $150 cheaper. Support your local computer geeks!
My first paycheck at Denman, my first real job.
This was for three weeks. So I was bringing home $351 a month! I had no idea what to do with that much money.
Well, that’s a lie. Of course I knew what to do with that much money. Maplewood Tavern, and 3.2% Stroh’s for everybody! And back when beers were a quarter, that went a long way.
By request! So I’ve been wanting to volunteer at the local Historical Society for a while now, but they were only open during the day. The Director and Outreach Manager are both good acquaintances – early 30 folks running the show. They’re doing an excellent job of archiving and cataloging, and they’ve just purchased and done a renovation of an archive building.
I asked what they wanted me to do, and they wanted to know if I was comfortable around computers. ‘Well, sort of…’. They’ve got volunteers reading 19th century letters and manuscripts which are rather unreadable, and deciphering them. For instance, this one from last week:
Not a lot easier to read in person, either. The volunteers do a great job of transcribing, but they are not the least comfortable with computers – so they write it out longhand. And my job, therefore, is to take the longhand and key it into the catalog app.
Yeah. They don’t want to tell all of these very nice little old lady volunteers they have to type it into a computer, and most of the LOLV are writing in longhand – so OCR doesn’t work, Either. So I’m doing data entry once a week!
Last week I probably made a mistake, though. If you google ‘Trumbull County Historical Society’, you won’t find their web page.
I strongly suspect that’s because of the SEO being done for them. I.e., none at all. For some reason I have yet to decipher the web site itself does not appear in DuckDuckGo at all. Facebook page and lots of links, but the site itself is invisible.
Last time in, I asked who was doing their web page – and faces lit up. “Do you know anything about WordPress??”. Well, enough to make weird posts every once in a while, but I’m certainly no designer. That’s OK; they’ve got a designer (and the site is actually not too bad), but he takes two or three weeks just to upload a new file. Could I help them out with simple file uploading?
And so it begins. Got the O’Reilly ‘WordPress: the missing manual’. We’ll see where this goes. I noticed their WiFi was using WEP. I’m desperately trying to keep my mouth shut.
Finally bit the bullet and upgraded my mail server to RHEL 9.2 from CentOS 7. Red Hat’s new ‘development’ licensing for under ten servers makes that a no brainer. Didn’t go too badly! Made me remember things I hadn’t worried about for years, like generating certs and getting Dovecot to work. And I am finally forcing myself to embrace systemd. For very, very small values of ’embrace’. I’m trying to wean myself off of the old commands. Alias is my friend.
[root@kyushu3 tboyer]# service whatever restart
Do not do that, asshole: whatever restart
[root@kyushu3 tboyer]# chkconfig –add whatever
Do not do that, asshole: –add whatever
[root@kyushu3 tboyer]#
I call it my mail server just out of habit. It is no longer my mail server. I have gone over to the dark side and signed up with Google Workspace.
It allows me to still do my wildcard email thing – an email to whatever@timboyer.org will still forward to me. It’s got better spam protection than my homemade spamassassin setup has. And the cost? $6 per month. Which is cheaper than I was paying for my ssl cert!
But I miss waking up and reading logs now. Ah, well. It was time.
Totally gratuitous link to Trumbull County Historical Society. I’ve started to volunteer with them and they need thwir link count bumped up.
So took the train down from Edinburgh to London. Because of a whole bunch of AmEx points and a good offer, I was staying at L’Oscar London. This is not my usual type of hotel. And I probably wouldn’t do it again. But it was a fun thing to do once. Turndown service and all that.
The reason I picked this hotel is that it’s smack in the middle of London, right around everywhere you read about in books. Half a mile from the Charles Dickens Museum; quarter mile to the British Museum;
two blocks from the John Soane. Short walk to the Thames:
St. Paul’s:
and right next to the neighborhoods you always read about in London: The West End:
Soho:
The best thing about this? My first trip to the UK in 1994 was to Brighton, for the UK Data General conference. Back when I was a young boy. With this game I have now officially played the silver ball from Soho down to Brighton.
My favorite, though, was the London Science Museum. Everything from Stephenson’s ‘Rocket’ to
It wasn’t in walking distance – but I have an Oyster Card, and the tube is simply wonderful.
Oh, yeah. I went to a pub or two. 🙂
Fantastic trip, and I will be going back. I flew Delta First, but the flight was actually run by Virgin Atlantic, so I got to take advantage of their lounge at Heathrow. This will give you an idea.
