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Digital Hoarding

I am a digital hoarder. I admit it. But occasionally being one pays off.

It took a couple months longer than I initially anticipated, but next weekend I’m finally getting this back from my repair guy in Prescott—along with the distressing news that after he’s finished with his current queue of equipment, he’ll be hanging up his soldering gun and enjoying a much-deserved retirement. (He noted that since I’d already contacted him about my other Kenwood receiver to go ahead and bring that up as “it’s already in the queue.”)

What does this have to do with digital hoarding? Well, I asked Randy if he knew of anyone who could fashion some genuine walnut end panels for the receiver to replace the crappy vinyl veneered ones that it came with. He said he did, but after checking with the guy he reported back that he wasn’t interested in taking on the project.

Well, shit.

When I got my initial Kenwood KR-7400 back in 2007, I’d contacted someone via the AudioKarma website who fashioned new end panels for me. Unfortunately the AK account I had at the time was long gone and I had no way of tracking the guy down now.

Or so I thought. A cursory search through the website was a bust, but since I am like a dog with a bone and not easily deterred once I’m on a mission, I got to thinking…what about old emails? Problematic, but it might work.

In 2007 I was still on a Windows machine using MS Outlook for mail. On a whim I pulled out the external hard drive where I hoard stuff. While I thought I’d saved all my emails from back in the day, it was still kind of a surprise to discover yearly archive files all the way from 1997 through 2008.

I knew they’d come in handy some day!

While I don’t use it, I do have Outlook on my Mac, but I wasn’t sure it would be able to read files that old. (Lord knows Word balks at opening any of its own files older than 2003.)

Not to worry. The 2007 .pst file imported flawlessly and almost immediately I found the email string between myself and the gentleman who fashioned the panels. And it turns out my memory really is shit; the panels weren’t solid wood as I’d thought; he had merely stripped the vinyl off the existing MDF and applied real cherrywood veneer in its place. I could’ve sworn they were solid wood all these years, but obviously they were not.

I fired off a email to him yesterday asking if he remembered me and if he’d be interested in veneering these “new” panels for me. As of this morning the mail hasn’t bounced back, so the address is obviously still active, but who knows how often it gets checked…or if he’s even still alive.

Fingers crossed.

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Of Balloons and National Security

The balloon. 

From Greg Fallis:

Jesus suffering fuck. Republicans are terrified of everything but guns–the one thing we KNOW kills thousands of Americans every goddamn year. They’re terrified of gay folks, terrified of the entire concept of gender that’s not based on a toggle switch, terrified of people of color, terrified of beliefs that don’t fall within their wildly idiotic interpretation of Christianity, terrified government agents will break into their homes and seize their gas stoves, terrified of books they haven’t read, terrified of surgical masks, and now they’re terrified by a Chinese balloon.

“My concern is that the federal government doesn’t know what’s in that balloon. Is that bioweapons in that balloon? Did that balloon take off from Wuhan?”

This was no ordinary fucking idiot who said this. This was a special fucking idiot. This fucking idiot was Congressman James Corner, the Republican Chair of the House Oversight Committee. And he said it on FOX News, of course, the primary venue for fucking idiots. This fucking idiot has access to a massive amount of information; he’s a fucking idiot with a staff whose job includes researching issues of national concern and informing him so he won’t come across to the public like a fucking idiot.

I’m not a member of Congress. I don’t have a staff. But I have a Chromebook (I could have just used my cell phone, but the display is smaller and my eyes get tired). So let’s see if we can answer Corner’s concerns.

Did the balloon take off from Wuhan? Nope. Okay, first–because words matter–it’s a goddamn balloon. Balloons don’t “take off.” Balloons are inflated and released. It’s not a fucking missile. Beyond that, we can with a certain level of accuracy backtrack the balloon’s path based on its current height and known patterns of wind currents. And hey, a whole bunch of meteorologists did just that, and we can say with confidence it was released somewhere in west central China. Wuhan is in east central China. So, nope.

Do we know what’s in the balloon? Yes and no. I mean, yes we know what’s IN the balloon, since all high altitude balloons are filled with some lighter-than-air gas, like helium or hydrogen. But he’s talking about the payload. The stuff the balloon is carrying. And no, we don’t know what the payload is. However…

Is the payload a bioweapon? We don’t know, but almost certainly nope. First off, it would be massively stupid for China to attack the US. Secondly, even if China was stupid enough to attack the US, a localized bioweapon attack would be an incredibly weak opening salvo of a war. Thirdly, even if China was that stupid, a high altitude balloon would be a really inefficient and ineffective delivery system for a bioweapon attack.

Here’s a question this particular fucking idiot didn’t ask, but is being asked by lots of other fucking idiots: A) Could the balloon be carrying surveillance technology? Sure. But why? China launches a lot of rockets capable of carrying sophisticated surveillance technology–and by ‘a lot’ I mean they’re second only to the US in the number of racket launches. If China wants to conduct surveillance of troops/bases/deployments, they have the capability to do it without resorting to a balloon.

The thing about balloons is they’re at the mercy of the wind. And yeah, we know general wind patterns at different altitudes, so while it’s possible (by changing the altitude of the balloon) to generally guide a balloon, they can’t be sent to spy on a specific target location. In addition to the wind, high altitude balloons are sensitive to the weight of the payload, to the amount of helium/hydrogen used for inflation, and even the air temperature at the time of release. Balloon guidance is largely a crap shoot; you know the odds, but you don’t know the outcome. To attach surveillance tech to a balloon and hope it drifts by something worth seeing is a really dumb surveillance approach.

Another thing. People keep saying “This balloon is the size of two (sometimes three) school busses,” as if that’s somehow threatening. The balloon IS A BALLOON. Even a really big balloon is just a latex membrane surrounding a lighter-than-air gas. The balloon may be really big, but that doesn’t mean the payload is really big. If the payload was the size of a couple of school busses, then the balloon carrying it would probably be the size of a football stadium.

But but but the military says they won’t shoot it down because of the risk of “debris could land on people or homes“. So doesn’t that mean the payload must be big? Nope. It means if you shoot a missile up in the air, the missile will come back down. That’s how gravity works. Could the US military shoot down the balloon over a rural area to minimize the risk? Sure. But the least expensive air-to-air missile (AIM-9X Sidewinder) costs US$430,818. Add in the cost of jet fuel (and that shit ain’t cheap) and we’re talking about spending maybe half a million dollars to take down a balloon. A balloon, for fuck’s sake.

So just what in the popcorn fuck IS the balloon and what’s it real purpose? I don’t know. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out to be just an underinflated weather balloon. Underinflated because a properly inflated weather balloon is designed that as the balloon gains in elevation the gas inside it expands to a volume larger than the balloon’s capacity to expand, at which point it…pops. The payload then returns to earth on a parachute. An underinflated balloon won’t reach that height and so won’t expand beyond its tolerance. It can just wander along until the elevated UV light at that height degrades the latex and it pops on its own.

Is this situation a violation of US air space? Yes. It may be accidental, but yes. But it seems highly improbable that the balloon or its payload, whatever it is, is a threat to US national security.

The actual threat to US national security is the Republican Party.

 

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If You Haven’t Seen It Yet…

DO IT.

I’ll admit I’m late to this party.

I’ve have seen two series in the past couple months that absolutely left me gutted. This is one of them. The other was American Horror Story: NYC. For those of us of a certain age…these two series reflected our lives, albeit in two very different ways. AHS focused on the terror; It’s a Sin not only gave us the unspoken uncertainty swirling about our daily lives, the discrimination we faced, and the abject sorrow of the late 80s and 90s, but also embraced the unbridled joy before the plague. Memories I thought I had safely sequestered to the back of my mind came rushing forward in a way I never expected. Tears of joy and tears of sadness streamed down my cheeks. Far too many scenes that perfectly mirrored actual events in my life and the lives of those around me.

And in what has to be a first for a historical drama, with only one exception It’s a Sin got the music down pat. Not only were the songs used in the soundtrack musically accurate by year, but also by season. Someone in the production was paying attention.

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