smkellat

Location: Ashtabula, Ohio

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: LaTeX2e, IDRS, MARC21, Incident Command System/National Incident Management System, HF phone

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephenkellat

Email: smkellat@gmail.com

And my part of Rural America was supposed to have a local government broadband taskforce meeting next Tuesday. The county commissioner concerned won't reply saying whether the meeting is canceled or not though the emergency declaration said county offices are closed to the public. I sent the commissioner a message imploring him to find a way to keep the matter going as there will be an end to this crisis and our decaying, limited, legacy infrastructure that the local broadband incumbent is not investing in is holding us back.

I'm not holding my breath.

There are basic communications principles that pre-date having an Internet. One of them is that emergency traffic let alone health & welfare traffic have precedence over routine traffic on communications systems. There can be voluntary prioritization of traffic to support emergency response now or the full legal power of multiple nation-states can be brought to bear to ensure traffic supporting emergency response gets handled first.

What we have here is a critical vulnerability in that too much is dependent upon one backbone.

As a halfway answer to this, I ask if specific plane types are required on these routes. If not then swap out current craft for smaller vehicles so that your pilots can maintain proficiency time while still moving cargo and the reduced number of passengers. Flying isn’t like riding a bike and pilots can’t sit in simulators ground-side indefinitely. You won’t be swapping in a Dash 8 for an A380 in every case but smaller Embraer jets in lieu of the Airbus heavies could help keep the training/proficiency side going.

RSS powers podcasts. 110+ feeds in my feed reader come from extremely diverse sources. It isn’t dead yet.

Spotify, iHeartRadio, and others want to wall off podcasts but their selection is still too limited. Frankly their apps frustrate me greatly. Trying to play things back on Xubuntu while writing is too much of a challenge compared to pairing gPodder & VLC.

I have a blog and a newsletter that doesn’t duplicate the blog. Using TinyLetter forces me to shoot for long form pieces and to get them in good shape. I also end up approaching things in the newsletter that I don’t on my blog.

I can’t remember if the bot on Telegram is fed by RSS but that’s how I spotted this anyhow...

This could lead to good outcomes. Mr. Dorsey is effectively an absentee landlord, metaphorically speaking, for this online property. I am hopeful.

Living in a crossroads area for shipping readily shows me this is coming. Supply chains are freezing up. If I don't see as many tractor-trailer rigs on the road and not as many ships in the harbor then supply chains will freeze. "Just In Time" will break rather catastrophically for some companies.

Oddly enough, the trade war with China instigated by President Trump unintentionally has had a good outcome in light of the current coronavirus worries. Companies that went all in on offshoring to China started diversifying again where their plants happened to be located. That start to deleveraging might keep a few manufacturers afloat as some or all operations per company relocate.

A tweet thread where you complain about AJAX popups and other Javascript-based slow downs seems utterly ironic. Whatever happened to having your own blog? Even better is that these tweets were from 2017.

This makes me yearn for building an ncurses-rooted non-GUI flavour of Ubuntu.

I’m glad I dumped my shares before they wind up being canceled. They only depreciated to being worth a sum total of USD$5.00, alas. Better than getting nothing.

Alphabet is 70% held by institutional investors so those investors might ignore something like this. Insiders are reported to hold just under 6% of the shares and the remainders are out on the market. The holders of the 30% of shares not held by institutional investors may have a good question as to who exactly owns Alphabet and who gets to set its direction.

There are employee-owned companies and worker cooperatives out there. Alphabet isn't one of them. The cost of buying up all the shares to turn it into such a thing looks fairly large at the current market rate.

Cloudflare is publicly traded under the symbol NET and has quite a number of institutional investors. A list can be found here: https://old.nasdaq.com/symbol/net/institutional-holdings

If all those companies are fronts for various parts of the US intelligence community then we're really screwed, I suppose.

They're late on filing their current reports with Companies House.

So I see this article extolling the virtues of being a nation of skyscrapers and flats.

Then I smack into a paywall.

Looking around at my nice, rural century home that has a monthly mortgage payment still far lower than the cheapest local rent...I’m not going to bother trying to find the article elsewhere. Living in a skyscraper is just not for me. Even the apartments I’ve lived in previously were comfortable ranch-style ones out in Nevada that weren’t very densely packed.

I have no need or desire to move to Manhattan or Silicon Valley for the time being let alone Cleveland or Pittsburgh. That shouldn’t be problematic yet the current crop of economy optimizers might not leave me that choice. We shall see in due time.

Raw possession does not always equal the legal right to dispose of something. To an extent this could be treated as a very limited scope data breach depending upon who your attorney is in the matter. Litigation outcomes should be interesting since the firm the strategist worked for is suing to regain legal custody of the materials.

Will we see it all crumble away eventually? Rapid iterative innovation has left us plenty of debris.

What a farrago of lies and deceit this is! Calling Open Access a “legacy regulation” is a rather excessive bit of lying. These journals depend very much on tax dollars which is why every library that drops them destroys their bottom line and the base of individual subscribers (teaching faculty) generally don’t pay for their subscriptions themselves.

Frankly in reading this I was just shocked to see the Trump administration accused of possibly taking steps forward that the Obama administration did not/would not. We should only be paying for research once. Paying publishers repeatedly for access to somebody else’s work isn’t right in this age of competing budget priorities.

I maintain a separate website for my sole proprietorship that is fairly tiny made with MkDocs. I have a blog running on ikiwiki. The sole proprietorship’s Facebook page mostly points you back to one of those two sites. There is a tiny amount of JavaScript on the MkDocs site but it is manageable.

Living in rural Ohio with flaky cable broadband means uBlock stays almost permanently on. I’m sure high engagement ads are nice things. Waiting a couple minutes for them to load makes for a poor user experience out here on the fringe of the qualitative digital divide.

Anxiety disorder, bipolar, and more will definitely help paint targets on you. I'm really not liking this brave new world we're heading into. This tech will only be as smart as the lowest bidder makes it and frankly that should terrify anyone with family who don't fit a stereotype defined as "normal". I have family that would need protection from something like this.

Earnestly and seriously:

Ed Mastery: The Standard Unix Text Editor (IT Mastery) (Volume 13) by Michael W Lucas

https://www.librarything.com/work/book/158901150

To an extent, I feel good that the Secure Scuttlebutt guys are behind this.

A good direction to develop would be to talk to FEMA and its global counterparts. There is literature on what is needed in disaster. Instead of an insular tech-world development of such a platform having disaster response practitioner insights might be useful.

There really is not a decline in numbers, though. This seems more an attempt to make a single widget to replace needing hams. Communications in disasters is not so much a function of having the best power toys but rather the best operational doctrine.

Hams have the operational doctrine and also the flexibility in terms of tools to use. If the message doesn’t get through on one frequency band, change bands. If your transmitter modulation isn’t working, switch modes all the way downward to continuous wave Morse Code if you have to. The sun has been on a multi-week streak without sunspots so High Frequency communication will take operator skill to get messages through.

Start here: https://www.treasury.gov/tigta/auditreports/2019reports/2019...

3-5 years?

1. The IRS primary, secondary, and cold backup tertiary mainframes will have failed and not have sufficient replacements in place.

2. Library of Congress Subject Headings will be incomprehesible due to controversies over how they are not sufficiently "woke" and library subject cataloguing will have to reach back to revitalize the work of Minnie Earl Sears to try to maintain order.

3. There will be an Internet. There will be the FAANG properties. They won't overlap anymore.

Selectively erasing our past feels a little like Stalin’s team of airbrush artists. Who or what will disappear next?

Well, we could always seem if somebody does a revival of the text-based Reddit Terminal Viewer: https://github.com/michael-lazar/rtv

And living in my rural area, Sprint and TMO are both weak performers. Consolidating may make for an okay third carrier.

Doing better. I gave up on my job a month ago. Not sure what I’m going to do now.

Hindsight is very distorting. It was not inevitable 10 years ago that we would get to this point now.

California insists on following its own drummer.

There is a National Emergency Communications Plan available at https://www.cisa.gov/necp. Duly-licensed amateur radio operators are discussed under AUXCOMM in the plan as a type of resource states typically choose to utilize. Again, California's needs are apparently different than the other 49 states. More power to them, I suppose?

Sometimes in trade and negotiations the most powerful tool is being able to walk away. Relative to the PRC, it is past time that we start walking away. There are certainly other partners available on the metaphorical dance card who are easier to deal with.