hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3003.txt

Episode: 3003
Title: HPR3003: 2019-2020 New Year Show Episode 4
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3003/hpr3003.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 15:00:33

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,033 for Wednesday, 5 February 2020.
Today's show is entitled Hacker Public Radio 2019-2020 New Year Show Episode 4.
It is hosted by Kevin Wischer and is about 162 minutes long
and carries an explicit flag. The summary is
8th Annual New Year Show from Star Wars to NASA.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support universal access to all knowledge by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
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And I would put him back on Mate and he's that's kind of been his favorite ever since, but he did not like cinnamon and hated it.
And I don't know, maybe he equated it with with windows is why he didn't like it, but he just didn't.
That's the thing with trying to sort of switch somebody over from windows is sometimes they really want to migrate for different reasons.
Yeah, they walk away from the windows experience.
That was actually true for me when I switched over to Linux and I started test driving different distros and different desktops.
I chose known, which was known to at the time over KDE because it looked less like windows and I wanted to make that mental separation in my head.
I didn't realize it looked more like Mac at the time because I'd never used a Mac, but you know that didn't play into it.
I just I wanted to get as far away from the look and feel of windows since I was not using it.
I didn't want to get confused in my head.
And I do use Mate quite a bit usually just with X to go with what now I'm sorry.
X to go. It's a remote desktop application.
So when I want to do things on my server at home, I'll just load up X to go.
Oh, interesting. Yeah, X to go sniff up used to the ms before.
Yeah.
Does that only work with cinnamon? Is there nothing like that in?
It works with basically any hold on. Let me bring up X to go because it has a list of ones that are supported out of the box.
And then you can also put in custom commands for it.
Let's see.
LXDE, KDE, GNOME, XFCE, Mate, Unity, Cinnamon, Trinity, Openbox, IWM, XT, MCP, I don't even know what that is.
So basically it works with X and anything that works on top of X.
Yeah.
I actually found X to go.
I will work in a lot of the places where compatibility with the desktop environment and VNC broken because of the because of movements to different display managers like me.
Let me ask you this.
What do you got to do to your router to make a hole to punch a hole through?
If you can SSH, you can run X to go and uses the SSH protocols.
You got to open a port in your router.
Yeah.
Well, it's, I mean, it's another remote desktop protocol. You can forward it over SSH, just like all the others.
Well, what I'm thinking of is if I could get it working on my body's computer, I could use it to, you know, fix problems remotely when I, when I can't always understand what he's trying to describe to me on the screen.
But I don't want to mess with his router that way. I don't want to put a hole in his router.
Well, my brother, excuse me, swears by team speak for that type of art.
What is a team speaker for that type of thing?
And that runs on Linux.
Yeah.
So what does that do that connects from he can initiate a connection with the server somewhere.
And then I can too and it connects us.
Yeah. Yeah.
And he starts the process on his ends by saying allow a connection.
And then it gives him a code that he then gives to you and you enter it into yours and it automatically connects and he still has to approve on his end.
How does it cause me to get through his router, though, wouldn't it have to go to a server somewhere first?
Yeah, but that's it's all on the back end.
So you don't actually see any of the that process.
And does it stay connected through that server the whole time or does it just do the handshake and step out of the way?
I think it does the handshake and steps out of the way.
It might do it through the server.
I'm not sure on that one.
Like I said, it's my brother that does that for people.
And who runs that server?
That's a good question.
And if they're good guys, how do we support them to make sure they keep running it?
Well, team viewer has actually been around for a while.
You see if they got a wiki page.
Yeah, team viewers are products been around for a long time.
I'm very torn on every suggesting people use it though because it does get used a lot by tech support scammers.
Like they actually they actually convince people to install the the support call client and then and then really, really mess with their machines.
Yeah, you see the anti scammers on YouTube.
They'll they'll get in contact or they'll be contacted by scammers and they'll set something up.
And they'll see that the person is using team viewer and sometimes is interesting and then sometimes it's just annoying to watch.
Now, but he's really good about being aware of scams.
He's he's very, very skeptical skeptical about anything and everything on the computer.
So I think I could trust him with that because he's not going to trust anybody but me to connect his computer anyway.
That's fair enough.
I mean, there was one.
There was a completely open source project.
Really wish had been continued, but it sort of stock development when Google code went away, unfortunately.
And it was actually packaged in the Ubuntu retreats as well.
It was called get so.
And it would it would form a reverse VNC connection from the since seeking support to the person providing support.
So that to to approve the support all had to happen was that the person seeking support put the IP address of them.
The like IP address of the person giving port into the client on their end.
So, you know, they obviously would anything like that if they weren't familiar and comfortable with the person providing.
Right.
Because you do have to approve it on your end.
Well, even with team viewer, you have to approve it on your end.
Yeah.
And the other thing is, I mean, with with get so was because it was a VNC connection.
The person providing support would have the port forward on their end.
But obviously if they were provide they'd know enough to do that.
That's what I was going to say.
Somebody's got to have a tunnel through their routers somewhere unless you're connecting with a server that steps out of the way.
Yeah.
I think I think in I think in the case of team viewer like there is a central server.
Sort of linking sessions.
Yeah, they're there.
I'm pretty sure there has to be.
I'll check it out.
I appreciate you posting the.
The Wikipedia page.
I'll check that out.
Also, if anyone wants to have a really detaining time watching summer's getting baited.
There is a there is a twitch streamer called bogger.
And he is online and more or less constantly either scamming a baiting service and really, really messing with them.
Or creating the tools that he uses to mess with them and showing his audience.
Is that the guy that goes in and like deletes everything off of their computers and then turns them into the government?
I don't I don't know if he goes that far.
He tries to stay on the right side of the law.
So he he has a nice audio setup where he plays like one of a number of familiar characters as far as they can hear over the.
The users.
And then he just keeps them on the line as long as possible and keeps confusing at them.
So he has like a grandma character and like a sort of late teens early 20s Valley girl character and an older guy character he plays on the phone to them.
And he has virtual machines set up that he obviously lets them remote into.
Wasn't there a piece of hardware two three years ago that you could buy and connect to your phone that would just run the scammers through a list of pre programmed responses.
I'm pretty sure there are systems like that.
But as far as I know, he uses an inbound line to a sip trunk on a geographic phone number.
So it looks like a residential number to the scammers.
Yeah, cool.
But yeah, some of the some of his highlights are hilarious.
Yeah, he's had a tech support and insurance and tax rebate scammers on blind for three or four hours on the end had them like, you know, he's had some sat like having nervous breakdowns but a singer to tears singing him homes, playing into the delusions of the character he plays that's like a senile grandma.
It's it's hilarious.
Now, I've said this on you random, but I'll repeat it here because reading this Wikipedia page is reminded me of it, but dark reader is one of my favorite Firefox extensions ever.
If you like a dark theme, this thing is awesome.
It works on just about every web page.
Somehow, it just seems to know what colors are light and what colors are dark and it's very good at inverting them more or less.
The only thing it seems to not do well is like the close buttons that you get in pop ups, not pop ups, but.
It's stuff like gone Wikipedia where they're roasting donations this time of year, it's hard to find the X to close that little piece of the window.
And a lot of websites have similar stuff to that.
But that's really the only thing that's difficult to see with this.
Everything else is so much easier on the eyes.
Yeah, for things like they've done Wikipedia and things of sort of they'll have they'll have odd chunks of CSS they've thrown in for it and some might not know what to do with them.
You can still find them if you know where it's at or if you're a good guess or it's fine.
And Wikipedia is fine because you can just scroll past it after your donate, of course, don't be ignoring donations to Wikipedia.
Oh, absolutely.
Hey, Mongo, you're keyed up full time.
Thanks.
We can see you key and up, but we can't hear anything except for what's not using the voice activity or was to talk is really the preferred method for group chats and mumble.
If you need help setting up to, you know, I can step out in the lounge with you.
You can text chat for now if you can't speak.
Well, gentlemen, I'm going to be do a good evening and dip out.
Yeah, maybe you don't tell Ken I was here.
Oh, he's always watching. He knows when you've been naughty or nice.
Damn, I thought you might miss it. He had it.
Oh, well, yeah, I still owe him a show.
It was nice talking here.
Yeah, take it easy, guys. Look forward to the next dev random.
Oh, it's you random. I don't think dev random's ever coming back.
Oh, damn. Oh, I was actually on that show.
That's it. Sorry.
I still do the same thing.
I'll take it easy, guys. Look forward to the next you random.
Have a good night.
See, Poke, this is when you promote and you drop the website address right now and everybody shows up because they don't have to wait because tomorrow new episode comes out.
I'm just saying it is you random probably dot org.
You suck at promotion.
I used to be good at promotion.
I was really good at promoting HPR for like three years.
Well, that's only three letters. So it's pretty easy.
It was six letters. It was HPR dot org.
Okay, fair enough.
But you're correct. Other than that, I'm pretty shit at promotion.
Oh, I have to tell you something, Poke.
Yes.
And when I say tell you something, it's something you already know and I'm just doing it to publicly shame you on stream.
Oh, go ahead. Let's shame me.
I'm going to need you to tell out that hard drive in your fridge and get the audio book episode that we need.
So we can release like the 15 after that.
I'm working on it.
I bought a connectic.
You did you really actually bought a thing?
Yeah, I bought a connectic. So I get about a thing.
Nice.
Yep. That's it's part of the plan.
Once the SSD gets here, I'll actually have some room to move that unthought data.
I'm kind of excited about this.
We can release like the five years old.
You'll put clubs that we have.
Damn time flies.
That sucks.
I wish time didn't fly like that.
I think it's been that long or close to that long.
It's probably been that long.
Okay, public shaming done just decided to throw it out there.
Ooh, I was going to ask you another question.
I was going to say before you do that, I bought a SATA hard disk drive connector.
And as far as I can tell, that's the brand name.
Nice.
Yeah, because it just came from Amazon.
The only other thing it says on here is made in China.
For some reason, I thought that was what it was going to say.
I don't know why, but I felt like that was probably a good call.
Yeah, that's the thing.
What was the other thing you were going to ask?
This is like the dumbest question ever.
But I looked it up and I didn't find an answer that made any kind of sense.
So what is advent?
Can you use the word in a sentence other than what is advent?
Like the holiday advent or I guess it's holiday.
I don't know.
Oh, it's like the four weeks before Christmas.
So that's literally all it is.
Well, I mean, there's different ceremonies that go along with it.
Not really ceremonies, but traditions that go along with it.
I would say more traditions and ceremonies for sure.
Okay, that's that's kind of what I got from my research.
And I was like, it surely isn't just that.
I guess it is just that.
Okay, go.
No, no, it really is just that you typically in the churches that I've been to each one of those weeks.
You read one of you read from one of the different four gospels since there's four weeks to go by.
And there are advent candles.
There's five of them really, but there's four of them.
There's four on the outside.
And then there's the Jesus candle in the middle.
And on each of the four weeks, you light a different candle.
And it's kind of traditional that you like have a kid do it because they get really excited to do it.
And you know, that kind of helps to have kids get excited about the stuff.
And then the Jesus candle you light on.
And it's done a little differently in every church, but more or less you like the Jesus candle on the Christmas Eve service.
And you use that candle to light to start lighting everybody else's candle.
And everybody in the church holds one and you stand around and sing a couple hymns.
Cool.
That sounds awesome.
It is actually it's it's it approaches fund.
I mean, there's fire involved that has to be at least some sort of fun.
Oh, yeah.
Well, we one kid lit one of the windows on fire one year, but other than that, yeah.
And a couple years ago, we somebody decided that we reused the candles too many times and it was time to get all new ones.
So they're like, hey, or someone throw this out and like, yep, I'll take care of the old candles. No problem.
And I've been making fire starters out of them for a couple of years.
Reduce reuse recycle all about recycling.
No, I was looking around and there's this thing called advent of code, which is like this coding challenge that they do.
And I was reading about it and they're like, you know, the advent holiday.
And I was like, what does advent I don't know what this is.
So I like we competed in it.
And it basically told me what you told me, but I was like, really?
I don't remember hearing anybody talk about this holiday.
So it's got to be something else, but apparently not.
At the other nice thing about advent is you can get an advent calendar, which is, you know, just the days of the four weeks leading up to Christmas.
And each day has a little door and you open the door and there's a piece of chocolate.
I'm so down for the holiday.
There's fire and chocolate.
Yeah, yeah, you know, you got to make sure if you bet by advent calendars that you give them out at Thanksgiving, because otherwise the kids going to miss out on the chocolate.
And also my fire starters kick ass.
I have no doubt of that.
I think we talked about those on you random.
I was going to say you've talked about making them. Did you make those out of the candles in the church?
Yeah, of course he did.
And one other candle because white ones are trickier to use.
If you throw a colored candle in with all the white candles, then you can see when the cotton is exposed.
Just melt the crayon in there or something.
Yeah, crayon or any candle like an apple cinnamon candle that's run out and there's just a few trade anything that's other than pure white works just fine.
So you can see when you've exposed white cotton fibers.
You can see to go full galaxy burning on this.
You go buy a really nice campfire smell candle.
And you melt that to make fire starters for your campfire.
I don't think I want to mix artificial campfire smell with my natural campfire smell.
That's, that seems strange.
Campfire smell candles seem strange to me.
Fair enough.
About Lyle said he was going to try to get on here this year.
We could text him until he does.
Just keep bugging him.
I see that as a challenge.
Challenge accepted.
All right.
Cool.
Oh, man.
I just got on here.
You guys are being like smoothie.
I can't do it now.
Wait, what?
He likes to sit this voice thing.
Oh, that nice.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Sorry, HPR.
We don't mean to keep you out of loop with Taj and Lyle and I are pretty smoothie most of the time.
When we're not blessed in each other's balls.
Okay.
So here's what's going to happen.
I'm going to record audio thing and send it to him live on the show.
So here we go.
Hey, Lyle, we are live currently on a higher public radio new year show that you said you were going to try to make it to.
And you're not here.
So I am publicly shaming you because I've already publicly shamed Pokey.
So yeah, talk to me in a minute.
Wait, what the fuck just happened?
He just responded before you sent that while you're recording it.
How many times shifting just happened?
I accidentally sent nothing for a second.
I sent the real one.
He's apparently typing.
No, that's me.
So your gift picture still didn't work.
You're shitting me.
That's the second time you tried to send it today and it's just broken.
It might not even be the same one.
Have two.
And by the way, for anyone playing along at home who doesn't already know signal is bitching.
Hey, the shaming worked.
Hey, Lyle.
I am shamed.
I didn't take much.
Was that one text each?
Yes.
That was for a markably easy.
Not that we were hoping for a challenge, but we would have made it funny.
Happy New Year, buddy.
You too.
So are you busy?
Are you hanging out now?
Or are you just going to say aye?
No, just hang out at my computer playing some cthulhu saves the world.
Or I'm sorry, cthulhu saves Christmas.
Instead of video game.
It is.
Interest in the instrument touch.
I mean, when cthulhu is involved, who knows?
It's like a guitar, but it's got 37 strings.
And you have to play them all with your face.
And the frets are all non-uclidean geometry.
Yes, that.
Non-uclidean frets.
You have to push through them from the backside through like a interdimensional glitch.
No, it's a new get new-ish game by a developer that I really like.
And it eaten the opening monologue.
Fourth wall breaks repeatedly.
So I just love how within two minutes.
We have Lyle on the show.
And we instantly hijacked doesn't turn it into you random.
You expected anything else?
I tried to get Poke to promote earlier.
But he didn't know the web address of our website.
So promotion fail.
You mean you random dash podcast dot info?
See, that's how you do it.
Poke.
Just like that.
That was my second guess.
Most likely, whatever your first guess was, I tried to get it and couldn't believe that.
I think you said like you random dot org or dot net or yeah, something like that.
Info is good.
I like dot info.
At least hasn't been hijacked by the dot org scam that we talked about on the last episode of you random dash podcast dot info.
Hey, there you go.
See you're getting better.
I'm working on it.
Thanks, Joe.
Yeah, no.
That's what friends are for us.
Lots of love in here.
So if we hang out long enough and Ken Fallon shows up.
Can we technically count Ken Fallon as being on you random?
He's written us enough emails that I think we can anyway.
Happy New Year to you folks.
Oh, I could call in that minor.
Thank you.
Happy New Year to Newfoundland.
We're only eight minutes late this time.
If you want to know how to be late, you have to go to a Linux log cast broadcast.
We do late, right?
You got to say the website there.
Are they going to jump on you too?
Linux logcast dot com.
See that's how it's done.
Yeah, Lyle dot com.
How hard is that?
If we got a dot com, we'd probably pay more than like $6 a year to host our website.
Oh, yeah, I know.
I'm only just busting balls.
AWS is good at some things hosting our website is one of them.
Is that what dot info means that it's an AWS site?
No, no, not info means I'm cheap.
Hey, you paid more than me.
All my sites are either dot TK or dot ML because they're free.
I thought dot info was just for the cool kids.
Yeah, he said cheap.
That means cool, right?
Yeah.
So my goal is either we get Ken Fallon on.
And he's been on you random kind of technically or honking my goo drops in.
And then we have like a you random Linux logcast crossover.
Ken won't go for that.
He's he'll find a link yellow loophole to get around that.
Something to work.
You guys are welcome to join the Linux logcast anytime you want to.
Thanks, Joe.
Yeah, I wish I could most of the time.
It's Fridays are just bad.
So that's I would love to.
It's just usually I'm not around on Friday nights.
I will warn you though, Joe, as one podcaster to another, you got to be real careful
with that anytime you want to invitation that has killed more Linux podcasts.
Then I think anything else.
Well, I think it's kind of in the idea of Linux like cast that it's anytime you want.
Yeah, pretty much fair enough.
I'm three new year's drinks in.
So this is not the anytime you'd want me to join Linux logcast.
Well, it's not Friday anyway.
Although I will say I'm going to start listening to you random.
We got him.
That's not a good idea.
I listened to a lot of podcasts that aren't a good idea.
I guess I am just going to come in and say hi and say goodbye.
I was already getting ready for bed.
So happy New Year's everyone.
Have a good one.
Happy New Year, man.
Love you, brother.
Love you, baby.
See you on our half show that we have the schedule.
Yeah, that.
Josh, I'm really excited about.
Well, because it sounded like you may have don't no spoilers here.
But it sounded like you may have enjoyed the death album, which means you're going to have to bring it for your next pick.
No, I don't say that.
All right.
I won't say it again.
I'm just going to recommend the program in again.
Can I do that?
Fuck yeah.
That kicked ass.
That may have been our biggest win thus far.
I guess depending on how much Lyle liked it.
I don't remember that one specifically.
I know it's moved on to like my top 10 list.
Maybe top five.
Yeah, digging a lot.
Not like I don't think they'd make my top five or even top 10 bands.
But album definitely.
And I guess if I put them on my like top 10 bands list.
They'd probably email and be like, yeah, which one of us?
Because we change all the time.
That's true.
It's like a collective.
Sounds like Cruciano.
They're banned a lot.
You may want to hang on to that idea, Joe.
Just in case you ever get invited on as a guest host.
Guest hosts are required to bring an album of the month.
I could do that.
I'd be sure to annoy you with the album that I brought.
Well, that's the way Taj does it, too.
Because it would be it would be like all covers.
I enjoy picking the album of the month for you.
Random to just witness how Pokey isn't going to say.
Man, I really didn't like what you picked.
But I want to try to make it sound like I at least liked it a little bit.
It's just going to be all metal covers of like random popular songs.
Oh, that's a Lyle does it.
Lyle hasn't done metal in a while.
He's been doing punk.
I don't see the problem with this.
Nothing wrong with punk.
I guess it just depends on which punk album you pick.
They got me worried.
I'm legitimately stumped about what to pick for next month.
Thanks, man.
Yeah, no problem.
If you guys are ever planning on inviting me,
you probably need a way to get a hold of me.
Yeah, I wanted you to drop a email in the chat here.
Because I think the chat is pretty ethereal.
I think it goes away once we close the window, right?
It doesn't matter.
I mean, I post that one on, well, at least one of my podcasts
every two weeks.
Yeah, that's a good idea to touch.
I didn't even think of that.
That's like cross pollination.
And I'm always, maybe not always,
but I've always been a fan of cross pollination with podcasts.
Yeah.
Let's see.
Here's the thing.
Joe has to start listening first,
because every listener eventually gets invited on.
So once he listens, then we'll invite him on.
That's true, Joe.
That is how we.
Okay.
I will, I will listen to your previous show.
And I will listen to your one from tomorrow.
Are you sad, right?
Yeah.
As long as Lyle's script works, which it usually does,
it should drop in midnight.
Actually, you could skip the, well,
I don't know if the previous show is the best one.
The one tomorrow that felt really good while we recorded it.
Okay.
I'll probably still listen to the previous one anyway.
Tomorrow's episode slaps as the kids say.
They say that now.
They do say that.
And I shake my head every time they do.
I've never heard that.
That's terrible.
It's not pretty bad.
Yeah.
They'll be listening to something.
They're like, man, this song slaps.
No, I never heard that.
And I have teenagers.
And do you mock them when you do it?
You listen to a song like, man, this bass slaps.
Well, I've never heard them say that.
This is the first time I've ever heard that.
I've heard about bass pounding, but never slapping.
Oh, slap bass is a style of playing bass.
Oh, okay.
It's really new.
Like I've only heard it in the last month or so.
But if I've just heard it in the last month or so,
it's been going on for six months.
I guarantee that if my kids ever used those words in my presence,
they would never live it down.
Just to be clear, slap bass has been around for many decades.
The word slap as in whatever Taj just said is new.
I've never heard that before, Taj.
I'm glad you warned me.
That's what I do.
I go into the trenches.
I get all the dumb lingo and I bring it back for the old folks like us.
What was the one that we called Clotu?
I can't remember what it was.
What?
It was like we were talking about kids are saying this really dumb thing.
And they were like, oh, savage.
Clotu is savage.
We have a savage episode.
Oh, Pokey.
Oh, all right.
All right.
Sorry.
All our episodes are savage.
You got to check it out at urandom-podcast.info.
That's what I'm talking about.
Oh, yeah.
Again.
Thanks, Joe.
Anyways.
Have you guys ever listened to electric city nerds?
No.
No.
You should check that out.
One of the cohosts from Mintcast.
He hasn't been on in a while.
But he runs that as well.
And he's let me guess spot on that once.
So if you've never listened to urandom,
you're probably not familiar with the interpition.
What?
Interpition?
What's the interp?
I'll be right back.
Ah, okay.
I understand.
I got it.
It took way too long for me to get.
Yeah, it's okay.
I am totally subscribing to this.
This looks cool.
Yeah.
Those guys are pretty good.
And then I tried to get them to collaborate with one of the nerd casts from El Paso.
Let me see if I can bring that up real quick.
Talk nerdy to me.
I think I have heard of that one.
Ah.
I have to speak with you earlier this morning.
I forgot to ask you a question.
I actually do listen to urandom.
And you guys did an album of the month doing Pink Floyd's medal.
So I was curious if you've heard the peel sessions.
I have.
It's been a significant amount of time ago.
So I don't remember a whole lot about it, but I did listen to it.
Ah, I think that there's some of the best just old school Floyd blues extended versions on there.
There's like a 10 minute version of embryo.
And as far as I recall, there's only a 30 second version on the published albums.
Yeah, it's really short.
I guess in regards to the topic at hand here that we've got a urandom.
I believe that if you guys are looking at your stats of where downloads are coming from,
I'm sure that I get mistaken for lost and Bronx because some probably 100 miles away from him here in Arizona.
And my IP comes in as Phoenix often.
Well, we wouldn't get you confused if you were doing the RSS downloads because he doesn't need.
He won't even subscribe the RSS feed.
He just goes and grabs it every month, which I don't understand, but you know, it's what he does.
Ah, okay. Well, that's what I was thinking.
Is that he would been grabbed in the RSS feed?
Why wouldn't you?
No, no, it's less than Bronx. He does what he wants.
I'm not going to fault him.
That's the way he wants to do it.
Now, our thing is this like we go through feed burner for the so like our static page makes a feed.
We route that feed through feed burner basically to kind of offload where the hits are coming from.
And then we get stats from them, but those stats have never been right.
But then we host the show on archive.org and then all the like download hits on that are like astronomical compared to what we think.
So it's like somewhere in the middle is probably where it's at.
Yeah, I know we've been been over the topic at least mailing list wise, but getting actual stats on listenerships.
It's never an easy thing.
If even possible, there's only one way to get stats on listeners and that's to ask them to donate cash.
And then you can figure out pretty much for everyone that donates cash.
That's like 2% of your audience or you just go through it in a way when we find somebody who listens to us.
We just invite them on the show.
Yeah, we make them co host, which Joe, I just thought of something while I was out of the room to something's actually.
The first is that if you're going to listen to the last show and the next show, be prepared.
That's all day tomorrow. That's like six hours.
I listened to everything like, you know, three acts anyway.
It'll be fine.
And here's the other things since you've had my back all night long.
I don't know if I can still trust you next year, but for now, I trust you implicitly.
If you happen to like our show and decide to go back to listen from the beginning, which sometimes, you know, podcast listeners have a tendency to do.
If that happens, if you can stand us that much.
Would you happen to make note of the episode numbers that have commercials in them and let me know?
This is Poke trying to offload his homework.
But I honestly can say that I do entirely too much listening to go back through somebody's backlog of podcasts.
Okay, that's fine.
I just, like I said, it was on the off chance that maybe someone wanted to do my homework for me.
No, sorry.
Can't help you.
And the next ask was going to be, can you give me time stamps of when I was working.
No, that would be great.
Someone wants to, but no, no, no, I wasn't going to ask that.
I, because I didn't think of it.
The reason being Joe, I wasn't trying to be a think.
I've made a couple of like fake commercials on some of our shows.
And it only occurred to me recently that because we're a CC zero, I think, right?
Touch.
We are by SA, I believe.
All right.
Since we're CC by SA and all my commercial bits are CC zero, it only occurred to me that other podcasts,
especially Linux podcasts may wish to use them.
And it'd be nice to, to pull them aside in case anybody wanted to do so.
Well, I can, when we pull them out, I can just put them up on archive.org and realize some of the CC zero.
Yeah.
I like that idea.
I just enjoyed them.
I just got to find them first.
Cool.
So, Pokey, are you the one that went into the show notes and left the all capital letters notes?
I don't think so.
For the next show, the last one, what are you talking about?
No, for this.
It's probably hockey.
Somebody really wanted to shout that you random took over the stream, which is awesome.
No, I, no, I didn't even realize it was a show notes page for this.
No, it wasn't me.
And I guess since it is in the show notes, it is now canonical.
The Ken Fallon is a number of you random.
It's always Joe and Brian and net minor.
Got him, Brian.
You said you bring up the show notes.
Probably should have done that a while ago.
Yeah, could you, someone post a link for me?
Yeah.
Sorry, I didn't know the existed.
Brian, you said you enjoyed the commercials that we play occasionally?
I couldn't tell you what they were.
What was the last one?
No, not at this time of night.
That's too bad.
You're actually trying to get somebody to do this, man.
No, no.
No, I just, I couldn't remember which one it was.
The next one is either better or worse.
So you can either look forward to it or dread it.
I think the one that comes out tomorrow's episode is the first time that I literally almost fell out of my chair.
I was laughing so hard when you delivered it on the show live.
That was the one that Lyle pitched in at the end, right?
Yes.
Yeah, that was, that was he really helped with that one.
So, so right now it's how the sauce says you gets made.
None of us have heard these before.
Poke starts reading them.
So we're in real time and we're just like you guys do.
Yeah, I do.
I do.
Yeah, I do.
I think what it appeals to me about it is my complete distaste for advertising.
So it's kind of like a, a discordian kind of take on religion type anti-ad.
That's the whole idea.
Brian, you totally get it.
All right, guys.
I'm going to step away for a few minutes.
Interpition, Joe.
Have a good interpition.
Yep.
All right.
And I will admit here, especially here on HPR that it was not my idea.
I am not the first one to do it.
I didn't come up with it.
I'm a copycat totally.
And I'm racking my brain to remember who it was to did it.
Who did the laudable commercial for.
I think it was the first HPR April Fool's show.
It's killing me that I can't think of his name right now.
It's Scottish guy.
I don't know.
I hear that ads are pretty ubiquitous on all the big podcasts now.
I don't know because the show has ads.
I don't listen to it.
But that helps it be funny, I think.
Yeah, but that's what I mean.
But the mocking of an ad that everyone has heard of bazillion times was this.
HPR New Year's Eve April Fool's show.
And I've been trying to emulate that ever since because it was so good.
I'm gonna try to look it up.
Do we know how long we've been doing the shows?
Because it's been a while.
I actually don't.
Aren't you the one that started it?
Yeah.
That's so unbranded.
I did for who?
HPR or for me or what do you mean?
For you to not know.
I do know that it was literally 24 hours of me sitting at the computer hosting.
Yikes.
It was fun.
It was crazy.
No, I'm sorry.
The first one was 12 hours.
The second one was 24.
The first was 12 hours.
That's a mistake.
Yeah.
And the initial idea was with a 12 hour window, there'd be time enough for anyone on the planet who wanted to participate to get in.
And then somebody else.
I don't think it was me.
I think somebody else maybe might have even been caught to.
The next year suggested that, hey, if it were 24 hours, people could call in and do happy New Year's when New Year's clicked over.
Oh, shit.
Three minutes late.
Happy New Year's to everyone who's an hour ahead of us.
Atlantic Canada.
And Cooper too.
Guess that's on here.
And 26 more.
Oh, yeah.
Cooper too.
Half a Brazil than Australia.
Albonia.
That can't be real.
Paraguay and Chile and Bolivia.
Well, it's one hour till we switch over.
I think I might actually make it all the way to midnight tonight.
I got to go ahead over some friends place here in a few minutes.
And it's only nine where I am.
Yeah.
If it wasn't for it being vacation all last week and all this week for me, I would not make it till midnight.
So my sleep schedule's already a mess.
Oh, man.
That first April Fool's show with the Fony commercial was so long ago.
It was before we were tagging series on HBR.
I bet somebody we know would ask you to go find it, but tags on it.
I'm still trying to find it.
If I knew HTML, I would certainly do tags.
No, I don't think you have to do it.
I don't think you have to know HTML to do the tags for Dave is like compiling them for somehow.
If I recall from one of the community news, I think there's just a way to add tags
to the shows just on the website.
Yeah.
Believe you're right.
Hey, should we like publicly shame everybody to go find an episode this year and put tags on it?
Like so you owe kind of show and you owe the people on the New Year show to go back and tag one episode that doesn't have any tags.
That's a good idea.
Good thing.
I just said it.
And whatever day of the month you were born on, the show should have those numbers somewhere in it.
Why are you going make it difficult?
I thought it was making it easier.
Really?
Oh, I think I just might have found out who it was.
He's not taking credit for the show.
Those that might not be in damage.
Oh, I can't even search the page for the word laudable because L.A.U.D.
Highest Claudio.
Claudio messing it up for everybody.
Wow, I'm going to be at this a while.
I'll be honest, I'm going through looking for shows that don't have tags and most of them have tags.
So this should be pretty easy to knock out people.
It looks like about episode 500 ish is where tags start becoming really scarce.
So anything below, well, about let's say 550 and under.
He's where I thought it was rowing golfer and I just it's not in his shows.
There's one of my shows fine.
They've been screwing up 589 is when I got in.
I was a laycomer to this.
Look at all these old names.
All these people got so much love for.
602 was Claudio's first urban camping show.
If you haven't heard the urban camping series, holy crap.
You've been missing out.
He's a show with the Northeast Linux fast.
That's where me and Lyle met.
I don't think I'm going to find it this easily.
I keep scrolling and scrolling.
And I'm arguing to shows that I started doing and I swear with before I did my first show.
I thought it was, I would have sworn that it was one of my influences for starting to podcast.
Was that episode?
And I would have sworn it was rowing golfer.
But I'm just not seeing it among his credits.
And I'm not seeing it scrolling through here.
There's the first episode by Epicanus 0757.
No, I guess it wasn't an April full show because I'm searching through the page for 0401.
And it's not showing up that way either.
I'm going to have to look really hard to find this.
Sorry, I was hoping to tell you guys where it was at.
Hello, can you tell me if I got the mumble working?
Yeah, I can hear you now, Mongo.
I heard you, Mongo, but you disappeared.
The mumble keeps popping in and out of the channel.
Is anybody else in here active right now?
Or is it just me?
I'm here.
I don't know about active, but I'm here.
I think.
Sorry.
I think I'm going to pop out into the lounge and see if I can give Mongo a hand.
Okay.
Good idea.
Hey, Brian.
Greetings.
Where are you at?
Where are you at?
Where am I at?
Geez.
That could be answered in so many ways.
But I'm in Flagstaff, Arizona.
I'm in El Paso, Texas.
I went through there once.
I got to say I didn't see it in its normalness.
It was a super rainy spring.
And it was just gorgeous wild flowers everywhere.
It was so nice.
When was that?
Oh, geez.
That must have been maybe...
I want to say like 2007-ish somewhere around there.
It was a while ago.
Yeah, I was living here back then.
I moved in 2016.
Now we're just here visiting family.
Moved from where?
Moved from El Paso to Dallas.
Oh, Dallas, Dallas.
Yeah, it was there twice this summer, actually.
I had to drive to Florida.
I tend to take the 287 down through Texas.
Yeah.
Well, I do quite a bit of driving to Florida too.
We got family out that way.
Now they're all in Alabama except my older brother.
He's still in Florida.
Oh, my dad.
My stepmom, my dad's mom and her husband are all in Florida.
My sister is now too.
One day I left to find my way back that way.
I got a house there now.
And my brother is anyway.
Because my dad's gone.
And my older brother ain't going anywhere.
So that's going to be ours.
It's kind of fancy, little old turn of the last century, 1900s.
A schoolhouse type.
Where?
Just inland from Canaveral, basically.
Right off Mosquito Lagoon.
Mosquitoes, of course, we don't really have to suffer much here.
Yeah, mosquitoes suck.
That they do.
So this stream been pretty active for most of the day.
I missed it.
I had to go to work.
From what I've seen, it's been fairly active.
There's been a few people all day.
Good.
Good here and there.
That's kind of the idea of the whole thing.
My family is out by Tallahassee.
Sorry.
I'm running around here trying to get some stuff together.
You got to go do some visiting.
Yeah.
I think we're all about ready to head back to Dallas.
Emma, we have to Florida.
We get over kind of that Dallas area.
Usually when I drive a cut over the street port and head down.
But my mom was.
We were moving my little brother too.
So we had this whole care for advanced stupidity.
She's setting the route.
And I could have swore we were going to go through Lafayette.
So I was like, God, that'd be great.
I'm going to contact John Cope and say hi.
And then, of course, she says, no, we're not going through there.
Okay, look at the route.
I'm in the car following.
Next thing I know we're pulling into Lafayette.
So there's my chance there.
I have to go stop over.
Not been university or something.
Say hi.
Yeah, it's always good to take a couple of steps along the way.
Yeah, you got to say I finally met someone that I've been communicating with online here for a while from HPR.
And man, it's freaking great.
I should take more opportunities when we're anywhere near each other.
I still like taking the long way from El Paso to Iowa.
So I stop off at a bunch of old friends places long away.
Because we knew a bunch of people that moved to the Denver area.
So I'd spend a day or two in Denver just visiting friends and then continue on North.
Yeah, I think that might be what I end up doing next.
I got a real good friend in Nashville.
So when I used to go to Florida, I used to just head straight across I've 40 to Nashville.
And then head south.
And it adds an extra day to the trip, basically.
But it's certainly worth it to visit some friends.
I mean, well, that friend actually, he stopped through town here recently.
And I had some interesting conversations with him.
He's the physicist that I did my last episode.
And music has life on some of some of his thoughts and research.
Cool.
And well, I got fireworks happen in here.
That's odd.
Yeah, seems pretty for that.
Yeah, I mean, usually I'll hear some gunshots around midnight.
But fireworks are definitely not the normal.
They'll get a ticket if they're not careful.
What?
What's the bottom?
What about it?
1933, you're going to bed?
All right.
Well, give me a hug and kiss.
Say hi to everybody.
Hi.
Good evening.
Good evening.
Hi.
Go to bed.
Yes, sir.
Be good.
Love you.
Go.
Go.
Shoot.
Close the door.
My son.
Early to bed.
Man.
It's like 9.30.
Yeah, this is usually when I'm trying to make my way toward bed.
You usually don't make there until 10.30 or so.
But if I don't get there by 10, then I'm not going to be up at 5.
Yeah.
Well, my usual schedule is to wake up at 6.
But being on vacation, that's all screwed up.
But I usually try to get to bed by, well, I try at 10.30.
But it usually happens at like 11.30.
Yeah, I aim for a two hour buffer in the morning from when I wake up.
I don't like to just get up and start running.
And I got to live my life before I go give it to someone else.
No, I'm up at 6.
And then I try to be done, you know, waking up by 6.30.
The whole shower shave.
Fun.
And then I got to wake up the kids so that they can get ready for school.
And then I'm usually trying to be out the door by 6.45, 6.50.
Are you saved some times, skip the shave?
Maybe.
Makes me look old though.
Great coming in.
No, makes you look wise.
No.
No.
Old.
I mean, the goatee has more than enough granted.
I don't need the rest of it.
But I think I am going to try and get up at 5 o'clock tomorrow so I can hit the gym again.
If you get there before all the new year, new me people.
I've been kind of thinking about that.
We got a good pool over here at the university.
That's pretty darn close to me.
I haven't been swimming in ages.
And then the other day, this swimmer came in from Santa Barbara.
And he was talking to me about it.
I was like, man, that's one thing missing in my life.
Here in Arizona is water, swimming water.
When the swimmer here, it's just river creek style swimming.
Not usually the big quarries and reservoirs are remembered from the northeast.
Swimming is supposed to be really good for you.
So definitely something to look at.
Low impact.
Low impact.
I just don't know of any gyms in my area that have an Olympic sized pool.
Well, us being up here at 7,000 feet, like I said, the university.
They do a lot of Olympic training up here.
So they made a point of doing a large pool facility.
I haven't even really checked out what's in there, but it's a pretty big building.
Cool.
As I'm getting older, I need to consistently find lower impact exercises for me to do on a regular basis.
And swimming is on my list.
I just haven't found a proper place for it.
I've just never been much in the gym mindset.
I've always felt like my life should take care of the exercise for what condition I'm in.
But of course, that life takes over on that whole realm.
Swimming is the one thing from my youth that kind of fits that gym style workout.
I've been lifting weights since I was like 14 or so.
I took a little break after I got out of the military.
But I picked it up again, and I don't see the point in stopping.
I'm not running as much as I did in my late teens early 20s.
Yeah, the cardio is the big one.
I'm going to have to get a bike here again and start riding into work once the weather clears up.
I'm using first in my cardio.
I'm using the step machine at the gym.
And I do have a peddler at home.
And I used to do like two hours a day, five days a week on the peddler.
But it gets to be hard on the joints after a while.
Yeah, I got some cardio last week.
I fixed this, it's a 74 or 75.
Jeep CJ five old round light looking Jeep.
And I'm fixing this suspension system.
So I fix it.
I'm going to take it around the block.
And I make it down to the corner and turn the corner.
And it dies like it's out of gas.
So I just pushed it off the side of the road.
And I start running back to the shop.
I get half a block and I start getting out of breath.
And this is horrible.
I'm getting old.
I made myself run all the way because of course I can still do that.
But I couldn't believe I fast.
I was out of breath.
So I believe it.
If you know my mask.
What was that?
How old are you?
I'm 43.
You got like five years on me.
I just started falling apart early.
Yeah, the key is just don't notice for as long as you can.
Yeah, that was difficult.
So they started paying me disability when I was about 22 and got out of the military.
All right.
I'm being told that I have to go spend the next two hours with people that I can touch.
I understand.
I felt I was kind of polite when to put it.
So I guess I'll listen.
I don't exactly have a whole lot to talk about all by my loans.
So I'll listen to the sound of silence.
Yeah.
Hey, Nat.
I'm glad you're still on because I just came back from having a bit of food.
But you guys are there too because I can't take this with me being on a Wi-Fi only.
So enjoy yourselves.
I shall be back later maybe.
Yeah.
Okay.
I might have to go do that spending time with people in person thing as well.
I'm not sure.
It doesn't seem like a good thing.
I don't mind it personally, but most of my people don't care for it when I show up.
Yeah.
So I was trying to help mom go get set up and I can't figure what's going on with him every once in a while.
I mean, you guys can see it.
Disconnected connected disconnected connected and the several moving back into the room that he was in.
It's a weird thing and it just drops.
It's instantaneous.
You barely even hear a drop in his voice.
Hmm.
I'm not sure.
To me, it smells like a networking issue like the cable coming from the pole to his house type of networking issue.
Just a really, really bad connection.
Is he wired?
Is he wireless?
He says he's wireless, but he's got like full bars.
He's got a really good wireless connection.
And then maybe his router sucks.
And he said he switched routers too.
He swapped them out.
Maybe his modem sucks.
That's quite possible.
Might be one of the rental units.
Yeah.
The other thing I thought he said he's got a bunch of default settings.
I think he said his left click on his mouse was the push to talk.
So I thought maybe he was dragging himself.
Yeah, I told him to make it a key combo.
He was working on that last I talked to him.
But he's on a different version of Mumble than I'm on.
So I don't even know what his settings windows look like.
I can't even talk him through that.
He said he was on 1.3, but I'm only on 1.2.19.
I didn't even know they went to 1.3.
Yeah.
But not in the repo.
Let me see.
I think you have to get the snap.
I think that's what he said he's got is the snap version.
Yeah, and it does work and it works well.
I haven't had any issues with it.
I'm running both.
I tend to prefer the older one though.
Okay.
Maybe we get him to install team viewer and we fix it for him.
Yeah.
No.
It's fun as that sounds.
No, I know.
That was only getting because we were talking about team viewer earlier.
Yeah.
I hated desktop tech support.
Some people are just too stupid to own a computer.
Oh, not this guy.
Mumble seems all right.
I wasn't talking about Mumble.
I know you weren't.
I just wanted to make sure he didn't think so.
If he listened later.
Okay.
What?
Can I have the tree?
Can I have the tree?
Can't reach the top.
Can't reach the top.
We're short.
You're short.
Yes.
Did you say can you say that again?
Say it again.
Oh, we heard it.
Oh, oh, they heard it.
Good.
That's recorded for forever.
You're just setting your tree up now?
No, we're taking it down.
Oh, you don't have to reach the top of the tree to take it down.
Just push real hard.
It'll come down to you.
I'm fairly certain that that that that is the case.
But I'm going to go help them real quick.
Just let the cat pull on one of the light strings.
Oh, one of the dogs.
All right.
I'll talk to you there.
See you.
So I'm here for about 12 more minutes.
And then I turn it to a bump getting.
I'm glad I'm not the only one in here because I just tried to take a sip of my microphone.
Is that good of a new year, huh?
Well, yeah, it's with you.
Oh, I'm still trying to figure out how to supply tags to a show.
Oh, I moved on.
I was reading the Wikipedia article for Team Viewer.
I was trying to figure out how BDSM can be used for or Team Viewer can be used for BDSM.
Oh, you apparently just send an email to tags at hacker public radio.
And there is actually there's very clear instructions on what to do.
Let me copy this and put it in the notes.
And then they'll just put a ball gag in.
No, no.
We're not talking about the same thing.
Are we?
I guess not.
You do this to me all the time.
I changed my keyboard layout to where my, my enter keys right next to my space bar.
And it's driving me crazy.
I'm about to change it back.
Oh, I don't worry about it.
You'll get used to it.
When I changed over to a ball mouse, it drove me crazy for like the first week.
But after that, you just get used to it.
Yeah, I'm usually pretty good about switching things.
But this one's just, it's, it's too close.
And because the way my keyboard is.
It, it, it looks like split and half.
But then there's these thumb clusters.
And so I'm not used to reaching the right distance on this thumb cluster.
And so I'm hitting the wrong thing.
A lot.
And it's making me angry.
Is this a keyboard you printed yourself?
Yes, it is.
I figured it must be.
Can you like print a thumb extension?
No, the problem is that they're too close.
So I'll reach to hit the space bar.
And I'll slide off and hit enter where I had it before.
The inner was on the other side.
So it was on my, my left hand in the space was on my right hand.
But I wanted to put control and all on the thumb keys on the left hand for E-Mac stuff.
Because I thought it's probably better to have those on the same side.
But I'm regretting my decision now.
Okay.
Is your keyboard already?
It is.
I can't be bothered to learn a whole new system.
It's hard enough to switch back and forth between Chinese and English.
On a courty keyboard.
Let alone on a keyboard that I don't know.
Wasn't E-Mac sort of ment for Divorak layout?
I don't know if it was ment for it.
It's ment for.
Well, I mean, what a lot of people think is the holy grail is the space kid at keyboard,
which it had, you know, different keys.
The one thing that it has that I have online is your, because everything's at list.
So parentheses are huge.
So my shift keys on both sides, if you just tap them, they're parentheses.
So I had parentheses really fast, just tapping the shift key and it gives me that.
I have to hold it to actually use it to shift.
But other than that, you know, I just, I change how I do it.
My caps locks, my cap locks, I can't say that word, the caps lock key is control on the one side.
If I hold it down and then the.
I forget what it is on this side, because I don't have any markings on my keyboard.
But one thing the thing makes to the colon and send me colon.
I think it's a slash maybe.
If I hold that down, it's alt.
So I already have that.
So I have control on both hands, but I wanted to move an alt over to my left hand too,
because that's control and alter the two big keys to do chords with.
So I don't know.
I'm still trying to figure out if I like it or not.
So if you hit left shift, it's an open parents.
And if you hit right shift, it's a closed parents.
That is correct.
That's pretty clever.
Yeah, it's awesome.
Like if I sit down, well, especially since a lot of the code that I write for myself is like rack it or it's something let's be, you know.
If I have to like hit shift and then reach up to nine and zero to do the parentheses, I just get real pissed off.
Yeah, yeah, I can imagine that.
So I have the trick where I have my keyboard setup that whatever is the thing that's printed on the key.
That's what it does.
That's lame.
But it helps if you look at the keyboard, which I have to do anyway.
I was like that until about two years ago and I finally taught myself to touch type on regular keyboard.
The problem is when I went to this keyboard.
So like a regular keyboard, you know how the columns are like staggered.
They fan out.
Yeah, yeah.
So this is not like that.
The columns are straight up and down.
And they're offset in a different direction.
It's supposed to be better for your hand this way.
But it ruined my touch typing on this keyboard.
So I still at home, because I'm on this keyboard less than my laptop. Unfortunately.
I still kind of have to look at this one occasionally.
Most of the time, I'm okay.
But just that switching is kind of hard.
And like backspace is not in the same space on this keyboard as it would be there.
So you know, it's just sort of this mental juggling game.
When I come home, I like this keyboard better because it.
I can type on it longer and not feel.
My wrist hurt is bad.
As I do on my MacBook, but that's because the MacBook is a shitty keyboard.
But I just, if I could just sit and play with this keyboard all day long, I'd be a lot better at it.
Wonder if you can post a picture of your keyboard in these show notes.
Don't know.
I probably have to post it somewhere and then put a link to it.
I don't know.
I actually posted a picture of it.
I'm asked it on today because I had to take the case off to reprogram it.
So if anybody wants to know, go, go find me on a mess of them.
And then scroll back to 2019.
The keyboard's called it Ergo docs.
Like if you look it up, they're fairly popular.
Mine just has a nice 3D printing case.
DOX or DOCKS.
DOX.
Hey, did I tell you how the adventure with my wife's laptop ended?
I don't think so.
I told you they sent.
We send it out for repair and they send it back with the wrong keyboard, right?
Yes, I heard that part of it.
Yeah, so they sent me a new keyboard for it.
When I finally got to talk to customer support, it took like three weeks to where I was available.
And so was the third level customer support individual that I had to talk to.
And when I finally was able to talk to her, she actually overnighted me the correct keyboard.
And you know, I just said I was going to put it in myself.
She scheduled a tech to come do it anyway, but I'm like, no, I'll do it myself.
And I'll keep both keyboards because don't think I've ever owned an HP.
Laptop that was consumer grade that didn't need the keyboard replaced at one time or another.
So I'm just going to keep it and she was like, yeah, all right.
That's fine.
And just when I get there blah, blah, blah or cancel the head, whatever.
So she sent me the keyboard and it's really not a keyboard in that laptop.
It's that they called the top cover and the keyboard's kind of built into it.
It's part of it.
The whole friggin computer bolts to that top cover every single piece has to be removed from the top cover.
Nothing attaches to anything but the top cup.
Nothing attaches to the motherboard even except for the Wi-Fi card and the M2 drive.
Everything else attaches to the top cover and is connected to the motherboard or the ribbon cable.
I've never, ever been so stressed out working on a computer.
Like the quotient of me messing this up is very high.
Oh, incredibly high.
And then on top of so I'm stressing out the whole time, I finally get the thing back together.
And I'm still stressed out.
And what happens next, I almost left the country.
You almost never heard from me again.
The battery on this laptop is internal.
So it's not, you would consider the battery on this not user disconnectable.
So because of that, because they can count on the user not disconnecting it, there's no CMOS battery.
They just power the CMOS off of the laptop's main battery.
So when you disconnect it, it loses all of CMOS memory and programming and whatever settings are in there.
So by doing that, it also will not boot up at all.
Won't even pretend to boot until you've plugged it back into the mains into wall outlet power.
So when I put this thing back together and hit the power button and it did nothing at all, I almost fled the country to someplace that doesn't extra day.
I'm out of here.
Oh yeah, she'd have killed me.
You guys would never have found the body.
I'd have been, I'd have been pokey sleeping with the fishes from now on.
So do you want to hear something really cool?
Yeah, yeah.
I kept scrolling down of this like report missing tags page.
They totally have tables that show which ones don't have tags.
So it's really easy.
Like nobody has an excuse not to put tags on shows now.
Oh cool.
Also, we were one minute away from 2020.
In our time zone, even.
I know.
Like for real new years, all the other ones are fake.
This is the only one that counts.
It's not that they're fake.
They just all seem to have had a head start at it.
Or they're late.
I mean, they will be late.
No, I'm calling it.
This is the only one that matters.
Wow.
That's, yeah.
I do not stand with Taj on this opinion.
Oh, I'll do folks out there who make it triggered by Taj's happy new year.
Happy new year.
Happy new year.
Happy new year, Paul.
See the only one that matters.
This one.
Happy new year.
Happy new year.
Happy new year.
Happy new year.
Happy new year.
Happy new year.
The East Coast of the United States.
Who was that?
I just saw a net minor.
Who else just said it?
East Coast.
The United States.
Cuba.
Jamaica.
Haiti.
The Bahamas.
Columbia.
Peru.
And some countries that are too small for them to print their names on in South America.
Sorry, guys.
Happy new year.
Welcome to 20.
Is it better yet?
It's the roaring 20s.
It's either better or it's going to pretend to be better and give you massive hangovers.
I'm okay with that.
I'm okay with that.
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I'm okay with that.
Yeah.
The second one is you talking about song fights more.
That was going to be my gimmick was to do a song fight song at the end of every show.
Network cabling I came back and listened to these.
Yes.
That was the one that На
Network cabling.
That was the one that people people comment to me on that one for a long time like For
For
that we tried to do this and that's in such episode after.
You get your knelt as soon.
There's like three or four of those, and they were, I think,
I recorded them all the same day, but at the time,
the rule was don't post two in the same, it wasn't a rule,
but it was recommended that you don't post two in the same week
just so you don't discourage anybody.
Oh, this one, it's actually just, you just turned me
onto this like a month ago.
The KADD3.
Oh, yeah, I like that.
That's got more features than Easy Tag.
Not easy, not as easy to use, but it's got more,
more tag ability.
Yeah, it actually fixed our problem of every year in the show
being called.
What was it mixed down?
I'm writing about your mixed down episode.
We were like, how many, how many mixed down episodes do we have?
Well, it was funny.
It was like that one episode had all this feedback and everyone was
going to a mixed down episode.
I'm like, what was happening here?
Are we being trolled?
Is that what's happening?
Why don't you retarge know what eggs are?
How I figured it out.
It's okay.
Oh, yeah.
Another elf or elf, elf and taxes.
Okay.
I don't remember why I thought those two things went together,
but I think taxes was just being able to do taxes on Linux.
More NELF.
More NELF.
Yeah.
Like I said, there was a bunch of them.
Oh, open street map.
I did an open street map one.
Yeah.
Really?
You did.
I've been wanting to do like open street map as a presentation
for a while.
I guess I did do one as an HPR.
I forgot all about that.
I think you did.
And that's when I started like editing it.
It was because of your episode.
Started editing HPR.
I mean, you got to put a tag on that one.
Well, yeah, that actually.
I just scrolled up.
The HPR audio book club has one that doesn't have any tags too.
So we got to do that one.
That does not surprise me because those are not actually my episodes.
Oh, no, no, no.
This one is not us.
This is before us because it's a badge of infamy.
Well, I was on it.
I just mean it's not.
It's credited to the HPR audio book club.
I don't think I've listened to this one.
So I might actually listen to a good book.
This may be an excuse after I get done with human action.
I might read this and then listen to the audiobook club episode
and make that.
I don't remember who suggested that book.
It might have been Dan or I don't remember his Dan or me,
but such a good book.
All of my things are tagged and all of miles are tagged.
So I'm just saying.
Just saying.
I just did.
I mean, I'm just saying.
I honestly, I got to give that book credit for the book club going as long as it did.
Because there's been a bunch of books that we did.
That if we had done them as the first episode,
there would not have been a second episode.
That book led to some very, very interesting conversation.
Ooh, ooh, who is the guy that came on here and just like,
like tore apart.
HBR with like how.
How a crash he was in that episode.
I want to see if his is there and if I could put tags on it.
I don't remember his name.
I'm sorry.
I was like space something.
Wasn't it?
Yeah, I think you're right.
Well, if that's true.
I guess the stuff he did to tags.
Well, again, it's the earlier shows that don't have them because nobody fought to do them yet.
Like we were so active at the time in like augcast planet.
If someone wanted to know a show or wanted to know something,
just get an augcast planet and somebody like,
oh, yeah, that's episode thus and such.
And here it is.
I wish augcast planet was a thing where people were,
I mean, they're all the time and almost nobody else is.
I just, I'm not, I can't really do IRC anymore, not from work.
Before, I mean, I had a government job
where I was not allowed to do much most of the time.
So I just sat at my desk and hung out in augcast planet and told dick jokes.
Okay, I didn't tell dick jokes.
I didn't do like set up punchline set up punchline.
I just injected dick jokes as frequently as possible based on what other people were talking about.
Isn't Jack really the verb you want to use in that sentence?
Specifically, yeah, I'm glad you picked up on that.
I mean, how good was that for being off the cuff?
Not bad, not bad.
The cuff also being pretty clever regionally and they may not use that where you're at.
No, that's not something we usually ask.
So cuff and inject would, you know,
specifically be two different dick jokes that they wouldn't be in the same one.
Fair enough.
I'm just looking at like the subjects that have been covered in these shows.
And I just want to go back and listen to a lot of these because I,
this was before I listened to HBR a lot of this stuff.
And it looks like some of this stuff is just so good, like probably still.
I just did this.
You were out of the room when I did it.
When I was looking for the episode that I was looking for, I did exactly this.
I just kept looking like, look at all the names.
Oh, there's, I got so much love for all the names.
And those shows that people I used to know personally that just, I don't know,
we just drifted apart and which makes me really sad.
And I had to call out a couple of shows specifically like urban camping.
Like, can you imagine someone new who listens to HPR and never heard the urban camping series?
I think I specifically went back and listened to it because somebody,
it may have been you told me you have to listen to this.
And I think that may have been the first time that I encounter Klaatu.
I got a lot of love for Klaatu.
I can't deny that.
He's, he's one of the few people who's stuck around for so long
and has just been so true to himself and to his beliefs and his idealism.
And he just, he's just a rock solid dude.
Seconded, even though I tried to publicly shame him.
It's all right. I stopped you from doing that.
You don't have to worry about that now.
See, that's what friends are for.
You could totally go do tags on the urban camping shows because they are not tagged.
I could. I'd have to find your instructions.
Well, they're in the show notes. So when the shows drop, you will find them.
I'll just open them as a tab now and be able to come back to them when I'm sober.
Yeah, look at this table.
It's all neatly laid out and stuff.
We got shows on Nokia.
We got shows on crunch bang.
I mean, holy shit, how much fun was crunch bang?
I never actually ran it.
I know everybody loved it, but I never, I was already,
I may have already been on arch by that point.
God, even my wife loved crunch bang.
And she never even used it. She just loved the name.
It is a pretty awesome name.
There's a show called screw you, hacker sold talking to me.
Yes, I miss that. That's a good series.
Wow, comfortably numlocked.
I don't even remember that one, but that's a great show title.
Ash Potter lost in Bronx has a show called pocket full of miracles.
Want to stick my hand in his pocket and find the miracles.
As your legal counsel, I would strongly discourage you from doing so without having.
Proper consent.
I'm sure he'd consent.
He's got four hands.
Remember, I promised to never speak of this again.
Wait, can we text him and shame him till he comes on?
Probably not.
I don't think I have his phone number to text him.
I don't know how much longer I'm going to last on here because I'm exhausted.
Yeah, I'm getting pretty close myself.
Oh, you know, zoke did a show on DD word.
That's cool. I bet that's what got me into the DD word or tomato.
I guess someone's tomato now, but still I just had to go find out what that was.
Good on you, zoke.
Well, gentlemen, you're going to be calling on my former professional qualifications.
I was a former security guard who spent many a night sitting in a chair staring at an empty road trying to stay awake.
So now I can be.
Go back to my roots and.
Man, the bastions of Hacquardum, glad that somebody'll be here.
We can't go if there's not someone here.
It's just tradition.
There's got to be someone at the helm.
So are you saying that minor?
You have the con.
No, I'm.
I'm trusting in the automated systems.
I don't know if they're all made by boring.
That seems like it'll totally work out.
Now, would you fly in an aircraft with a company name so close to Boeing?
I mean, they should really change their name.
And my name's their luck.
Tasha, I do have point this out to you because you may be able to bring this up at some point in the future.
Go on.
Show 727.
Yes.
It's by clatoon.
I'm scrolling. Hang on.
It's how to root and mod an Android phone.
Yes.
I think if one of us brought this up to him, he would even remember owning an Android phone, let alone making his jaw about it.
I don't know.
I don't know if I don't know if he has a phone or what kind of phone it is.
And I think that's pretty much how he wants to keep it.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
I can't imagine he's the guy that did an Android show.
Yeah, but it was science and mod, which is basically lineage.
Oh, is that he was doing science and mod in that episode?
You must have clicked on it.
Yeah, I'm looking at the show notes.
Need some tags though.
I'm just saying.
Damn, he's going to be the guy that got me into cyanogen mod.
Does all of your media consumption consist of HPR?
For a long time, it absolutely did.
Yeah, I'm going to say for a solid four, maybe five years.
That can only turn out to be a good thing.
For a long time, it was.
Yeah, man, HPR got me through some rough days too.
Welcome, Claude.
Happy New Year, everybody from UTC minus five.
Happy New Year, Claudio.
Hey, what's up, Claudio?
How you all doing?
Good now, my brother from another mother.
Yep.
Yeah, these gentlemen were folding their tents,
messily as I noted.
And they were wondering if anybody was going to hang on
to keep the lights burning.
Well, I'll be on for a little bit.
I just wanted to wish you all a happy new year.
Wasn't sure who else was going to be jumping on.
Claudio, I'm going to warn you.
Taj is attempting to shame you.
I am not.
Does he have shows in her tent?
He's attempting to shame everybody.
And I'm afraid you might be in this list,
because you've been around for a while.
All right, let's do this.
It's growing.
He's taken to task everyone who's got shows out there
that don't have tags and show notes and whatnot on them.
And apparently someone's made a handy page where you can identify them.
And he's taking people to task, even if you have tagged your shows,
that you've got to go tag a show sometime this year,
even for someone else.
Claudio, it's looking pretty good.
He's only got two shows that don't have tags.
All right, which ones are these so I can fix that?
Episode 672, how I upgraded my PC.
Ooh, that was a wild go.
All right, let me, let me, let me, let me take these down.
Let me take these down.
Give me a sec.
I've been trying to tell them these are all,
so these were shows from before we realized what tags were.
All right, which one was the first one?
672?
672.
All right.
And what's the next one?
And 722, which just looks like it's the sequel to the first one.
All right.
Now, I'll do what I can to tag it.
How would I go about doing that?
Once it's posted.
I just posted a link in our chat and so did Taj.
You basically just send a properly formatted email
with the tags.
And I guess Dave Morris takes care of the rest.
Do you really know how we'll take care of it?
Dave Morris is the best.
And that will be my first action as New Year's resolution
for 2020.
Dig it.
I have to take up the 5150 episode.
That's not a bad idea.
Taj, you're a real big.
Definitely activist here.
Well, I mean, secretly what this is all about.
I'm really jealous that everybody says,
you owe Ken a show.
I just want people to eventually have to say,
you owe Taj some tags.
Because the eliteration, it's just, it works.
I'll send you some skin tags if that works.
Not what I was looking for.
Claudio, do you have the good nail clippers
with the curve the other way too?
No, but now I'm going to have to look for those.
Oh, they're the best for skin tags.
See, I thought Claudio got on here just because he wanted
to finish our robot tech conversation for mastodon.
No, no, it's okay.
I think we, we, uh, took care of that one.
We proved how big of nerds we all actually are.
Oh, no, I don't think we've done that quite yet.
I think we still got further to go with that.
So I have a document that those of you addicted
or afflicted with EMAX might want to look up.
I actually have it in hardcover,
but I believe it has been released as PDF.
You said EMAX, I'm listening.
It is called The Craft of Text Editing
by Craig A. Fintheth's EMAX for the modern world.
If you ever should be tempted to begin a improved EMAX,
this is the source book for it.
This gentleman also created the micro computer EMAX Mints
that ran on CPM
and, uh, and DOS.
And allegedly violated his beliefs about EMAX,
but when he discovered how to do it,
he made a, he set up a company
and they produced an EMAX to run under CPM and,
and M.S. DOS.
It's actually going to be cool.
It wasn't, well, it was an EMAX family editor,
not, not exactly EMAX,
but using a lot of the EMAX technology,
the, it had a virtual memory system
and a whole bunch of things.
Doing virtual memory in a real mode machine
must have been non-trivial.
I'm getting to the point where I literally cannot imagine
doing my job without EMAX.
I wouldn't even know where to start with another text editor,
especially like Orgrif for writing papers and stuff
because that's, you know, all my research stuff is in there.
So it's, it's so much a part of my life.
Well, I'm, Neanderthal,
for a long time under DOS,
I was running WordStar version seven,
a starter kit that was available in a,
as a floppy's in a, you know,
a book about advanced WordStar.
And I've been,
religiously using plain text
for my writing for many years,
although the real notepad plus plus,
I believe tries to convert everything to utf8.
So Taj, I'm just missing the tags for these two.
Yeah, let me double check.
I think so.
The first one and let me double check the second one.
It's missing a summary and the tags.
And that's for 672.
672 and 722.
Oh, so they're both missing summary and tags.
Yes.
Okay, noted.
I'm going to write that in the text file I have.
See, we're making an HPR better,
like one show of the time, guys.
Of course.
Now, I just, actually, I got my,
I had an account on SDF
and someone was gracious enough to validate my accounts.
So I have an email,
so I'll probably send it from there.
SDF is the thing that I've heard about
and never like attempted on my own.
I had actually signed up before
and I sure to use it
and then I kind of forgot about it after,
because if you're not validated yet,
your account gets deleted for obvious reasons.
And so it happened again to me and I was curious
and since there were a lot of people
that I follow and also follow me on Macedon
when I recreated it.
Someone was generous enough to actually validate my accounts.
So it was very grateful to them for that.
So yeah, no, no, I've been using it a lot.
I've been on COM.
I've been participating in the B boards,
not much, but just kind of, you know,
I lurk and I read the stuff there
and every so often I'll post on there.
But as far as using the shell account for anything
other than just using the services they have there,
I haven't really done anything yet.
That may change this year. We'll see.
Yeah, I think mainly through Macedon and you
and a couple other people.
It seems like it's a nice little community
of people that interact with it
and lots of things going on there.
Oh, no, I enjoyed a lot actually.
They have the, they're also affiliated
with what's called a non-radio,
which is a live streaming radio
and you have a lot of the DJs
are actually members of the SDF.
And I usually listen to Snowdisk
who has the intergalactic wasabi mix.
And his show is usually trying,
I don't know what it is, UTC.
I know that as far as my time zone,
it is from eight to nine.
So let's see, what would that be?
That would be UTC one to two, I guess.
I could be wrong.
It'd be eight to nine here, Claudio.
I just did the math real quick,
which means it's potentially wrong.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, probably wrong.
We're in the same time zone,
so I added them all and then subtracted them back again.
And I think I got it right.
Stupid like a fox.
Well, gentlemen, I would love to stay,
but I do get some sleep.
Wait, wait, I could ask you a quick question
before you go attached.
Okay, ask away because you mentioned
how much of your actual work
is public information?
What do you mean?
The grow project that you were working on,
how much of that can be used publicly and freely?
As far as how much can the tech be used
or how much am I publicizing what it is?
Yeah, that.
I am no longer affiliated with that project.
And that project is no longer technically existing.
Oh, well, it gets swept up
in all the Jeffrey Epstein stuff.
Oh, that sucks.
That was a good project.
Yes, the tech was good.
There are people still out there working on the tech.
It's just the organization itself may have not.
Some people in leadership there made some bad decisions.
Oh, you know what?
I remember talking about this now.
I'm sorry.
It's all good.
It's as far as the tech goes
and duplicating it.
Is there any documentation out there?
Yes, there's a GitHub for the project
to where you can pull down those designs.
I'm actually working on
basically ground up redesign for our program
to use that takes out some of the features
that didn't make sense for what we want to do.
It makes it more of a
they were going for swarm networking
and getting lots of data
and doing data analysis on all that data.
That was never something we were really interested in.
We were interested in using the hardware
to teach plant science
to our co-workers.
So basically creating the appliance itself
that can be controlled on the device itself
instead of going through a web interface.
So that's what I've been working on quite a bit here
in the last few months.
It's just taking what they had
and redesigning it to make it easier
for our age group of students
to rebuild themselves
and control themselves and program themselves.
So that's been the main thrust of my work
currently as far as the research end.
Yeah, I'm looking for specifically
how do we grow food
or grow plants in controlled environments
and let computers do the shit
that humans don't want to do or suck at doing.
I mean, really, it's not difficult.
A lot of the things that are problematic
are going to be problematic no matter what,
unless you're dealing with large scale systems.
So like CO2 levels,
it's really hard to control that
in a small environment.
Basically, what you have to do
is just doing a CO2 purge every once in a while.
Once you get to a certain point
of CO2 build up in a device
or not enough CO2 in the device
then you invent it to the outside atmosphere
until it pulls in enough to reach
whatever specification you say
and then close off the vents
or stuff like that.
But as far as like light,
water, nutrients,
temperature,
all that's fairly easy to do.
Like anybody with a little bit of know-how
with Arduino could set that up.
It's just tying all that stuff together
and creating an interface
where you can create sort of programs
to run on.
So say I want to grow lettuce.
Okay, what is the perfect combination of light
and temperatures of light
and light spectrum
and intensity of light
and what temperature
and what nutrient solution do I need
and just dialing all that in
to where I can just walk up
and hit lettuce
pour the nutrient solution in,
plant my seeds,
and walk away and come back
and there's lettuce.
Yeah, and you did all that, right?
And all that's on the GitHub?
Yes.
I mean, yes,
the original project
they've done some of that.
They've worked with specific plants.
I know basil is one of them
and I forget with hazelnuts,
I think we're the other,
that they did their control research on.
Mainly because that's the two
basil is really easy to do
and I think they were getting funding
from a from Ferreira,
which is hazelnuts,
to do basically growing the trees
in a controlled environment.
But I don't think they put anything
else out publicly other than that.
When you get a chance,
not to be tonight,
can you send me a link to that?
Yeah, sure.
Thank you.
All right.
With that,
I will now say goodnight.
Happy New Year to everybody.
Hope it's a good 2020.
Happy New Year,
Taj, have a good night.
You too, man.
Happy New Year, Taj.
Later, guys.
See ya.
Happy New Year.
See ya.
Well, right now,
I'm working exactly on those tags
and summary,
so hopefully I can get that sent out.
Taj was just in a naming
and shaming mood tonight.
Don't take it personally.
No, I'm not.
Please.
If I can do anything that I can do
to help out HP ARPs,
I'm off work.
So it's customary for us to have
the 12 grapes
to round out the months of the year
once the New Year rolls in.
But given all the wine
that I've had tonight,
I think I'm good for the next decade.
Did you say the 12 grapes?
Yeah, 12 grapes.
It's a...
I guess it's a Latin thing.
Can you explain it?
I'm not familiar with it at all.
It sounds cool.
Yeah, do you like
once during the turn of the...
of the...
of the hour of the year,
you're supposed to eat 12 grapes,
which represent the 12 months of the year.
So you have the 12 grapes
and what exactly is supposed to mean
I don't know,
but I know it's customary.
Had to do it since I was a little kid.
So we did it today.
Yeah, but yeah.
So with all the wine that I've had,
I think I'm good for the next decade or two.
Not bad.
How's the family gladio?
Family's good.
The boys are doing good.
Much older.
My eldest is now in college.
He's...
he's on his second year.
He's already 18.
So I'm telling you,
they grow up so quickly.
My middle one's 15.
He's a sophomore in high school.
And my youngest is going to be 13 this month.
This month for me,
not everybody is in 2020 yet.
So in the month of January.
So he'll be turned 13.
They do grow up so fast.
Were you in here earlier when Zoke was in?
No, I missed him.
I missed him.
I was actually on here around
about 6.30 p.m. or so.
So when I jumped in,
and I was just going to jump in for half an hour
but I ended up being here for almost an hour.
I was chatting with a bunch of people.
I was chatting with NetMiner and Moss.
And Dan from Link's Link Tech Show.
And we just got talking about stuff.
And yeah, but I...
Man, I wish I could have caught Zoke.
I know that his son is like huge.
Because I remember when I first started talking to them,
his...
their son was like about the age of my youngest.
Yes, Captain Underpants.
I was...
That's what I was going to say.
I talked to Zoke earlier.
And Captain Underpants is married now.
No way.
Oh my goodness.
He said he moved out.
I thought he said he was married.
Maybe I was just thinking to my own kids.
But I thought...
I'm sad.
I missed Dublin Dan.
Yeah, he was on earlier.
He was on earlier.
Actually, it surprised me because I didn't know he was on.
I saw that he was there on the...
on the chatroom.
But all of a sudden, I popped in.
I heard his voice.
I was like, oh, hey.
So...
I think I heard Mrs. Zoke mention something about that.
About him getting married or so.
So you might not be that far off.
Or maybe I'm also kind of messed up.
I've had a few of myself.
But I...
He said he moved out and he was dealing with that.
The moving out thing.
And I thought he said he was married.
But I don't...
Well, there you go.
I'm telling you.
Time flies.
It really does.
My youngest is now in college.
Wow.
What year in college?
That's first year going to a community school.
Claudia, you're not going to believe this.
I'm already a grandpa.
Wow.
Congratulations.
The second grandson is on the way.
That's awesome.
Oh, I can't wait to be a grandad.
I'm looking forward to it.
I love...
I love kids.
It's fantastic.
It is so great.
In fact, my grandson...
My first grandson is from my oldest child.
My second one will be from my middle child.
Wow.
That's awesome.
It is true.
They've moved away, so I don't get to see them much,
because they're both now related to the military
and they're both in far off places.
But, you know, we do video chat from time to time
and we get to see them when they come home and stuff.
But it being a grandad is great.
I can't imagine.
I can't wait.
I know that it's for...
I know that for my boys' grandfather from their mom's side.
I mean, they're, you know, they love being grandparents
and they love having the boys over whenever they can.
They're everything.
So, I'm looking forward to that.
I'm looking forward to that.
You know why grandparents and grandchildren get along so well?
Why is that?
Common enemy.
Yep.
That's about right.
It's not even anymore.
It's not...
I don't even fight with my kids anymore.
They don't fight...
Well, they don't fight with me anymore.
I never really fought with them.
But they've even given up on that.
It's so nice.
It's like the grand kid is like unifying
as what it really is.
Yeah.
But still, you know you just smile and wave
when you send them back home.
Because, you know, you just...
You see the look on their face.
You just smile.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There it is.
You know, it's not even like that.
It's...
You know, so far, the time...
Like I said, she's my oldest with my grandson.
She's so far away that the time that they've been here,
it's never been like that.
It's always been like, geez, I wish they could stay another hour
another day, another week, you know,
and see them some more.
Oh, of course.
I know.
I'm just messing around.
You know, you always want to have the grandkids.
And it's nice because you kind of miss that.
And I know I miss...
My boys are all older now.
So I miss, you know, that part of when they were younger
and everything.
And there's times where I'll see, you know,
little kids or whatever.
And all of that from what my boys were little comes back.
And I know that you're probably...
You probably feel the same way.
And I guess being a grandparent,
you kind of relive part of that.
So it's nice.
But yeah, you can also...
There comes a point where you can also send them back to their parents
when you're like, okay, you know, you know,
you can go back home now.
And that's what I hear from everybody.
That's a great parent, all right?
Yes, they do.
They say it all the time.
And you're 100% correct about those days with the kids.
And I've been really, really blessed in that.
I've never been without those days.
Because I got nephews on my brother's side
that were right behind my kids.
And then we've got nieces on my wife's side
that are right behind them.
So we've just had a constant flow of small children.
And when they don't actually live with you 24 hours a day,
you know, you're right.
You're absolutely right.
There's so much more enjoyable.
Yep, yep.
So yeah, I'm looking forward to the day when I have grandkids
and holding my grandchild in my arms, you know,
newborn in my arms.
It's just all those flood of emotions and feelings
and experiences and sensations
will just come back from when they were kids.
And yeah, I'm definitely looking forward to it.
Yeah, yeah, it's good stuff.
It's really good stuff.
So what else is new with you, man?
It's been a while.
Well, since I was on DeVU random.
Yeah, yeah.
With me, nothing much cabin fever from, you know,
not being out there on the motorcycle.
And just trying to, trying to fill time through the winter.
I've been, we talked about this earlier when you weren't here,
but it's okay.
We can recover because it's a New Year's Eve show.
I've been getting into these old HP elite books lately.
And just because they're, they're really, really nice laptops,
really good hardware, really rugged cases, mill spec cases.
Right, right.
They're old enough now that they're cheap enough
that you can just upgrade the hell out of them
for next to no money.
Yeah.
Actually, I have not an elite book, but I have an HP Pro book,
a 4540S that I got a few years ago.
It's a used one that I got through a mutual friend at the time.
And it's still my main machine.
I've actually been thinking about upgrading this year,
but I keep looking at this one and say,
you know what?
This was still doing me quite well.
So I think I hold on to this a little longer.
I upgrade the RAM, upgrade maybe to SSD or something,
but yeah, I mean,
well, it's a third generation i3 to 3110M.
So it's not the greatest thing in the world.
And it'll only take a max of eight gigs.
But for what I use it for now,
I mean, it's, it's doing me well.
You know, that I don't know.
As a matter of fact, I was thinking of checking that
because I know this old Toshiba and 400
that I have the Portaget and 400.
I've got open BSD running on it now.
And I'm actually connected to it from two mumble
with this Toshiba right now.
This one does have a socketed CPU,
and I can actually upgrade it.
But I have any on bothered.
I mean, at this point,
it doesn't even make it much of a difference
because I have a CPU that'll work with this one.
But it's really not worth it.
As far as the HP one,
I don't know.
I have to actually look into it and see.
But that is something that crossed my mind
because of the fact that I had research
the same thing for my Toshiba.
It's all right.
I'm going to tell you,
like gone this deep with Tosh and Lyle yet.
But with these,
I've got these two HP Elite Books.
And one is a 15-inch book,
and it's like the second Gen Elite Book
with the first Gen Core i5.
And it's socketed.
So I upgraded to a Core i7,
which was completely worthless
because the i5 that it had is so close to the i7,
there's practically no difference.
It's a name-only change.
Yeah, you only see the difference
probably in Benchmark and stuff,
but really in real world,
it probably doesn't mean anything.
No, it absolutely doesn't.
Even in Benchmark,
you can barely see it.
You've got to look for it.
But with the other one,
I bought a fourth Gen 12-inch Elite Book,
which has got a third Gen and Ivy Bridge Core i5 in it.
And they only ever came with dual Core processors.
But they got all the drivers
in the BIOS for Quad Core processors,
so you can literally double
the performance of these things.
And it's all pretty nice.
Yeah, and it's all been done.
There's pages and pages and pages
of people already having done this.
And here's like the best processor to get for it.
Because they're limited in wattage,
there's no use chasing after the absolute top
of the line i4s,
excuse me, i7s.
But there's like a page on,
here's the best results people have had
with us in such processor.
So I got a Core i7,
a Quad Core,
to replace the Core i5 for,
I think it was,
I think it was like 60 bucks for the processor.
Right, right, that's not bad.
No, and that's,
that's still Core i7 performance,
because, I mean,
I was running Linux on,
you know, like a Pentium 4,
you know, piece of crap
back in the mid-auts.
You know what I mean?
And now,
I'm running a 4 Core i7.
That's, I mean,
even just jumping up to this i5,
well, actually it's an i7 now,
but the Core i5,
this is the fastest laptop
I've ever used Linux.
It's the fastest computer.
I've ever run Linux on.
It was,
it blew me away how fast this thing was.
And this thing's production dates
like 2011.
Yeah, no, I understand
completely what you're talking about.
I, as a matter of fact,
I have my desktop,
which I really, really use,
but I may end up using again
because my boys don't really use it much anymore.
Um,
it has a phenome 2,
um, X4,
965 processor.
And before that,
I had an Athlon XP 2400.
So that end of itself
was quite an upgrade.
Yeah.
And I mean,
this laptop,
I'm,
the Toshiba was my previous
flagship main use laptop,
um,
which took over the EPC
that I had before that.
Um,
and the Toshiba has a
Core2 Duo CPU.
I don't remember exactly
which model of the Core2
I think it's a T7200, I think.
Uh,
but it's, I mean,
it's old right now.
It barely runs as much
of anything.
My craft just,
just, just sluggish on it,
completely.
Um,
but when I moved to that,
from that, from this Toshiba
to this HP with the Core i3,
and even just with the Core i3,
it was quite an upgrade
as far as performance.
Um,
but yeah,
I mean, I even went so far
as to get Doom 2016
install on this laptop.
It,
it runs,
but it's like two frames a second.
It's,
it's ridiculously slow.
So,
I,
I do want to look for something newer.
If I can get something,
maybe this year,
uh, preferably something like a
gaming laptop,
but I don't want anything in video base.
I'm looking for something more of a name,
the,
uh, of a name,
the,
uh,
uh, configuration
for the laptops,
and I know there's some new ones that came out with a rise in stuff
that, um,
that definitely look interesting,
especially because, uh,
I want to see if I can do a boot,
uh, Fedora and OpenBSD on it.
Sure.
Um,
since, uh,
the AMD,
AMD GPU support on OpenBSD seems to be getting a little better.
It's not perfect,
but they do have hardware acceleration,
and there are some games that will run on it,
but for anything else, like,
uh, the stuff on Steam,
I can always boot to the,
to the, uh, Fedora side and just run that.
Um,
and I've always been a fan of,
of AMD,
uh, especially once they acquired the ATA graphics,
and they really improved that.
Um,
I know a lot of people will kind of crap on the,
AMD graphics,
uh, because of,
uh,
the stigma that it's had compared to,
uh,
the Nvidia stuff,
but they really have come a long way,
as far as the open source driver,
and AMD's support for the open source drivers.
So,
I mean, they,
they have my full support,
full support,
100%,
uh,
since,
for a long time now.
And I remember talking to Klaatu for a while,
and he was like,
I don't know about that,
but I was like,
when he should give it a shot and check it out,
because they really have improved,
and I think he recorded a,
um,
a good world order talking about that,
not specifically with me saying anything to him,
but,
as far as his,
um,
his perception of the AMD graphics has changed,
and he was quite impressed with how they've improved with the open source drivers.
So,
yeah, I mean,
and now,
given Ryzen,
and how they're kind of spanking Intel with,
with performance,
especially going to 7nm.
Uh, yeah,
they definitely look like the way to go,
at least,
you know,
for an AMD,
and AMD guy like myself,
yeah, I kind of would love to find a portable machine that could do something like that.
As a matter of fact,
I know there's some think pads
that, uh,
use some of the Ryzen processors now,
and they have the Ryzen graphics,
but I really want to make sure that it's not anything that's like,
comparable to the Intel integrated.
I want something that's a little more discreet,
that would be comparable to more to the Nvidia stuff.
So, I'm still kind of doing my research on that,
but, uh, yeah,
I want to see if I can invest on a more of a gaming laptop,
uh,
because I have been getting back into gaming,
uh, especially with my boys and older that they are,
uh,
being into that,
I kind of want to get into that.
I got myself, uh,
I don't want to say I got myself,
I got for all of us,
up PS4 Pro,
less Christmas,
um,
and, um,
I've been using it,
and I've been getting into some games as well.
So, I've kind of been getting back into the whole gaming thing.
So, I would like to do that also on the PC sides,
whenever they're using that,
I can actually go ahead and play some games on the,
on the PC side,
be it through Linux or OpenBSD.
Looking for like older hardware,
or are you going to go with like a brand new laptop?
Something,
as new as can possibly be,
that is,
would be supported by the least common denominator,
that being OpenBSD,
because I know that as far as the graphics support,
um,
the BSD's tend to lag behind Linux in that regard.
But, regardless,
um,
you know,
I could always boot to the Linux side
if I want to play anything,
uh,
that one run on the BSD side.
Not knowing what your specifics are,
and just trying to relate what my recent findings have been.
The 12-inch Elitebook that I bought,
um,
people are still tricking those things out,
and they're using the, um,
the external card slot to do an E SATA.
Oh, okay.
Sorry,
external graphs,
they're putting external graphics cards
on these things,
like,
extra housing.
How are they connecting to it
through,
does it have like thunderbolts
or something like that,
or?
No, it's, um,
oh shit,
what's the card slot called?
It's just a small card.
I forget what it is,
but it's like a five,
gigabit per second,
bus,
and they're just,
you just plug it in
when you put it on your test.
Right.
Yeah, I'm going to try and research that,
but, you know,
once I feel that,
I'm ready to make the jump
because I was thinking about that, too,
this,
like, I wanted to get to myself
a Christmas president,
I'm thinking about,
you know,
a new laptop would be nice,
but this HP is still kind of working for me
in spite of the fact that, you know,
it's,
it's a third generation,
a laptop's from 2012.
I mean,
I still can use it for a lot of things,
I can use it for Minecraft,
I can use it for open-source gaming,
like, open arena
or any other thing like that.
Well, I'm the only thing
that it kind of chokes on
is Doom 2016,
but I got down on the PS4,
so I'm not going to go ahead
and replace a lot of tubs for that.
Yeah, I'm serious, though,
for the third gen,
Core i series cards,
check out,
and see if you can see
if it's locketed
and see if you can upgrade
the processor
because they're so cheap
right now,
if you don't go,
like, the top of the line quad cores
that are not the extreme ones,
if like,
the 45 watt cards
are like 140 bucks,
and the ones that are just slightly below that,
like I said,
I got it for like, 60 bucks.
Yeah, I'm going to,
I'm going to try and check that out
and see what upgrade options I got.
I still have to upgrade the RAM.
Right now,
it's got six gigs.
I used an old module
for my Sundance,
old laptop,
that he wasn't using,
so I bumped there
from 4 to 6,
but if I can push it
to the max,
which is 8,
and then see about upgrading
a lot of topic,
I probably send a life
of this thing a little more.
Now, I've
heard a lot,
a red lot of stuff.
Happening here
from the Midwest.
Oh, happy New Year.
Good call.
Thanks, Archer.
Oh, Archer,
finally managed to catch you
even though you missed me earlier.
Yeah, bear.
Yeah, that's fun.
That's the Midwest.
A giant swath of Canada
and a giant swath
and a giant swath
of Canada,
most of Mexico.
Happy New Year.
Galapagos Islands.
So, happy New Year
to all the
Camono Dragons.
Easter Islands.
Happy New Year to all the heads.
Thanks for pointing that out, Archer.
Good call.
Yeah, we got two caught
up in a PC talk here.
No, I don't mind, listen.
That's really interesting
about these elite books.
I'm just blown away by them.
I really am.
They're such solid hardware.
Just they're like the other day
I was just messing around.
I was just leaning on the thing.
All my body weight.
No flex whatsoever.
It's just rocks all
it on the palm right there.
I didn't have the screen shot.
I wouldn't do that.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, I was actually
looking at the
think pads for my next purchase.
I know there's some AMD ones
that have come out recently.
As a matter of fact,
I think, well, it's not a recent one,
but I think it's the A485.
Theo Durat, who's obviously
the leader of the OpenBasty project.
He was looking to get one of those.
So if he gets a machine,
he definitely makes sure
that it works on OpenBSC.
So that's a good sign
for anything that might come down the line.
So.
Yeah, the think pad series
is the other way to go.
There's a couple others too
that are,
that are mil spec like that.
And that's what I like about these elite books.
Is the mil spec just makes them so solid.
And I know that some of the T.
I don't think it's all of them,
but some of the T series definitely are also
mil spec and that's,
that's what makes them solid too.
But seeing as how I can't afford
something brand new,
I'm, you know, stuck with these older ones.
And I'm really,
I'm super happy with them.
They're, it blows me away
how fast these things are.
Yeah, I was actually,
I actually use one of my school sites.
There's a think pad X230
that's not being used.
And so I kind of took that one over
and I put OpenBasty on it
and it runs really well.
Well, OpenBasty or any BSD
really tends to run well in ThinkPad.
But just the,
the feel of it as far as even the key,
the keyboard,
everything just definitely feels like a well-built machine.
Yeah, that's what it means.
It makes a nice replacement for a netbook
just because of the size of it.
Yes.
So I might want to get one of those used
just to have as like a,
you know, a travel laptop
just to be able to get on the net
and just SSH stuff or do whatever.
Definitely, you know,
maybe let some like gaming
but nothing major.
And they tend to be pretty cheap.
That's what I was telling the guys earlier
is I found an 11-inch elite book for my buddy.
And I mean,
I was thrilled with the performance.
He's thrilled with the thing.
I got it refurved on new egg
for like 160 bucks.
And just recently,
like the other day,
I was looking,
just I forget what I was even looking up about the thing.
But I saw a review of it
from when it first came out
and I clicked on it.
And that book was over two grand
when it was new.
And we just got it for like 160.
Wow.
That is impressive.
And they still,
they still,
I mean, they're still very useful today.
That's what I'm saying.
It really is.
Even the dual core i7s
with the ultra low energy usage.
That thing was a rocket ship.
I mean, we had that thing.
Okay.
And maybe it's not a rocket ship
just to, who's new to,
to brand new hardware.
But with four giga ram
and a spinning hard drive at like 5500 RPM,
that thing goes from power off
to a login screen.
I want to say it was like 24 seconds.
I mean, to me,
that is so fast.
Yeah.
I have to,
I have to agree with you with that.
And it's,
it definitely boots up pretty fast.
As a matter of fact,
go ahead and throw an SSD on that.
And your performance will skyrocket
even further.
I'm working on it.
I know my wife,
we just bought her a brand new laptop.
Because she works from home quite often.
And she got like a tremendous discount on it.
So she's got not quite the latest.
I think it's an eighth gen quad core i7
and an M2 drive.
And that thing goes,
gets the login screen in like under seven seconds.
So yes,
I get it that the SSDs are very fast.
And I'm working on getting one for me first
and then see if I can talk him into it for his.
Well, I mean, an eighth gen Intel CPU is not bad at all.
As a matter of fact,
we just,
my niece actually got a,
a Dell laptop,
which has an eighth gen CPU,
for Christmas.
And it's actually not bad.
It actually runs pretty well.
Oh,
and it's,
it's wicked fast.
That thing's,
even Windows can't slow that machine down.
That's what I keep saying to people.
Is it's,
even with Windows on it,
it is that fast.
You,
you hit the power button.
And,
you know,
under seven seconds,
you're at the login screen.
And you put your password in and it enter.
And before you can get your hand to the mouse,
it's ready for you to start mouse and around.
And even though the,
the thing's still spinning,
loading up stuff in the background,
you can just click on the menu,
open firefox,
open Libra office,
and it just pops up.
It's, I mean,
it's right there.
It's, it's so fast.
It's unbelievably fast.
I can't wait to put Linux on that thing
when she grows out of it.
But, you know,
for now, these,
these older generations,
I mean,
they were still top of the line chips
in their day.
And these chips came out
when we were running Linux on,
you know,
uh,
uh,
Pentiums, you know,
and going,
wow, look how fast this is.
And it's basically the same kernel.
Right, right.
Give me one second.
I got to take care of a couple of things.
I'll be right back.
I do two acts.
I got to step away for a minute.
All right.
I'll be back in a bit.
All right.
I have returned.
Art, are you still there?
I believe he stepped away.
Ah, okay.
Well, now that the noises have died down,
some, I can say,
happy new year for a central time zone.
Happy new year.
You're a gummy.
Thank you.
So what's good with you?
What you've been up to,
uh, up until this new year?
Was that question named at me?
Yes.
Oh, sorry.
No problem.
Yeah, we're just,
we're just taking a break here.
My son is into me to,
to a coordinated light of some fireworks.
So I can't actually chat at the moment.
I don't know where he's.
Norris.
Well, we did,
uh, as far as us here,
uh, we,
uh, I went ahead and did a barbecue for the family.
A New Year's Eve barbecue,
uh, did some, uh, chicken thighs,
uh, some flat meat steak,
some, uh,
top loin beef,
and some Argentine style sausages.
Everything came out delicious.
And of course,
I've had my wine,
so I got to accompany that food with some wine.
So it was good.
Mine goes to having trouble.
He's in plum bowl,
so that makes it a little easier.
Sorry, guys.
I'm back.
I didn't mean to monopolize the conversation.
I just,
I got so excited about these laptops.
They're so easy to mod and cheap.
It's like the old days when we were building desktops.
You know,
hey, mom, go here with us.
Well, I don't know.
Is this thing working?
Yes.
I'm not bad, actually.
Yeah.
Well, that one,
I've installed,
uh,
that snap version of,
uh,
mumble just didn't cut it.
So, uh,
uh,
installed, uh,
the older version that you were using.
And, uh,
that seemed to be working, huh?
It seems, it looks stable right now.
Wow.
I would have bet anything
that that was a network problem.
So happy new year.
Oh, yeah.
It got really loud over here a few minutes ago.
I guess it,
it must be new years.
I was messing with this thing.
I missed it.
And thank you.
Happy new year, everyone.
Happy new year.
I'm in Houston.
So, uh,
yeah, it's just after midnight here.
Well, happy new year.
Speaking of the new year,
I was, uh,
in a discussion with my sons about
the supposed new decade
and the fact that it really isn't the new decade.
It's not until 2021.
But that might start a whole other conversation,
right there.
Thank you, Pogi.
But as well, it just, uh,
agreed to disagree.
Well, Richard Stalman says we start counting at zero.
Right when we do a computers,
but in real life,
we don't really start counting from zero.
If I want to know what year it is,
I look at my computer.
And that's what we agreed to disagree.
Well, my brother was born in 1960,
so by starting at zero,
if we get,
you know,
it makes things a little easier
figuring out his age and such.
I saw an article on the internet about that the other day.
I think it says about 60% of people think one way
and 40 the other way,
but I forgot which it is.
I'm of the,
the start with one myself for years.
I remember we went through all this,
uh, during the turn of the millennium,
where people thought the year 2000
was the 21st century.
And then there was discussion about,
no, it's actually in 2001 that we start the 20th century
because 2000 is the culmination of the 20th century.
So this is all too familiar.
Well, the first century started at one, not zero.
So the next one had to start a thousand one,
and then two thousand one.
So same thing for the,
the first 10 years started off at one as well.
Well, as I explained it to my son is that the 1900s
were considered the 20th century.
And that's why it culminates at the year 2000.
And the 21st century starts at 2001,
which culminates in 2100.
So, but, you know, what are you going to do?
Well, I don't know what you guys,
I'm going to party like it's 1999.
Yeah, I think I'm going to do the same thing.
But since I, I like my synth wave,
I think I'm going to party like it's 1989.
And, uh, I think I'm going to drop off,
uh, until the sun rises.
So, you all have a very happy new year.
If you're already in the year 2020,
and if not, uh, wishing you all the best once it is.
Happy New Year, Claudio.
Glad we got to talk.
Likewise, happy new year, bud.
Oh, and tell Taj that I'm working on the tags.
I think he knows.
All right, guys.
Later.
Hello.
Hello.
Listen, Mongo.
Got your issue sorted.
I didn't catch that.
What did you say?
Got your issues sorted.
You were having problems with mumble earlier.
Uh, yeah.
I installed an older version.
I had installed a latest snap version of mumble.
And, um, so I went back and did the real,
a real install of, uh, an earlier version.
And that seems to have, uh,
I picked up the one that's end of the Ubuntu, uh,
repos and it seems to be working fine now.
Okay.
I hadn't had any problems with the snap,
but I mostly used the older version anyway.
Well, I had just reloaded this box here about a month ago.
Uh, I've been running 1604 up until then and I got a,
a new SSD and decided it was time to, uh,
just clean it up and wipe and start from start fresh and, uh,
I put 1804 on it and, which is finally stable.
I really didn't like it at 1804.1 or even .2 very well.
But it seems to be okay now and so, um,
I put my new SSD in and, um,
and install it.
I was going to try to use snaps for possible to not,
for things I'm, I'm not going to use regularly.
So that's what I do with mumbles.
I just didn't think about it not being, uh,
you know, working very well with this particular computer
configuration or something, but it's,
this seems perfectly fine now.
Cool.
So where are you at?
Uh, I'm Houston.
Houston, cool.
Somebody else from Texas?
I guess there's lots of us down here.
Uh, sometimes it's kind of far apart.
Yeah, well, I spend most of my time in, uh,
North Dallas, but I'm visiting El Paso right now.
Yeah, you're not in Texas.
You're, you Mexico or Arizona or somewhere way too far.
I thought way from to be actually Texas.
Still Texas.
I've been there.
It looks, I look more like Mexico.
Well, you know, I, I can, there is a place that I can stand.
You know, Paso and throw a rock into New Mexico and throw a rock into Mexico.
Yeah, it's, it's been a long time since I've been to El Paso.
That's, that's a little out of my neighborhood.
Yeah.
I used to live here.
Yeah, I suspect there's about 20 states closer than El Paso,
where I live.
Yeah, no, no.
It's probably what?
900 miles, 1000 miles?
Uh, it's over a thousand, I think.
It's, actually, I think it's closer to Chicago.
Hmm, maybe.
I suppose somebody said once.
I don't think I measured it, but, uh, pretty much everything.
You know, lots of, lots of states are, are closer,
including, um, you know, most of New Mexico and Colorado,
and certainly all the local homun, Kansas,
and up into the problem.
New Mexico is not a closer.
Uh, yeah, most of it.
No.
No.
New Mexico would not be closer.
They can't mean.
Most of New Mexico is closer to Houston than El Paso is
close to Houston.
No.
Because you have to go through El Paso to get to New Mexico.
No.
From Houston.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm, I'm serious.
I'm right on the border with New Mexico and Mexico.
I know, but if I'm going to say, uh, I don't know, say Hobbs.
I'm going to Hobbs.
I'm going up to Dallas.
Uh, now I've got to go to Dallas, but I'm going to go up there
and hit I-20 somewhere, um, and go into Odessa and go across
the border up there.
And I'm still 200 miles east of El Paso.
Oh, okay.
I see what you're saying.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's, I've, I've made that trip.
Uh, I've, I used to drive out to Odessa a lot,
in the New Mexico occasionally.
Uh, I think I've only been to El Paso once ever, maybe twice.
Once, maybe it's a kid and then once as a young adult, which is,
I'm not a young adult anymore.
So it's probably over 40 years since the last time I went.
But, uh, I had a friend that lived there and we went rock climbing
while we were there.
I remember that.
Yeah.
A whole lot of mountain here.
Yeah.
We had a good time.
Yeah, we had a good time.
Um, I remember it was really hot and, um, pre-dry,
like a lot of that country out there, which, uh, it wasn't,
wasn't bad or anything.
It's just, that's hot and dry.
And though where I live, it's hot and sticky and mosquito-infested.
Yeah, Dallas is pretty humid too.
Not as bad as Houston.
Yeah.
I've got a brother up there in De Soto.
So, uh, but I don't go up there real often.
No, I say Dallas, but really it's Allen.
Yeah.
But there's no point in really, you know, naming off all the various
North Dallas suburbs.
Yeah.
Same with Houston, I guess, but I actually have in Houston.
So although, although just barely, I'm, I'm just clinging
to the very bottom edge of Houston.
So practically in the ocean?
Well, we're a few miles from the bay, I guess.
Um, but, um, you know, eight or ten,
probably eight or ten miles to the closest place that there's water over
the Galveston Bay.
Yeah.
Close enough to make my homeowner's insurance high.
I imagine.
So do you podcast normally?
Do I podcast?
No.
Oh, do I list podcast?
No.
Yeah.
I actually do podcasts.
Um, I assume you listen to podcasts if you knew about HPR's
New Year's show.
Oh, I am a contributor of HPR, but just barely.
I did a thing a couple of years ago, and I've got two that I've
in rough draft right now that were supposed to have been done.
One of them was supposed to have been done six months ago,
and the other one was about the upgrade to this computer that I
just did about a month ago, but, um, I hope I'll get them done.
Cool.
I always feel guilty when I listen to, I listen to them,
and I realize how long it's been since I've contributed.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, I am going to switch computers here in a few minutes,
and I will be back on.
All right.
Talk to you later.
Yep.
Later.
Hey, how's it going?
Hello.
Hi, this is, uh, this is Monica.
Hello.
My backup.
My backup headset died.
The mic died on it.
Wait, your backup headset?
Yep.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I told you I was switching computers.
I was using my backup headset on that one, but the mic doesn't
work anymore, so I'll take it apart when I get home.
Oh, that's right.
You're on the road, aren't you?
Yep.
Just, uh, family, uh, holiday, get together thing?
Yeah.
Letting the grandparents see the kids for the holidays.
Hey, that's what Skype's for.
Yeah, but we also wanted to hang out with some of our old friends.
I mean, I lived here for 17 years, and the wife grew up here.
Oh, that's worth a trip.
You ever had ride motorcycles in the desert out there?
No, I haven't ridden motorcycles since I was a kid.
No, I was wondering if that was one of the things you did when you were living there.
Nope.
I haven't ridden motorcycles since somebody did me a favor and stole my last one back
in the 80s sometimes, but I had some friends out in Odessa that used to take their bikes
out in the sand dunes, and, uh, and man, was that a lot of fun.
I knew some guys up in Iowa that used to go ditch hopping.
Yeah, my normal thing would be river bottom sand and mud and things like that.
And I would go out to West Texas, and it would be deep sand.
And, uh, my bike, you'd have to really work to get up on plane, you know, up on top of the sand.
They had these sand bikes that had back tires about a foot wide in the front tires
or maybe eight or ten inches wide with, uh, and the back tires had, uh, kind of, uh,
little scoops on them to grab more sand.
And they were like, like riding a regular dirt bike in the dirt in the sand in bottom of my bit.
Those sound like fun.
Man, that was a lot of fun.
I think they were Suzuki's.
No, no, they were Yamaha's.
But that was a long time ago, and I was, like I said, adopted, they probably,
somebody probably did me a favor when they stole my last motorcycle.
I think I was 23 last time I got on a motorcycle and wrecked it.
And wrecked it.
Crashing into a trailer will do that.
Yeah, let's see.
How was I the last time I wrecked a motorcycle?
I have to see.
I was probably 23 or 24 the last time I had a really, really good wreck.
I've laid it down a couple since then.
But, uh, yeah, I was, I was about that age too.
What do you do up around the Dallas area?
What do you mean?
What do I do for fun?
What do I do for work?
I don't know.
You're a pool shark.
Um, yeah.
I am production suburb for Bank of America.
Oh, I've got a working worth.
Go ahead.
I've got a nephew that works for Bank of America at the North Carolina Charlotte.
Is that where the headquarters thing is?
I think we have people out that way.
Um, yeah.
Okay, yeah.
We do have a server center there in Charlotte.
Mostly I work with people in New York, Chicago, South America, India, um, Sweden, London,
sometimes Australia, and once or twice Japan.
Y'all gonna have to change your name and not be Bank of America anymore?
Hey, money trades all over.
I guess it does.
I don't know anything about banking, but, uh, yeah, we do, I mean, we have an account
of Bank of America right down the street and, uh, my wife's nephew, uh, has been working there
for, I don't know, like, in the better part of 20 years, I imagine.
Last time I paid attention, he was doing some international stuff, mostly in South America.
He did, he did mostly business with South America.
So, yeah, I knew that.
I think I still have a couple of, um, people that I work with that are in Canada, but, yeah.
I worked on the space shuttle program until they, apart the space shuttles and fired all
of us about eight years ago.
Well, I had to be far until it sucked.
That kind of describes it.
I tried to get a job for a couple of years, but, um, I was a little kind of long in the tooth for, uh,
the kind of work I did.
It's a lot better to get somebody for half, half the age and half the, the, the pay, you know,
to do the same job.
And I can't really blame anybody for that.
So, I just said, what the hell?
File for Social Security.
Yeah.
My wife's gonna work in, but she's, she's chomping at the bit.
She's probably gonna quit in the next few months.
She works for, uh, an oil company, uh, here at Houston.
So, we're looking to, to move out of the, this, you know, at least up to, we were looking,
we were looking at properties up around Conroe actually.
Trying to get a place at the lower cost.
Um, a little above the flood zone.
We're the last time it rained really hard here.
We were about four inches from going underwater.
We had a 50 inch rain, um, in, in 24 hours that came real close to the front door.
And, uh, and the, you know, we've had a couple of hurricanes and it's, no real damage.
But, you know, it's like, let's get to the higher ground.
Yeah, I actually had Bank of America.
Asked me if I wanted to move to Houston.
And I, I told them that I was allergic to hurricanes.
You know, we feel the same way about Dallas, as Dallas people feel about Houston.
My brother would move down here.
Wait a minute.
My brother lived out here once for a while and, and they, Houston kicked his butt.
So, uh, and then more ways than one and, uh, and he's been up at Dallas for around 20 years.
He retired, uh, or they retired him.
I think within the last year or about a year ago, maybe, he, he was, uh, AT&T.
And, uh, he got retired about, about a year ago.
He worked.
I see, I just, I got laid off.
I was 62 when they parked it.
It went, they, they laid us all off.
So, I planned to retire at 64.
So, I kept, I looked for a job until I was 64 and quit looking.
Um, I think he worked until he was 67 or something.
So, he, he worked a little longer than I did.
And, um, but they're, they're not moving.
They, uh, his waffle budge.
He would like to get, he would like to move somewhere else, but, uh, you know, just kind of get out, you know,
a little further away from the congestion and all.
But he won't, he won't go.
Yeah, I don't think Dallas area is a real retirement community anymore.
And, you know, kids, grandkids and stuff like that around there, uh, we don't have any.
So, we could get, we could move if we want to, but they get kind of stuck.
My wife's got a brother in Alaska and they've got grandkids and he wants to move somewhere
where it's not dark for six months of the year.
Yeah.
You know, 40 below zero and, and his wife, no, I got to stay close to the grandkids.
Tell the grandkids to move too.
Yeah, I don't know.
She, she actually is, um, neither one was born up there, but, uh, she, she really, really likes it.
You was what?
I was born in Fairbanks.
You were?
My goodness.
That's awesome.
Yeah, my dad's, it's military.
So, got moved around a lot.
Yeah.
Um, they were up there originally because, um, their older brother was in the army and he was the breadwinner of the family.
And, uh, he took his mother and my wife and, uh, the younger, young brother, the brother who just older than my wife, uh, because they were both still in school.
So they had to go, uh, the other siblings were, were on their own.
And so the two that were in school went up, went to Alaska and my wife really hated Alaska.
She was there to escape.
But, uh, the boys liked it and, um, end up staying up there or leaving and coming back, um, at some point.
Um, so, you know, making, making a living, uh, living of it.
Yeah.
Well, they do pay you to stay there.
Yeah, I came to imagine that this nearly enough.
I was, it was about 50 here today and I was like, damn, it's cold.
Right.
But they, they were up there.
They're building a new house right now.
I, I was wondering how they're going to pour concrete.
I, they were, they cleared away, snow and stuff to, uh, start building, doing the foundation.
And I'm thinking, mmm, that concrete's not going to, uh, not going to stick.
No, I don't even remember Alaska.
We moved from there to Oklahoma not long after I was born.
Yeah, but I've been up there just one time for a visit.
My wife, uh, lived, lived up there for, I, I don't know, a couple of years when she was in high school.
And escaped as soon as she was able to.
In fact, I think she may have told them she was going to go visit a friend in New York and never came back.
Just abandoned her, you know, you know, whatever fit in the suitcase.
That's what she took with her and never, never went back.
But, uh, she was not, not at all, um, enthusiastic about going back to Alaska.
As far as I know, she didn't go back to Alaska until just a few years ago when, when we went up there for a visit.
And she knew she could, you know, nobody would try to make her stay.
And we saw whales and moose and eagles and, um, puffins and otters and all sorts of cool animals and mountains and snow in the summertime.
And it was pretty cool. I went to a glacier.
It was, it was truly a neat place to visit.
Just don't, don't go.
I just don't want to go there in the wintertime.
I used to ski up in Colorado and, um, you live in Houston, you fly to Colorado, you ski for a week and you come home.
You don't shovel snow, you know, to get to work every day for months on end.
You don't have to mess with tire change for the few times during the, you know, because generally when you're on a ski trip, you're just skiing.
You're not driving around so you don't have to do a whole lot.
So, um, and you dress warm and you're doing active stuff and the sun shining and then you, you don't have to put up with a bad stuff.
And then you come home where it's, it's 75 degrees.
No, I dealt with a lot of the same stuff in Iowa, because the winners can get kind of rough there.
So, the changing of the tires, the having to shovel my car out of six feet of snow in order to go to work.
Yeah, that happened once or twice.
Yeah, we had some friends, um, here, uh, always been some years ago now, but, um, he had a job interview in Duluth, I think.
Some, some were up and up there.
Minnesota.
Yeah, some, somewhere up there, you know, Minnesota or board.
I, I think it wasn't Duluth, but it was like, you know, February, late January or something.
And they get off the plane is 10 below zero.
And, uh, it was like, doesn't matter how the interview goes.
The decision was made when they got off, they got off the airplane.
So, they were polite and came back to Texas.
And, uh, as far as I know, they're still here.
Yeah, yeah, I moved south about the time I turned 18 or so and kind of stayed warm places since then, other than, you know, a year in Korea.
How soon that was did, were your military service in?
Yeah.
Way back when.
Which service were you in?
Army.
Yeah, me too.
That's good.
I've been there a little earlier than you.
I don't know.
I was, I got to go to Vietnam.
It sounds like it's a whole lot earlier than me.
Yeah, I was there during the military and in like 1999.
Oh, yeah, that was, that was a lot later.
I was, I was in Vietnam in 1970.
Yeah, a little bit of a gap there.
I think my grandpa was Vietnam.
Ouch.
Yeah.
Do we have another happy new year to give out?
Yeah.
To me, happy new years to what mountain times on?
Denver, mountain high.
Yeah, I was lucky.
I was between Vietnam and post-Vietnam civil service.
Yeah, there used to be a time when you could get between wars around here,
but I doesn't work that way anymore.
Now, when I was out of MIT, I ran into a couple of people from Vietnam.
One was a chopper pilot.
One was an intelligence officer.
The intelligence officer said things were crazy
because normally intelligence people don't do guard duty.
However, in Vietnam, every officer had to do everything,
including guard duty, you know, in a bunker out wherever.
Of course, the military is going to have somebody with a head full of secrets,
but it's stuck out at where the enemy could snatch him.
Makes perfect sense.
Also, he said that there's scheduling.
Besides his regular duty, he had to do officer of the day,
you know, whatever officer of the watch, whatever night stuff.
So we often had days that were just tumbled into each other
because none of the schedules aligned.
Yeah, I believe that because certainly schedules were a problem with any group,
depends on what your specialty was.
They covered the bases, and if it took all of you 10 hours a day,
then that's what you did.
If it was 12 hours a day, then that's what you did.
If it was 16, that's what you did, you know.
And sometimes you got a day off occasionally, and sometimes you didn't.
Now, I have three war stories, two from Vietnam and my friends,
and one from my brother in the Cold War.
I love war stories.
Okay, well, this intelligence officer said that they were in bunkers,
and they had this guy driving around in a truck with a bad muffler.
He was a major, and he would go around,
and he would rattle everybody's change for the sign and counter sign.
And these guys were exhausted, and they didn't really remember the stuff.
Not that his vehicle could be easily used by anyone because it was a very distinctive sound.
Well, he said they went down to the next bunker from his,
did the sign, counter sign thing, and then the bunker did a counter challenge.
Well, he'd been rattling people's chains so much, he forgot the counter challenge.
Well, some bright spark did a mag dump in his general direction,
and that officer wasn't seen the rest of the night.
But by the rules, since he didn't respond with the proper counter sign, he could have been shot.
Well, if that was the rules of engagement at that point, yeah, then that's what you do.
Those things happen.
I think the mag dump was done sort of as a pointed instruction, 20 or 30 of them.
Oh, yeah, if he had a very distinctive vehicle, they all knew who he was when he was coming.
Yeah, he was deliberate, but you kind of have to follow the rules even if somebody else isn't.
You just try not to hit him.
Well, during the Battle of Apology, evidently they put Eisenhower or somebody through it,
he had to put his ID down and step back because they had a bunch of German special forces,
in American uniforms, going, you know, doing all sorts of nasty stuff.
But, you know, and when they tighten the security down, it doesn't matter whether you're a privateer in general.
Everybody's got to go through the proper hoops.
Yeah, when they want to play the game, you can, you know who it is.
They know you know who it is, so you have to act right, but so if they fail to respond correctly,
then you have to go ahead and do what you're supposed to do as if you didn't know who they were.
So it's kind of, sometimes it doesn't make a lot of sense.
You don't want to kill anybody over it, but, and maybe a not entire dump.
Well, yeah, the second story is from my chopper friend who I met at a Linux users group at MIT.
He was up in the very edge of South Vietnam up right near the DMZ.
And he got this story from a guy who was doing an intelligence probe into the North with a Kit Carson scout, which is a turned VC.
He went up there, up where angels fear to tread, and he found in a, what they thought was a safe hillside,
a battalion of VC having a powwow.
Well, he got on his radio and tried to call for artillery, tried to call for aircraft, tried to call for, you know,
the good human man, anybody who would drop ordinance on these people.
Well, because he was in North Vietnam, everybody thought it was a spoof of some kind.
Well, he goes down to his list of radio frequencies, and he gets one that he ain't used.
And he reports, you know, here's the coordinates.
Says how close are you to that, that, that target, 500 meters.
Get two clicks away and call his back.
Well, he goes one click away, calls him back, says, fire a ranging shot, and then I will adjust to target.
The guy at the other end of the radio says, we do not adjust, your mission is fired.
Well, the hilltop disappears.
His kid Carson Scott is bleeding from the ears from the concussion of the shells.
He calls up and says, by the way, who have I been talking to?
Battleship New Jersey.
The battleship does not adjust because it's just going to remove the block of whatever the target is on.
Yeah, they don't waste time ranging, I guess.
Yes, when you're going to drop, you know, nine Volkswagen's worth of high explosive on somebody, that's going to, you know, forget AT&T, that's just reach out and touch someone.
Well, it was a real experience, I can tell you that.
I was also, I was a non-combatant person.
I did electronics repair stuff for classified electronic gizmos and building with no windows and barbed wire and stuff and guards on the gate.
But every, I think about every 11 days I had guard you on an ammo dump.
Again, somebody with a head full of secrets.
I don't know if I knew a lot of stuff that was real important, but yeah, if it was something with secret art, it was.
But we were all on a list that rotated and, you know, everybody went.
And for some of some people, it, guard you, it was preferable to what they did, you know, every day.
I think we had a lot of guys that took code, you know, they sat for 12 hours a day with headphones on, listen to this, and they had to pick that out from a lot of really static.
And screeching and working the knob back and forth trying to pick out the code.
And, yeah, they, they had it worse than I did.
And so for me, I prefer not having guard duty, but I think some of them probably would rather have, well, actually liked it when they had guard duty.
Yeah, well, I used to be a shortwave listener. In fact, it's one of my shortwave radios was dropped off by a guy who got it at the end of World War II.
And it had a lot of the crystal filters instead of like, like your code, code guys would use for CW.
Yeah, one of my job was to maintain, one of my jobs was to maintain radios like they used for, for those, for taking code, you know, single side bands, shortwave radio.
And, but these guys would sit for 12 hours a day, 50 days in a row before they got a day off, listen to this stuff.
So you get a call that up somebody's radio is not working. And so you go in there and you check and they just kind of screwed with the dials to make it not work for a little bit.
And so you give them a break, you know, they get to go out and take a smoke break and you pull it out of the rack and kind of mess with a little bit and
tune it up, get it back, get all the knowledge back in the right positions and check it out, give them 10, 15 minutes outside so that they can clear their heads.
You catch one with a screwdriver though, you take it away from them.
Well, my brother was in a Pershing unit the last of his service in Germany. I mean, actually he's started serving in El Paso and a Hawk unit and then they shipped him to Germany for one of the, you know, relatively late.
It was mid 80s probably at most. He was shipped to Germany with a, with a Pershing unit.
There were a couple of exciting events there, but the last of it in what brought him home was he was short, you know.
And the Pershing unit was going out on a drill in the field.
But because he was going to be short, they said, well, why should he go through another drill when he's just going to go home in a couple of weeks.
So they gave him guard duty.
And during his stint of guard duty, a couple of ordinary gentlemen armed with plastic explosive and submachine guns was came over defense.
And Tim fired on or at one of these gentlemen.
And that activated the reaction squad and they took these gentlemen into custody and whatnot.
And that's how my brother, who was a mechanic by trade, got into a hot portion of the Cold War.
He said as he was clearing post at the end after such an incident, they generally expedite your return home or at least out of theater or wherever.
He said he had to deal with the liaison with the Germans.
Well, evidently after our people caught the intruders, they handed them over to the German authorities and
it was quietly told that those gentlemen never made it to jail.
They just sort of evaporated somewhere in the woods of Germany.
Wow.
Well, when the opposition comes over the wire with blood in their eye, the Germans lose their limited sense of humor entirely.
So I suspect there's some patch of German woods is growing a little better because of the contributions of these Soviet socialist brothers.
The people since they were caught red handed.
The incident virtually didn't happen and if it didn't happen, there weren't any people to lock up. Where they?
Yeah, I guess not. I've heard too many stories like that.
Also, there was one time when he was doing drill and somebody gave the wrong signal and it was supposed to be a drill as if they had to abandon the missile and scramble.
Well, before they abandoned the missile, they're supposed to put a self destruct charge and see for with a little golf ball size detonator on it.
Well, the word got back quick enough that one of the sergeants pulled the detonator who had been, who's been had been pulled and tossed it up in the air.
My brother said that there was a little pop as it came down where the detonator, the little golf ball detonator went off in mid air.
Of course, C4 without a detonator is just a play dough or, you know, it's very stable.
Yeah, just plastic.
Right, you know, it's, you know, it might as well be modeling player, whatever.
In fact, is that's, that's how come a lot of times they would cook on cook over.
Yeah, yeah, we sometimes use it to heat up sea rations and Vietnam.
Speaking of sea rations downstairs, I have a few cans of beer rations, which, which are actually sea rations that I got during the, uh,
a visit of 78 this Sunday before they opened the roads up here.
I was filling sandbags from the stuff that the storm had washed up on our local, on a regional beach here, and I went up to my town hall or to, to a school near my town hall.
And, and I got into the six by six and I had a half hour ride in the back of a six by six and a week after the blizzard of 78.
So I may have a sandbag and I have some beer rations and I have the shovel from the spade from that, that adventure.
Well, I managed to bring home my can opener from basic training. I carried me all the way through the army and I kept it for about 30 years and then somehow lost it on a camping trip.
Is that a P-38 or P-39?
I would have said P-38, but I wasn't positive of the number. Yeah, P-38 is what I remembered.
I knew you'd, you know, if I said it right, I knew you'd know what it was, but I was afraid I had the number wrong after 45 years or so.
I kept it on my key ring for just years and years, for, for literally decades and I had, it was like the, it was the first P-38 I got out of the first package of sea rations.
Probably on Bivwack in basic training at Fort Devons in 1969 and it went on my key ring and stayed there for probably 30 years.
They hold you clear up here to, to go to basic?
For some reason, because of my MOS, they did that. I don't know why, but everybody who was, I was in the Army Security Agency and we all went there for basic.
Even if there was a closer place like, in my case, Louisiana would have been the right place to, there was a place in Louisiana, I probably, there was closer for me.
And there was one in Texas, I think, that may have been a little further away, that would have been appropriate as well, but I went to Missouri because we all went to Missouri and we never met each other up there.
But for some reason, that's where we went, mostly we hobnob with draftees from the South Side of Chicago.
Devons in Missouri, I didn't know that they had two of them.
I'm sorry, I'm a Fort Leonard Wood.
Yes, my brother is Alma Mater.
I went to Fort Devons was where I, I did go to Fort Devons for my AIT, that's where I was, that's where I went for all my electronics training and stuff like that.
Like I said, it's been a couple of decades, so you're right. Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri is where I had my basic training, where they sent all ASA people.
And then, if you were doing, a lot of us went to Fort Devons, I know you said MIT, so I've certainly been along that, you know, I've been on the MIT campus before, because if you go to Fort Devons, I was up there for 13 months.
And Friday afternoon, you walk out of Route 2 and stick out your thumb.
Well, you were learning to live dangerously, weren't you?
Oh, yeah, sleeping in the park under the public garden, bus station.
Well, I mean dealing with Massachusetts drivers is nearly as hazardous as being over in NAMM.
You know, that, I think that would may have been a different time. We could hitchhike anywhere.
And they'd see your short hair and say, that's, that's the soldier and he'll be okay and he's stopping picking up.
So, I was up in a friend of mine for, we were, a guy from California had cousins up in New Hampshire that he had never met.
And he decided one day that we were going to, that he was going to hitchhike up to New Hampshire to visit him.
And he didn't call him or anything. And he asked if I wanted to go with him. So I said, sure, I'll go with you.
So, we hitchhiked up to New Hampshire. It took two rides from Fort Devons all the way up to some place,
halfway up New Hampshire. And we, coming back, we thought we were in so much trouble because it was five o'clock in the afternoon.
And we were on a road that had a two lane asphalt road with no traffic.
And the second car that stopped took us all the way to highway two. And the next car that picked us up took us to the gate.
So we had two cars up there and two cars back. And that was kind of the way it went.
The only place you couldn't hitchhike was out of Boston. You literally couldn't get a ride going out of Boston.
Yeah, well, I'm far more familiar with the Boston part of the mass drivers.
Out in the country, that's a, it might as well be a different country when you get outside the 128 or 495 where Devons and stuff is located.
Yeah, typically what we do is, or at least what I did, I would grab my camera and I would hitchhike into Boston.
And because the bus is way cheaper than a motel, I would ride the bus. I would hitchhike into town, which was easy.
And then you ride subways wherever you wanted to go. I love the subway system. I'd never been on a subway being from a small town in East Texas.
And in fact, I'd never been on an escalator. I remember the first escalator I was ever owned was in Boston.
I thought it was so cool. And then you catch the last bus out of Boston going back to Fort Devons and stay the night.
Even if so, if you wanted to be in Boston on Saturday and Sunday, you hitchhike in on Saturday morning and Sunday morning.
Yeah, that sounds interesting.
But I was a 19 year old kid when I got up there and I was never been away from home before.
And like I said, 13,000 population town in East Texas, stupid as just dumb kid, and just discovered the world.
Looking all over the subways were fantastic. I walked the campus of Harvard University and MIT.
I went to lots of places that I thought I was just so fascinating and met some nice people in the...
In fact, it was after I got my orders for Vietnam. I met some nice people over at the public garden that offered to help me get to Canada, so I wouldn't have to go.
Well, also you probably had a rather interesting awakening a few blocks from the public garden.
What do you mean?
Well, back in that day, there was a district that...
You say no more. I know exactly... I know exactly what you're talking about and I was there.
Well, evidently, after my brother came back from service, he spent considerable time, money, and brain cells in that district.
Yeah, but I love Boston. I actually even married a lady who was a performer in that district.
Outstanding.
Well, she was from the Carolinas, and besides her trade, she was...
Well, let's say she still had a lot of... She was getting middle aged, but she was a lady who...
Well, she still had to bark on.
I think we call that the combat zone.
Yes, that's about as far as you can go without going... not say for work.
Yes, the combat zone.
No, I mean, that was what we call it. That was exactly what we call it.
But I loved all parts of Boston. I really enjoyed going over to Harvard and to Harvard Square was fantastic.
It was sitting in the coffee shops and going over to...
That was more interesting than MIT. MIT was more sterile.
But there were so many places over on the east end, the little restaurants and family play things where you're so out of place.
Chinese restaurant where there's no English anywhere on the menu.
And they look at you and you just go in and you order something that you know the name of in Chinese.
And it was good food and it cost practically nothing.
Instead of going to the big place, a few blocks away that had a great big neon dragon in front of it and where...
A bowl of noodles was $9 or something.
Yeah, and did you go up to the Italian neighborhoods?
Yeah, I got lucky there. One of the guys in my class was a Italian kid from summer...
What's it? Not summerable.
Summerable?
What's close there? Something...
It starts with S and V-I-L-E on the end.
Summerville.
Okay, that's a lot of Italian people and I got invited up there to visit his family one weekend and stay with him.
He had six beautiful sisters and we ate Italian food and I took one of his sisters out.
She took me out and we had fun and walked the beaches and enjoyed the neighborhood.
Yeah, that was great.
And the little Italian shop, just like the Chinese places, you know, you go to the one that doesn't look like a restaurant.
It looks like somebody's home or something.
He went on a screen door and three or four tables and the menu is written on the chalkboard.
Yeah, I did. I went there. That was great.
Yeah, I used to work on a internet cafe up there in summer.
Not only that, I used to get a kick out of taking the bus from Leachmere, Greenline, just get beyond the Science Museum and stuff.
And I took the bus up there and they had the bus announcing the stops and they said McGowan Square.
Now, McGowan Square tells me that that was programmed maybe in Phoenix.
It wasn't programmed in Boston. It probably wasn't programmed in Chicago, maybe L.A.
It's McGoneman, McGon Square.
I didn't know where you were going with that.
Every time that bus said, McGowan Square, I said, what the heck?
Yeah, computers, you know, you don't know what neighborhood they came from.
It was a voice recording.
Whenever the GPS or whatever signaled a certain thing, they would say, this stop, that stop, whatever.
It wasn't even a person.
Was it like a recorded or was it a digital?
I guess it was long enough ago that it wasn't digitally, it was actually recorded.
It was recorded human voice, probably little snippets.
You know, they would say, you know, so and so street, this and that street, this stop, this stop, this square.
But when they said McGowan Square, I said, wait a minute, there's a bug in the system.
Yeah, no doubt, no doubt.
I mean, I live in Houston and we've got some streets that are, you know, they're mispronounced.
It's all you can say, they're just mispronounced.
But that's the way they've been saying them in Houston for 100 years or so.
That's the way they're supposed to be pronounced around here, just like any other street, any other town.
You said the way the locals say it.
Well, what I get a kick out of, I take the local public transportation.
And we have a square where you go through a light.
It's like we're famous for our five corners, all sorts of roads coming in from all sorts of angles.
Well, you come across this square and then they go halfway down the block.
And the spiel that they're using is the same spiel that they used when I was a kid.
And the buses were run by GM or whoever, private buses.
However, the spiel hasn't been updated because originally the bus would go across the square, stop in front of a Rexall drugstore.
And then people could get off and cross over to buses going down the main drag of the other way.
Because that headed down the coast to and we were coming from a more inland route.
Well, they still have the same rules, but they say here's a place where you change buses.
But they moved the stop half a block down.
So now you're in the middle of a four lane undivided highway.
So if you try to cross the street there, it wouldn't be good.
Yet they haven't updated it to just to move the crossover down to the the next stop that has a has a crosswalk at it and a light.
But the bus didn't stop there.
The bus stops in the middle of the block and then they say, well, yeah, if you want to catch the buses on the other side of the street.
Here's where you get off.
This spiel is from my childhood when the stop was half a block up there where there was a cross.
So you would have to then walk a half a block or so before you could cross over?
You'd have to walk half a block up or half a block down.
That's cool.
The thing is that the system is running the same spiel that it was invented when I was a kid or maybe in the 50s.
Or the 40s.
Well, I think in the 40s there were probably trolleys in this area.
And they didn't tell you when to get off.
Well, the trolley routes would be a little different.
In fact, as I was a kid around my neighborhood, they were doing some flood control and stuff.
And they were pulling up the pavement.
And in the pavement was the trolley track.
Probably hadn't been used for 20 years, but, you know, they'd been buried in.
When the trolley stopped running, they just tarred over the track.
Well, that's the easy way to do it.
I guess you could call it rebar.
Well, what happened was that up the valley or in a branching valley off of where I live, they have a couple of impoundments.
Well, one of the impoundments, we had a heavy rain on top of snow melt in the spring.
And this four foot diameter culvert overflowed onto one of our streets here,
named with usual New England brilliance water street.
So for a while, there was, you know, four inches of water running down water street.
After this incident, they finished the flood control that put a siphon on the outer dam of the impound.
So that when the water gets high, the excess is diverted to its own underground channel out to tidal water.
But during that emergency, the stream by my house, which is usually 0, 4 or 5 feet down the bank vertically, was getting darn close to my lawn.
But now we have a flood control that keeps everything under control.
And unlike a lot of places around here, we don't have to worry about the old dams causing a flood problem in the spring.
But it was a little exciting for a time here.
Well, thank you for your patience. I tend to rather lawn when I get a chance.
No, I'm enjoying the conversation.
You ought to listen to some of my war stories sometimes.
Sir, it would be my pleasure. Also, one of the things that my grandfather was a coal miner.
He worked his way up from driving horses at age 12 through for a limestone mine to eventually leasing properties and doing strip mining.
And finally, some deep mining, but also in the same area of West Virginia up near Morgantown, where the university is, where the, you know,
and the football team and the basketball team and everything.
I had the experience of seeing a walking drag line, one of the big old stripping shovels.
So big, it didn't have caterpillar tracks. It had two feet and a platform.
And the thing moved around by basically walking on those two long feet and lifting the base up and moving forward and like that.
And this was a drag line with a bucket you could probably drive a bus into.
I've seen pictures of those drag lines. So I knew what you were talking about, but I've certainly never seen anything like that in person.
Quite impressive.
I have seen the vehicle that moves the space shuttle from the building where they put it together to the launch pad, though.
And that's pretty, pretty impressive, too.
Well, what's interesting about those vehicles, they're only two of them in the world, is they were also used for the moonshot rockets.
I thought they were for that, but originally built for that, but I didn't remember for sure.
So I didn't say that. Those were the ones that were built for the moon rocket.
Not only that, they are lost technology.
How? I mean, it's just four caterpillar kind of diesel vehicles all strapped together with a big platform on them and some kind of computerized thing to keep them level.
Keep the platform level, no matter what the, the things do. I'd seems like that would be pretty simple.
You could do that with a, some kind of a little Linux computer.
Well, but the thing is those tracks and that machinery, the blueprints to those are no longer.
They weren't archived anywhere.
I've heard that was true about the Saturn V. I didn't know about the crawler, whatever they call that thing.
I'm just saying that if those, I'm sorry you cut out, I can't hear you.
But nobody knows how to build another unit if they need it because the original plans are long gone.
Yeah, we would just get, you know, like four Teslas and strap them together or something now.
Yeah, really.
I'm sure that wouldn't be a problem. I've seen the thing parked quite a few times, but I've never seen it on the move.
I really wish it. That was one of the things I was always hoping to do would be able to be in Florida whenever they were moving a shuttle out to the launch pad.
I worked for the program for 24 years and I got to go out to the Cape not often, but quite a few times.
And I got to see exactly one launch of the space shuttle and one launch of one of the moonroapers.
But that one I didn't get to see and I would have liked to see that.
Well, one of my uncles worked for Comset at Goddard Space Flight Center.
And he did a lot of the unmanned launches, satellites and such, you know, probes and such.
In fact, one of the last projects he worked on while he was still with Comset was the command relay satellite that was used with that recent rocket test.
They were replacing ground stations with satellites that would beam commands would be beamed up to a relay satellite.
And that satellite would be told to beam that commands at another satellite who was in higher orbit or something.
Yeah, I was familiar with that. We were able to close. Yeah, I had a lot to do that.
They were able to close a number of those stations because places like Australia by having several satellites and the signal would go up to one satellite across to another satellite and then down is the way it worked.
And at least that's what I remember. So that's how they fixed the having, you know, those ground stations all over the world.
What I find incredible is that the Voyager probes are still functional to some degree.
And from from the thing that I listened to on YouTube, they're not only functional, but they are dealing with it on at least one unit, a flaky transmitter transceiver.
And they've had to basically reprogram, including using a new data pro compression algorithm compression and error correction algorithm over the remotely.
Yeah, they've done some really, really clever stuff to keep that thing working. And also with the Hubble, they've done some clever stuff to keep it working when they had two or three gyroscopes not working.
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