During the winter when the air is cold and the process of heating it also brings the humidity levels way down, sometimes my skin dries out badly.  Right now is one of those times.

     I’ve been sick for more than two months now, although for a while it was in my bronchia and larynx, couldn’t breath without choking and thus couldn’t sleep and I had no voice, that cleared up.

     Then, it entered my sinuses and for about three weeks I had constant sinus headaches, but that seems to have largely cleared up.

     It is still living in my nose.  It alternates between being almost gone and being horrid, bloody mucous with all sorts of technicolor components.

     I’m really not loving it!

If you’ve been in the Shoreline area lately, you’ve probably seen these signs:

I wish I could say they had a snowballs chance in hell of having any real effect but the Shoreline City Council has a strong track record of completely ignoring what the citizens want and maximizing the land developers profits.

What this is all about is that we’re going to get a light rail station on 185th and I-5 with components on both sides of the I-5.

Not as if itself that wouldn’t completely destroy the nature of the neighbourhood, which presently is a fairly quiet area with single-family dwellings set in a backdrop of a large number of trees.  Just to accommodate the station, they’re going to have to destroy Shoreline field on the West side of I-5, and a number of houses and a whole bunch of trees on the East side.  So We can kiss goodbye to this neighbourhood.

Agenda 21

As if the light rail invasion isn’t enough, and folks I really don’t mind trains, real trains I enjoy riding on, when the tracks are above ground and the passenger cars are designed for comfortable seating and a good view, but much of this light rail project will be underground.  Be all that as it may, what is even more troubling is the council wants to re-zone everything within 1/2 mile into ultra-high density housing, and it is this I have a problem with.

Expect it all to be replaced with high density apartment buildings with inadequate parking. The streets will be absolutely jammed with cars.  These people think, hey if we build it without provision for cars, everyone will be forced to take the light rail and we’ll make a bunch of money trying to force something down the throats of people we already know don’t want it.

The idea behind Agenda 21 is that in order to save the planet, we need to push everyone into 6x6ft cubical apartments with no heat, eliminate private transportation, minimize dietary impact by eliminating meat from everyone’s diet, and basically force everyone into a sub-poverty level existence, so that we can return the majority of land to nature.

If you can’t tell, I’m against this.  I know technology exists that would allow us to all live a reasonable lifestyle without destroying the planet, but there are too many financial disincentives for developing and putting it in place.

I feel helpless though, because our City Council pretty much ignores our wishes, this has been well demonstrated many times, and the only local news media here doesn’t have the balls to cover anything remotely controversial, so they aren’t going to give this the attention it deserves.

If you’re not in Shoreline, well don’t worry this will be coming to a neighbourhood near you soon as it is a global agenda.

Found this on Quora, in part;

Many don’t, for a variety of reasons.  It’s irreversible, so it’s literally a last resort.  For some who think that life isn’t worth living, they’ll find that there is a reason to live before they reach the last resort.  Others never reach the last resort because it’s painful.  Some find sufficient cause to live in those who would be hurt by their death.  Some observe that death will come anyway, eventually. Still others are simply socially conditioned, through religion or other social cues, that it’s unacceptable, and are afraid there may be consequences.

Kind of where I am right now.  I told my daughter before she left that I didn’t think I’d see her again in this lifetime.  I’m still holding out hope otherwise.  Same for my youngest son though his disappearance and refusal to communicate with me was unexpected.

Then there are the individuals I owe in some way, my customers who’ve stayed with me through all this, and my wife though sometimes I’m not sure how she feels about me.

Then there is the commandment, “Thou shall not kill.”, and I’m assuming that includes myself.

      I’m saddened that Leonard Nimoy died today of COPD.  This is what took my mother a couple of years ago although she was also suffering advanced Alzheimer’s at that point.

      It’s difficult to think that we’ll never see another guest appearance in any future Star Trek movie or series.

     Tired today, wife switched to days for two days as Safeway where she worked got bought out by Haggins.  She’ on days training.  I had to get up extra early to get her there and still getting over this head scuz.  Too much blood in my caffeine system and can’t seem to get the ratios right today.

Radio Shack is joining the list of things from my past that are now gone forever.  Radio Shack has recently been delisted from the New York Stock Exchange, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and is in the process of negotiating a sale of half their stores to Sprint with the intent on shutting down the other half of their company owned stores.  It’s hard to say what will happen to franchise stores, some say they are doing fine, but where will they get stock?  What value will the brand have when it’s gone?

Analysts are not surprised because the company has been losing money for the last eleven straight quarters.  They blame it on competition from online retailers like Amazon.

I am not surprised because Radio Shack abandoned it’s core customer base several decades ago.  The electronic hobbyist / enthusiast was their core business, I was among that group.  I found that as time went on the parts and other useful items available dwindled, while they devoted large portions of their store to selling cellular phones.  I’ve also owned STA-2000 and STA-2100 receivers, both of which were well designed and built units for their time.  They stopped building their own equipment, moved to selling Japanese junk, and then stopped selling audio equipment altogether.

Trying to make money selling other peoples stuff is a challenge, they can always sell it cheaper than you can, and when you’ve got the overhead of a store and online retailers had cost advantages and volume advantages, there is no way to compete with that.  Cellular phones are a generic item, they were much better off selling things where people wanted the hands-on experience of trying it, listening to it, fiddling with it, before they made a buying decision.

I will miss them, but then the Radio Shack I will miss has been gone for two decades already.

I started what an upgrade from Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS to Ubuntu 14.10 on my old Mac Workstation today at 6:15 AM.  This was a project advertised as being three hours.

Ha!  It’s now 11:35 PM and I finally have everything working again!  To be fair, the actual upgrade only took 9 hours, it finished around 3PM, but then every once in a while WinAmp skipped on me so I wanted to install a low-latency kernel.

I installed a low latency kernel, and the X-server no longer recognized my monitor.  Further, lsmod showed the Nvidia driver was no longer loading.  I spent the next eight hours trying various incantations, manually editing configuration files, etc, at several points I had no X at all, just a text console.

Finally, I went and grabbed the driver straight from the Nvidia site instead of the repository, and it worked!  For some reason the driver supplied by the repository, even though it claims to be exactly the same version, simply does not work with the low latency kernel.

So now I’ve got the latest and greatest, a nice responsive workstation and WinAmp plays smoothly now.

     In case anyone wonders where this blog got it’s title…

     When I first started blogging, I used blogger.com and ftp publishing to publish to my website.  When the evil empire, Google took over Blogger, they discontinued FTP publishing to force everyone to either publish under their domain or host their domain with Google, neither of which were acceptable options for me.  For months I didn’t publish any of my blogs.  Then someone came out with a conversion script that allowed you to import a blogger blog into WordPress.

     WordPress allowed me to host my own blogs and as it turned out was far more flexible than Blogger, and as I learned to use it, faster and easier to use than Blogger.  When I first ported my blogs over, I changed my personal catch-all blogs title to commemorate my new found freedom from Blogger.

      If you’d like to move your blog from Blogger to a WordPress blog here at Eskimo North, I’d be happy to assist you.  Please e-mail support@eskimo.com or call 206-812-0051.