Tab Clearing...

• The FAA hiring outreach program that Trump lambasted and derided at yesterday's press conference...was launched by the Trump administration in 2019.


• The most polarizing thing on wheels...


• "The two things people most go to dermatologists for are acne and wrinkles. Acne is a disease, and wrinkles are a sign of privilege that you're still alive." -Paulina Porizkova on the TODAY show just now. I was a fangirl when I was a kid and it turns out I still am.

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'64 Ragtops...

• Chevrolet Corvette Sting Ray


• Pontiac Bonneville


• Chevrolet Chevelle Malibu SS

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Fresh memes! Get yer memes here!

It's time...

Taking this one to sell off at Indy Arms Company in the morning. Too much month left at the end of the money and, really, I haven't shot it much in years. It'll be LNIB with four factory mags...

Meme Dump...

Shooting on easy mode...

Those little steel plates at twenty yards are a breeze with a red dot sight* on the Staccato C. It went another 150 malfunction-free rounds in the pistol bays at MCF&G yesterday, and if it hadn't been in the low forties with a 15-20mph breeze making it feel a lot colder, I would have stayed for another hundred rounds.

The Ruger RXM is continuing to run like a top as well. The knife is for popping the ammo box flaps open without tearing them so I can use the empty boxes for a photo shoot later. It's been literally decades since I've had to pull a pistol, but I use that little Spyderco Dragonfly at least a half dozen times a day.

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It's a small world...

I've flown on an American Airlines CRJ700 from DCA (Reagan National) to MHT (Manchester, NH) a couple of times.

I don't think it was necessarily N709PS, but there's a non-zero chance it could have been. According to FlightAware, it's done that run before.

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Midweek Memes...

Freak Accident

At a baseball game fans have to be on their toes for foul balls. Once in a blue moon, a bat...or a chunk of one...makes it into the stands, too. But those are fairly benign compared to what made it into the stands at a recent track and field meet in Colorado:

A spectator at a track and field event in Colorado died when he was struck by an errant hammer throw.

The incident occurred Sunday at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, which was hosting a club sports track and field meet for high school students from across the state, according to the school. In a statement, UCCS said “a member of the attending audience was killed when a hammer thrown by a participant cleared certified barriers and struck him.”

A baseball is moving faster than a hammer, granted, but an official Major League ball weighs, like, five ounces. A hammer in the hammer throw can weigh as much as sixteen pounds...and it's made of iron.

Yikes.

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Meme Dump...

Monday Memeday...

Magic Beans, Thinking Rocks

My first computer of my very own, as opposed to my folks' Apple ][, was a Ti-99/4a that I bought used in high school with babysitting and lawn-mowing money. I sold it on late in my junior year when I replaced it with a Coleco Adam.

I was computerless for a while in the late '80s, mostly using a roommate's XT to dial in to local BBSes, before buying an XT of my own in '91. I used that computer and a Mac SE/30 until I bought a 486DX/66 in 1994.

The 486 was replaced with a Compaq Deskpro with a Pentium 120 in early '96, which was itself supplanted by a PII-266 powered Compaq Presario in 1999. Early 2001 saw a home-built Celeron machine that got relegated to guest computer status in 2003 when I brought home a 2.2GHz P4...and I used that computer, with short breaks on Macs, until 2012. Then an HP commodity gaming tower in 2013, which was so forgettable I can't even remember what the CPU was, but it did have a neat red glowing light inside the case.

When the HP's hard drive croaked, rather than replace the machine I just limped along on laptops for a few years before buying a dual core i5 Mac mini from Marko in early 2018 and used it until just this month when it got supplanted by by the M4 Mac mini, which I similarly hope to get six or seven years out of.

Notice something about the general pace of CPU acquisition? It's on a downward trend. Uneven, but definitely downward.

That seems to be broadly true across a lot of areas. My first smartphone (LG Optimus) lasted me two years before being replaced with a Samsung Galaxy SII, which in turn was replaced after three years by an iPhone 6S. That first iPhone only made it a year and a half before getting supplanted by a 7 Plus, and that phone went five years before getting replace with the current one three years ago...and I don't see any compelling reason to swap this one out on the horizon short of it no longer being supported, which shouldn't happen for another three to four years at minimum.

We gotta pump up demand for CPUs somehow, now that the churn of Moore's Law seems to be slowing.

Hey, buddy, wanna buy some stock in AI?

Remember when you had to upgrade every other year?

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Car Parts

The distinctive snout of the 1939 Ford makes for an interesting photo subject, as do the egg crate fender vents of a 1971 Corvette Stingray...

Or what about the grille of an MG-B GT?

Memes, memes, memes!

 

Well...

Yesterday was my birthday, and now that I'm older it seems like my joints are more stiff and sore in the mornings, although that might just be my imagination.

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End-of-Week Memes...

Meme Dump...

QotD: Death Of Creatives Edition...

"But it is deeply wounding to feel your industry get squeezed into a misshapen lump of clay. Something could be rebuilt from this material, but it’s going to require innovative thinking and people willing to provide the capital for the future of journalism. I see this in the television and film industry, too. The music business. Anywhere creativity lies is being borne down on by a hydraulic press, like in that disgusting commercial by Apple that reduces access to cultural fulfillment down to a goddamn iPad." -Lindsey Adler

Private Equity and its swarm of brunchlord failsons have left a barren swath of machine generated clickbait sludge interspersed with ads about how long you should do chair yoga to reduce belly fat in their wake.

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Midweek Memes...

 

Vroom...

Coolest recent car posts:

• 1969 Pontiac GTO Convertible


• 1968 Chevrolet Chevelle SS396


• 1968 Chevrolet Impala Sport Coupe

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Video of Anything You Can Imagine

Over a thousand people chatting in a livestream waiting to see if the corpse flower in the Sydney Botanical Garden opens...

Meme Dump...

StalkerBot

A machine learning tool that can guess where a photograph was taken by contextual cues:

A powerful AI tool can predict with high accuracy the location of photos based on features inside the image itself—such as vegetation, architecture, and the distance between buildings—in seconds, with the company now marketing the tool to law enforcement officers and government agencies.

Called GeoSpy, made by a firm called Graylark Technologies out of Boston, the tool has also been used for months by members of the public, with many making videos marveling at the technology, and some asking for help with stalking specific women. The company’s founder has aggressively pushed back against such requests, and GeoSpy closed off public access to the tool after 404 Media contacted him for comment.

They're apparently marketing it to the po-po pretty heavily.

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Monday Morning Memes...

Cold Spell

The sun has risen here in Indianapolis, causing the mercury to soar to 2°F, a full two degrees higher than it was just before dawn. Depending on who you believe, today's high could creep into double digits. While the local television meteorologist is saying we'll only see 9°F this afternoon, Weather Underground says we could get all the way up to 12°F.

It's currently seventeen degrees in Nome, Alaska.

I do not approve of any of this.

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Memes to Keep You Warm...

"For some reason, the Nokia G0-4T5-E never caught on."

Lucky Break

The way that it was giving him that hard eye contact, I was sure dude was going to end up as moose toe jam, but apparently he was okay, just got knocked down.

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Tab Clearing...

• Norway's closing its last coal mine in Svalbard, which could have unexpected geopolitical repercussions...


• The outgoing director of the BATFEIEIO has a sad.


• Coinage and currency in fantasy role-playing games.

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Meme Dump...

Final Weekday Memes...until Monday