A subject near and dear to my heart.  About a decade ago I went to vote here in Texas.  Had my voter registration card, had been in the same house for a decade and had been voting from this same location just as long.  Oddly my name wasn’t on the rolls.  Even odder, my wife, in pretty much the exact same situation, was still registered.

I refused to go away and perhaps held up the line a bit.  Eventually someone brought over a judge, with an unlikely German accent.  I told him the facts, and he said (maybe a bit dramatically): let this man vote!  I believe my ballot was only provisional, though.

My wife suspected shenanigans.  She had recently given our first, small, political donation to a local candidate who had helped out our neighborhood with a road construction issue.  Yes, the candidate happened to be a Democrat.

I was pissed and tried to find out what had happened.  I wrote all of my Representatives.   Only Lloyd Doggett replied.  I eventually learned that there were “problems” with the company contracted to management voter rolls.  Yeah, right. I still want someone to go to jail for this, but I couldn’t get any traction. I’m suppose I could have hired a lawyer or called the local TV station.  Today I would.  I see little has changed here in Texas.  It seems to have gotten worse.  I suppose someone has been held to account in some way, but I think another hatchet man did his job and took his fall.  Anyone wanna bet he ends up in a cushy job with political connections?

Texas secretary of state resigns after leading botched voter purge that questioned the citizenship of almost 100,000 people

I started this blog as a bit of a protest against the way Facebook operates.  Mostly I am concerned about privacy, but the 800lb gorilla in the room is the question:. Is Facebook a media company, or a common carriers (like a phone company)?  Clearly it is a media company.  It may be other things too, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is an ad selling distribution entity like a TV or radio station.

A good NYT opinion piece on this.  Like Noam Chomsky said, the media can’t tell us what to think, but it can tell us what to think *about*.

Taking some time off.  Saw a band this afternoon.  Went to Round Rock with and old friend for lunch and coffee yesterday.  Hung out with another old friend last night.  Cleaned the stovetop.  Went to dinner tonight for another friends birthday.  Making some sauerkraut.  Used my phin to make some Vietnamese coffee.  Went to my son’s high school graduation.  Plus some yard work and swimming.  Cats also enjoying themselves.

A fun web site with interactive maps of the US:. Opportunity Atlas

From today’s news (yes, in 2019):

German official warns Jews against wearing kippahs in public

Anti-Semitic attacks in Germany have surged in the past few years. Last year, an attack on two men wearing kippahs — also known as yarmulkes — on a street in Berlin caused widespread outrage in in the country.

You don’t need to know much about Italian politics to enjoy this one.  I wish more Americans were similarly undisciplined.  I remember when the Soviet Union broke up and Gorbachev stated he was aiming for an “Italian style democracy”.  One commentator quipped that it was surely one of the most modest political goals he had ever heard.

A somewhat long and detailed study of the used of Depleted Uranium (DU) weapons in the Gulf Wars.  Linked to 2x or more increases in cancers and a possible link to Gulf War Syndrome and other health issues our veterans face.  It does help answer the question: How do we dispose of our hazardous nuclear waste?

Depleted Uranium and Radioactive Contamination in Iraq: An Overview

By Prof Souad N. Al-Azzawi

Global Research, August 22, 2017

An article from the New York Times on the health issues encountered in the Havana U.S. Embassy.  It goes into the poorly understood world of Functional Disorders and mind / body interactions.

Invisible Attack on U.S. Diplomats, or Something Stranger?

An “unknown energy source” has been blamed for debilitating symptoms suffered by Americans posted in Cuba. The real cause may be more surprising.

By DAN HURLEY MAY 15, 2019

Found a stock tank I liked online.  The ones at Tractor Supply were banged up and I figured 100 gallons might be too big.  Decided on the 44 gallon.  But it arrived without a drain.  So I spent yesterday with a drill and jigsaw cutting a hole (a bit too high, but good enough). Put in a one inch drain plug I also bought online.  Then I went out to Lowe’s to get some PVC for a serious drain.  Don’t want this guy filing up with water when it rains hard.  Had to do a bit of drilling in the PVC pipe, but put some broken bricks and rock on the bottom, a layer of mesh and then three cubic feet of peat moss with a big sack of potting soil on top.  Somehow it all fit perfectly.  Going to start planting tomorrow.

Have a nice little Intel NUC for my wife’s PC.  It has a 500 GB SATA SSD which is getting filled up, mostly with photos.  I thought I would make use of the PCIE m.2 slot so I bought a 1 GB drive to replace the old SATA.  Should be a quick disk clone, like I have done dozens of times.  Even easier now with these free utilities you can download.

Well, it took two hours to copy all the files for the clone, then I couldn’t get it to boot from the new m.2.  twiddled with the BIOS, plugged and unplugged drives in various combinations.  Tried a different clone tool.  Then I read that some Intel NUCs will only do a new style UEFI Boot, which is a new secure format for boot, on the m.2 drive.

Found a way to convert the new disk to UEFI.  Suddenly it showed up in the UEFI BIOS list, but various tweeks to BIOS settings didn’t help.  I could see all the right partitions and all my files, just no way to get it to boot.

One way  forward was to try to convert the old SATA drive to UEFI, then clone it.  But this disk is essentially an original MS-DOS 5.0 system that has been upgraded over the decades.  I didn’t want to risk damaging it.  Thought about buying a second SSD to close it for safe keeping, but that seemed like too much work and expense.  I guess I finally gave up and decided to just make the m.2 a second data drive and keep the SATA SSD as it is for boot.  So much for UEFI and secure boot.