To the 650K in Alabama who voted for Roy Moore

Why did you think that voting for Roy Moore was a good idea, such that voting for literally anyone else was worse?

Mad Idolatry

"Mad Idolatry", the twelfth and final episode of the first season of The Orville, was a strong finish to the season. I couldn't say much about the content without it turning into a spoiler, so I'll just say that I recommend it, along with the entire first season.

It's a good show.

Ingress

I've started playing Ingress, after using Pokémon Go as a gateway.

Ingress is more interesting, as it's more of a puzzle game.

"Strategery", to quote Will Ferrell.

Edited in August 2018, originally published December 2017.

If the Stars Should Appear For the World is Hollow and I have Touched the Sky

Fourth episode of The Orville.

The title of this post covers it to a point. It's a more gritty, brutal take on the concept from that Star Trek episode.

Recommended.

Old Wounds from a Command Performance About a Girl, or the first three episodes of _The Orville_

We need a good science fiction series that is free-to-air. The Orville has promise to fill that niche.

Yes, it's irreverent at times. Yes, it's loaded with Seth MacFarlane's humor. If that's enough to turn you off, then turn it off.

My house is not a Nielsen house. We don't have cable TV. While we can receive it over the air and skip the commercials, we have chosen to watch it on Hulu in the days following the initial airing, suffering the commercials that Hulu charges extra to avoid, in order to have a chance of recording viewership for Fox.

Fox isn't friendly to new shows, particularly shows that have story arcs or character development. Firefly is the prime example. I want to do what I can to ensure that viewer interest is noted.

I want The Orville to succeed.

1. "Old Wounds" - the premiere episode, loaded with laughs and an introduction to the main cast. It's light on story content and that's fine. It served its purpose.
2. "Command Performance" - the ensemble cast begins to shine. Ron Canada is a smile-inducing guest, echoing a role he played in Babylon 5.
3. "About a Girl" - those who should see this probably won't, or will come away with the wrong message. This is a much more serious story than the previous two and left me sad. A must-see.

LineageOS 14 (Nougat)

I decided to try LineageOS 14.1 (Android Nougat 7.1) on my aging Galaxy S3. Since acquiring a used S3 about two years ago, I had been running CyanogenMod 12 (Android Lollipop). I wanted security and feature updates.

Tools currently used:

• TWRP recovery (TeamWin Recovery Project). This is a handy way to make backups of operating systems, applications and application data. It does not backup SDCard contents. It can use USB On-The-Go (OTG) and can generally read encrypted data volumes, using the same unlock as regular boot.
• TitaniumBackup. This product is an excellent way to make backups of current applications with data and is a virtual requirement to restore a phone to its prior usability after a major OS upgrade.
• I keep a stock operating system copy for PRL updates. I backup the live OS, restore this, perform a PRL update, then restore the live OS.

To complete the upgrade, I performed a backup with TitaniumBackup, a separate OS backup with TWRP, then copied all that to another machine for safekeeping.

Then I wiped /data, /system, and installed LineageOS 14 and Google Apps using TWRP. After booting and restoring connection to my Google account, I installed TitaniumBackup and restored my applications with data. At that point, I did have to rebuild my home screen and tweak options with Nougat to reduce battery consumption and data usage.

Finally I chose to encrypt. I'd been putting that off for some time, but decided to take the plunge. It worked fine. It encrypts only the internal /data, since I chose to keep the SDCard as a separate volume. It does require an extra step at boot, but is otherwise unnoticeable. I detect no degradation of performance and my S3 is still great, five years after its introduction and running a current operating system that is nine major releases past what shipped with it (counting the three separate Jelly Bean and two Lollipop released), much better than the manufacturer and original carrier would have offered.

Cox Update

Cox introduced a hard data cap of 1TB per month, after which they will charge US$10 for each 50GB of data.

Thus there is no point in paying for more than the lowest tier, where it would require running the service flat-out for almost a whole month to exceed the limit.

Data caps suck.

The Return of the King

As mentioned in a previous post, I finally got around to reading The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Yesterday I finished The Return of the King.

I'm glad that's done. It took a good many years for me to get around to it and the reading itself had many stops and starts.

Probably I will watch the movies, then consider it done for sure.

An unexpected event

A puppy showed up on our doorstep.

Really, at the driveway, sitting in the street. Fortunately uninjured and hopefully free of everything more severe than fleas.

We can't take in another pet full time right now, so we're caring for him until we can either find his people (unlikely, given his condition), or find him a good place to go.

Doublethink

Do Trump's antics count as doublethink?

The Salmon of Doubting The Return of the King

I'm still slogging through The Lord of the Rings. In order to take a break from it and feel like I'm reading enough, I've switched to The Salmon of Doubt, assembled from Douglas Adams's computers after his death.

Just a few pages in, it's already a more pleasant experience.

How to stress about a 401(k) rollover

1. Initiate rollover
2. Watch market prices climb more than 2% over the days the funds are in limbo

On Supreme Court Justice confirmations

One of my U.S. Senators, in reply to a protest about the coddling of Neil Gorsuch versus the snubbing of Merrick Garland in their respective nominations to sit on the Supreme Court, said this:

". . . the Senate traditionally does not confirm a Supreme
Court nominee in the final year of a president’s term."

So I researched it and found at least these cases:

• Anthony Kennedy was confirmed on 1988/2/3, in the final year of Ronald Reagan's second term. 
• Benjamin Cardozo was confirmed on 1932/2/24, in the final year of Herbert Hoover's presidency. 
• John Clarke was confirmed on 1916/7/24, in what could have been the final year of Woodrow Wilson's presidency. 
• Louis Brandeis was confirmed on 1916/6/1, in what could have been the final year of Woodrow Wilson's presidency. 
• Mahlon Pinney was confirmed on 1912/3/13, in the final year of William Howard Taft's presidency. 
• George Shiras, Jr. was confirmed on 1892/7/26, in the final year of Benjamin Harrison's presidency. 
• Melville Fuller was confirmed on 1888/7/20, in the final year of Grover Cleveland's first presidency. 
• William Burnham Woods was confirmed on 1880/12/21, in the final year of the presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes. 
• Roger B. Taney and Philip Pendleton Barbour were confirmed on 1836/3/15, in the final year of Andrew Jackson's presidency.
• William Johnson was confirmed on 1804/3/24, in what could have been the final year of Thomas Jefferson's presidency. 
• Oliver Ellsworth was confirmed on 1796/3/4, on the cusp of the final year of George Washington's presidency. 

Reading Tolkien

More years ago than I care to admit, I bought a boxed set of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. A bit over a year ago I finally started reading them.

I'm now through The Two Towers and will soon start on The Return of the King. I'm glad to have read them, but Tolkien's prose is still a slog for me.

At a recent book fair, I bought a copy of The Silmarillion. . . .

On moving

We've (mostly) moved to a new (to us) residence.

Getting out of the old house has been slow, but we do have a deadline, as the old house is under contract to sell at a substantial discount under what it would be worth if fixed up. Nearly everything is out. We're left with gardening tools and supplies, hand tools and a few odds and ends. The rest we'll likely leave behind because the contract allows that.

At this point I think all of our books are out. About half the artwork is out.

We're still getting things sorted in the new place, still painting here and there, still finding new places to put old things.

I'd like to carve out more time for the life-enriching things I consider important. I have ten things on my list. I'd like to touch on more than three each day.

We gave up on AT&T for DSL. We gave up on AT&T altogether, because they botched the move order for the analog land line and after spending hours trying to get someone who both cared and knew what they were doing, I gave up on them. Now we're with Cox (😐) for internet, at the lowest pricing tier. They haven't introduced hard data caps here, but since they sort of talk of having a 1TB cap, what's the point of having faster service if it's possible to hit the cap at the lowest tier of service if one were to run it flat-out for a whole month? I hope that having Cox for internet is a better experience than having them for cable TV was.

We're still a cut-cord household - we had an antenna installed and it's hard to be happier with it. All the local channels we care about come through splendidly.

We giving up AT&T we also gave up the landline number I'd had for a long time. With all the junk calls it received, this isn't that much of a loss. It does mean relying more on mobile phones and the attendant per-minute charges, but even with a pay-for-what-one-uses plan (yay Ting!), we pay less than we would with an "unlimited" plan with one of the big carriers. VoIP like Google Voice fills part of the gap.

With Cox internet, OpenWRT would panic reboot when starting WoW. I haven't yet determined why. Connecting our actual WiFi access point directly to the cable modem was fine, though.