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?